better know a bookseller

This week, a few of my staff picks are featured on a display at Politics and Prose.  I was urged to include my own book, and I also included Stevie Smith's Collected Poems, a couple of which I posted on this blog for National Poetry Month.  I also included Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, which I wrote up last week, and I have described a few of the others in more detail below.

The Giacometti book featured above is a gorgeous catalog of the Guggenheim's current exhibit, which I was fortunate enough to see a few weeks back.  If you can go, you must. If you can't go, this book is the next best thing.

My Struggle - Boyhood Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard    If you’re interested in getting a taste of Knausgaard but don’t fancy committing to 3,600 pages, Boyhood is the perfect choice. It’s the most lyrical of the volumes thus far and easily stands alone. The descriptions of Knausgaard’s Norwegian childhood and his visits to his grandparents in the fiords are nothing short of transporting. Reading this novel is the closest I have ever been to becoming someone else. How does Knausgaard do it? You will also find some gut-wrenching backstory here about his relationship with his father, which inspired this stunning multi-volume contemporary classic.

This Close To Happy by Daphne Merkin    Many experience depression as a mood of joylessness, disconnection and boredom which eventually passes. But what Daphne Merkin describes here is more akin to a permanent state of despair. From early childhood she experienced crying jags, feelings of abandonment and emotional impoverishment. She was later institutionalized. Many questions emerge. Why did her parents have so many children, when they clearly had so little time for them? Why were the children put into the care of such a sadistic nanny? And where does depression take root in the psyche? This memoir is insightful, intelligent and ruthlessly honest.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig    This novel is one of my all-time favorites.  An Austrian cavalry officer makes a faut pas at a party by inviting a crippled girl to dance.  Trying to make amends, he gets involved in her family. Then he can’t extract himself. Set before World War I, the story demonstrates how bad judgment and the inability to make firm decisions changes the course of a life. The unwieldy nature of this book is part of its charm. Wes Anderson referenced Zweig and the opening of this novel in Grand Budapest Hotel.  It’s an unsung classic, which will utterly capture your heart.