Staff Picks Acquisitions December 2018

50 Staff Picks for December 2018

  TITLE FIRST NAME LAST NAME #Category DESCRIPTION   (from Amazon.com unless otherwise noted)
1.       The Thing Around Your Neck

 

 

 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie #FIC In these twelve riveting stories, the award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.
2.       Half of a Yellow Sun

 

 

 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie #FIC With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.
3.       Purple Hibiscus

 

 

 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie #FIC Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They’re completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating. As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together. Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.
4.       The Handmaid’s Tale

 

 

 Margaret Atwood #AUDIO Margaret Atwood’s popular dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale explores a broad range of issues relating to power, gender and religious politics. Multiple Golden Globe award-winner Claire Danes (Romeo and Juliet, The Hours) gives a stirring performance of this classic in speculative fiction, one of the most powerful and widely read novels of our time.
5.       Jordan Wolfson: Manic/Love Truth/Love

 

 Jack Bankowsky, et. al. #NONFIC Jordan Wolfson is known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance.

 

Produced in partnership with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, this book focuses on two major new works, Colored Sculpture and Female Figure. Operating somewhere between sculpture and interactive installation, these pieces rely on Wolfson’s contradictory relationship with technology to create an unsettling tension between the figure and the spectacle. Like Real Violence, Wolfson’s virtual-reality piece shown at the Whitney Biennial, and indeed much of his work in other media, the perspective becomes more complex once the works engage with viewers through movement and sound.
6.       A Manual for Cleaning Women

 

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 Lucia Berlin #FIC A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.
7.       Evening in Paradise

 

 

 Lucia Berlin #FIC In 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to wild, widespread acclaim. It was a New York Times bestseller; the paper’s Book Review named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2015; and NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other outlets gave the book rave reviews.

 

The book’s author, Lucia Berlin, earned comparisons to Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Anton Chekhov. Evening in Paradise is a careful selection from Berlin’s remaining stories―twenty-two gems that showcase the gritty glamour that made readers fall in love with her. From Texas to Chile, Mexico to New York City, Berlin finds beauty in the darkest places and darkness in the seemingly pristine. Evening in Paradise is an essential piece of Berlin’s oeuvre, a jewel-box follow-up for new and old
8.      

Creating Sanctuary

 

 

 

 Jessi Bloom #NONFIC In Creating Sanctuary, Jessi Bloom taps into multiple sources of traditional plant wisdom to help find a deeper connection to the outdoor space you already have—no matter the size. Equal parts inspirational and practical, this engaging guide includes tips on designing a healing space, plant profiles for 50 sacred plants, recipes that harness the medicinal properties of plants, and simple instructions for daily rituals and practices for self-care.
9.       Ed Ruscha and the Great American West 

 

 

 Karin Breuer, Editor #NONFIC Ruscha’s interest in what the real West has become—and Hollywood’s version of it—plays out across his oeuvre. The cinematic sources of his subject matter can be seen in his silhouette pictures, which often appear to be grainy stills from old Hollywood movies. They feature images of the contemporary West, such as parking lots and swimming pools, but also of its historical past: covered wagons, buffalo, teepees, and howling coyotes. Featuring essays by Karin Breuer and D.J. Waldie, plus a fascinating interview with the artist conducted by Kerry Brougher, this stunning catalogue, produced in close collaboration with the Ruscha studio, offers the first full exploration of the painter’s lifelong fascination with the romantic concept and modern reality of the evolving American West.
10.    Women of Visionary Art

 

 David Jay Brown and Rebecca Ann Hill #NONFIC In this full-color illustrated book, David Jay Brown and Rebecca Ann Hill examine the work and inspirations of eighteen of today’s leading female visionary artists, including Josephine Wall, Allyson Grey, Amanda Sage, Martina Hoffmann, Penny Slinger, and Carolyn Mary Kleefeld. They explore the creative process and the role that dreaming, psychedelic experiences, sexuality, and divine guidance play in the work of these women, alongside full-color examples of their art. They discuss the future of visionary art and reveal how these artists have all been informed and inspired by deep inner experiences and seek to express non-ordinary visions of reality, often reminiscent of those encountered in shamanic trance, lucid dreams, psychedelic states, spiritually transcendent experiences, and other altered states.
11.   

