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
  |  Don
  |  Elaine
  |  Elaine Kahn
  |  Garrett
  |  Gent
  |  Jeff
  |  Jolene
  |  Layla
  |  Linda
  |  Lawrence
  |  Maia
  |  Matt
  |  Nancy
  |  Paul
  |  Peter
  |  Scott
  |  Stacey
  |  Tân
  |  Vanessa

   
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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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Heroines
Kate Zambreno
"ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." Heroines is a feminist rescue story, a trip back in time to commune with Zelda Fitzgerald, Jane Bowles and Vivienne Eliot, the forgotten wives...
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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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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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Just My Type
A Book About Fonts
Simon Garfield
"Comic Sans walks into a bar. The bartender says, 'We don't serve your type here.'" This is probably the most fluid, engaging book about fonts you'll ever read. Whether you're a professional designer or just your everyday type enthusiast, you will...
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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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Canada
A Novel
Richard Ford
"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." Then fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives...
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Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
"…the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other." I think this book should be handed out to high school students along with free condoms and pamphlets on road safety. I think this book should be handed out...
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Solar Throat Slashed
The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire's poems have body, a jagged dimensionality. They climb off the page and fill up the room. They feel around for the sun. The poems get hot and explode into energetic shards, only to reform and explode again. The bilingual edition is a must...
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Fine Fine Music
Stories
Cassie J. Sneider
Judd Apatow should collaborate with Cassie Sneider on his next screenplay, as she's a terrific writer who fearlessly mines her suburban life in this collection of stories that is guaranteed to bring you joy. I was blown away by her performance at our...
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Debt
The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber
An history of debt written by an anarchist-sympathizing anthropologist (and a respected one, mind you)—who better to dig beneath the assumptions taken for granted by the Western science of Economics? From blood debts in moneyless societies...
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Ayana Mathis
The arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.

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