Recommended reading for right now
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social distancing we have composed a recommended reading list focused around books that will engage, fascinate, and delight.
Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO »
Sitting inside and wondering about life, the universe, and visible and invisible invaders? Try Intimate Aliens. The power and fascination of the UFO has nothing to do with space travel or life on other planets. It's about us, our longings and terrors, and especially the greatest terror of all: the end of our existence. This is a book about UFOs that goes beyond believing in them or debunking them and to a fresh understanding of what they tell us about ourselves as individuals, as a culture, and as a species.
"David Halperin doesn't believe in the literal reality of flying saucers, but he understands that they needn't physically exist to teach us lessons about a culture that sees them. Part folklorist and part psychologist, Halperin reads our UFO mythos like an alienist analyzing an extended collective dream."
—Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory
Invisible Companions: Encounters with Imaginary Friends, Gods, Ancestors, and Angels »
Have you been thinking about the potential heights of creativity and imagination? In his award-winning book Invisible Companions J. Bradley Wigger travels five countries on three continents to hear children describe their invisible friends—one-hundred-year-old robins and blue dogs, dinosaurs and teapots, pretend families and shape-shifting aliens—companions springing from the deep well of childhood imagination. Drawing on these interviews, as well as a new wave of developmental research, he finds a fluid and flexible quality to the imaginative mind that is central to learning, co-operation, and paradoxically, to real-world rationality.
Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships »
Wondering how you’ll meet that forever partner once we’re allowed to reconnect? Try Love Drugs. This book builds a case for conducting research into "love drugs" and "anti-love drugs" and explores their ethical implications for individuals and society. Love Drugs arms us with the latest scientific knowledge and a set of ethical tools that we can use to decide if these sorts of medications should be a part of our society. Or whether a chemical romance will be right for us.
"Part of the argument in the book is that if we know that certain drugs can help relationships, we might want to lean into those drugs. [The] recommendation is a guided meditation on MDMA in a clinical setting with a therapist there to facilitate, and not just the couple in the woods on MDMA....Fascinating...I recommend the book highly."
—Dan Savage, Savage Lovecast
The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice »
Would you like to read about an incredible journey that spans continents and centuries? In 2010, the world's wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. In The Missing Pages Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript's footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom.
"[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of what is known as the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war, conquest and dispossession.
—Ernest Hilbert, The Wall Street Journal
Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America »
The first sustained study of the relations between literary celebrity and queer sexuality, the award-winning Categorically Famous looks at the careers of three celebrity writers—James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal—in relation to the gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1960s. While none of these writers "came out" in our current sense, all contributed, through their public images and their writing, to a greater openness toward homosexuality that was an important precondition of liberation.
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution »
Are you interested in an award-winning, rich, sweeping history that reframes the industrial revolution? We recommend Empire of Guns. The commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution, anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses, overlooks the true root of economic and industrial expansion: the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war in the eighteenth century. Demand for the guns and other war materiel that allowed British armies, navies, mercenaries, traders, settlers, and adventurers to conquer an immense share of the globe in turn drove the rise of innumerable associated industries, from metalworking to banking. This book traces the social and material life of British guns over a century of near-constant war and violence at home and abroad.
"A fascinating study of the centrality of militarism in 18th-century British life, and how imperial expansion and arms went hand in hand. This book is a triumph."
—Guardian
Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba »
Set against a backdrop of world-changing events during the headiest years of the Cuban Revolution, Goodbye, My Havana follows young Connie Veltfort as her once relatively privileged life among a community of anti-imperialist expatriates turns to progressive disillusionment and heartbreak.
"Anna Veltfort's graphic novel is both historically important and utterly engaging. Her early life, in which she brushed shoulders with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara while navigating the dangers of a hidden queer existence, is portrayed in exquisite, uncompromising, and impeccably researched detail, all in the 'clear line' style of Hergé's Tintin. This remarkable and heartfelt book is a loving ode to Cuba, a cautionary tale about the politics of oppression, and proof positive that the personal is always political and the political always personal."
—Justin Hall, editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics
Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian »
Longing for a compelling story that encompasses art, family, and legacy? Feast of Ashes tells the story of David Ohannessian, the renowned ceramicist who in 1919 founded the art of Armenian pottery in Jerusalem, where his work and that of his followers is now celebrated as a local treasure. Ohannessian's life story is revealed by his granddaughter Sato Moughalian, weaving together family narratives with newly unearthed archival findings. Witnessing her personal quest for the man she never met, we come to understand a universal story of migration, survival, and hope.
Longlisted in the 2020 PEN /Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, sponsored by PEN America.
This Atom Bomb in Me traces what it felt like to grow up suffused with American nuclear culture in and around the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As a secret city during the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge enriched the uranium that powered Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The granddaughter of an atomic courier, Lindsey A. Freeman turns a critical yet nostalgic eye to the place where her family was sent as part of a covert government plan. Through memories, mysterious photographs, and uncanny childhood toys, she shows how Reagan-era politics and nuclear culture irradiated the late twentieth century.
“A beautiful and haunting memoir."
—Publisher's Weekly
Do you need to be transported somewhere else by an engrossing novel? Acclaimed author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani offers a poignant satire about migration, one of the vital issues of our times. Us&Them explores the ludicrous and the tragic, the venal and the generous-hearted aspects of Iranian life away from home.
Lili and Goli have argued endlessly about where their mother, Bibijan, should live since the Iranian Revolution. They disagree about her finances too, which remain blocked as long as she insists on waiting for her son—still missing but not presumed dead yet—to return from the Iran–Iraq war. But once they begin to "share" the old woman, sending her back and forth between Paris and Los Angeles, they start asking themselves where the money might be coming from.
Silver in the Literary Fiction Category in the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards
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