A 1970s Italian film crew's journey into the depths of the Colombian jungle during the height of the drug cartel's power is a trip into the darker recesses of the human soul. Not since Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has there been a book that plumbs these depths with such chilling precision. Kea Wilson's We Eat Our Own is a literary masterpiece you will not soon forget.-Kris' September Staff Pick, 2016
This is my absolute favorite breakfast book of all time! - Kris
This is a celebration of the African American poet’s love-at-first-site marriage to her remarkable Ethiopian husband, Ficre, who speaks seven languages, is a talented painter and cook, and all round old soul with enormous heart. Which fails him completely just 3 days after his 50th birthday, leaving behind Elizabeth and their tow teenaged sons. The prose is as beautiful as the man and the life she remembers. This is one of those one-sitting books whether you intended it to be or not. Do not think of it as a tear-jerker or a downer: the tears you may cry will fill your heart with joy. - Kris
This sharply-observed, painfully true letter from a black man to his adolescent son has been written about everywhere. What I will say to my fellow white folk: this book was not written for you and that is why you should read it. Coates doesn’t mince words or sugar coat the harsh reality of being a black man in a world where the mere fact your physical existence alone can get you killed. All of us are complicit in this fatal arrangement and all of us are needed to break the contract on black men’s (and women’s) livesin this country. Just read it. And then, do something outside your comfort zone. -Kris' Top 10 Picks of 2015
An absorbing novel of life in Columbia as experienced by those who lived through the drug wars. Antonio Yammara is a young lawyer whose friendship with a mysterious man he meets in a pool hall makes him an unintended target of unfinished business from a violent time thought to be long behind them. To heal from this present-day trauma that threatens to destroy his marriage, Yammara must take a journey into his now dead friend’s past, a journey where he confronts both his own childhood, and that of his friend’s beautiful daughter. Vasquez has been rightly hailed as a literary force of a new generation of Latin American writers. Read this book! - Kris
Immensely readable essays on wide-ranging topics with certain appeal for fans of Patchett who have waited a long time for a collection like this , but it will also be satisfying for readers who enjoy essays about writing, the shortcomings of marriage, family life, and the current state of the bookselling industry. Give it to a Patchett fan, a woman in your life, or a would be writer who will benefit greatly from her unvarnished advice. -- Kris
(This book cannot be returned.)
Comparisons to Dickens are not far off, but I am put in mind more of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The tale chronicles the lives of the varied assortment of families living on Sal Mal Lane, as experienced particularly through the eyes of the children there. As the tentative bonds of proximity work their magic, the civil war brewing at the boundaries begins to intrude. It is a beautiful, lushly, and lovingly written account full of a sense of place and history, but brilliantly universal as well. - Kris
If you are in the mood for a little local history, this is your book. Journalist Lee Sandlin evokes a lovely sense of place and time in this account of his German great-great-great grandparents who settled in Edwardsville in 1850. It is filled with the little details of everyday life as it evolved through time and peopled with a rich array of characters.- Kris
Why drink coffee on the subway with Patti Smith when you can ride horses naked in the country with Sally Mann? This unorthodox artist’s life opens with accounts of Mann’s “nearly feral” childhood and moves easily into her career as one of the most important photographers of our time. Tales of her own creative process, her family, the right’s attack on her work, are interwoven with knowledgeable and fascinating expositions on her beloved Lexington, Virginia, complete with all its dark legacy. There is literally nothing that Sally Mann cannot do or talk about. This book is a great account by a woman who is fully in charge of her incredible life. - Kris
George fled his tiny home town of Paris, Missouri to lose himself in the publishing world of New York City and avoid what he saw as somehow failing his parents and town for being gay. When his ailing mother calls him home, he returns for what he thinks will be a few days. A few years later he is still there, free-lance editing from the card table set up next to the couch where his larger-than-life mother holds court even as her feet and her memory fail her. George captures perfectly their verbal interplay and emotional tug-of-war with a delightful, often self-deprecating humor. Betty, brutally aware of her failing memory, can still give as good as she gets. Told with warmth and humor, with a poignant, at times hilarious, dose of bumbling self-doubt, this is an original and affecting portrait of a remarkable woman and the son who loves her. -Kris' Top 10 Picks of 2015
When Eva Rose Babbitt, mother of daughters Lizzie, 15 and Elvis, 10, drowns sleepswimming, her daughters are left to fend for themselves emotionally while their father tends to his grief by wearing his wife's bathrobe and lipstick. Lizzie, a sleep-walker and eater, keeps Elvis up at night trying to keep her from burning the house down with her nocturnal "cooking". But Elvis doesn't trust the circumstances of her mother's death and she is also determined to finish her mother's book, "The Sleep Habits in Animals and What They Tell Us About Our Own Slumber", so she does a little research of her own. Annie Hartnett has created endearing and memorable characters in a delightfully original story in what is sure to be a beloved favorite of readers everywhere.