Milkman

 

 

 Anna Burns #AUDIO In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him―and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend―rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.
12.    Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them

 

 Shakil Choudhury #NONFIC Deep Diversity integrates Choudhury’s twenty years of experience with interviews with researchers in social neuroscience, implicit bias, psychology, and mindfulness. Using a compassionate but challenging approach, Choudhury helps readers identify their own bias and offers practical ways to break the “prejudice habits” we have all learned, in order to tackle systemic discrimination.
13.   

Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction

 Joshua Cohen #NONFIC One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In essays, memoir, criticism, diary entries, and letters—many appearing here for the first time—Cohen covers the full depth and breadth of modern life: politics, literature, art, music, travel, the media, and psychology, and subjects as diverse as Google, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, fictional animals, Gustav Mahler, Aretha Franklin, John Zorn, landscape photography, fake Caravaggios, Wikipedia, Gertrude Stein, Edward Snowden, Jonathan Franzen, Olympic women’s fencing, Atlantic City casinos, the closing of the Ringling Bros. circus, and Azerbaijan.
14.   

Unladylike: A Field Guide to Smashing the Patriarchy and Claiming Your Space

 

 

 Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin #NONFIC Get ready to get unladylike with this field guide to the what’s, why’s, and how’s of intersectional feminism and practical hell-raising. Through essential, inclusive, and illustrated explorations of what patriarchy looks like in the real world, authors and podcast hosts Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin blend wild histories, astounding stats, social justice principles, and self-help advice to connect where the personal meets political in our bodies, brains, booty calls, bank accounts, and other confounding facets of modern woman-ing and nonbinary-ing. By laying out the uneven terrain of double-standards, head games, and handouts patriarchy has manspread across society for ages, Unladylike is here to unpack our gender baggage and map out the space that’s ours to claim.
15.   

Outliers and American Vanguard Art

 

 

 Lynne Cooke #NONFIC For a new exhibition launching at the National Gallery of Art, curator Lynne Cooke explores shifting conceptualizations of the American outlier across the twentieth century, drawing on the inherent sociality of the exhibition in her installation of these works. This companion catalog, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, offers a fantastic opportunity to consider works by schooled and self-taught creators in relation to each other and defined by historical circumstance.
16.    Nothing Good Can Come from This

 

 

 Kristi Coulter #NONFIC Kristi Coulter inspired and incensed the internet when she wrote about what happened when she stopped drinking. Nothing Good Can Come from This is her debut–a frank, funny, and feminist essay collection by a keen-eyed observer no longer numbed into complacency.
17.    Now You’re Talking: Human Conversation from the Neanderthals to Artificial Intelligence

 

 

 Trevor Cox #NONFIC Now You’re Talking is the fascinating story of our ability to converse. It takes us back to the core of our humanity, asking important questions about what makes us human and how this uniqueness might be threatened. On this illuminating tour we meet vocal coaches and record producers, neuroscientists and computer programmers, whose experience and research provide us with a deeper understanding of something that most of us take for granted―our ability to talk and listen.
18.    It’s Only Blood: Shattering the Taboo of Menstration

 

 

 Anna Dahlqvist #NONFIC Every day 800,000,000 people menstruate. Yet menstruation is still seen by many as a mark of shame. We are told not to discuss it in public, that tampons and sanitary pads should be hidden away, the blood rendered invisible. In many parts of the world, poverty, culture, and religion collide, causing the taboo around menstruation to have grave consequences. Younger people who menstruate are deterred from going to school, adults from work, infections are left untreated. The shame is universal and the silence a global rule.

 

In It’s Only Blood Anna Dahlqvist tells the shocking but always moving stories of why and how people from the United States to Uganda, Sweden to Bangladesh, are fighting back against the shame.
19.   

Housegirl

 

 

 Michael Donkor #FIC A moving and unexpectedly funny exploration of friendship and family, shame and forgiveness, Michael Donkor’s debut novel follows three adolescent girls grappling with a shared experience: the joys and sorrows of growing up.

