The Believer is one of the magazines we carry on our ever bustier magazine rack.

Believer book reviews are insightful about not only the specifics of the book but why it might be important to a greater body of literature. In a new take on the  ’anonymous review,’ Justin Taylor was asked to invert the standard ‘anonymous review’ formula — if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice– whether positive or negative, wheter directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc. I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds: ‘No googling‘) and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out by a Sharpie.’

After his reading, Taylor found himself ‘freed from the tyranny of the preprogrammed response, set adrift, context-free, at sea with an alien test. Every reviewer–every reader–should hope to be so lucky.’

We’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover or a person by their clothes, but I really like book covers and clothes and I like to distinguish between book covers I kind of like and book covers I love. Also, didn’t the author have some choice over the book cover just like I had some choice over the shoes I put on this morning? I guess judge people. . .within budget. 

Of that opinion is pop philosopher Chuck Klosterman (what?! I really like his book covers), who wrote (and based his whole career around the fact that) ‘ There are two ways to look at life . . .The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherantly connected. . . The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected . . . In and of itself, nothing really matters. The problem is that nothing is ever in and of itself.’

Does anything mean what it really means out of context? Is it wrong to judge a book by its cover or is it wronger to lack to judgement? Would the obviously gay guy from 10th grade have come out if he went to high school in San Francisco? Maybe this is just an existential question for a slightly snowy yet somehow warm winter day (If the snow doesn’t stick and only turns into puddles was it ever snow in the first place? etc., etc.,)

Oh yeah, the anonymous book was Book of Jokes by Momus. I guess sometimes there is a third option, that context matters more than the thing itself. --Marina

Man, I totally would switch up the whiskered flares and 2D kid books of my 90’s youth for skinny jeans and pop-up architecture books.---Marina

Before I’d read a word of it and well before it was published this spring, I knew that Karl Marlantes’s debut novel, Matterhorn (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24.95), was the recipient of some major publishing industry push. The hype machine had been well oiled for this one. But sometimes hype surprises; sometimes it’s completely warranted.

I’m not going to pretend to provide an overview of this entire 600-page novel about the Vietnam War. I haven’t even finished it: in fact I’m only about 80 pages in. But I’ve read far enough to say for sure that this is a really, really good novel — maybe even a genuinely great one, as the PR juggernaut has claimed it to be. Marlantes served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam and his firsthand combat experience is part of what makes his narrative so authentic and viscerally powerful. When his characters go on patrol in the jungle, when they take enemy fire, you are with them. The book feels like the best novels do: like a complete universe of its own. I’m going to get back to Matterhorn and comment more later, maybe when I’ve finished it. Whenever that is (it is 600 pages). In the meantime, think about getting Matterhorn and finding out for yourself how good it really is.--Alex

Originally published in 1975 and for my money one of Heaney’s finest moments. Resonant with Irish history and a deep-rooted sense of place, North practically exudes the smell of the Irish turf and the enveloping sea. Want a trip to Ireland but can’t afford the travel expense? Read North. It’s one of my favorite books of poetry, period. If you’re new to Heaney North is an ideal shore from which to set off on the soul-voyage of discovering a truly great artist: it’s a slim volume and provides a glimpse of SH at his very best.--Alex

Despite images of subway vent winds cooing up Marilyn Monroe’s skirt, on an everyday basis, being a woman continues somehow to be both a vile and boring experience. Because supply exceeds demand then I tend to shy away from books by women who are not Patti Smith. I also am in possession of an unfortunate mind that first associates Louise Erdrich not with her prize winning 1984 classic Love Medicine, but with even the remote possibility that she is a  second year ‘minority author’ pick for suburban book clubs after whatever Toni Morrison title has been checked off (don’t shoot the messenger). That said, we had a copy of Erdrich’s latest, Shadow Tag, lying around and the cover was made of that soft plasticized paper that feels not just like velvet but like ice cream marketed as ‘velvet.’