Can the land tell us what our ancestors cannot? Can silenced and excised accounts of all the humans who made his country what it is—black, indigenous, white, brown, colonizers and colonized—be given voice in the ancient and modern upheavals of flint and fossil, flood and famine? Savoy, a geologist of mixed heritage, travels the country in this collection of interlinked essays to read the signs, both granite and archival, as she attempts to piece together the real America. Beautifully rendered, quietly urgent. - Kris
Just how intimate is the connection between humans and "the wild"? To what degree are we linked? Opposed? Helen McDonald knew her true calling by the age of 8 was hawks and whatever else was in her life, she knew she would learn to work and hunt with falcons. But it wasn't until the death of her beloved co-adventurer in life, her father, that she got the primal call to work with the most prehistorically fierce and huge bird of all, the goshawk. I was utterly rapt, pun intended. Rather than the very tired trope of "man against nature", in H IS FOR HAWK, we have the tale of two complex females--one human and one avian--and their transformational dance of intimacy. As a bonus to the reader, McDonald manages to come to terms with her grief over losing her father and intersperse her own goshawk adventure with T.H. White's, all in beautifuuly rendered prose. So good! - Kris
This is a wonderfully rich and engaging yarn set in 1870 Texas, about an odd couple--70 year old retired Army Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd whose print shop was on the wrong side of the war and who now travels the territory reading the "news of the world" from East Coast papers to the gathered townfolk, and orphaned 10 year old Johanna who has recently been unwillingly rescued from her Kiowa captives, having completely assimilated to Kiowa life and speaking no English. They are thrown together when he agrees to transport her to her relatives 400 miles through perilous unsettled territory. As their eventful journey unfolds complete with chicken thievery and shootouts, their uneasy partnership flowers into a friendship. Told with wit and warmth, humor and pathos, this is a book I absolutely loved. -Kris' October Staff Pick, 2016
I was prepared not to like this story of coming to terms with the untimely death of a lover but instead was utterly captivated. Donoghue’s prose is exquisite. She strikes just the right tone, balancing the grief with the memories of a passionate love. I was also intrigued by the way she handled the secrecy with which Pen & Cara conducted their lesbian relationship in Catholic Ireland. Take a break from Jeanette Winterson and try Emma Donoghue! - Kris
Do not be put off by the size! Ludmila Ultiskaya, is wildly popular in Russia, tho not with Putin, and is heir apparent to the likes of Pasternak. This sweeping epic opens at the time of Stalin's death and follows the lives of 3 young boys as throughout their lives thru the cult of Kruschev, their participation in the underground samizat movement to disseminate “subversive” literature, thru constant surveillance and neighbors who will report you for possessing a copy of Orwell’s 1984. It is a big, full-cast narrative with love and heartbreak and more love and more heartbreak as only Russians do it, with lots of vodka, poetry, big all night arguments about the point of it all, Lenin v Marx, Pushkin v Tolstoy, and of course, always the KGB. Ulitskaya's novel slams the tragically absurd repression(s) these beautiful people survive with characteristic Russian dark-humored wit and pathos. -Kris' February Staff Pick, 2016
So I read the first of the three of this ground-breaking epic tale of two women, whose friendship and life-long rivalry begins early in their Naples, Italy childhood. I can’t think of anything since Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series that centers a story this big around the lives of women. Fully imagined lives—with husbands, lovers and children, yes, but also with jobs, careers, political intrigues and whose relationship is stronger than all others to which women are normally assigned. These are must reads. -Kris' Top 10 Picks of 2015
A modern Greek drama told in two voices: first by the golden boy Lotto, whose fortunes come easy and are assured, and second, by his mysterious and strikingly beautiful wife Mathilde. There are also occasional asides by the (Greek) chorus. Lotto would have you believe that his gorgeous wife of mysterious French origins fairly exists to serve him, and he paints a fairly convincing picture. But when Mathilde speaks, the picture goes a bit murky. This is a compulsively readable and original retake on what could have been a stale trope. Hint: In a game of rock paper scissors, Furies trump Fate. Or do they? -Kris Top 10 Picks of 2015
This is a mesmerizing tale told in exquisitely wrought prose. We follow the lives of 4 young men who meet in college when they share a dorm room and remain close the remainder of their lives. There is a fundamentally sad tale-within-a-tale centered around the fragile Jude, one of the friends, who withholds the heart-breaking details of his tragic childhood to everyone but the reader. But one of the most interesting themes in this book is that of how we define family—who is in it and why—and the rules of engagement as they pertain to love. A masterpiece. -Kris' Top 10 Picks of 2015
When I was little more than 19 or 20, I took a trip with a friend to Washington, DC, where we found ourselves at some sort of women’s rights sit-in in the halls of Congress. Seated against the wall of one of those halls, struck up a conversation with the woman next to me who told me she was planning to start a feminist magazine. Being me, I gave her lots of advice about getting the word out. Gloria Steinem didn’t need my advice to make Ms. Magazine a success. But in My Life on the Road, she shares story after story of the people she met travelling—first with as a child with her eccentrically nomadic father, and later as a journalist, activist and public speaker—people perhaps like me only more interesting. People—from feminist colleagues to taxi cab drivers—whose stories and advice were building blocks to her organizing for women’s rights. This is an anecdotal account, easy to dip in and out of and full of sentences of deceptively simple clarity that you will want to underline and repeat. It’s equal parts armchair herstory, memoir and travelogue. So much of the last 50 years of the women’s liberation movement has been removed to the inaccessible pages of academic tomes. Here is your chance to go behind the scenes with one of the most influential women of our time and see how it’s done. -Kris' Top 10 Picks of 2015
What a great, big fat book of many interlinked stories! Comparisons to Eco's The Name of the Rose and the work of David Mitchell are spot on. Set in all the Venices (Italy, Nevada and California) and spanning centuries, The Mirror Thief is a virtuosic tour de force! This is a novel that everyone will be reading and talking about for years to come. -Kris' May Staff Pick 2016
Kris' October Staff Pick 2015
I discovered this wonderful little book *after* Christmas when it was in hardcover and wished I could have mailed it out to all my family and close friends. What a lovely collection of stories and memories by one of my favorite writers. The recipes and how they came to be is an added bonus. Great book for giving, great book for sharing aloud.