Karin Slaughter and I have been in the book biz for about the same amount of time.  Her first novel, Blindsighted, came out the first year I worked at Lemuria so I like to say I discovered her!  I have read all of her novels and experienced some wild murders and miss the characters that she has killed off but I will say I really do like Will Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who has a past he would really like to keep quiet.  We all know that one can never keep secrets for long. In Criminal, we are allowed to see just how Will became a GBI agent and while he was raised in the orphanage that he had people looking out for him all his life.

A female co-ed goes missing and Amanda Wagner, Will’s boss and mentor, purposely keeps him off the case and he doesn’t understand why.  Amanda, on the other hand, sees a connection to the first case she worked on as a member of the Atlanta Police Department 40 years ago.  She has her reasons and Will soon comes to realize them when Will, Sara and Amanda coincidentally end up at the abandoned boys home where Will grew up.  Will was telling Sara some about his past but why was Amanda there?

Flashback 40 years, and Amanda and her partner, Evelyn, are working a case that no one else seems to care if it is solved and as you read it becomes clear that these two cases are connected and that Will Trent is at the center of the mystery.  I loved reading how these women came up in the justice system while Atlanta was a city in transition (the office politics are amazing) and many character back stories are filled in here in Criminal.

Before I started working at Lemuria I was a shopper.  The day after the Pulitzer Prizes were announced in 2011 I came to Lemuria, bought A Visit From the Goon Squad, and began reading it in the atrium while I ate a decent reuben. It didn’t take me very long to conquer Jennifer Egan’s instant classic, as it was both enthralling and a vision into the future of storytelling.  If you are not familiar with the book, A Visit From the Goon Squad follows a record executive and his one-time assistant.  Egan takes us through their lives by way of different characters that have come across the two main characters.  This concept produced a novel comprised of thirteen chapters that span fifty plus years.  The reader sees Los Angeles in the 1980s and Africa in the 1960s.  Time and place shift in no particular order throughout the novel.  If that sounds radical, it is.  The thirteen chapters cover as many characters as it can, leaving the reader to understand that each chapter can easily stand alone as a short story.

And that is what brings me to Triburbia.

Triburbia follows the lives of a group of fathers who meet in the same cafe in Tribeca after dropping their children at the same school.  They are wealthy people, but pride themselves on steering away from a bourgeoisie lifestyle.  There is a photographer and a sculptor and a sound engineer and memoirist, etc.  As the novel unwinds the reader quickly learns that Karl Taro Greenfeld followed suit from Egan.  It is split up into chapters that could stand alone as short stories, bouncing between characters and time periods.  If the structure weren’t enough to catch my eye (and the cover is what brought me in in the first place) I found that I loved the different voices I met.  The characters are displayed in a fashion that allows the reader to understand them three dimensionally.  The reader watches as these people with more means than necessary witness their lives crumble around them.  Without Greenfeld’s wit this book could have been a real bummer, but the wit is there.  If you take a blase stance on the emotional lives of the rich, consider Greenfeld’s tongue-in-cheek coy attitude to be sympathetic of the everyman.

“Triburbia, should share space on the shelf next to Tom Perrotta’s Little Children and Jeffery Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides.” (Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh )

“The excellent Triburbia brings to mind such modern masters as Cheever, Updike, and Salter, but Greenfeld delivers his own wonderfully sharp-eyed take on recent American life. . . . This is fiction of the first rank–intense, suspenseful, and relevant in the most urgent way.” (Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, )

“I loved Triburbia, loved dropping in on these wonderful characters with their outsized appetites and ambitions . . . Most of all, though, I loved Karl Taro Greenfeld’s deft satirical touch, the searing empathy with which he offers up his privileged, damaged people to the world.” (Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets )

Triburbia, Karl Greenfeld, Harper Collins, $25.99

by Simon

A few weeks ago in Chicago, I saw a wonderful Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the Art Institute. It was arranged roughly chronologically, each room both a different stage and style in Lichtenstein’s work and a deeper, novel-like exploration of the artist himself. You never know when you’re going to have a unique experience of the art like that when you’re going into a museum or a new exhibit. And I had no idea that I’d have one when a friend scooted this quirky little book across a table towards me.

People just love Maira Kalman’s illustrations. I told Kelly that I was reading this book (it took about a day), and she got so excited to show me Michael Pollan’s book, Food Rules, in which he and Kalman collaborated for an illustrated version of his popular, no-nonsense, list of back-to-basics rules about eating that is a lovely read—or just good for the curb appeal and approachability of the art. Here is Kelly’s November blog post about that book. People have already bought two of them since we put them on display near the front desk about a week ago.