Shadow Tag is about the dissolution of the marriage of a stalled graduate student, Irene, and her older painter husband, Gil. Both have Native American and white ancestry and a lot of the plot revolves around Gil’s obsession with possessing Irene and  if Gil is the breadwinner because his paintings bring in money or if he owes Irene and the Native community a debt because many of the paintings are of her in degrading sexual poses. Toni Morrison herself has been praised for making huge seemingly impossible issues of race and gender understandable through smaller, more domestic stories and I can see how yeah, actually, bite sized post-colonialism totally works.

There is much to love in this book, including a lot of sweet moments when Irene tries to understand how her children see the world and some really interesting philosophical looks at love and power. ‘I’m just food,’ says Irene. ‘What kind of food?’ asks Gil. ‘Fast food.’ Genius! On the other hand, I could have done without all the animal metaphors ( ‘You are the snake. You have struck a poison in my heart.’ Geez, Louise!)

What struck me about Shadow Tag and many other books about domestic disputes is that there is always a clear enemy, in this case the husband. Perhaps my reluctance to relate to ‘female-oriented’ or at least ‘female-marketed’ literature is that for many women the Enemy is He, and I have never found a tangible enemy in my own life (hence my Kafka Krush). Another thing I noticed is that other then small flashback scenes, there are only six characters. It could be a stage play and that may actually speak to the larger problem with many American families. Day to day our lives ressemble awkward lonely kitchen table scenes from Death of a Salesman more than they do the loud sprawling clan from The Godfather.  --Marina

A Chilean priest offers up his deathbed confession to an unidentified audience. A wonderful example of how the political must always be personal for many people, especially in a dictatorship. '. . .then came the coup d'etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda, and when the bombing was finished, the president commited suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place and thought: Peace at last.' Warning: No paragraphs!

My favorite part of our database, Visual Anthology, is that you can type in partial keywords and it finds the book. (Every once in awhile she shuts down on us but in general I couldn’t have designed a better database myself. I mean I couldn’t have designed a database myself. She’s as helpful as Rosie the Jetsons robot with occasional lapses into that time of the month crankiness) I love checking to see what copies of To Kill A Mockingbird we have in stock because I type ‘kill mock’ into the computer and America’s most beloved young adult novel comes up. --Marina

Welp, Harper Lee it’s your 50th anniversary and congratulations! For those of you have not yet had the pleasure, To Kill A Mockingbird, in all its full infinitive glory, is the story of a small town Southern white lawyer who defends a black man accused of rape. The plot is fairly simple but I think what allowed the book to be elevated to classic status was the use of the lawyer Atticus Finch’s 6 year old tomboy daughter, Scout, as the narrator.

This style, called ‘innocent/naive narration’ is super interesting because, according to this pretty on point wikipedia article, a ‘naive narrator is one who is so ignorant and inexperienced that he/she actually exposes the faults and issues of his/her world.’ I think as a kid I couldn’t have tolerated or understood the raw injustices described in this book without an equally confused child pointing them out.  My favorite sentence that still makes me tear up a little is when Atticus explains to Scout that ’courage is when you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.’

Lee expected To Kill A Mockingbird to disappear after its first printing and just hoped it would ‘die a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers.’ But in the 50 years since its first press it has never gone out of print,  and has been translated into 40 languages (I don’t think I can even name 40 languages). It has been banned for vulgarity (ugly girls hate mirrors), accused of both treating black people as one dimensional characters and unjustly vilifying white Southerners, as well as secretly being written by Truman Capote (Lee’s childhood friend and inspiration for the character Dill), and ‘poaching off’ the ‘literary preserves’ of noted Southern writer Carson McCullers. . . by noted Southern writer Carson McCullers.  It’s classic, it’s controversial, it’s worth a read or even a re-read. --Marina

Newly translated short stories from the recently deceased Chilean-Mexican writer showcase his unique blend of sci-fi, pulp, raw historicism and deadpan humor. Like hanging out with the most depressing third world hipster you know, five beers in, and hating him because he's right and you have to drive. --Marina