“An arresting and textured novel…[Donkor] has a gift for succinct, piercing description: through Belinda’s eyes, the exotic (Ghana) becomes familiar, and the familiar (London) becomes exotic.”

–The Observer (The New Faces of Fiction)
20.    One October

 

 

   Dreamscape Media, Studio #DVD On October 1st, 2017, over 22,000 people gathered in Las Vegas for the annual Route 91 Harvest music festival, which featured some of country music’s biggest stars. As closing act Jason Aldean performed his set, a gunman opened fire on the throng of concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino and unleashed over 1,100 rounds of ammunition in just 10 minutes. Fifty-eight people were murdered, and over five hundred others were shot, making it the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history. Using interviews, eyewitness testimony, and haunting cell-phone footage, acclaimed director Charlie Minn recreates the scene from that harrowing night and pieces together the variables surrounding the incident. Focusing on the survivors and their stories, Minn creates a narrative of the shooting and its aftermath that provides some solace and reveals a community that chose to be #VegasStrong in the face of terror. directed by Rachel Shuman
21.    Sabrina

 

 Nick Drnaso #FIC THE FIRST EVER GRAPHIC NOVEL NOMINATED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE! A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK! ON 20 BEST OF 2018 LISTS INCLUDING THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, NEWSWEEK, AND THE GUARDIAN!

 

. . . Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. Presenting an indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake-news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster. (graphic novel)
22.   

The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror

 John Duffy & Ray Nowosielski #NONFIC At the heart of this book is a mystery: Why did key 9/11 plotters Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, operating inside the United States, fall onto the radars of so many US agencies without any of those agencies succeeding in stopping the attacks? The answers go beyond mere “conspiracy theory” and “deep state” actors, but instead find a complicated set of potential culprits and an easily manipulated system. Taking readers on a character-driven account of the causes of 9/11 and how the lessons of the attacks were cynically inverted to empower surveillance of citizens, kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, torture, government-sanctioned murder, and a war on whistleblowers and journalists, an alarm is raised which is more pertinent today than ever before.
23.   

American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures

 

 

 America Ferrera #NONFIC . . . [I]n American Like Me, America invites thirty-one of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures. We know them as actors, comedians, athletes, politicians, artists, and writers. However, they are also immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants, indigenous people, or people who otherwise grew up with deep and personal connections to more than one culture. Each of them struggled to establish a sense of self, find belonging, and feel seen. And they call themselves American enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all.
24.   

Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir

 

 

 Liana Finck #NONFIC A visually arresting graphic memoir about a young artist struggling against what’s expected of her as a woman, and learning to accept her true self, from an acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist.

 

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Guardian • New York • Refinery29 • Kirkus Reviews . . .

Melancholy and funny, personal and surreal, Passing for Human is a profound exploration of identity by one of the most talented young comic artists working today. Part magical odyssey, part feminist creation myth, this memoir is, most of all, an extraordinary, moving meditation on what it means to be an artist and a woman grappling with the desire to pass for human.
25.   

Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to Leave

 

 

 Joanna Gaines #NONFIC Joanna Gaines walks you through how to create a home that reflects the personalities and stories of the people who live there. Using examples from her own farmhouse as well as a range of other homes, this comprehensive guide will help you assess your priorities and instincts, as well as your likes and dislikes, with practical steps for navigating and embracing your authentic design style. Room by room, Homebody gives you an in-depth look at how these styles are implemented as well as how to blend the looks you’re drawn to in order to create spaces that feel distinctly yours. A removable design template at the back of the book offers a step-by-step guide to planning and sketching out your own design plans. The insight shared in Homebody will instill in you the confidence to thoughtfully create spaces you never want to leave.
26.   

Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist

 

 

   Greenwich Ent, Studio #DVD Since igniting the punk movement with ex-partner and Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren, Dame Vivienne Westwood has been redefining British fashion for over 40 years and is responsible for creating many of the most distinctive looks of our time. The film blends archival footage and insightful interviews with Vivienne’s fascinating network of collaborators, guiding us on her journey from a childhood in postwar Derbyshire to the runways of Paris and Milan. This is an intimate and poignant homage to one of the true cultural icons of our time as she fights to maintain her brand’s integrity, her principles and her legacy in a business driven by consumerism, profit and global expansion.
27.   

Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward

 

 

 Gemma Hartley #NONFIC In her ultra-viral article “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up,” shared by millions of readers, Gemma Hartley gave much-needed voice to the frustration and anger experienced by countless women. Now, in Fed Up, Hartley expands outward from the everyday frustrations of performing thankless emotional labor to illuminate how the expectation to do this work in all arenas—private and public—fuels gender inequality, limits our opportunities, steals our time, and adversely affects the quality of our lives.
28.   

Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else

 Maeve Higgins #NONFIC Maeve Higgins was a bestselling memoirist and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of thirty-one, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more. Like many women in their early thirties, she both was and was not the adult she wanted to be. At once smart, curious, and humane, Maeve in America is the story of how Maeve found herself, literally and figuratively, in New York City. . . .

     Together, the essays in Maeve in America create a startlingly funny and revealing portrait of a woman who aims for the stars but hits the ceiling, and the inimitable city that has helped shape who she is, even as she finds the words to make sense of it all.
29.    Censored 2019: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2017-2018

 

 Mickey Huff et al., Ediitors #NONFIC The annual yearbook from Project Censored features the year’s most underreported news stories, striving to unmask censorship, self-censorship, and propaganda in corporate-controlled media outlets. Featuring the top 25 most underreported stories, as voted by scholars, journalists, and activists across the country and around the world, as well as chapters exploring timely issues from the previous year with more in-depth analysis.
30.   

Modern Herstory: Stories of Women and Nonbinary People Rewriting History

 

 

 Blair Imani #NONFIC An inspiring and radical celebration of 70 women, girls, and gender nonbinary people who have changed–and are still changing–the world, from the Civil Rights Movement and Stonewall riots through Black Lives Matter and beyond.
31.    Paul Klee: Irony at Work

 

 Angela Lampe, Editor #NONFIC Exploring the satires and caricatures of Klee’s youth, his experimentations in Cubism and “mechanical theater,” and the constructivist approach of the Bauhaus school, this book follows the trajectory of Klee’s oeuvre as a reflection of prevailing styles. It closes with the artist’s final years, in which he was labeled a “degenerate artist” by the Nazi regime and struggled with illness. Viewed through the many facets of irony as a complex theme, and against the backdrop of Europe’s seismic political and artistic movements, Klee’s body of work takes on a renewed significance as one of the most critical of its generation.
32.    Passing

 

 Nella Larsen #FIC Restless Classics presents an undersung gem of the Harlem Renaissance Nella Larsen’s Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, belonging, self-invention, and race set amidst the pealing boisterousness of the Jazz Age.

 

When childhood friends Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield come across each other at a white-only restaurant, Irene learns her estranged friend has severed all ties to their African American community and is now married to a bigoted white man unaware of her heritage. Swinging between allure and repulsion, their revived relationship becomes a stage upon which questions of identity, sexuality, belonging, and self-invention play out.

Abrim with stifled desires, Nella Larsen’s searing portrait of these women’s inner cadences straddles the edges of things–communities, identities, races, and speech–and ultimately lands somewhere absolute and subversive: a place that defies categorization.
33.    Bigfoots in Paradise

 

 Doug Lawson #FIC Beauty and terror collide in Doug Lawson’s Bigfoots in Paradise, a wild new collection of stories set largely in and around Santa Cruz, California and the surrounding mountains. It’s a land tucked between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean, one that’s populated by aging hippies and venture capitalist sharks, pot farmers and surfers, child prodigies and roaming herds of wild boar. Earthquakes rumble, meth labs explode, helicopters search overhead for drug farms while wildfires ravage the hillsides. Blimps crash, mushrooms dream, dogfights erupt, trustafarians pontificate while pneumatic ostriches walk the streets and sons and fathers and lovers try desperately to find some way to connect with the past, with themselves, before it’s too late.
34.   

