"The Flu Season" + Drown

I'm still mulling over the bravery of Will Eno's play "The Flu Season," which I read a few weeks ago. It has flitted about the edges of my mind since. Currently I'm reading Junot Diaz's short story collection Drown, in part because I loved his novel and in part because you rarely see central New Jersey get any literary love, and rereading Anthony Doerr's collection The Shell Collector, because I finally found my copy. I'm also rereading Mikhal Gilmore's Shot In The Heart--but then, I am always rereading that, and will keep on re- and re- and rereading it until I figure out how the heck he managed to write it.

-Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, assistant editor

Eudaemonic reading

I recently purchased The Art of Happiness (by the Dalai Lama) at a tiny local used bookstore after watching an older man have an unemployment-related breakdown at the cash register because the manager would not give him a job application. It's a pretty insightful book-length conversation between His Holiness and a Western psychologist (though the psychologist is a little over the top in his lionization of the mystical lama).

Sticking with the Tibetan Buddhist theme, I also picked up No Time to Lose by Pema Chodron at the local library. The older lady working the checkout counter's eyes lit up when she saw this book in my pile. "You should come to the Shambala Center," she said. "We have FREE meditation for an hour every weeknight."

Yeah, isn't meditation supposed to be free?

The Chodron book isn't quite as compelling as The Art of Happiness, but it's a more analytical text.

I enjoy reading fiction from small presses, so this month I'm taking in Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press) and Hymn California by Adam Gnade. Antosca's book was written entirely at night and therefore it's fitting that it sorta gives me nightmares; Gnade's work is Kerouacian and pretty fun to read.

My girlfriend recently gave me a copy of Ondaatje's The English Patient, so that's the next fiction coming up. I'm also looking forward to Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles by Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes.

For my current web design projects, I'm rereading Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug and Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.

Other good books I've recently read include The Four-Hour Workweek, Nickel and Dimed, and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.

-Matt Borondy, editor-in-chief

This Is Your Brain on Music

I recently read This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin, The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff, Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, and The Snowball by Alice Schroeder. (If you are wondering why so work-related, I interviewed Colvin and Schroeder for a business journal in NY.)

-Sherry Saturno, interviews editor

Midnight Picnic

Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (a book trailer) from brothercyst on Vimeo.

Just finished Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (my review forthcoming at PopMatters.com) -- in the middle of Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler (fascinating tale about one ambitious fellow...unfortunately, the story's often about business, with many numbers crunched) -- just read Pinter's The Homecoming: what an odd little tale told in beautiful language; favorite line: "You'll drown in your own blood"...how's that for assonance -- just finished reviewing Scorsese by Ebert (pub. TBD) -- all this within a boatload of reading for my graduate course in the History of Childhood: the latest, Children and Childhood in Western Society by Hugh Cunningham -- also going through Flashback: a Brief History of Film by Gianetti and Eyman with my Honors Sem. in Film Crit. at Rutgers-Camden, and am about to teach Fast Food Nation to my freshmen at Camden County College (day job).

-Matt Sorrento, film editor

The Graveyard Book

As a teacher, I reserve the right to read great kiddie and YA literature, so...

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (just received a well-deserved Newberry Medal). The Happy Prince and Other Tales (Oscar Wilde) and on my adult bookshelf, Hardboiled and Hard Luck (Banana Yoshimoto - her writing is just so clean!)

-Sarah Weissman, assistant fiction editor

Notes from No Man's Land

"The world was not waiting for a telephone," begins Eula Biss in her striking essay "Time and Distance Overcome." I started her new book, Notes from No Man's Land (Graywolf Press 2009), last night and I cannot put it down--mostly because I keep rereading this eight-page essay. I've been trying to figure it out. I mean, how did one slim essay about telephone poles make me gasp? Maybe it's her deft weaving of tidbits like, "Mark Twain was among the first Americans to own a telephone" (how fitting is that?) with an account of the obscure "War on Telephones." Or maybe it's how she maneuvers the quotidian of telephone poles into a brutal, illuminating discussion about lynching. Or maybe it's how she is not afraid to talk straight--her writing looks you dead in the eye and speaks--but that she does so with an empathy so tangible, a hope so strong, that you arrive at the end sure that you've read something honest and sad and necessary. These are feats to be admired over and over again.

