What We’re Reading

April’s staff reading list includes Hemingway, Ron Rash, Vanessa Veselka, Gary Lutz, James Franco and more.

Matt Borondy is reading Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard,  Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Charles J. Shields’ biography of Kurt Vonnegut (And So It Goes), and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.Robert Birnbaum is reading The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano, The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, Stolen Souls by Stuart [...]

I recently finished Enchantments, a charming Italian novella by Linda Ferri. I picked it up serendipitously at the Harvard Book Shop on trip to Boston last month and loved it. Ferri co-wrote the script to the Cannes-prize-winning film The Son’s Room.In other news, I’ve made it to page 970 of War & Peace.I’m currently enjoying [...]

I enjoyed Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, and am now tackling Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King & Other Stories. I also recently read Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers, and am now onto Duncan Wu’s William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, since I personally can never read enough Johnson or Hazlitt biographies.-James Warner, assistant fiction [...]

I’m currently reading Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson, and thinking about theater and playwriting. I’m also working on translating some of Leon Bloy’s short stories from French into English.I also just finished Husband-Coached Childbirth, by Robert Bradley. My feeling is that the Bradley childbirth method is great, but the book [...]

More sloth stuff this month, including a very sweet picture book by Eric Carle called Slowly, Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth. I bought Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, and will be reading that over the next few weeks. Sometimes I wish I could take his brain and put it inside my head. Then I could [...]

T.S. Eliot might have said April is the cruelest month in The Waste Land, but I personally have a fondness for the first full month of spring. Living in New England means never knowing what sort of weather to expect next, but at least once you get to April, you’re that much closer to warmer [...]

Wake-up Call!All the books on my nightstand have had it with my lackadaisical attitude. It’s spring, they say, and time to finish what I’ve started. Which means one and three-fifths issues of American Short Fiction (Spring 2009, with Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Yoon, Smith Henderson, Rachel B. Glazer, Amelia Gray, Kim Chinquee, Joe Wenderoth, Desmond [...]

I’m reading Style: Towards Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams. It shows you how to almost unconsciously edit this:The point I want to make here is that we can see the American policy in regard to foreign countries as the State Department in Washington and the White House have put it together and made [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

“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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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

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 [...]