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Authors Bookstore
(brought to you by arrangement with Borders)
Here's a list of recommended books, chosen by your Guide for their
outstanding features and editorial excellence. As a result of a commercial relationship between
About.com, its Guides and Borders online booksellers, these titles can be
purchased directly from Borders by following the links below. (Note: Borders is solely
responsible for fulfillment of book orders placed through these links.) The bookstore is divided in Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction. If your looking for gift ideas, see also a recent gift Book Ideas feature, with selections for everyone on your list.
Fiction
Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's written a murder mystery, set in the 19th century that is also a metaphysical mystery of identity.
Almanac of the Dead
by Leslie Marmon Silko
An innovative novel which includes a "500-year map" and transverses the U.S., Mexico, and Africa to create a Native American history that manages to be comprehensive while personal.
All Soul's Rising
by Madison Smartt Bell
A sprawling novel by prolific prose stylist Bell that takes on as its subject nothing less expansive than the history of Haiti.
AVA
by Carole Maso
Writer, intellectual, concentration camp survivor, lover of life, Ava Klein gratefully rolls through fragments her past as she lays in her deathbed on the last night of her life. An erotic, thought provoking and moving novel.
Bombay Ice
by Leslie Forbes
Bombay goes Hollywood, in a Shakespearean way, in Forbes novel of a new, cosmopolitan India.
The Evolution of Jane
by Cathleen Schine
Schine's latest novel about explores the mystery of a friendship gone awry in the thought provoking setting of the Galapagos Islands.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
The book that put HST on the map, a wild tale of drugs, paranoia, and the American road, in Hunter's gonzo style. A twentieth century
American classic.
Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
A reinvention of the short story form, Borges' 17 tales take you on a cerebral trip through a fantastic world. An amazing series of transactions in the library of the mind.
A Frolic of His Own
by William Gaddis
This National Book Award-winning novel is a heteroglossic tale that questions the nature what we call justice in the contemporary U.S.A. A hilarious and incredibly accurate sendup of the American legal system, home of frivolous lawsuits galore.
Gain
by Richard Powers
Powers' latest novel is about cancer and the American Corporation, and explores the how seeeming benevolence of business practices can have devestating effects on the lives of individuals.
Gold Bug Variations
by Richard Powers
What do D.N.A., Bach, Edgar Alan Poe, physics, reference librarians, childbearing and computers have in common? Find out in this epic and complex novel of discovery by the ingenious MacArthur-winning author Powers.
Gravity's Rainbow
by by Thomas Pynchon
A landmark of postmodernism, worth reading for the language alone. Follow a huge cast of characters, led by the oft-aroused Tyrone Slothrop, as they spin a world of paranoia from the development of the V-2 rocket.
Hopscotch
by Julio Cortazar
Cortazar gives us a revolutionary postmodern novel in which, at the end of each chapter, the reader is given a choice of the next chapter to hop to. Much of the action takes place in Paris, but the story is filled with magic realism and Argentine culture.
The House of Sleep
by Jonathan Coe
A remarkable novel of the alternate lives of dreams, full of Nabakovian doublings, by turns maudlin, sinisiter, and absurd.
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
The sprawling, 1000 page ultrahyped 1996 novel-event, about tennis, addiction, recovery, and U.S. commercialism. A great book that you should carve out a month or two to read (even if it doesn't have an ending.)
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
by Manuel Puig
Mostly dialogue between two men in an Argentine jail cell, the novel traces the development of their unlikely friendship. An intensely human and political drama that became a great film.
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Perhaps the most famous novel of obsession ever written. Follow perverted intellectual narrator Humbert Humbert across the country with Lolita, the "nymphette" his heart aches for, as he glides down the path to his own destruction. A brilliantly achieved novel, however politically incorrect.
Lost in the Funhouse
by John Barth
Barth's most famous, oft-anthologized work, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968) is a collection of short stories which really define the terrain of American metafiction. From a sperm's night-swim to a self-deconstructing funhouse, Protean Barth makes great stories of storytelling and storytellers. Metafiction at its best.
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A lush, beautiful novel that tells the stories of people who have held their love long, a tale of passion and memory not restrained by boundaries of time.
Memories of My Father Watching T.V.
by Curtis White
A postmodern exploration of what television can do to human relationships, in which a son communicates with his father through an imaginary media.
Mason and Dixon
by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon's 1997 offering follows the two famous surveyors/astronomers, as the follow the transit of Venus and lay the historic line from East to West. I won't give anything away, but there's some great vignettes here, including a talking duck that becomes the Hegelian Geist, and George Washington sampling hemp.
Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
This is the classic book that emerged out of Burroughs' heroin addiction. It's one of those books that makes you rethink what novels are -- for better or for worse. After the first time I read it, I felt like I'd just emerged from the end of a tunnel to a dark, carnival world.
No Strange Fire
by Ted Wojtasik
A novel of mystery set among the Amish of the twentieth century. One part Faulkner, another Willa Cather, a novel that balances between two worlds.
Plays Well With Others
by Alan Gurganus
Gurganus has done the seemingly impossible in this AIDS novel/comedy. Even though the subject is tragic, the lives involved are ones at play. Gurganus ventures into new territory here, and has fun doing it.
Reader's Block
by David Markson
Quite possibly the end of metafiction. Markson novel of fragments tells the tale of near-suicidal old writer, piecing together a meaning of his life from esoteric flashes of data. Unlike any other book you've read before it.
Riven Rock
by T.C. Boyle
One of our best prose stylists sets some new challenges for himself in this tale of Stanley McCormick, one of the world's richest men who is also a sexual psychopath, hidden away from the women of the world with a team of psychiatrists and a colony of apes.
The Sot Weed Factor
by John Barth
The Sot Weed Factor (1960) is an American Tom Jones -- a picaresque romp through colonial Maryland, featuring all the stuff of great comedy: an English Candide in the form of poet Ebenezer Cooke, intent on remaining a virgin, who is forced to consummate his union in order to retain his estate, mistaken identities, doubles, bodice-ripping pirates, comic bestiality and more. Also a serious investigation of the way we read history.
Ulysses
by James Joyce
This may be the most important book of the 20th Century. Buy it and read it. It's a great book. I mean, it's a really great book. It'll piss you off, and it will more than likely sit on your bookshelf for years and years before you crack it, but trust me, it's good. It's got its own rewards. You need to have a copy in your home. Maybe they ought to stick it in hotel rooms, like the Gideon bible . . . oh never mind, just buy it, you need it.
Unbabbling
by Reyoung
This bizarre release from Dalkey Archive Press might have been written by Samuel Beckett, if he were an American monster.
Poetry
ARK
by Ronald Johnson
Ronald Johnson's epic architectonic poem is his magnum opus, one of the most important American works in the form during the twentieth century, completed just a few years before he passed away.
Broken Helix
by Dina Ben-Lev
Ben-Lev's first book of poems, Broken Helix is both a personal and a political work, that deals with the poet's experiences as an adopted child, as a New Yorker, and as a woman dealing with failed relationships.
Elegy
by Larry Levis
Levis writes elegies for his own life and death in his posthumous collection, asking "what else is there?" after all is said and done.
From the Devotions
by Carl Phillips
Phillips' poems examine the line between devotion and obsession, between religious and sexual extascy.
Heights of Macchu Picchu
by Pablo Neruda
The 12 sections of The Heights of Macchu Picchu represent separate phases of a journey, literally and figuratively. Neruda recounts his failures, successes, his journey through life, mountains and valleys.
100 Love Sonnets
by Pablo Neruda
A astounding collection of love poetry from the Spanish master.
Primate Behavior
by Sarah Lindsay
Lindsay uncovers the animal side of human behavior in this collection of poetry.
Winter Night: Selected Poems of Attila Jozsef
edited by Michael Bakti
A Hungarian Romantic, Atilla Jozsef is known as one of the most talented poets to emerge from Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. Unfortunately, he killed himself at age 32.
Nonfiction
Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts
by David Thomson
A Hollywood insider delivers the scoop in this collection of essays and anecdotes of the lives inside the big screen.
Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos From The Baffler
edited by Thomas Frank
Some great short essays on contemporary consumer society from The Baffler, a vehicle of dissent from out of Chicago.
A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul
by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Peter Sekirin
Tolstoy's book of days offer inspiriation from the world's great thinkers, for the religious and secular alike.
God and the American Writer
by Alfred Kazin
In this study, Kazin takes a look at how classic American authors related to their ideas of God.
Hail Babylon!
by Andrei Codrescu
You couldn't find a better travelling companion than NPR wit, Transylvanian poet Andrei Codrescu. An investigation of the American city at the close of the Millenium.
Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America
by Richard Nelson
Richard Nelson does an all-out study of the deer and deer hunting, examining how man and nature interact through the hunt.
Home from Nowhere: Remaking our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century
by James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler examines the way American cities are designed, and the effect those designs have on the everyday lives of urbanites.
No Laughing Matter: The Life & Times of Flann O'Brien
by Anthony Cronin
Cronin's biography explains all the comedy and tragedy of the life of one of Ireland's best satirists, who spent much of his career in the shadow of James Joyce.
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman: 1955-1967
by Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson's early letters and journals reveal a writer who learned as much from typing out Hemingway stories as he did from the substances he abused with regularity.
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