Staff Recommendations

I wanted to hate this—Freudenberger was a staggeringly young writer given a book contract based on ONE short story.       But you know what?  It’s wonderful.  And the young protagonists would make it a wonderful “cross-over” book for high-schoolers, too. --ES

Tolstoy said it best:  “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”The Lambert family is gorgeously, uniquely, and sometimes comically unhappy.  The story of how each member comes to terms (or doesn’t) with this fact makes for a damn good read.        - Joy

     I don’t know which I like better, the wry story or the hip mom. It’s a winning combination.    - ES

• Twenty years ago, Tucker Crowe recorded Juliet—“one of the greatest break-up albums ever made”—promptly dropped out of the recording industry, and has rarely been glimpsed since.
• Annie and Duncan live together in Gooleness—a sleepy, English coastal town—and stay together mostly because they have nothing better to do.
• Annie doesn’t really love anything or anyone—not her job, nor the city in which she lives, not Duncan, and certainly not her therapist.
• Duncan loves Tucker Crowe.
• Tucker—now living anonymously in rural Pennsylvania—loves Jackson, the only one of his five children (by four different women) with whom he has any kind of relationship.
• And Juliet, Naked is the long-awaited stripped-down version of Tucker’s masterpiece that causes all of their lives to come crashing together.

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is a novel about love—good and bad, ruined and new.  It’s about growing old enough to have “a past”, and it’s about how we are sometimes forced to either face up to or live up to that past. Honest and straight-forward, Hornby’s Juliet is a beauty.

In 2007, novelist Jonathan Lethem was approached by Marvel Comics to do a limited series.  When asked which character he would like to work with, Lethem replied, “Omega the Unknown”.  Marvel’s editors responded, without irony, “Who…?”     Omega the Unknown, created by Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes, and Jim Mooney, originally ran for only ten issues between the years 1976-1977.  Despite the comic’s short run, however, the character remained something of a cult favorite to a certain few, due to the oddities of the plot and the quirkiness of the writing.  Jonathan Lethem was one of those certain few who found himself unusually moved by the strange relationship between a nerdy adolescent and a mysterious, alien superhero.     Lethem and Dalrymple’s Omega... is a loving tribute to the original, and it is also truly, genuinely, strange.  It lives in mystery and has the kind of subterranean logic of a surrealist painting.  Dovetailing thematically with Lethem’s other work, Omega the Unknown is a haunting portrait of isolation in a big, quirky, colorful, modern world.

All of Jane Austen's words are here, with Grahame-Smith simply adding the missing zombie action.--G.L.

The reissue of Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful is cause for celebration.  Part biography, part criticism, part prose-poem, the vignettes that compose But Beautiful represent some of the most gorgeous lyrical writing I have ever read about jazz or music in general.     A novelist and critic, Dyer attempts to capture the essence of jazz genius by distilling anecdote, history, and tall tale into a kind of fictionalized elegy.  Clearly something different, But Beautiful defines its own category.     And the most amazing thing of all is just how well Dyer succeeds.  It doesn’t even really feel like reading; it’s more like listening to John Coltrane and Duke play “In a Sentimental Mood”.       I don’t have praise higher than that.--C.M.