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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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Are You My Mother?
A Comic Drama
Alison Bechdel
Pretty heady stuff going on here as Bechdel cross-examines her childhood to consider how she was affected by a smart, artistic, but emotionally-removed mother, and a repressed, angry father. If you don't regularly gravitate towards graphic novels...
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Beauty Salon
Mario Bellatin
Biting social allegory from one of Mexico's most exciting young authors: edgy, lyrical and cynically hopeful.
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From A to X
A Story in Letters
John Berger
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books In From A to X: A Story in Letters, internationally-acclaimed author John Berger conjures an epistolary romance between an insurgent named Xavier and his beloved A'ida. With every letter, a larger sense of...
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A Wicked Company
The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
Philipp Blom
The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach's Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach's house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring...
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The Poisoner's Handbook
Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Deborah Blum
Fascinating and entertaining, tinged with both humor and horror, this account of the early years of forensic medicine in New York City is near unputdownable. We follow the city's Medical Examiner and head toxicologist as they develop the techniques for...
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Amulet
Roberto Bolaño
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books Amulet is a novel of extraordinary intensity by literary phenomenon Roberto Bolaño: "the real thing and the rarest"—Susan Sontag Amulet embodies in one woman's breathtaking voice the melancholy and violent recent...
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Antwerp
Roberto Bolaño
This book is actually a labyrinth. —Recommended by Dia, City Lights Books.
Antwerp's signature elements—crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits—mark this, his first novel, as pure Bolaño.
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
Roberto Bolaño
The book purports to be a biographical dictionary gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. While several meet violent ends, most are simply deluded...
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The Savage Detectives
A Novel
Roberto Bolaño
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation, but his novel The Savage Detectives is a lot closer to Y Tu Mamá También than it is to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hilarious and sexy, meandering and...
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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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The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
This book is brave, imaginative, and brutal; and just when you think it's gone far enough, it goes farther. Bowles spent most of his life in North Africa, but his genius is not in his familiarity with the culture; rather, it's in brilliantly recreating...
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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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Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
The temperature at which book paper combusts! Written in 1951, this dystopian novel is a must-read in today's world of disappearing bookstores and young readers who have never held an actual paperback. —Recommended by Don, City Lights Books
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Troia
Mexican Memoirs
Bonnie Bremser
For those who are interested in the Beats and want to dig a bit deeper beyond the usual suspects, this long-neglected memoir of hard life in Mexico is raw, naked, honest, full of feeling, and sometimes barely in control. While avoiding statements about...
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