Matters of Vital Interest: A Forty-Year Friendship with Leonard Cohen

 Eric Lerner #NONFIC Funny, revealing, self-aware, and deeply moving, Matters of Vital Interest is an insightful memoir about Lerner’s relationship with his friend, whose idiosyncratic style and dignified life was deeply informed by his spiritual practices. Lerner invites readers to step into the room with them and listen in on a lifetime’s ongoing dialogue, considerations of matters of vital interest, spiritual, mundane, and profane. In telling their story, Lerner depicts Leonard Cohen as a captivating persona, the likes of which we may never see again.
35.    It Can’t Happen Here

 

 Sinclair Lewis #FIC A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, [It Can’t Happen Here] is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

 

Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.

Called “a message to thinking Americans” by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today’s news.
36.    How to Be Alone – If You Want to and Even If You Don’t

 

 Lane Moore #NONFIC How to Be Alone is a must-read for anyone whose childhood still feels unresolved, who spends more time pretending to have friends online than feeling close to anyone in real life, who tries to have genuine, deep conversations in a roomful of people who would rather you not. Above all, it’s a book for anyone who desperately wants to feel less alone and a little more connected through reading her words.
37.   

The Green Witch: Your Complete Guide to the Natural Magic of Herbs, Flowers, Essential Oils and More

 

 

 Arin Murphy-Hiscock #NONFIC In The Green Witch, you will learn the way of the green witch, from how to use herbs, plants, and flowers to make potions and oils for everyday healing as well as how crystals, gems, stones, and even twigs can help you find balance within. You’ll discover how to find harmony in Earth’s great elements and connect your soul to every living creature. This guide also contains directions for herbal blends and potions, ritual suggestions, recipes for sacred foods, and information on how to listen to and commune with nature. Embrace the world of the green witch and discover what the power of nature has in store for you.
38.   

Jane (Jane Goodall)

 

 

   National Geographic, Studio #DVD An intimate and exclusive documentary about Jane Goodall, featuring restored footage from the National Geographic Archives that has not been seen in 50 years.
39.    The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

 

 Maggie Nelson #NONFIC Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
40.    The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

 

 Priya Parker #NONFIC Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn’t, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings–conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp–and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience.

 

The result is a book that’s both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue–and how you host and attend them.
41.   

Phoenix Empress

 K. Arsenault Rivera #SCIFI Once they were the heirs to a prophecy that predicted two women would save an empire.

 

Now Shefali is dying―and her wife is unaware of the coming tragedy. Shizuka is too busy trying to reunite a fractured empire and right the wrongs of her ancestors.

As the Imperial Army gathers against a demonic invasion, Shizuka must do all she can with an empire on the brink of civil war.
42.   

Fox 8: A Story 

 

 

 George Saunders #FIC Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack, the one his fellow foxes regard with a knowing snort and a roll of the eyes. That is, until he develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak “Yuman” by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children’s bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people—even after “danjer” arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack.

 

Told with his distinctive blend of humor and pathos, Fox 8 showcases the extraordinary imaginative talents of George Saunders, whom The New York Times called “the writer for our time.”
43.   

Codex 1962: A Trilogy

 

 

   Sjon #FIC Over the course of four dazzling novels translated into dozens of languages, Sjón has earned a global reputation as one of the world’s most interesting writers. But what the world has never been able to read is his great trilogy of novels, known collectively as CoDex 1962―now finally complete. . . .

 

In CoDex 1962, Sjón has woven ancient and modern material and folklore and cosmic myths into a singular masterpiece―encompassing genre fiction, theology, expressionist film, comic strips, fortean studies, genetics, and, of course, the rich tradition of Icelandic storytelling.
44.   

