Brendan's picks

A natural born Concorder, former touring & starving musician, and aspiring starving writer (though starvation isn't the aspiration so much as a part of the package), I'm currently finishing up at New England College where I'm studying English & Literature. As I'm sure you can imagine, I hardly threw myself into the program out of a finely-tuned sense of pragmatism. I'm in love with literature, which for me can mean anything from early 20th century writers (Hemingway, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett), to Greek tragedy, to poetry by T.S. Eliot, Whitman, or Garcia Lorca, to a graphic novel by Alan Moore or Brian K. Vaughan, to any contemporary writer who seems to contribute something to the form, such as Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Salman Rushdie. Otherwise, I'll read anything that speaks to my curiosity, which is usually history, philosophy, or psychology.

Snows of Kilimanjaro (Paperback)

By Ernest Hemingway

$14.00

ISBN-13: 9780684804446
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Scribner, 10/1995

Other Editions of this Title

January 2012

There's nothing very radical about a Hemingway recommendation. Likely, you've already either made up your mind about him (adoration, bregruding respect, and loathing seem to be the modes), or you've been planning to get to him for some time without my help. I'd like to make a pitch anyway, however, for The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, in part because his shorter fiction is a little neglected by casual readers, but also because some of this work, and particularly Snows, are among the best pieces he ever wrote. The title story follows Harry, a failed writer on Safari in Africa who finds himself dying, to his embarrassment and fury, from an infected thorn scratch.

Immobilized, disappointed, his dignity insulted, Harry remembers the vital and true moments of his life, realizing only now that these are precisely the things he failed to write about. A later story, it has all the subtlety and ambiguous power of his earlier short stories, and all the melancholy grandeur of his novels. The "other stories" are no slouches either, mind you. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (following a cowardly husband hoping to reclaim his manhood on Safari) and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," just to name two, are classics. Even if you loathe the man, give these stories a try. The treatment is so madly precise and provocative, the language so ruggedly lyrical, that I'll stake my reputation as a bookseller (we take such things very seriously) on your coming around.

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (Hardcover)

By Don DeLillo

$24.00

ISBN-13: 9781451655841
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Scribner, 11/2011

Other Editions of this Title

Don DeLillo is a profoundly American writer, which isn't to say that he's a kind of literary Frank Capra. With an eye to the strange, half insane currents which run beneath American culture, he pays a mystics attention to consumerism, tourism, baseball, television, supermarkets. The Angel Esmeralda, a collection of nine short stories spanning his career, from 1979 to 2011, captures wonderfully all of DeLillo's talents as a writer, and the disconcerting but exciting strangeness and familiarity of his world. Set everywhere from an island in the Caribbean made inescapable by airport bureaucracy, to a space station haunted by WWII radio broadcasts, following nuns, tourists, terrorists, astronauts, it is a wonderful panorama of America, and a must read for anyone interested in contemporary American fiction.