A great simply introduction to the art and philosophy that make up the postmodernist movement since about 1950. According to critics Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan, 'the work of postmodernists was deliberately less unified, less obviously 'masterful,' more playful or anarchic, more concerned with the processes of our understanding than with the pleasures of artistic finish or unity, less inclined to hold a narrative together, and certainly more resistant to a certain interpretation . . .' --Marina

This just in in dinosaur news: According to Science magazine which is super legit, dinosaurs were probably all different colors not just the boring browns and greens of the 20th century imagination. I hope Born to Be Giants incorporates this trend, but if it doesn’t, our paleontology book, Dinosaur by Stephanie Stansbie, is keeping the playground up to date.---Marina

Which brings me to Ted Kooser, lifelong Midwesterner, former poet lauriate of the United States, and author of the new memoir Lights on a Ground of Darkness (University of Nebraska Press, $10.95). Kooser’s one of those writers who shifts gracefully from poetry to prose. His poetry is marked by rigorous clarity and an intelligent deployment of a sort of higher form of plain English; his prose, meanwhile, affords him more room to develop his themes. Whatever the subject, he always writes with an attentive eye to the widespread natural beauty of the Midwest, that section of the nation scoffed at and underappreciated — often even by those native to it. Lights is very short (60 pages) and very good. It reminds us to open our spirit vision to the Midwest. Some people have tried their level best to uglify it, but its essential beauties remain undimmed. The prairies haven’t all been paved over; tallgrass and wildflowers will greet you if you look for them. --Alex

The new Slavoj Žižek book, ‘Living In The End Times’ arrived at the store last week and I had the good fortune of ‘unwrapping’ it (mere mortals call it ‘receiving’). I made a little gasping noise like the kind Victorian women made when their corsets were tightened, or the kind ancient Chinese women made when their feet were bound . . . maybe.  Žižek is one of my absolute favorite writers and probably my favorite philosopher. In a sentence his work describes with the objective and structural violence of capitalism through literature, philosophy and pop culture anecdotes.

From his 2008 book ‘Violence‘:

‘Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries ‘help’ the underdeveloped with aid, credits, and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the underdeveloped.’

‘Living In The End Times’ is sort of Žižek jumping on the 2012 bandwagon while paraphrasing a Joy Division song title. The phrase ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ is almost as tired as the post Jacobs use of the phrase ‘Death and Life of Great . . . ‘  (srsly every other book about a problem comes out with this title) but Žižek names the current trends hurtling us towards worlds end as: 1) the ecological crisis, 2) the economic crisis, 3) biogenetic revolution and 4) increasing social divisions. He also says that we are going through the five signs of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, withdrawal. I’m excited to get to the part about acceptance. I think it just involves a lot of sarcasm and irony, in which case I already did my homework, Prof.

From the first chapter of ‘Living in the End Times’:

‘. . . the question ‘if capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?’ provides a simple answer: it is because we are not yet really in capitalism, for the Communists are still ruling, only now wearing the masks of new owners and managers.’

Žižek changed my life. . .maybe in a bad way. He’s like the boyfriend you had when you were 21 who ruined you for life but also ensured that you would never again fail to understand the power dynamics in any and all situations. . but I digress (Ladies? Ladies?) I usually disagree vehemently with the concluding chapter of every book of his that I read and am depressed for a month after. His conclusion is usually like the old saying ‘don’t vote, it only encourages them’ which I prefer to Bukowski‘s gravestone etching ‘don’t try’ cus at least its politically oriented, but still. Anyways I’m enjoying my time in the End Times and am apologizing in advance for the eventual Daria-like demeanor that will follow in the month of June.--Marina

A sunny late-winter Saturday and who should stroll in the store but our pal Kyle Beachy, author of the fantabulous set-in-St. Louis tale The Slide. Kyle signed our copies of his novel while he was here, so snap ‘em up while you can. The last ones he signed went fast. --Alex

My cable was out so I got the next best thing. Palahniuk is the cult novelist well known for 'Fight Club.' His novels are a fun, if shallow read. He paints a pretty cinematic picture in this novel about the supposed last member of a religious cult and his rise to fame. --Marina

oMg! i tOtEs <3 mElViLlE.

