April 23, 2022
This week we have a lovable heroine (whose story should continue in successive books), new translations of a dazzling German modernist, instructions on how to shape your own personal narrative, and a celebration of the bookstores that bring these stories to you.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Lessons in Chemistry
By Bonnie Garmus
Published by Knopf
Elizabeth Zott stars in this delightful debut novel about an eccentric chemist turned single mother turned TV personality. A precocious, uncompromising young woman, she falls in love with the star of a prestigious chemistry lab. Their romance ends tragically, and she loses her position at the lab, however, voilà! She reinvents herself as the host of a surprisingly popular cooking show that combines chemistry with delicious food. Her charming journey is filled with heartbreak and heart in equally satisfying doses.
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How to Tell a Story
By The Moth
Published by Crown
In 1997, The Moth began in lower Manhattan as a sort of underground club for mostly everyday folk who yearned to take up the mic and share their personal stories. Twenty-some years later it is now an award-winning series that has a huge following and a podcast as well. This is a how-to book in the best sense, with seasoned directors and writers giving tips and tools for honing the skills to craft everything from a simple wedding toast to a live performance with a large audience of strangers. Teachers, comics, budding writers and wannabes rejoice!
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The Shadow of the Coachman's Body
By Peter Weiss
Published by New Directions
Translated by Rosemary Waldrop
These two extraordinary short pieces of experimental fiction introduce readers to a renowned polymath mostly known for his plays (like the Tony-winning Marat/Sade directed by Peter Brook) and films. In The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, “a micro-novel” from 1960, Weiss creates a mordant catalog of enlivened objects in a boarding house, like a dark, twisted scene from Beauty and the Beast. And in Conversation, he presents three entwined monologues (by Abel, Babel, and Cabel) that show off his passion for the fantastic and the illogical. A post-war Kafka filled with linguistic pyrotechnics and an equal sense of the absurd.
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The Conversation of the Three Wayfarers
By Peter Weiss
Published by New Directions
Translated by E.B. Garside and John Keene
These two extraordinary short pieces of experimental fiction introduce readers to a renowned polymath mostly known for his plays (like the Tony-winning Marat/Sade directed by Peter Brook) and films. In The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, “a micro-novel” from 1960, Weiss creates a mordant catalog of enlivened objects in a boarding house, like a dark, twisted scene from Beauty and the Beast. And in Conversation, he presents three entwined monologues (by Abel, Babel, and Cabel) that show off his passion for the fantastic and the illogical. A post-war Kafka filled with linguistic pyrotechnics and an equal sense of the absurd.
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In Praise of Good Bookstores
By Jeff Deutsch
Published by Princeton University Press
Deutsch’s love letter reminds us of the essential contribution bookstores make to their communities. His many years of experience at Chicago’s famed Seminary Co-op have supplied insight for his sage observations about the role a bookstore can play in our neighborhoods and our lives. The rise in book sales concurrent with the pandemic combined with the loyalty of customers determined to keep bookstores alive proves that literature brings a necessary solace, comfort, enlightenment and entertainment to those who venture into their local shops.
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Cain Named the Animal
By Shane McCrae
Published by FSG
Our National Poetry Month offering this week is McCrae’s new book of poems. It is his eighth in little over a decade, during which he’s published with small, university and larger presses and picked up several awards. Though he says his biggest influences are the metrics of Elizabethan and Renaissance poetry his subjects are both contemporary and biblical. Some are informed by his troubled childhood (kidnapped and raised by his white supremacist grandparents; physical and sexual abuse). His remarkable powers of survival have led to a Harvard law degree and a teaching position at Columbia University. Quite an inspiration.
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