Read This Book

One of the greatest perks of bookselling has to be the advance reader copies (ARC); bound galleys of books that come from the publishers, meant to be read by reviewers, booksellers, and so on. But one of the of the worst things about ARCs is that they haven't been reviewed yet, and there are just so many coming into the store everyday. Most of the time it's not even possible to keep track of every ARC that comes in, let alone read them all. 

And sadly, I am the absolute worst at just picking up an unknown book/author. I have so many other books that I know I want to read, I just can't justify picking up a book by an author I've never heard of. I can't handle that kind of risk. I need someone to tell me to read it. I need to know that it's good. Well, luckily for me, and new authors, and ultimately you (to whom I recommend all the great new books I read), I have a boss with excellent taste in books. And he shares that good taste with his less adventurous booksellers.

So the other day, when our boss told me that he thought I would really love Barefoot Dogs, a new book of short stories by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, I put everything else down and read it. Keep in mind, this is the same boss who recommended Stoner to me, which is now on my Super-Awesome, Mega-Elite, Best Books Ever List. The funny thing is, I had the ARC of Barefoot Dogs just sitting at home-- like for months. But because I had never heard of the author, and no one had told me to read it, I never picked it up.

I really, really need to resist this urge in the future, because this book is AMAZING. And I could have been gushing about it months ago. I would have looked so cool for being the first one to like it. And I really love looking cool. Oh well. Read this book anyways, even if I'm not cool.

Barefoot Dogs : Stories by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

This is my new favorite book. I very nearly read it entirely in one sitting-- I was just propelled forward by these amazing characters, and beautiful language. It's a collection of stories, but they are all linked so it reads much more like a novel. The head of a wealthy Mexican family is kidnapped; and in fear for their safety, his adult children and their families flee to places all over the world. It's funny, edgy, sexy, terrifying, and bold. Really, it's just all the good adjectives. READ IT!  -Erin B

An unforgettable debut of linked stories that follow the members and retinue of a wealthy Mexican family forced into exile after the patriarch is kidnapped.

On an unremarkable night, Jose Victoriano Arteaga--the head of a thriving Mexico City family--vanishes on his way home from work. The Arteagas find few answers; the full truth of what happened to Arteaga is lost to the shadows of Mexico's vast and desperate underworld, a place of rampant violence and kidnappings, and government corruption. But soon packages arrive to the family house, offering horrifying clues.

Fear, guilt, and the prospect of financial ruination fracture the once-proud family and scatter them across the globe, yet delicate threads still hold them together: in a swimming pool in Palo Alto, Arteaga's young grandson struggles to make sense of the grief that has hobbled his family; in Mexico City, Arteaga's mistress alternates between rage and heartbreak as she waits, in growing panic, for her lover's return; in Austin, the Arteagas' housekeeper tries to piece together a second life in an alienating and demeaning new land; in Madrid, Arteaga's son takes his ailing dog through the hot and unforgiving streets, in search of his father's ghost.

Multiple award-winning author Antonio Ruiz-Camacho offers an exquisite and intimate evocation of the loneliness, love, hope, and fear that can bind a family even as unspeakable violence tears it apart. Barefoot Dogs is a heartfelt elegy to the stolen innocence of every family struck by tragedy. This is urgent and vital fiction.

New Release Tuesday: Short Story Edition

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.

Long and Short of It

Short stories have been my preferred reading material lately. There is something poetic and impressive about the short story. I really do believe that it takes much more talent to write a great short story than it takes to write a novel... even a great novel. That being said, short stories are a hard sell among our customers. People seem to prefer a big, old novel they can sink their teeth into, but they're ignoring the beauty and genius to be found in a well-written collection of stories.

I'm hoping that Alice Munro's Nobel win will generate some much needed hype for the oft forgotten short story. While every bookstore in the country waits to get Alice Munro's books back in stock, try this amazing collection that I just read and fell in love with.

Amor and Psycho by Carolyn Cooke

From the author of Daughters of the Revolution and The Bostons (winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for fiction) come eleven stories about sex and death, violence and desire, love and madness, set in a vast American landscape that ranges from the largest private residence in Manhattan to the lush rain forests and marijuana farms of Northern California.

In “Francis Bacon,” an aspiring writer learns essential lessons from an aging pornographer. In “The Snake,” a restless Jungian analyst sheds one existence after another. In “The Boundary,” a muralist falls in love with a troubled boy from the rez. In the surreal “She Bites,” a man builds an architecturally distinguished doghouse as his wife slowly transforms. And in the transcendent, three-part title story, two best friends face their strange fates, linked by a determination to wrest meaning and coherence from lives spiraling out of control.

At once philosophical and compulsively readable, Amor and Psycho dives into our darkest spaces, confronting the absurdity, poetry and brutality of human existence.

Here's my review:

Once in awhile you come across an author who shifts your belief about what is possible; about what the written word can do and what a short ten page story can make you feel. Carolyn Cooke is one of those authors. And Amor and Psycho will blow your mind. 

It's dark and sexy. A little violent, and surprisingly funny at some of the most inappropriate moments. Like life, I guess. 

She isn't timid in her exploration of the terrifying things we face everyday. Illness, poverty, misogyny, isolation; it's all in here. But minus the bleakness you would expect. Cooke's genius is her ability to connect you to characters and situations far afield from your own life and infuse your experience with compassion, solidarity, and humor. Add her acrobatic, razor sharp writing and BLAMO! mind blown.