          As I do every New Year housecleaning, I spotted my double novella edition of Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno by Herman Melville. I’ve had this book since I was twelve. It’s been following me around like a homework assignment I didn’t do because it is a homework assignment I didn’t do. I guess I could say it’s my white whale, but not really because I only think of it once a year and now the spitfire strength of these less than 100 pages works makes me want to erase all associations I have between Melville and Moby Dick. Also, Melville House has reissued these novellas in hip, American Apparel looking editions (. . .and that’s a compliment). 

 ‘Wtf is a scrivener? Ew.’ I sat down for what I thought would be a dry read only to find myself thrilled by Melville’s prose and character driven plots and overall view of mankind. Bartleby is about a law clerk in 1850’s New York while Benito Cereno is about a wayward slave ship off of Chile in 1799. Both use this narrative technique I love in which the narrator is a chance acquaintance trying to understand the motives of the main character. The narrators’ struggles to classify both Bartleby and Benito as good or bad, friend or foe, subtly become a metaphor for understanding the world. It sounds so cheesy but it happens absolutely naturally and you kind of don’t even know until you’re done reading and then you’re like, ‘whoa, Herman! Why you gotta do me like that?’

Methinks narrative style is Melville’s most important genius but then there’s the prose which has neither aged nor lost its bite in 150 years. Taciturn Captain Don Benito of the latter story is described as ‘a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say.’ When the narrator feels something amiss in the juxtaposition of the disarray of the ship’s shabby country-style attic and the calm ocean, Melville writes, ‘The similitude was heightened , if not originally suggested, by glimpses of the surrounding sea, since, in one aspect, the country and ocean seem cousins-german.’ I had to read this sentence about three times to fully appreciate the genius of Melville (I may still not know what ‘cousins-german’ means in which case I don’t know what I’m appreciating. . . oh well).

          I love Melville’s concern with being American. In an 1850 essay, Hawthorne and His Mosses, he extolled the originality of the adolescent American writing scene (Thanks to Professor Bailey for letting me know about this!)  But representing 19th century America as he does of course raises the issues that have gotten all dead white males besides Oscar Wilde kicked out of class curriculums. I don’t read a lot of fiction written before 1970, mostly because I’m self involved but partially because for many Americans, our absence cannot help but be noted in a canonical works in which we can never be heroes. In Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Richard Rodriguez wrote this of his youthful attempt at reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: ‘William Makepeace Thackeray mocks my mother’s skin. And mine . . . really how can I laugh?’

          Fiction, almost more than ‘non-fiction’ historical accounts, exists as a sort of screen-capture of that moment, typos and inappropriate google autocomplete searches and all. The question that arises then is: ‘How are we supposed to read Melville’s attitude towards slavery?’ aka ‘Was Melville racist?’ The short answer to the gut question is: duh. After all, a la Do The Right Thing (incedentally, the President and the Mrs.’ first date), racism may be the only thing we all have in common. Melville is part of racism by default as part of the dominant group in a caste society but I prefer him to orientalizing travel writing, cus at least he’s honest about it. Within the rigid racial hierarchy presented by Benito Cereno, characters of all races are given some room to breathe and assert themselves as human which is actually no small feat considering the views of the time. --Marina

I’m just nosy to begin with, but I love customers who are so totally into what they’re buying that they might explain it a little but aren’t trying to recommend it. ( This is also why I’ve historically respected the Jews cus they throw great quinceñear@s but never knock on my door trying to get me to buy a Torah). When people buy Steven Pinker books they’re usually enthusiastically humble about it (humbly enthusiastic?) so I thought I’d try to read him.

