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2016 Staff Favorite
Donald Judd's Complete Writings 1959-1975 collects of much of the innovative artist and critic's most important writing, reissued this year after being quite hard to find for decades. Alongside "Specific Objects," Judd's 1965 minimalism manifesto (or manifesto-like essay, some would more hesitantly say), are reviews of contemporaries and reflections on the mid-century art world, both New York-based and, to some extent, beyond. Read it slowly, pausing to revisit and reconsider the artists, impulses, and creative processes he examines. -Alena
This is the complete, authorized collection of Donald Judd's early art criticism and polemical writings; it includes his landmark essay Specific Objects plus more than 500 contemporary art reviews he wrote on key artists and exhibitions of the 1960s.
Complete Writings...
2016 Staff Favorite
From the subtitle: To Engage the University in a Useless Task Which Will Allow It to Expose a Working Model of Its System.
-Adam
In the summer of 1970, the artist Les Levine arrived at the University of Toronto to take part in the installation of site-specific work on the quadrangle in front of the University's Hart House. The intended piece--construction materials hung from high-tension rope between campus buildings--was...
2016 Staff Favorite
Always the master word-combiner, Cave takes on the road documenting the pleasures, frustrations, absurdity, and epiphanies of a touring artist.
-Adam
From the inimitable Nick Cave comes a mesmerizing exploration of love, inspiration, and memory that chronicles his 2014 twenty-two-city American tour with the Bad Seeds.
The Sick Bag Song began life scribbled on paper airlinesick bags during Cave's 2014 tour. It soon grew into...
2016 Staff Favorite
Where most biographers and reporters gloss over the life of James Brown in all of its musical glory and drug-conflicted shame, James McBride digs deep to find what made one of the hardest performers in show business tick. What we get is a soul-searching portrait of a private and conflicted man, the character of his birthplace of the American South, and a meditation on the creative spirit -- and the loneliness it often travels with.
-Kevin
2016 Staff Favorite
A throwback to the golden days of gonzo rock’n’roll journalism by one of the remaining originals. An incredibly detailed, marvelously researched return to the end of ‘60s, which, in its exploration of the implosion of idealism, turns out to have quite a bit to do with the present. A must for music lovers and cultural critics alike.
-Alex
In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s.
In the...
2016 Staff Favorite
Brilliantly rendered exploration of contemporary provincial Russia and former Soviet states, through the eyes of a Slavic lit-loving, accordian-playing, constantly-touring, insanely articulate punk. Filled with histories of places you’ve never heard of, portraits of cities and people on the other side of the shreds of the Iron Curtain, and guaranteed to send you hunting down obscure Soviet-era anarchopunk.
-Alex
2016 Staff Favorite
A thorough, exploratory and divulgent cookbook. Each recipe feels and tastes like a long awaited, revealed secret into remarkable age-old and perfected Israeli comfort and communal recipes. Nothing in this book is complicated or intimidating, yet the flavors embody what it means to be fresh, complex and pure. An intimate and revealing journey through one of my favorite pastimes, sharing food.
- Alyx
James Beard Award winner of Outstanding Restaurant (2019)
James Beard Award winner of Outstanding Chef (2017)
James Beard Book of the Year and Best International Cookbook (2016)
The James Beard Award-winning chef...
"Ferocious."--The...
2016 Staff Favorite
In her second novel Eimar McBride remains committed to the manipulation of language and strives to, as she puts it, "make language cope with and more fully describe that part of life that is destroyed once it begins to get put into straightforward grammatical language." McBride has found a way to jam the bodies into the speech. Hardly a page is untouched by the linguistic fallout of violence, sex and grief. McBride marks experiences as those which bring language to a shuddering stop. That halting of speech is seen, heard and felt in The Lesser Bohemians with the use of unfilled spaces between words, blank as a way of registering what can barely be spoken. -Annie
Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize & the 2016 Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize
Shortlisted for the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year The breathtaking new novel from Eimear...
2016 Staff Favorite
This collection of short stories delivers both a profound insight and an efficient reading experience. The author is taking on the world's oldest subject in a way that feels impressively relevant and -- at times -- heartbreaking. The stories can be read as individual, coherent units, or as parts of a larger whole; ultimately, both approaches relay the collection's thoughtfulness in a way that will resonate with any reader.
-Muriel
2016 Staff Favorite
Fall into a year in the life of Tess... As an almost-waitress in a tony Manhattan restaurant, the food biz is her school. Tess's new world is all-consuming: the people, the wine, the oysters, the relationships. Sharply written and unputdownable.
-AnnJ
2016 Staff Favorite
A poetic and patient novel that is a celebration of loss and how it shapes us. With careful and measured prose, Klougart reveals life's remembered stability to be situated firmly as a point in our past that progresses toward deterioration, but in that journey there is a beauty of experience that only exists due to our fragile memories. Klougart has been called the Scandinavian Virginia Woolf, and she lives up to it here.