-Amy Lee Scott, assistant editor

The White Tiger

Some books I read recently are The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance by Matthew Kneale, and A Winter Marriage by Kerry Hardie.

-James Warner, assistant fiction editor

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Recommended V-Day Reading

I just finished Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and now I'm finishing up My Mistress' Sparrow is Dead, a love story anthology edited by Jeffrey Eugenides (in time for Valentine's Day) -- great collection and the proceeds go to benefit 826 Chicago. Plus What to Expect When You're Expecting, which I read in weekly installments. I'm also starting to read the work of Leon Bloy, I'm hoping to translate some of his short stories into English.

-Summer Block Kumar, contributing editor

Sloths, comics, and The Lagoon

A couple of months ago I read a pretty great graphic novel called The Lagoon, by Lilli Carre. It's kind of hard to explain what it's about--there's a thing living in a lagoon, and weird stuff happens when it sings. The drawings are perfect. It's actually a perfect book, or almost. Then, for Christmas, I got a beautiful box set of Tintin comics, so I've been reading through those as a treat. I've also been skimming portions of light zoology texts, trying to learn about sloths. Though some of its research has since become obsolete, the most informative thing I've read on the subject is S.W. Britton's 1941 article 'Form and Function in the Sloth,' which is all about what kinds of environmental shifts caused sloths to evolve in the funny ways they did. I can tell you all about it if you want.

-Sumanth Prabhaker, assistant fiction editor

David Foster Wallace and a Quiet Purging

Last we blogged I bragged. "I'll read a slew of women and one man," I wrote. Big talk.

I started off well--beautifully, sadly, amazingly, actually--with Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Jennifer Pashley's States.

I had intended then to fold back the cover of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, but before I got to it, I was sucker punched--we all were--by David Foster Wallace's death. In that dark and magnetic immediacy, that feeling-knowing-thinking he will never write another word, I sank into "Incarnations of Burned Children." I kept the Harper's Magazine link of his essays open on my laptop for a week, barely sleeping so I could read it all, afraid, I guess, that his words would disappear, too. My recommendation: start here--and have your dictionary handy. Then read his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

After that it's felt like a quiet purging. I moved on, forgetting about gender, to those works that enticed me with darkness, thoughtfulness, more beauty and sadness. Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, David Mura's "A Male Grief: Notes on pornography and addiction": an essay, and, for a dash of wildly, sickly funny in the dark, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm.

And here we are. Next is (for the first time) Miquel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote, and (for the second time) Richard Selzer's Notes on the Art of Surgery.

A little healing, imaginary or otherwise, never hurt anybody.

-Stacy Muszynski, copy editor

Roberto Bolano, Jim Harrison, and more

In no particular order: 2666 by Roberto Bolano, The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolano (poems), Saving Daylight by Jim Harrison (poems), Just Before Dark by Jim Harrison (non fiction), Flying by Eric Kraft, Runner by Thomas Perry, Waltzing with Bashir (graphic novel), Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, Life Sentences by Laura Lippman, Fidel's Last Days by Rolando Merullo, Open City #26, A Public Space 007, New Yorker/Book Bench/Writer Tributes to Updike...

-Robert Birnbaum, editor-at-large

The Way Through Doors, The Elephant Vanishes

I just picked up the new Jesse Ball novel The Way Through Doors at Powell's the other day, and I've brought it with me to Marfa, TX where I'm spending the month of February. That and The Elephant Vanishes by Murakami.

-Anna-Lynne Williams, music editor

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle + War and Peace

When not enjoying LSAT review books, I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and I'm in year 2 of my quest to read War and Peace (made it to page 857 thus far).

-Alexandra Tursi, visual arts editor

Thelonious Monk, Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson

I've been taking my time through the Thelonious Monk Reader. Took it out from the MIT library and realized, hey, why would I ever buy old books again?

I'm also reading Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman's short story collection. And also Neal Stephenson's ginormous book Anathem, which honestly I can't imagine finishing--turns out I'm not so much a fan of 900-page novels with 70-page glossaries.

-Andrew Whitacre, fiction editor