Independent since 1974 · (413) 528-1521 · Mon-Wed 10-7 · Th-Sat 10-6 · Sun 11-5 · Contact Us
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Note our current WINTER HOURS (through April) · Monday-Wednesday 10:00-7:00 · Thursday-Saturday 10:00-6:00 · Sunday 11:00-5:00
Before Mark Ouillette retired, he was our senior bookbuyer, with over 40 years in the book business. He likes to read primarily contemporary American novelists and short story writers with a decidedly playful bent (Pynchon, Lorrie Moore, the McSweeneyites). A victim of a liberal-arts education, he knows his modern poets, essayists, and musicians too, and prefers the experimental to the tried-and-true.
Mark's Staff Picks:
(See more of Mark's past Staff Picks here.)
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Pond
Comments:
This is her first book & what a find! I love this author, a young Irish woman, and her way with language is just mesmerizing. The story is very simple - an unnamed woman chronicles her life in a coastal village - yet her sensibility is ferociously intelligent as she relates seemingly mundane details - eating breakfast, cleaning clutter and finding an old love letter, sitting in the bath in the midst of a storm. She describes a book she liked about the last person alive and you see how the language reflects her - "such extraordinary isolation also beautifully charted and it is quite impossible to stop reading because in a sense you want to go where she is goin; you want to be undone in just the way she is being undone." This Pond is, as McCann says, "Quiet and luxurious all at once." Highly recommended.
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Save Twilight
Comments:
Mark comments from and old notebook, something like: Delight in giving up sprang into his craning dinosaur head." Anyway, as with Cortazar's masterpiece novel Hopscotch, you skip around - he encourages it - these generous, pensive, and playful poems to wonders and rhythms on every page.Hear the bandoneon's gentle urging in "The Getaway Polka." Pre-hear the pre-echo from a vinyl record scientifically dissected in "For Listening Through Headphones." Like their peerless writer, his people "throw into the most serious moments a large portion of play." Neruda famously said, "Anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed." Might I suggest you avoid your doom with this fantastic little book?
(Also, check out his newly-published Literature Class, Berkeley 1980. The best teachers practice preventative medicine.)
Bookseller: Mark
Title: This Old Man
Comments:You can forget about Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Coloring Book-- it's a mindless pleasure dancing in a publisher's head-- this is the real deal for a gift for your literary need-to-buy-for guy.
Angell calls it "a dog's breakfast" and I call this miscellany a grateful survey of his Life and work, at The New Yorker and with his family, dog, and fellow writers.
He's a master stylist, vivid with wit and nearly a century of memories (failing) and remembered frtiends (fondly). E. B. White, Derek Jeter, William Steig, and other past masters have their star turns. The best essay, "This Old Man," is worth the price of admission alone and a model for memoir. Like his collection Let Me Finish, this book comes highly recommended by this Booklofter.
With a knick-knack paddywhack, give your dog a bone, this old man came rolling home.
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Purity
Comments:Coming Soon!
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It
Comments:Dan Klein's latest book is one for the ages, a remarkable blend of autobiography and philosophical survey. Each modest chapter takes off from a signature quotation of a well-known thinker, indicative of an approach to life, which Dan takes the measure of with insight and wit by telling how it has played out (or hasn't) in his own life experiences. How-to-live advice casts its existential shade, its free will roves, its pessimistic pall changes to positive thought and free thinking spirit, spun with Kleinian candor and serious humor. (Huh?) From youthful enthusiasms to qiseguys's wisdom, it reads like the offspring of an authoratative "Bertrand Russell and a weird uncle Monty Python.
How can this be?
Pithy indeed!
Bookseller: Mark
Title: City on Fire
Comments: Wonderfully ambitious & fantastically successful -- the best new literary novel from the best publisher in America. / Hallberg's generous, immense worldview is portrayed on an intimate scale by his main characters, from all ages & social classes: writers & artists, anarchists & power brokers, rockers & wannabes, lovers & madmen... / Its narrative captures in gritty detail NYCity in 1976-77: the punk-rock heyday, dubious financial affairs, the big blackout in July. On a sentence-by-artful-sentence level, thru perfect-scale chapters, we are propelled thru this early version of our current life. There's drama: terrorist plots, addiction, adulteries, police procedures -- & there's humanity: multifaceted, pulsing with people & dreams, unsettling & yet restorative. / This entertaining & omnivorous novel is alive with deeds dark & hopes high & everything in between. I finished it with tears of joy.
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Preparation for the Next Life (A Novel)
Comments:1. We three agree: great! This first novel of the lower depths is utterly contemporary and vital writing. Gritty, disturbing, unforgettable...
2. "So much of American fiction American fiction has become playful, cynical, & evasive. [This] is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialites. Powerfully realistic, with a solemn, muscular lyricism, this is a very, very good book." - Joy Williams
3. "Atticus Lish is a true original & this tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America & the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one." - Sam Lipsyte
Highly recommended; but be forewarned that this may be the most unsentimental novel you'll ever read, harshness conveyed in masterful writing.
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Caribou
Comments:Any or all of these new poetry collections from the three great American poets- Charles Wright, Louise Gluck, & W.S. Merwin- would make a lovely, mindful gift for an aspiring poet or anyone else who admires meditative poetry, opening from the natural world & rising to the transcendental.
Gluck's book won the National Book Award for poetry this year (2014), and Wright & Merwin are equally contenders. Sample & see...
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Faithful and Virtuous Night
Comments:Any or all of these new poetry collections from the three great American poets- Charles Wright, Louise Gluck, & W.S. Merwin- would make a lovely, mindful gift for an aspiring poet or anyone else who admires meditative poetry, opening from the natural world & rising to the transcendental.
Gluck's book won the National Book Award for poetry this year (2014), and Wright & Merwin are equally contenders. Sample & see...
Bookseller: Mark
Title: The Moon Before Morning
Comments:Any or all of these new poetry collections from the three great American poets- Charles Wright, Louise Gluck, & W.S. Merwin- would make a lovely, mindful gift for an aspiring poet or anyone else who admires meditative poetry, opening from the natural world & rising to the transcendental.
Gluck's book won the National Book Award for poetry this year (2014), and Wright & Merwin are equally contenders. Sample & see...
Independent since 1974 · (413) 528-1521 · Mon-Fri 10-7 · Sat 9-6 · Sun 11-4 · hello@thebookloft.com · Map
