"Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's novel about his narrator's complex relationship with being Asian-American, and living in a changing USA, and resisting the stereotypes that he must embrace to find work as a movie actor. The book is so full of feeling, yet it's also very funny, and formally it's completely original, binding the conventions of screenwriting with a novelistic structure. I think about this book all the time."

 

 

Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family.

 

 

 

Best read aloud in the company of a four-year-old, Emily Jenkins's Toys series is a marvel of complex character development and sly existential anguish. I would kill to write characters this good. There is this stingray named StingRay who always pretends to know stuff that she doesn't know, a buffalo named Lumphy who is brave but also scared, an enthusiastic rubber ball named Plastic, a wise towel named Tuk-Tuk, plus this sheep who is missing one ear who is obsessed with talking about the one time she went outside and ate real grass... as well as a dryer (Frank, he lives in the basement), assorted mice, a rubber shark, and these Barbies who can't talk and who all the other toys despise... at one point a stuffed animal who doesn't talk is described as having "furniture eyes" ... I'm obsessed with these books.

 

 

In these six linked stories from Emily Jenkins, and illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner Paul O. Zelinsky, readers will meet three extraordinary friends. Lumphy is a stuffed buffalo. StingRay is a stuffed stingray. And Plastic... well, Plastic isn't quite sure what she is. They all belong to the Little Girl who lives on the high bed with the fluffy pillows. A very nice person to belong to. Together is best for these three best friends. Together they look things up in the dictionary, explore the basement, and argue about the meaning of life. And together they face dogs, school, television commercials, the vastness of the sea, and the terrifying bigness of the washing machine.

 

 

 

"Baker is maybe the most gifted writer since Proust at slowing down a single instant into a chapters-long exercise in pure interiority, and his outrageous 1994 not-quite-erotic novel The Fermata literalizes at the level of plot what books like The Mezzanine and Room Temperature accomplish through form: the novel's narrator possesses a secret power to stop time such that he alone can move through the world, with everyone else frozen in place. What does he do with his powers (which are of course simply the powers of the novelist, made material)? Well: he ogles women's bodies! This sounds like a nearly impossible premise to pull off, but the book skillfully addresses its own potential creepiness, slowing down narrative time to meditate on sexual consent and voyeurism with the same spirit of curiosity and generosity with which it approaches the everyday delights of human bodies, public libraries, and washing machines (Baker is also one of our foremost describers of mechanical processes). I enthusiastically recommend literally all of Baker's fiction, but this one might be the most singularly joyful, and maybe the most weirdly sexy."

 

 

This is the story of Arno Strine, a modest temporary typist, who has perfected the knack of stopping time in its tracks and taking women's clothes off. He is hard at work on his autobiography, The Fermata, which proves in the telling to be a very provocative, very funny and altogether morally confused piece of work.

 

 

 

 

 

Rosemary is an ex-con with no viable career prospects, a boyfriend old enough to be her grandfather, and a major obsession with our nation's forty-first president, whom she fondly refers to as G.B. Unexpectedly smitten during his inaugural address, Rosemary is soon anticipating G.B.'s public appearances with the enthusiasm she once reserved for all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets. As her ardor and determination to gain G.B.'s affection grow, Rosemary embarks on an increasingly outrageous campaign that escalates from personal letters to paid advertising, until at last she reaches the White House.

 

What happens next is nothing like how Rosemary imagined it would be.

 

 

 

 

 

Described as "the most well-executed literary sex comedy" of our time by Salon.com, and "a wickedly smart satire that deserves to be a classic" by Bookforum, Helen DeWitt's Lighting Rods is a novel that will leave you laughing for more. Follow one steady rise to power in corporate America as down-and-out salesman Joe curtails sexual harassment in the office and increases productivity with his mysterious, mind-blowing invention.

 

 

 

 

 

The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit's new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post-Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

 

 

 

 

 

Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night—an entire egg farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland—a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits—assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues.

 

 

 

"In the fall my mind often turns to Powell’s New York novels of the 1930s through the 1960s, in which writers and editors compete for space in dive bars and newspaper columns. Her wickedest may be this 1942 satire on a social-climbing do-gooder novelist and her very wealthy husband, a publishing magnate. Set on the eve of World War II, like Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, it is perfect for when the booze soaks in, well after Happy Hour."

 

 

Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America's entry into World War II, A Time To Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends. At the center of the story are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler. Powell always denied that Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce, until years later when she discovered a memo she'd written to herself in 1939 that said, "Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?" Which prompted Powell to write in her diary "Who can I believe? Me or myself?"

 

 

 

 

 

Considered the greatest graphic novel in the history of the medium, the Hugo Award-winning story chronicles the fall from grace of a group of superheroes plagued by all-too-human failings. Along the way, the concept of the superhero is dissected as an unknown assassin stalks the erstwhile heroes.

 

 

 

 

 

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present.

 

The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.