novels in three lines
by félix fénéon

If you like weird little books no one knows about that you can read aloud to your friends, put this at the top of your list. Fénéon was an anarchist, editor, and all-around dandy. He discovered Seurat, translated Rimbaud, and was the first French publisher of James Joyce. But in 1906, his day job consisted of writing anonymous two-or-three-line news items for the French newspaper, Le Matin.

music for chameleons ~ by truman capote, 1980

If you were not lucky enough to have drunk and dished with Truman Capote, (or unlucky, depending on how many drinks and on just how incriminating your behavior was), here's what you missed. The grand master of storytelling in portraiture is at his very best in this collection. Deftly laced with just enough fiction and fancy to make the truth of these true stories emerge, and crafted with Capote's trademark, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, these are addictively delicious, dramatic, and tender non-fiction tales.

In the same way that a photograph is not the actual person at all, but renders in its fantasy of light and shadow and time the ephemeral essence that glitters with everything you cannot see, Capote crafts his conversational vignettes. Also included is Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime, one of the most haunting true-crime stories you will ever read -- and surely never forget. This is a particularly engrossing collection, that works both in pieces and as a whole. You will probably find yourself staying up reading all night or in the bathtub too long. If you're restless, don't know what to read next, and nothing sounds right, this is a surefire cure.

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neck deep, and other predicaments
by ander monson

Warning: Monson's writing may inspire jumping up and down, bursts of laughter, reading aloud, sweet sighs, and flailing of arms. Whether writing about snow, teeth, car washes, or Mrs. Miller, Monson is both startlingly smart and heartbreakingly tender. You'll be smarter, and happier, for having read these.

here is new york ~ by e.b. white, 1949

In the summer of 1949, E.B. White wrote a "poem" for the city that is in itself a poem. A city brimming with overwhelming sensation, indecipherable messages, inescapable metaphor, unbearable significance, conspicuous symbolism, fantastic truths, and multiple meanings all too large to be wrestled to the ground and pinned down. But White, as both native and observer, draws his pen pristinely through the baroque excess of the city illuminating its grandest, most glowing, indestructible, volatile, and vulnerable qualities. I call E.B. White's essay a poem only because it does what great poems usually do best. It points gracefully but surely, guiding the reader to look here, or there, and see what is found as the details are drawn into the towering subjects, the tiny parts indicating the greatest truths of the whole.

And though the very hotel from which E.B. White sipped a drink and recorded the sunset falling on the bricks has disappeared, the resonance of his exalting portrait is even greater over fifty years later. What was a portrait of a city on the dawn of greatness, shape-shifting even more than it has recently (in creation, not destruction), is now hauntingly pertinent, its passages alluding to the terrifying vulnerability of its concentrated significance read as terribly obvious foreshadowing for what has become recent history.

Reading Here is New York feels breathlessly triumphant, the kind of thrill that comes from witnessing that rare occasion of writing born of true inspiration and passion translated through flawless craft - witnessing that moment when someone got it, and put down in words what you thought was impossible to capture.
-Lucía Silva  read excerpts  return to top

don't let's go to the dogs tonight ~ by Alexandra Fuller, 2002

Spanning the years leading up to the end of the Rhodesian civil war, and a decade after, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight draws a landscape scarred with the indelible marks of a country and a family running deep with blood both drawn and shed, the story of a soul and a country, inseparable. An unapologetic, wide-open-eyed memoir, it's neither a story of privilege, nor a treatise on racism, but rather the story of one family as difficult as the physical and political terrain they both battled and loved.

-Lucía Silva     read excerpts   return to top

ex libris ~ by anne fadiman

Before you dismiss this as another book "for the booklover" or "for the bookworm", or one that could be accompanied by a silver bookmark with engraved cats, let me finish. It's not just for people wearing t-shirts that say "a book is a gift you can open again and again". It's about you. You who have read all your life and accumulated books faster than dust, who reads cereal boxes at breakfast and the shampoo bottle in the shower, who proofreads menus and signs. You who maybe religiously folds down the corners of pages (agghhh - no!) or considers such practices horrifying (as you well should!).

Ex Libris is all about the particularities developed during a life-long love affair with books - peculiarities you will no doubt recognize if you know your stuff. Whether writing about marrying libraries, inscriptions on a flyleaf, or building castles out of books, Anne Fadiman reveals a wit and style that's honest, unaffected, and irresistible.

- Lucía Silva   return to top