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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 Elementary Particles
Michel Houellebecq
An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel—part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis—that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence. Bruno and Michel are half-brothers...
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1491
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann
This is an important book. Mann presents such a massive amount of new material that it represents an absolute return to square-one for Western Hemisphere studies. Easy to understand, even...
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Platform
Michel Houellebecq
Recommended by Peter, City Lights Books
In his new work, Michel Houellebecq combines erotic provocation with a terrifying vision of a world teetering between satiety and fanaticism, to create one of the most shocking, hypnotic, and intelligent novels...
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War by Candlelight
Stories
Daniel Alarcon
Something is happening. Wars, both national and internal, are being waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. War by Candlelight is an exquisite collection of stories that carry the reader from...
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Queer Beats
How the Beats Turned America on to Sex
Regina Marler
The writings that shocked America out of the 1950s. Blasting through the crew-cuts and conformism of their day, the Beat writers were queer in the fullest sense of the word: their fluid sexuality challenged all sexual and romantic conventions. Most...
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Caught Inside
A Surfer's Year on the California Coast
Daniel Duane
A finely written and lyrical account of a year spent in the singular pursuit of surfing, punctuated with illuminating episodes on the literary history of surfing, the physics of wave formation, and the lure of the California coastline.
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A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost is about the stories we use to navigate our way through the world and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves or losing ourselves. Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on...
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Surviving the Extremes
What Happens to the Body and Mind at the Limits of Human Endurance
Kenneth Kamler
Combining personal experience and scientific knowledge, Kammler weaves together the stories of victims and survivors of the most extreme conditions on Earth: high altitudes, deserts, open sea, deep sea, jungles, and outer space. An amazing book.
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Everybody into the Pool
True Tales
Beth Lisick
Beth Lisick is the best kind of storyteller -- utterly original, naturally hilarious, wisely observant, and completely down-to-earth. Those who like David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Marjane Satrapi or Julie Doucet will absolutely love this book.
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Hello, I'm Special
How Individuality Became the New Conformity
Hal Niedzviecki
Hal Niedzviecki has a blunt message for the army of tattoo and piercing enthusiasts, bloggers, skateboard warriors, and anyone else walking around with the smug certainty that they are one of a kind: Individuality is the new conformity.
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San Francisco Noir
Peter Maravelis
San Francisco Noir lashes out with hard-biting, all-original tales exploring the shadowy nether regions of scenic "Baghdad by the Bay." Virtuosos of the genre meet up with the best of S.F.'s literary fiction community to chart a unique psycho-geography...
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Godlike
Richard Hell
Set largely in the early '70s, but structured as a middle-aged poet's 1997 notebooks and drafts for a memoir-novel, the book recounts the story of a young man's affair with a remarkable teenage poet. Godlike is a novel of compelling...
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Gilead
A Novel
Marilynne Robinson
Recommended by Elaine, City Lights Books
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the...
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Deadwood
Pete Dexter
Deadwood, Dakota Territories, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man...
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