Emily's Picks

This book is technically six novellas, all delicately nestled inside each other like Matryoshka dolls. A Maori warrior Matryoshka doll, and an evil doctor Matryoshka doll, and a nutty British publisher Matryoshka doll, and a Korean clone Matryoshka doll, and so many intricate little details you might start to feel totally baffled by everything, and yet. And YET. It's fascinating, and fascinatingly good. Honestly, I don't think I'm even sure what this book is about. Slavery and subjugation? The will to power? Small personal cruelties? The downfall of humankind? I don't know, but it sure is incredible, especially with Mitchell's uncanny ability to skip around to different genres and writing styles so easily.

Davis has an incredible capacity to approximate real, lived existence in relatively simple prose. Most of her stories touch on our hidden anxieties in some way or another. My favorite is "Break It Down" (p. 17): Then you forget some of it all, maybe most of it all, almost all of it, in the end, and you work hard at remembering everything now so you won't forget, but you can kill it too even by thinking about it too much, though you can't help thinking about it nearly all the time.

Hilarious vintage espionage spy dramedy. Greene takes jabs at everybody in this 1950s Cold War world: expats, British intelligence, Cuban authorities, American tourists, and even vacuum salesmen. In light of the military intel that led to the invasion of Iraq, this book remains as relevant today as it did in 1958.

Dry, dark, and sexy--a Hungarian classic. Protagonist Mihaly is, if I could describe him in only two words, passive/moody, and he abandons his wife (on their honeymoon!) after getting on the wrong train in Italy. They both end up not minding the other's absence very much and having wildly delightful adventures.