Matt Borondy:
I'm on a couple of short story collections (Valerie Martin's The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart) and they are both pretty exceptional. And there's a nice long article about Whole Foods ("Paradise Sold") in the New Yorker.
Ross Simonini:
Zappa by Barry Miles
Slow Man by Coetzee
Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine by Thom Jones
The Age of Sinatra by David Ohle
Summer Block:
I'm re-reading Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge and also Bleak House - both because I love them and because classics are the type of English literature easiest to find in Shanghai.
Christian Bauman:
Reading a galley of Michael Ruhlman's new one, The Reach of a Chef. Ruhlman rocks.
Alex Shapiro:
"Illinois Rules of the Road" so I can hopefully pass my test and get a drivers license in this city.
Robert Birnbaum:
The Foreign Correspondent - Alan Furst
A Writer's Life - Gay Talese
America's Magic Mountain - Curtis White
Miss Kansas City - Joan Frank
In Persuasion Nation - George Saunders
To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society - Louis Perez
A Million Nightingales - Susan Straight
Oracle Bones - Peter Hesler
New Tin House story Anthology
The Theater of Night - Alberto Rios
Allan Gurganus's introduction to New Stories of the South 2006
The Secret Way to War - Mark Danner
June 1941: Hitler and Stalin - John Lukacs
The Way We Eat - Peter Singer and Jim Mason
May I Finish - Roger Angell
Eric Lagergren:
Actually one of the best New Yorkers all-around: article on Whole Foods (and what is organic and what organic means); there's an article in that issue on the Nigerian email scams and how a psychologist got caught up in one and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars; there's an article on Ivan Lendl's three (four?) golfing-prodigy daughters; and there is one other article in that issue that's very captivating, although for the life of me this a.m. (just got into work) I can't recall what it was. A profile, maybe? Hmm....
Also reading
- In Cold Blood
- Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Uncertain Science (Atul
Gawande)
Drew McNaughton:
"Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA" by Luis J. Rodriguez
"The Creative Writing MFA Handbook" by Tom Healy
Both of which arrived in the mail from Senor Borondy with a cryptic letter about color morphology in candles. I have been reading "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood" by William Pollack. It basically says that boys have the same maladies of the psyche that you'd think, it just explains it better and makes you feel like you have more of a ceaseless uphill battle ahead of you if you want your child to turn out anything less like the trainwreck you are.
Jane Friedman:
I'm busy catching up on a backlog of New Yorkers and Atlantic Monthlys. Two books I just recently bought, with full intention to read immediately, are: MAYBE BABY (an anthology of essays about having children) and TO HELL WITH ALL THAT by Caitlin Flanagan.
Mara Naselli:
I'm reading Angelhead by Greg Bottoms, and A Plea for Eros by Siri Hustvedt.