This is a case of an artist who knows her medium so well because she’s put in her ten thousand hours, the requisite amount of time that Malcolm Gladwell famously explores in Outliers. This is also one of those exciting cases in which the artist was born outside of the U.S., and has a hint of that untraceable sensibility that the rest of us can sniff out at page one. It makes for some of my favorite art, visual and of the written type. Kalman’s style is to intertwine hand-painted illustration and an episodic storyline (hand-written signature font) to patiently share her detail-oriented and gracious perspective on all things earthly. The key element here is empathy. It is shameless compassion with which she paints the way people wear hats, the funny piece of paper that she finds on the sidewalk, or a bowl of berries fed to her by an aging friend.

Her illustrations for other books shine with this empathy, but this one stands apart because it is a kind of memoir, with each observation reflecting back on the story of the author herself. It reminds me a little of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in that sense. This is a book in which we are graciously invited to try on Maira Kalman’s eyeballs and see her person, her history, and her suffering. Somehow I found a way to personally connect my own feelings of uncertainty having just graduated from college with hers about life around age 58. And isn’t that sort of exactly what we’re digging for when we pick up any book?
 

Visit Kalman’s New York Times blog for a sampling of her work. It contains a year’s worth of a column she wrote about democracy in America at kalman.blogs.nytimes.com.

The Principles of Uncertainty, Maira Kalman, Penguin Books, $20

by Whitney

The first time I read “And That’s Why You Should Learn to Pick Your Battles” I had one of those can’t-breathe-you-are-laughing-so-hard moments.  A friend had posted a link to this particular blog posting via Facebook. After reading it, I had to find out more about the author, Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess. It just so happens that The Bloggess does indeed publish a blog, chock full of hilarious/awkward/cringe-inducing personal experiences.

“And That’s Why You Should Learn to Pick Your Battles,” a tale of a large metal chicken named Beyonce(see picture to the left, which was borrowed straight from Ms. Lawson’s blog,) starts out as a simple disagreement between husband and wife over the purchase of new bath towels but quickly develops into a fifteenth wedding anniversary prank gone wrong. As you are reading Ms. Lawson’s blog, you discover fairly early on that her sense of humor does not quite match that of her husband’s. Where she finds the act of placing a five-foot-tall metal chicken at her front door and then gleefully watching her husband’s reaction from afar as he opens said door to the aforementioned chicken perfectly acceptable, her husband’s  reaction aptly sums up his opinion of his wife’s sense of humor. He opens the door, sees the chicken, lets out an exasperated sigh and then promptly slams the door in Beyonce’s face. If you want to learn the fate of Beyonce (and Victor and Jenny’s fifteenth wedding anniversary,) please click on the link to Ms. Lawson’s blog that I’ve included above and again here.

You read it and are having your own can’t-breathe-you-are-laughing-so-hard moment? Okay, good. Now let me tell you about Ms. Lawson’s new “memoir” Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, which is essentially a collection of some her funniest blog posts and misadventures to date. Here’s a book summary from her website:

For fans of Tina Fey and David Sedaris-Internet star Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, makes her literary debut.

When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father (a professional taxidermist who created dead-animal hand puppets) and a childhood of wearing winter shoes made out of used bread sacks. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.

Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter are the perfect comedic foils to her absurdities, and help her to uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments-the ones we want to pretend never happened-are the very same moments that make us the people we are today.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir is a poignantly disturbing, yet darkly hysterical tome for every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud. Like laughing at a funeral, this book is both irreverent and impossible to hold back once you get started.

Whether she is writing about her most recent fight with Victor via post-it notes or expounding her love of slightly off-kilter taxidermy (which, let’s face it, taxidermy is pretty much off-kilter to begin with,) Ms. Lawson will have you howling with laughter. I would NOT advise reading this book in public unless you relish weird looks from strangers. Anytime I need to put a bad day behind me, I read one of the Blogess’s stories and feel a little bit better about myself. I’m pretty sure that’s what she was going for when she decided to put her life on the internet and then turn it into a book.

by Anna

First off I have to ask:

Question: How cool is it that this book has two different covers?  Answer: VERY.

This is a collection of short stories written about 100 different *tchotchkes.  Each story is written by a different author including Shelley Jackson, Lydia Millet, Jonathan Lethem and Tom McCarthy just to name a few.

*  “Tchotchke is a small toy, gewgaw, knickknack, bauble, lagniappe, trinket or kitsch.  Depending on context, the term has a connotation of worthlessness of disposability, as well as tackiness and has long been used by Jewish-Americans and in the regional speech of New York City and elsewhere.” -Wikipedia

So here’s how this works;

1. 100 items were obtained from flea markets, yard sales and thrift stores (all were around $1.25 a piece).

2. 100 different writers were asked to write a short story about 1 of the items, a story that gave significance to the item.

3. All 100 items were put up for auction on eBay using the short stories as the item descriptions.

So, they bought 100 items for the sum total of $128.74 and sold them all on eBay for a grand total of $3,612.51.  That’s pretty cool.  It just goes to show you how important stories are.

by Zita