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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The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
Bruno Schulz
This is a book that I will recommend to anyone and everyone. Schulz's writing is torrential, flooding the page with fantastic imagery in order to tell the experiences of a merchant family. Through this style, mundane details of everyday life become...
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Autumn in The Heavenly Kingdom
China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
Stephen R. Platt
A gripping account of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping...
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Embers of War
The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam
Fredrik Logevall
The struggle for Vietnam occupies a central place in the history of the twentieth century. Fought over a period of three decades, the conflict drew in all the world's powers and saw two of them—first France, then the United States...
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The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket
John Boyne
Barnaby Brocket is an ordinary 8-year-old boy in most ways, but he was born different in one important way: he floats. Unlike everyone else, Barnaby does not obey the law of gravity. His parents, who have a horror of being noticed, want desperately...
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Selected Stories
Robert Walser
Walser's whole body of work is the outpouring of a rapturous and eccentric voice, one that speaks of the joys of the small, the aimless, the unrecognized, and the servile. This collection was my first introduction to Walser––from the miniature "The Job..
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Hokey Pokey
Jerry Spinelli
Welcome to Hokey Pokey. A place and a time, when childhood is at its best: games to play, bikes to ride, experiences to be had. There are no adults in Hokey Pokey, just kids, and the laws governing Hokey Pokey are simple and finite. But when one of...
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Damascus
Joshua Mohr
Santa Claus tends bar as a stage 4 cancer patient, an artist, war vets, hipsters, and alcoholics collide in the San Francisco Mission bar Damascus. Mohr's pitch perfect, simmering, almost hard-boiled novel contains my favorite Hitler reference since..
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Black Mountain
An Exploration in Community
Martin Duberman
Duberman's unconventional and very smart history is a juicy one for those who care about questions of communal living, pedagogy, and artistic creation. What a lovely, messy experiment. —Recommended by Matt, City Lights Books
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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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Tenth of December
Stories
George Saunders
George saunders has this ability to pair the grim with the quirky, the brutal with the bizarrely hopeful, so that his stories never tip over completely into darkness. He captures the nastiness of violence, consumerism and sexism while keeping the tone...
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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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Two Cheers For Anarchism
Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play
James C. Scott
James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of..
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Where the Heart Beats
John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
Kay Larson
In this stunning biography of John Cage, Larson investigates how Buddhist concepts shaped Cage's approach to art, and the influence it had on other artists of his era (ie. Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.). If you're a fan of Cage, you...
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Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer
Like many young Americans, Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. As he became a husband, and then a father, the moral dimensions of eating became...

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