New books, new books, new books! Lots of short stories (YAY!). And lots of paperback (YAY!).
New Hardcovers:
Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link
She has been hailed by Michael Chabon as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” and by Neil Gaiman as “a national treasure.” Now Kelly Link’s eagerly awaited new collection—her first for adult readers in a decade—proves indelibly that this bewitchingly original writer is among the finest we have.
Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.
Funny Girl by Nick Hornby
From the bestselling author of
High Fidelity,
About a Boy, and
A Long Way Down comes a highly anticipated new novel.
Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingénue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process.
New Paperbacks:
City Beasts: Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife by Mark Kurlansky
In these stories, Mark Kurlansky journeys to his familiar haunts like New York’s Central Park or Miami’s Little Havana but with an original, earthy, and adventurous perspective. From baseball players in the Dominican Republic to Basque separatists in Spain to a restaurant owner in Cuba, from urban coyotes to a murder of crows, Kurlansky travels the worlds of animals and their human counterparts, revealing moving and hilarious truths about our connected existence.
In the end, he illuminates how closely our worlds are aligned, how humans really are beasts, susceptible to their basest instincts, their wildest dreams, and their artful survival.
The Other Language: Stories by Francesca Marciano
A teenage girl encounters the shocks of first love at the height of the summer holidays in Greece. A young filmmaker celebrates her first moment of recognition by impulsively buying a Chanel dress she can barely afford. Both halves of a longstanding couple fall in love with others and shed their marriage in the space of a morning. In all of these sparkling stories, characters take risks, confront fears, and step outside their boundaries into new destinies.
Tracing the contours of the modern Italian diaspora, Francesca Marciano takes us from Venetian film festivals to the islands off Tanzania to a classical dance community in southern India. These stories shine with keen insights and surprising twists. Driven by Marciano’s vivid takes on love and betrayal, politics and travel, and the awakenings of childhood, The Other Language is a tour de force that illuminates both the joys and ironies of self-reinvention.
One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak
A boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes—only to discover how claiming the winnings might unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins—turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A new arrival in Heaven, overwhelmed with options, procrastinates over a long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We also meet Sophia, the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, who falls for a man who might not be ready for it himself; a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who try to figure out how to host an intervention in the era of Facebook. Along the way, we learn why wearing a red T-shirt every day is the key to finding love, how February got its name, and why the stock market is sometimes just... down.
Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, One More Thing has at its heart the most human of phenomena: love, fear, hope, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element that might just make a person complete. Across a dazzling range of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices, the many pieces in this collection are like nothing else, but they have one thing in common: they share the playful humor, deep heart, sharp eye, inquisitive mind, and altogether electrifying spirit of a writer with a fierce devotion to the entertainment of the reader.
Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail- but Some Don't by Nate Silver
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen was a literary legend, the author of more than thirty acclaimed books. In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it.
One week in late autumn of 1996, a group gathers at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews in this camp to their deaths. Clements Olin has joined them, in order to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to bear witness, not only to his family’s ambiguous history but to his own.
It's been one of those moments for me lately. I finally got around to reading The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. A good friend read it last year, and bugged me, and bugged me, and bugged me about it. She loved it, and she was sure I would love it too. Well, she was right. It's phenomenal. Just so interesting and different (it's my March Staff Pick, 20% off all month, if you're interested, at the Ravenna store only). Each thoughtful essay in this collection is an examination on empathy-- how we feel for others; how our pain, and the pain of those around us fosters understanding and connectedness. Jamison explores such fascinating and expansive topics that the subject matter alone is enough to reel you in. But it's her experimental form and innovative command of language that are the real stars here. It's a new favorite. It's hard to read this and not be altered, moved, awed ...maybe even a better person. Super smart. Super good.
So after The Empathy Exams, I moved on to the next book my friend read and would not stop recommending. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I barreled through it, until about 45 pages from the end. At that point, I put it down for two days. I was so in love with the characters, I couldn't face leaving them. It's been a long time since I felt that way about a book. Loved it so much I couldn't bear to finish it. Seriously, Americannah restores my faith in the humanity of human beings.
And I know, I know, it isn't as if either of these books is a sleeper hit. Americannah was Ravenna's second best seller of 2014. And The Empathy Exams is a New York Times Bestseller. I just never would have read them if I hadn't finally given in the recommendation. So, now, I'm moving on to her next recommendation, The Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. Hey, if my friend says it's good. It's good.