-Kevin
Scandinavia now has its own Virginia Woolf. Few get as close to the human mind as Klougart--Mari Nymoen Nilsen, VG
The English-language debut from one of Denmark's most exciting, celebrated young writers, One of Us Is Sleeping is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms...
2016 Staff Favorite
Iben Mondrup's portrayal of artistic creation, rebellion against the misogynist status quo, and a destruction that stems from forces both external and self-imposed is one of the most gut-feeling stories I've read about an artist's life. The tension between rebelling and becoming that which you rebel against in mimeograph are tackled head on. What comes through in the prose is a confidence of style and a conviction that the stones we unturn have a weight that is capable of crushing who we once were.
-Kevin
When Mondru's prose is ablaze, cruising around with her inside a bruised and beaten artist's soul is a veritable party. . . . By God she's a great prose stylist full of character.--Politiken
Danish Women Writers Series
Stylistically provocative, Justine tells the...
2016 Staff Favorite
The Minotaur of the Labyrinth. Fierce. Terrifying. Tender and misunderstood? In this sequel to The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, we see the grunting, misunderstood M continuing his search for acceptance. He works as a Civil War reenactor on the side of the Confederacy, takes small steps toward friendships with those around him, and, much like any of us, struggles with nature's more primal instincts. The story of the Minotaur...just might be the most human story you've ever read.
-Kevin
Sixteen years have passed since Steven Sherrill first introduced us to "M," the selfsame Minotaur from Greek mythology, transplanted to the modern American South, in the critically acclaimed The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. M has moved north now, from a life of kitchens and trailer...
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2016 Staff Favorite
Drawing short lines across the streets of a London housing estate, between the lives of two biracial families and the very different daughters they produce, and much longer ones from Africa to England, slavery to celebrity culture, imperialism to humanitarianism, tribal dances to movie musicals, Zadie Smith manages to meditate on practically every contemporary preoccupation without ever veering into banal commentary, treacly moralizing, or gimmicky postmodernism.
-Alex
2016 Staff Favorite
Pizarnik's poetry is reminiscent of, if not transcendent of, many of South America's greats. A little known talent in English, she was revered by Calvino, Cortazar, and others. Her use of language and dire meditation on our fleeting joys and unavoidable fate cut deeply into a beauty that only poetry can unearth. As she says in "Memory Loss:" "I recall with all my lives / my reasons for forgetting."
- Kevin
2016 Staff Favorite
Only a poet would choose to explain two elements of the world that are unexplainable. But being a poet proves the advantage. Adonis finds the sweet spot in catching the wind inside both of their destinations. He uses his own knowledge and experience in both by showing that though one, Sufism, is usually confined to a religious pantheon, and the other, Surrealism, is completely lacking in affiliation to any religious institution, he finds their parallel in the high point, a.k.a the holy madness, that both intend to achieve in practice and in living. This may seem like a muddy point to make but for a reader like myself who's studied Sufism extensively, and understands the angle in which its intentions lie, and has researched the essence behind Surrealism, I too see them as being two sides of the same coin, especially when it comes to producing poetry. These are both, for lack of an easier term, alchemical processes. Max Ernst spoke alot about these things as well. It is the individual's sole journey to the center that both disciplines hope to achieve, whatsoever its manifestation. Adonis proves that, from a traditional standpoint, God does not exist in either. Because it is not worship of God nor of oneself that they both have in common, but rather a discovery of oneself.
-Aaron
The Arab world's greatest living poet.--The New York Times
Adonis is one of the most important major literary figures of our century. His vision is extraordinary, his poetry sublime . . . a master of our times.--V. S. Naipaul
At first glance, Sufism and Surrealism appear to be...
2016 Staff Favorite
A thought-provoking, wide-ranging, philosophical consideration of the joys and perils of friendship by a tremendous stylist.
-Jeff
2016 Staff Favorite
Timely. Perhaps even prescient. Chang's small volume of essays is a tightly packed collection of diagnosis, frustration, illumination, and hope ready to explode. His take on #BlackLivesMatter as well as the resegregation of our communities that has been happening for several years will provoke and incite. This is a call to empathy and a spotlight on race relations in America, as well as a pondering of where we are headed next.
-Kevin
A provocative and timely collection of essays from a celebrated cultural critic on race, diversity, and resegregation.
The Smartest Book of the Year (The Washington Post)
2016 Staff Favorite
There's a new breed of book out there, short but far from sweet, unafraid to be both brief and biting. In this one, Kristin Dombek takes a concept that has somewhat suddenly become central in pop pyschology -- narcissism -- and digs deep into the literature and her own life to figure out why, exactly, we’re now so quick to use (and accuse with) it and how this prevalence is counterproductive, culturally and personally. Razor sharp and terribly relevant.
- Alex
They're among us, but they are not like us. They manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal. They are irresistibly charming and accomplished, appearing to live in a radiance beyond what we are capable of. But narcissists are empty. No one knows exactly what everyone else is full of--some kind of a...