Here are some of our staff's favorite books with brilliant, compelling, and iconic first lines.
Step right in the world of Jonas Karlsson’s Kafkaesque new novel, in which a real-life vanishing act leaves one man looking for his missing friend.
The gentle, off-beat narrator of The Circus is perfectly content with his quiet life. By day he works in a bakery, and by night he obsessively organizes and reorganizes his record collection: it’s all just the way he likes it. But when a childhood friend Magnus comes calling out of the blue, the contours of his familiar world begin to shift. On a visit to the circus together, Magnus volunteers to participate in the magician’s disappearing act, and midway through the routine he vanishes—and never returns. Is this part of the act? What’s happened to Magnus? And who is it calling on the phone in the dead of night, breathing into the receiver, but never saying a word?
Smart, sharply unsettling, and with its playful sleight of hand exquisitely kept, The Circus is a funhouse mirror of a read—one that ingeniously reveals the way we see ourselves and the stories we tell.
Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them. Written in exquisitely wrought prose, Pigs asks questions about community, environmental responsibility, and the possibility of innocence.
Staff review
If you, like me, enter into Pigs expecting a brazenly absurd novel from its blurb, you'll find that it more than delivers on that front, from its finger-severing pigs, to the grown-ups who only speak in high-society minutiae, to the angry sea that gives welts to whoever soaks in it. But, like me, I wager you'll also be surprised by its deftly scintillating commentary on generation gaps, social norms, growing up, and humankind's wasteful ways. And that's not even getting into its disarming, oft stunning moments of beauty amid chaos. Pigs is wickedly funny, a damn wild ride that always has new surprises ready to blindside you on the next page, and deserves a place on the shelf of any oddball fiction enthusiast.
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
Staff reviews
Dream House as Reflection
A history can double as reflection. A mirror. Reading accounts similar to our own can be conduits for processing the personal. Carmen Maria Machado showed me this could be true.
I knew going into this book, as a queer abuse survivor myself, that its subject matter alone would wreck me. I didn't know just how much of it would come from how Machado interweaves structure effortlessly, allowing echoes of several pasts to overlap. Machado's prose is stellar as always, equal parts sensitive and staggering. Her Body and Other Parties stunned me, but this ripped me apart in a completely different way. Machado takes this unwritten collective history and gives it new meaning, new perspective, and a new sense of closure, for me and so many others who have had these experiences linger open-ended for so long.
An entrancing new novel by the author of the prizewinning Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
There’s a village an hour from London. It’s no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the land’s past.
It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure local schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.
With Lanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant novel will ensorcell readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porter’s reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.An entrancing new novel by the author of the prizewinning Grief Is the Thing with Feathers There’s a village an hour from London. It’s no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the land’s past. It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure local schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny. With Lanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant novel will ensorcell readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porter’s reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.
Hearing Max Porter read from this elegant novel is one of the highlights of my year. Months later, I'm still haunted by the subtle horror laced throughout the book.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
“Everything about this novel rings true. . . . Original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.”―The Guardian
In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him―and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend―rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.
The rest of the list is here
Write a comment ...