Staff Recommendations

A listing of current favorites, recommended by the bookstore staff. Check back for new recommendations each month as we bring you the best of what we're reading. Browse by title, author or staff member!



  Anah
  |  Andy
  |  Dia
  |  Don
  |  Elaine
  |  Elaine Kahn
  |  Garrett
  |  Gent
  |  Jeff
  |  Jolene
  |  Layla
  |  Linda
  |  Lawrence
  |  Maia
  |  Matt
  |  Nancy
  |  Paul
  |  Peter
  |  Scott
  |  Stacey
  |  Tân

   
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    sort list by title | author


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The Infinite Tides
Christian Kiefer
An impressive debut novel from NorCal poet, songwriter and recording artist Kiefer, full of achingly beautiful passages on loss and regret, yet leavened with self-aware humor and with wonderment at the banality of contemporary suburbia.
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Capital
A Novel
John Lanchester
From the best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure, a sweeping social novel set at the height of the financial crisis. Celebrated novelist John Lanchester ("an elegant and wonderfully witty writer"—New York Times) returns with an epic novel that...
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Southern Cross the Dog
A Novel
Bill Cheng
In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor, Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young...
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Astragal
A Novel
Albertine Sarrazin
As if the reader were riding shotgun, this intensely vivid novel captures a life on the lam. "L'astragale" is the French word for the ankle bone Albertine Sarrazin's heroine Anne breaks as she leaps from her jail cell to freedom....
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Arming Mother Nature
The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
As a Cold War aggressor, the United States, along with its allies, needed to maintain parity, or better yet attain superiority, in ecological warfare. This fascinating book explores how this perceived "unconventional warfare gap" was one of the main...
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The Democracy Project
A History, a Crisis, a Movement
David Graeber
The Democracy Project is an interesting dialogue with Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right, McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto and Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World. —Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books
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Wild
From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
We loved this book for many reasons. Cheryl Strayed is smart, introspective, bad-ass, and loves books. She proves to her readers that it's often only in hindsight that we take the time to carefully reflect on our lives, finally seeing the trail through...
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The Watch
A Novel
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
Following a desperate night-long battle, a group of beleaguered soldiers in an isolated base in Kandahar are faced with a lone woman demanding the return of her brother's body. Is she a spy, a black widow, a lunatic, or is she what she claims to be...
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Middle C
William H. Gass
This is the first novel I have read from Gass and it far exceeded any expectations I had of this highly acclaimed writer. Middle C is an intense exploration of identity told through the life story of Joseph Skizzen, an amateur pianist and music...
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How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
A Novel
Mohsin Hamid
His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world's pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation—and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man's journey...
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Ghana Must Go
A Novel
Taiye Selasi
Courageously and with great tenderness the people in this book are allowed rather than exposed. We get to know the sparkling fissures of where they have been broken, the beauty of their longing, and the tremendous strength of their love...
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AfroSurreal Manifesto
Black is the new black
D. Scot Miller
This. is. beautiful. —Recommended by Tân, City Lights Books A limited letterpress edition of 500 copies, produced as a companion piece to the exhibition Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire, Revisited at the Arcade Gallery, Columbia College Chicago.
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Canada
A Novel
Richard Ford
"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." Then fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives...
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1Q84
Haruki Murakami
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence...

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