Whose Boat Is This Boat?: Comments That Don’t Help in the Aftermath of a Hurricane – By Donald J. Trump (By Accident)

   Staff, The Late Show #NONFIC On September 19, 2018, Donald Trump paid a visit to New Bern, North Carolina, one of the towns ravaged by Hurricane Florence. It was there he showed deep concern for a boat that washed ashore. “At least you got a nice boat out of the deal,” said President Trump to hurricane victims. “Have a good time!” he told them. The only way his comments would be appropriate is in the context of a children’s book—and now you can experience them that way, thanks to the staff of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
45.   

The Labyrinth

 

 

 Saul Steinberg #NONFIC Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth, first published in 1960 and long out of print, is more than a simple catalog or collection of drawings— these carefully arranged pages record a brilliant, constantly evolving imagination confronting modern life. Here is Steinberg, as he put it at the time, discovering and inventing a great variety of events: “Illusion, talks, music, women, cats, dogs, birds, the cube, the crocodile, the museum, Moscow and Samarkand (winter, 1956), other Eastern countries, America, motels, baseball, horse racing, bullfights, art, frozen music, words, geometry, heroes, harpies, etc.” This edition, featuring a new introduction by Nicholson Baker, an afterword by Harold Rosenberg, and new notes on the artwork, will allow readers to discover this unique and wondrous book all over again. [from New York Review of Books]
46.   

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Worlds of Classic Literature

 

 John Sutherland, Editor #NONFIC Some stories couldn’t happen just anywhere. As is the case with all great literature, the setting, scenery, and landscape are as central to the tale as any character, and just as easily recognized. Literary Landscapes brings together more than 50 literary worlds and examines how their description is intrinsic to the stories that unfold within their borders.

 

Follow Leopold Bloom’s footsteps around Dublin. Hear the music of the Mississippi River steamboats that set the score for Huckleberry Finn. Experience the rugged bleakness of New Foundland in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News or the soft Neapolitan breezes in My Brilliant Friend.
47.   

Children of God

 

 

 Lars Petter Sveen #FIC Lars Petter Sveen’s Children of God recounts the lives of people on the margins of the New Testament; thieves, Roman soldiers, prostitutes, lepers, healers, and the occasional disciple all get a chance to speak. With language free of judgment or moralizing, Sveen covers familiar ground in unusual ways. . . .

 

Children of God was a bestseller in Norway, where it won the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize and gathered ecstatic reviews. Sveen’s subtle elevation of the conflict between light and dark focuses on the varied struggles these often-ignored individuals face. Yet despite the dark tone, Sveen’s stories retain a buoyancy, thanks to Guy Puzey’s supple and fleet-footed translation.
48.   

The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy

 

 

 Paige Williams #NONFIC The Dinosaur Artist is a stunning work of narrative journalism about humans’ relationship with natural history and a seemingly intractable conflict between science and commerce. A story that stretches from Florida’s Land O’ Lakes to the Gobi Desert, The Dinosaur Artist illuminates the history of fossil collecting–a murky, sometimes risky business, populated by eccentrics and obsessives, where the lines between poacher and hunter, collector and smuggler, enthusiast and opportunist, can easily blur.

 

In her first book, Paige Williams has given readers an irresistible story that spans continents, cultures, and millennia as she examines the question of who, ultimately, owns the past.
49.   

Capitalism: A Six-Part Series

 

 

 Ilan Ziv #DVD Capitalism is much more complex than the vision Adam Smith laid out in The Wealth of Nations. Indeed, it predates Smith by centuries and took root in the practices of colonialism and the slave trade.
50.   

Not All Dead White Men

 

 

 Donna Zuckerberg #NONFIC Donna Zuckerberg dives deep into the virtual communities of the far right, where men lament their loss of power and privilege, and strategize about how to reclaim them. She finds, mixed in with weightlifting tips and misogynistic vitriol, the words of the Stoics deployed to support an ideal vision of masculine life. On other sites, pickup artists quote Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to justify ignoring women’s boundaries. By appropriating the Classics, these men lend a veneer of intellectual authority and ancient wisdom to their project of patriarchal white supremacy. In defense or retaliation, feminists have also taken up the Classics online, to counter the sanctioning of violence against women. Not All Dead White Men reveals that some of the most controversial and consequential debates about the legacy of the ancients are raging not in universities but online.