Pinker is a Canadian Harvard psychologist/linguist who is also pretty good looking (nosy . . . and shallow!) His book  The Stuff of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature had a great cover so I thought I’d give it a whirl. He’s a great writer, his references are on point and relatable (Freud, Dick Gregory, George Costanza, trifecta win!). I skimmed over a lot of the really specific verb groupings (why ‘to load’ is different than ‘to put’ and other distinctions worthy of a Lisa Simpson monologue) but the way Pinker describes how we manipulate language to fit our meaning and motives is pretty easy to grip and super fascinating. ”Bus Blows up’ is indeed a strange way to describe an incident in which a human being straps explosives to himself, gets on a crowded bus in a city street and kills 13 people by detonating his payload, clearly intending to murder,’ Pinker quotes.

I’m not at all there yet, but the wikipedia entry on Pinker’s thesis is this: ‘He asserts that language must do two things: 1) convey a message to an audience, and 2) negotiate the social relationship between the speaker and the audience.’ The first part is easy to remember but the second part is the reason we twist language the way we do, often unintentionally.  The second reason is also why Kafka exists as an adjective.

When you think about it that way, books are amazing. Where else does that second part of the equation, the relationship of the speaker to the audience get to remain constant no matter who the audience is? ‘Some things are so personal you can only tell them to a complete stranger,’ memoirist Richard Rodriguez has written. Similarly, Lil Wayne once said, ‘you might say that it’s wrong but I’m not talking to you, child, I’m talking to this song.’  The process of reading gives time for a multidimensional explanation, space to contemplate a message that is universal and not meant to elicit shallow reactions based on in-group out-group psychology.  What a gift we are losing in our rush towards cyberporn then.  --Marina

Slovenian Marxist philosopher Žižek's 2002 assessment of Western reaction to the events of 9/11 follows his main theses of development and subsequent underdevelopment merged with anecdotes about movies such as 'the 3:10 to Yuma' and the theologian G.K. Chesterton. More of the same but easily digestible and pleasant to read. --Marina

Noted American psychologist and brother of novelist Henry James has been mentioned so often in other books I've read that I decided to hunker down and read one of his famous texts. Pragmatism at its basis believes that ideas are only important so long as they are practical and is jazz of philosophy in that it is uniquely American but is internationally influential.--Marina

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.—Ian McEwan

Two recent works of fiction, 2007’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengetsu and 2008’s Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, are about the interactions of a working class dark skinned immigrant and a well-off white person (in the case of Netherland, also a fellow immigrant) in East Coast American cities (D.C. and New York respectively). In the beginning of both novels the authors make clear that the friendship is over and the Other is now gone, due to circumstances that are unknown but definitely unfortunate. However, The Beautiful Things is narrated by an Ethiopian shopkeeper about his friendship with his new white neighbor while Netherland is narrated by a Dutch financial analyst about his friendship with a Caribbean jack-of-all trades Cricket teammate

Many GANs (Great American Novels) are about immigration and its residue. I mean, obviously. My one wish with current literary analysis is that these new immigrant novels not be set aside on a separate shelf full of Lahiris and Díazes but also allowed simply to play with Mark Twain on the playground (cus he’s a fun guy who’s good at four-square). So within both O’Neill and Mengetsu’s debuts we find much observation on humanity and city life that has nothing specifically to do with the condition of Being An Immigrant:

Mengetsu on owning a store near a well known area of prostitution:

‘The men buying diapers, ice cream, and tampons they had supposedly left home for, and the women newly minted but still with only enough money to buy another can of soda to keep them awake, all came together for just enough hours every week to make me a living that I no longer judged as decent or honest, but accepted as a matter of standard fact somewhere between yes, we all must die, and the sun is ninety-three million miles away.’

O’Neill on post-9/11 New York anxiety:

‘Apparently any fool could built a dirty bomb and explode it in Manhattan. . . We were trying to understand whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii or whether our situation was merely near apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, or for that matter, Moscow.’

Mengetsu and O’Neill write of concerns and the possibility of terror but they both write with a sort of outward communal eye. So while I enjoy the urban existential disillusionment of  Sartre and Wright as much as the next black eyeliner wearing liberal arts grad, it is beautiful to see The City celebrated as a place where people of different backgrounds come to melt into one another, however awkwardly. I guess then it’s not the elementary school playground, but the middle school cafeteria that is the more fitting metaphor. --Marina