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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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The White Boy Shuffle
A Novel
Paul Beatty
Ever been smacked so hard it makes you giggle? Neither have I.
—Recommended by Tân, City Lights Books
Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica...
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The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard
First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily...
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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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Ottoline Goes to School
Chris Riddell
I can't say enough about this series. The stories are simple, engaging and emotionally-grounded. The characters are quirky and unforgettable. And much of the fun comes from discovering the odd little details in the wonderful illustrations. (For ages 7-10
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Waiting
A Novel
Ha Jin
The stifling atmosphere of Maoist bureaucracy forms the backdrop for a slow, quiet story about patience and longing, passivity and frustration, and most of all, about how so many of us live most of our lives in unconscious submission to "fate."
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The Virgin of Flames
Chris Abani
From the author of the award-winning GraceLand comes a searing, dazzlingly written novel of a tarnished City of Angels Praised as "singular" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and "extraordinary" (The New York Times Book Review)...
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The Parallax View
Slavoj Žižek
Philosophical and theological analysis and detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music co-exist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes in an exploration of the territory Zizek knows best. In this treatise, he delves into the concept of...
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Jesus' Son
Stories
Denis Johnson
An absolutely flawless little gem, this book cuts like a diamond. Almost nobody is as good as Denis Johnson, and almost nothing he's written is as good as this: in its few short pages you get booze, drugs, love, heaven, hell, death, resurrection...
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Helping Me Help Myself
One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone
Beth Lisick
Beth Lisick emerges as one of the great storytellers of our generation, joining the ranks of David Foster Wallace and Cintra Wilson with her hilarious and poignant tales of immersion into the million-dollar self-help industry.
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Falling Man
A Novel
Don DeLillo
There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks...
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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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Black Hole
Charles Burns
This is a beautifully drawn and eerie novel set in the 1970s. Seattle teens get a disease that transforms them into mutants. Their battle against this and other more normal high school situations, makes for a frighteningly good read.
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The Barbary Coast
An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld
Herbert Asbury
You're standing right in it! The Barbary Coast. 150 years ago this area was a den of such vice and iniquity that it would've made even the Marquis de Sade blush. Find out why...
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Beijing Coma
A Novel
Ma Jian
Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books Dai Wei, a PhD student and protestor in Tianan-men Square in June 1989, was caught by a soldier's bullet and fell into a deep coma. But as the millennium draws near, he begins to emerge from unconsciousness...
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