Staff Pick: Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

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By the end of the first page, you have learned everything you are ever going to know about the events on which the book focuses. What Queneau does do, however, is re-narrate this same scenario a further 98 times, in a series of distinct styles.
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Staff Pick: Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock

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In Kenneth Fearing's 1946 noir novel, a Manhattan writer is given the unenviable task of tracking himself down.
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Staff Pick: Daniele Mastrogiacomo’s Days of Fear

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In the spring of 2007, the Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo arrived in Afghanistan. He was there to conduct an interview with a Taliban commander, but the promised interview was a trap.
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Staff Picks: Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth

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With its gallons of bodily fluids and its frankness about the attendant pneumatics, Sabbath's Theater makes Nicholson Baker's "manstarch" look like marzipan, and The Rosy Crucifixion look like Make Way for Ducklings.
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Staff Pick: Baseball Playbook

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“You might have to coach Little League in a few years,” my father told me, handing me a strange, plain book. My son was a week old. It would be at least two years before he would learn to throw a cut fastball (and probably another year or two before he had any real command of the pitch).
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Through A Glass, Clearly: Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars

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One comes away from Ghost Wars with two seemingly paradoxical impressions: 1. unlike most civilians, American leaders saw 9/11 coming years before it happened; and 2. barring a run of stupid luck, they had almost zero chance of stopping it, given the realities of the pre-9/11 world.
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Staff Pick: The Real State of America Atlas

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Where The Real State of America Atlas truly shines is in its demolition of the notion – the enduring fantasy – that America is a land of equal opportunity.
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The Devil in a Cadillac: Langston Hughes’ Tambourines to Glory

This is a living book—one that summons the age of the Great Migration and Sarah Vaughan and Joe Louis.  And while it's a morality fable, its characters aren't the flat allegorical kind.

The Beauty I Long For: Maira Kalman and the Principles of Uncertainty

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Her books are quirky, deeply moving, and beautiful documents of life on earth. She considers Spinoza, George Washington, fruit platters, her dog, the nature of war. If this sounds incoherent, it isn’t. “I am trying to figure out two very simple things,” she said once at a TED conference. “How to live, and how to die. Period. That's all I'm trying to do, all day long.”
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Staff Pick: Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine

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Following in the wake of Moravagine's violence and abandon is also a vicarious thrill for the reader; the book’s prose and pacing and bravado is fearsome, irresistibly so.
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Staff Pick: China Mieville’s Embassytown

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Instead of doing the safe thing and revisiting his imaginary world of Bas-Lag or his reconfigured city of London, Mieville now takes us to his titular "city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe."
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Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels

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The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them.
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Staff Pick: The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone

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I longed for a contemporary novel about contemporary life. I longed for references to malls, and to boners, and to "intense cell phones" and to a pillow made of denim with an actual jeans pocket on the front, "like it thinks it's Bruce Springsteen."
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Staff Pick: The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac 1900 to 1950

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Phelps and Deane were interested in the individualized, romantic convergence of reader and writer; in the deeply-felt notion that literature matters in life, that indeed it is life.
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Staff Pick: The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature

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Potential is a dreamer’s word, an ideal state that may never be. Perhaps that's what makes it a writer’s word.
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Staff Pick: Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live

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It's a ripping story, splashed with bloody horrors and punctuated by moments of serene beauty.
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Staff Pick: Bleak House and The Dickensian Way

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You have to embrace Bleak House for what it is – a rambling, confusing, verbose, over-populated, vastly improbable story which substitutes caricatures for people and is full of puns. In other words, an 800-page Dickens novel.
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