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The Enchanted April  |  Elizabeth Von Arnim
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Recommended by Chad Harbach
 
"One of the most delightful novels in existence. A 1920s rom-com romp on the Italian Riviera, written by Katherine Mansfield's more famous cousin. "
 
About the Book
 
Four very different women, looking to escape dreary London for the sunshine of Italy, take up an offer advertised in the Times for a "small medieval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April." As each blossoms in the warmth of the Italian spring, quite unexpected changes occur.
 

Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon  |  Leonard S. Marcus
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Recommended by Keith Gessen
 
"This is a thorough and thoroughly intelligent biography of the author of Goodnight Moon and The Noisy Book, situating her at the heart of the tumult of modernism. Among biographies of children's book authors in general, it has no peer."
 
About the Book
 
Nearly fifty years after her sudden death at the age of forty-two, Margaret Wise Brown remains a legend and an enigma. Author of Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and dozens of other children's classics, Brown all but invented the picture book as we know it today. Combining poetic instinct with a profound empathy for small children, she understood a child's need for security, love, and a sense of being at home in the world. Yet, these were comforts that had eluded her. Her sparkling presence and her unparalleled success as a legendary children's book author masked an insecurity that left her restless and vulnerable.
 
In this authoritative and moving biography, Leonard S. Marcus, who had access to never-before-published letters and family papers, portrays Brown's complex character and her tragic, seesaw life. Colorful, thoughtful, and insightful, Margaret Wise Brown is both a portrayal of a woman whose stories still speak to millions and a portrait of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when the literary world blossomed and made history.
 

Perfumes: The A-Z Guide  |  Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez
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Recommended by Dayna Tortorici
 
"Unfortunately this book is so good that it's ruining my life. A gift from n+1 Senior Writer Richard Beck, this enormous compilation of concise and stylish fragrance reviews by former husband-and-wife team Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez first appealed to me as an achivement of criticism. (As John Lanchester wrote, it passes the high test of being more entertaining in its positive reviews than in its negative ones.) With time, though, I have unlocked an entire sense—an entire, neglected sense!—and with the help of this book have discovered the aesthetic universe of fragrance composition and appreciation via direct experience. The life-ruining part is that I now pine for expensive and decomissioned formulas. Welcome this delight into your life, even if you think you hate perfume. Great bathroom book."
 
About the Book
 
'I've long wished perfumery to be taken seriously as an art, and for scent critics to be as fierce as opera critics, and for the wearers of certain "fragrances" to be hissed in public, while others are cheered. This year has brought Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which I breathed in, rather than read, in one delighted gulp.' — Hilary Mantel, Guardian
 
Perfumes: The A-Z Guide is the culmination of Turin's lifelong obsession and rare scientific flair and Sanchez's stylish and devoted blogging about every scent that she's ever loved and loathed. Together they make a fine and utterly persuasive argument for the unrecognised craft of perfume-making. Perfume writing has certainly never been this honest, compelling or downright entertaining.
 

A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles  |  Millicent Dillon
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Recommended by Sheila Heti
 
"This is one of my favourite biographies. It's about Jane Bowles, the author of Two Serious Ladies, which I also highly recommend. Most writers' lives aren't much to write about. Somehow this is not the case with Jane Bowles, who died very young and produced very little. I don't read many biographies because there's just too much in them that no one could possibly care about; this book is written more like a novel. This is two recommendations in one!"
 
About the Book
 
Tennessee Williams called Jane Bowles "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters." John Ashbery said she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language," consistently producing "the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art."
 

Interior Chinatown  |  Charles Yu
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Recommended by Sheila Heti
 
"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."
 
About the Book
 
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.
 

Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing  |  Deborah Levy
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Recommended by Dayna Tortorici
 
"The first of Levy's three memoirs, this book about her childhood in South Africa has a mesmerizing recursive style. Supposedly based on Orwell's "Why I Write," it deviates quickly to become its own thing. Slim, memorable, with a voice that gets in your head. It also has one of the best opening sentences I've read in a long time."
 
About the Book
 
As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK where she played at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye.
 
Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the writer at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the reader into a writer's heart.
 

The Fermata  |  Nicholson Baker
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Recommended by Lisa Borst
 
"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."
 
About the Book
 
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.
 

The City We Became  |  N. K. Jemisin
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Recommended by Kristin Dombek
 
"If you dream of women of color ruling the world, and you love New York City, meaning all four or five boroughs, and especially if you are away from New York and miss it with a physical pain, clear your schedule. If you keep reading minimalist millennial insta-fiction for some reason and miss how the biggest most fantastical stories get at what’s true and real—just stop, and put yourself in the hands of one of our greatest storytellers."
 
About the Book
 
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels. And they're not the only ones.
 

Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films  |  Molly Haskell
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Recommended by Mark Krotov
 
"An author/subject pairing that does the subject very few favors—and is all the better for it. Haskell’s short and delightful critical biography is an extremely non-reverent treatment of a man central to the decline of the American film industry. Haskell doesn’t hate all the films—some are OK—but she really has Spielberg’s number: her account of his childhood is a study of the petty yearnings, superficial insecurities, and regressive attitudes toward gender and sexuality that would lead him to become our most successful director of movies for children (who deserve better) usually marketed toward adults (who also deserve better)."
 
About the Book
 
"Everything about me is in my films," Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding the hugely successful moviemaker, Molly Haskell explores the full range of Spielberg's works for the light they shine upon the man himself. Through such powerhouse hits as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones, to lesser-known masterworks like A.I. and Empire of the Sun, to the haunting Schindler's List, Haskell shows how Spielberg's uniquely evocative filmmaking and story-telling reveal the many ways in which his life, work, and times are entwined.
 

The End of Days  |  Jenny Erpenbeck (trans. Susan Bernofsky)
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Recommended by Vanessa A. Bee
 
"The End of Days is a literary dish I recommend cold. Never heard of it? Perfect. May this cryptic blurb be your last read about it before fetching it from your local library. Allow yourself to be swept up in this time-warping tale of love and loss and what could have been. Surrender to Erpenbeck’s exquisite prose and leave wishing you were fluent in German so you could experience the beauty in the original."
 
About the Book
 
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos.
 
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