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Mark
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.)
$16.00
ISBN: 9780399575907
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Riverhead Books - July 11th, 2017
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.
$16.95
ISBN: 9780872867093
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: City Lights Books - August 9th, 2016
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.)
$16.00
ISBN: 9781101971390
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Anchor Books - October 18th, 2016
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.
$17.00
ISBN: 9781250097101
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Picador USA - August 2nd, 2016
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Purity
Comments:Coming Soon!
$20.00
ISBN: 9780143126799
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Penguin Books - October 27th, 2015
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!
Email or call for price.
ISBN: 9780385353779
Availability: Special Order
Published: Knopf Publishing Group - October 13th, 2015
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.
Email or call for price.
ISBN: 9780991360826
Availability: Backordered
Published: Tyrant Books - November 3rd, 2015
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.
$13.00
ISBN: 9780374535155
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - March 10th, 2015
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...
$14.00
ISBN: 9780374535773
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - September 1st, 2015
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...
$17.00
ISBN: 9781556594540
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Copper Canyon Press - December 1st, 2015
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...
$19.99
ISBN: 9781593596699
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Peter Pauper Press - March 1st, 2009
Bookseller: Mark
Title: Ambigram Journal
Comments:This Ambigram journal is excellent! Look at it upside-down or write-side up. The light lines and generous page size allow for lots of room for words or sketches to roam. The thicker pages make for no-bleed-thru, front & back writing. I use mine pratcicaly every day for random thoughts, poetic scraps, graphis try-outs & copying apercus from my scattered reading. The gilt-edged pages, leather cover, ribboned place-marker, & the perfect, personal portability, make this a beautiful and useful journal that anyone would enjoy filling up.
