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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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Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih
Tayeb Salih is able to inscribe the mythic onto everyday life throughout Season of Migration to the North. The narrator of the novel must confront his home after studying abroad, and finds that a new presence has entered his community. What is revealed...
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The Unnamed
Joshua Ferris
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books
He was going to lose the house and everything in it. The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family-again he would lose his family. He stood inside the house...
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Marx's General
The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
Tristram Hunt
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books.
"Written with brio, warmth, and historical understanding, this is the best biography of one of the most attractive inhabitants of Victorian England, Marx's friend, partner, and political heir." --Eric Hobsbawm
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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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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 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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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 Shock Doctrine
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein
At the core of Klein's book is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization, combined withy the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, the "disaster capitalism complex" now exists...
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Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson
Winterson creates a dense vison of intimacy, and an interresting take on relationships. A unique read. —Recommended by Luke, City Lights Books
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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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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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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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Coming Through Slaughter
Michael Ondaatje
Tragic, beautiful and strange. --Recommended by Tân, City Lights Books
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet...
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The Woman in the Dunes
Kobo Abe
If you've seen the 1964 Teshigahara film you've already experienced Abe's brilliance (he wrote the screenplay as well). If you haven't, read this first. The haunting story of a vacationing entomologist trapped in a sand-pit with an enigmatic woman...
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