Staff Picks
March 30, 2011
Staff Pick: The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac 1900 to 1950 0
by Sonya Chung
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.
February 18, 2011
Staff Pick: The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature 3
by Anne K. Yoder
Potential is a dreamer’s word, an ideal state that may never be. Perhaps that’s what makes it a writer’s word.
February 3, 2011
Staff Pick: Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live 5
by Bill Morris
It’s a ripping story, splashed with bloody horrors and punctuated by moments of serene beauty.
January 31, 2011
Staff Pick: Bleak House and The Dickensian Way 13
by Janet Potter
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.
January 25, 2011
Staff Pick: Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way 5
by Emily St. John Mandel
In her elegant debut novel The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard defies the odds; she takes a story we’ve all read before—a girl disappears, the lives of those left behind are changed forever in the aftermath—and manages to create something entirely original.
January 12, 2011
Staff Pick: FreeDarko Presents The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History 6
by Patrick Brown
To find truth — and in so doing, beauty — in the game is the height of sportswriting, a genre usually mired somewhere between tawdry gossip and vitriolic hyperbole.
