Recommendations from Lucia Silva, the book buyer at Portrait of a Bookstore in Studio City, Calif.
Big Machine
Big Machine: A Novel, by Victor LaValle, paperback, 384 pages, Spiegel & Grau, list price: $15
Ricky Rice is a sort-of ex-junkie working as a janitor at a bus depot in Utica, N.Y., when he's summoned to join a group of "Unlikely Scholars" at the mysterious Washburn Library in the backwoods of Vermont. A motley crew of mostly tender souls with shady pasts, the Scholars are faced with baffling protocols and cryptic assignments to investigate paranormal activity in service of some larger scheme.
LaValle uses Ricky's past as a child of a bizarre religious cult in Queens and his later battles with soul-sucking specters to deliver an intense rumination on faith and doubt, and how vital both are to survival. Victor LaValle's prose is thrilling and electric from the first word to the last as he shapes Ricky into a character you want to follow to the ends of the Earth -- and beyond. (Read about the mysterious package -- containing a bus ticket to Vermont and an enigmatic message on a Post-it Note -- that Ricky Rice opens while hiding from his boss in the station's bathroom.)
Anthropology Of An American Girl
Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel, by Hilary Thayer Hamann, hardcover, 624 pages, Spiegel & Grau, list price: $26
Flawed, but beautifully, and perhaps purposefully so, Anthropology of An American Girl is an emotionally haunting novel, entrancing from the first to the last of its 600-plus pages. The arrestingly intimate first-person narration follows Eveline, a townie from East Hampton, from her senior year in high school in 1979 through the next five years of her life into a fast-lane, moneyed life in 1980s Manhattan.
Eveline is cerebral and deeply reflective, and it's her take on the world around her -- her musings, budding desires and wrestlings with contradictions -- that creates the mesmerizing drive behind the story. As she negotiates herself into adult life, she teeters in a dangerous netherworld between finding and losing herself. An emotional anthropology of what it's like to be a certain kind of girl reckoning with the kind of woman she might become, Anthropology is both beautiful and terrifying -- and uncommonly true. (Read about the Cold War-era bomb drills Eveline endured as a schoolgirl on the South Shore of Long Island.)
Vanishing Point
Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, by Ander Monson, paperback, 208 pages, Graywolf Press, list price: $16
Ander Monson is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, and this is his "not a memoir" -- a series of explorations and meditations on the very idea of memoir, of self-representation, vanity, and memory. A piece on jury duty digresses into ideas about "truth" and "facts," Monson's own petty-criminal past, and the very nature and impossibility of justice. Another chapter takes us into the now-common obsession with "self-Googling," as Monson explores all of the other Anders he finds online. Other sections are assemblages pieced together from lines from other people's memoirs, both famous and infamous.
In a brilliant twist on the digitization of books, Monson inserts symbols throughout his beautifully designed paper-and-ink book that indicate places where readers can access footnotes, marginalia, images, video, and other digressions on his website -- kind of like inked hyperlinks, or "text adventures." So funny and so smart (but never smug), Monson's writing makes you realize how very alive thinking and writing can be. (Read Monson's explanation of why he kept his underage conviction for felony credit card fraud to himself while being chosen for jury duty in Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Welcome To Utopia
Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town, by Karen Valby, hardcover, 256 pages, Spiegel & Grau, list price: $25
On assignment for Entertainment Weekly to find an American town untouched by popular culture, Karen Valby happened upon Utopia, Texas -- a town with "no stoplights, one constable, six real estate offices, and seven churches," no chain stores or fast-food restaurants, no movie theaters, bookstores, or video stores.
After finishing her assignment, Valby couldn't shake the town, and she returned to Utopia to mine its simple mysteries. She takes us deep into the morning kaffeeklatch of older gentlemen who hang out at the general store, introduces us to the waitress at the local diner who has three young sons fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hangs out with the oddball emo kid and only African-American family in town; all of whom reveal why so many stay in Utopia, and why some ache to leave. Filled with personal portraits and complex issues, Valby's account reads like a book-length New Yorker article -- compulsively readable and deeply affecting. (Read Valby's description of the early-morning crowd of old-timers at the Utopia General Store.)
One More Theory About Happiness
One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir, by Paul Guest, hardcover, 208 pages, Ecco, list price: $21.99
My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge
My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, by Paul Guest, paperback, 96 pages, Ecco, list price: $13.99
I lived with the opening poem from My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge pinned to my wall for a year before learning that its author had typed it with his mouth. When he was 12 years old, Paul Guest broke his neck when the brakes gave out on a borrowed bicycle, leaving him paralyzed.
One More Theory About Happiness chronicles the years that follow as he battles his physical limitations on the unfettered playground of his poet's mind. Far from a saccharine "triumph of the human spirit," Guest's memoir is marked by his winning humor and bare-naked honesty, distilled into poetic prose. His poetry is brutal, funny, and tender -- an unusual and exhilarating mix. Together the two books paint an indelible portrait of a writer, and alert us to the amazing ability of the human body and mind to reconcile with an unbearable reality. (Read Guest's account of the bike accident that broke his neck.)
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