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Staff Recommendations
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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!
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Love and Obstacles
Stories
Aleksandar Hemon
From the celebrated author of the bestselling Lazarus Project-"a dazzling collection of stories...further cementing [Hemon's] position among the finest fiction writers working in English" (GQ). The stories of Love and Obstacles are united by their...
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Low Bite
Sin Soracco
Full of ovaries and bravada, this is not a girls-gone-wild-behind-bars pulp tale. But it is an underground classic thankfully back in print. It is also a picture of life behind bars and the hustle to stay cool and get out without playing out or getting...
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Black Water Rising
A Novel
Attica Locke
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books Jay Porter has long since made peace with not living the American Dream. He runs his fledgling law practice out of a dingy Houston strip mall—where his most promising client is a low-rent call girl—and he's...
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The City & The City
China Mieville
A wonderfully labyrinthine novel. Ostensibly a murder mystery cum police procedural, Mieville has much more on his mind here -- how does a class of people define itself and coexist with another class of people with whom it may, on the surface, have...
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The Beats
A Graphic History
Paul Buhle, Harvey Pekar
I've read a lot of Beat books in my time here at City Lights, but none are quite as fun as this graphic history. The perfect collection for those who think they've heard all the stories about Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, et al. The Beats also provides...
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Ablutions
Notes for a Novel
Patrick deWitt
A drug-addled bartender serves up strong booze to his loathsome customers in a filthy bar in Hollywood. In less skilled hands, this story could have turned out like a tired retread of Bukowski; instead, it's a head-spinning surreal portrait of a...
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Poems of the Night
A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text
Jorge Luis Borges, Efrain Kristal, Suzanne Jill Levine
An initial offering from a new series of thematically edited collections of Borges' poems & prose that is certain to bring English readers much deeper into the universe of the Head Librarian. The poems of this volume span Borges' lifetime and focus on...
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Wintergirls
Laurie Halse Anderson
This is the single most powerful Young Adult novel I have ever read. It is searing, devastating, tragic. It is about bulimia, the death of a friend, and regret. It is also ingeniously conceived and beautifully written, transcending the difficult subject..
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Big Machine
A Novel
Victor LaValle
A hybrid of low-lifes and high ideals, his Big Machine runs on suicide cults and the voice of God taking you straight to the bowels of The Bay and the monsters that lurk without and withoin. Hard as a gun-muzzle to the jaw...
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Pain Killers
A Novel
Jerry Stahl
Jerry Stahl tears up the literary scene with his razor sharp wit and darkly hilarious prose. He puts a magnifying glass to consensus reality, burning through it's thin veneer with delicious irony. Punk Rabbi, cultural critic, prankster, master wordsmith!
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The Possessed
Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Elif Batuman
Batuman is a natural storyteller. Her love of literature is delightfully infectious. Using the Russian greats as inspiration for research and travel, her exploits reveal a writer who is at once keenly observant, erudite, sensitive and truly hilarious.
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The Lost City of Z
A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann
A fascinating tale of travel, intrigue, and finding a lost city of gold in the Amazon jungle. The author tries to retrace the steps made by Percy Fawcett (the great explorer from the early 1900's), who went searching for the lost city with his son—neither
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Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother's death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a...
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In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books "The rural rootedness and gentle humour of R.K. Narayan with the literary sophistication and stylishness of Jhumpa Lahiri."—Financial Times Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan's cities to the harsh..
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