The Staff Shelf: BookCourt

When we walk into a bookstore, the first place we go is the staff recommendation shelves—it’s how you get a quick sense of the personality of the store. The very best bookstores are merely a reflection of the eclectic, deeply felt opinions of the book-lovers who work there. As part of our Interview with a Bookstore, we asked the staff at BookCourt in Brooklyn, NY what to read.

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SLIDESHOW: BookCourt Staff Shelf

: SOPHIE STEWART RECOMMENDS: A brilliant, challenging novella that is incredibly affecting for its length, Khirbet Khizeh is a first-person, fictionalized account of an Israeli soldier serving in the 1948 war. A classic in Europe and required reading in some Israeli schools, it is an intimate portrait of an important historical moment that has had lasting significance.

: DAN POPPICK RECOMMENDS: Visionary and relentless, Notley is on a limb all her own and one of our best living poets.

: OLIVIA SWEET RECOMMENDS: At times gruesome, at times lyrical in its treatment of the murdered bodies of its protagonists, Jim Crace’s novel finds beauty in decay and renewal in death.

: MARY GANNET RECOMMENDS: This brilliant novel of complex family members is told from the 8-year-old daughter’s point of view. Originally published years before the recent Dept. of Speculation, this book is extraordinary in its own right.

: SARAH GOEWEY RECOMMENDS: A riveting real-life thriller centered on the kidnapping of a South Korean actress and her filmmaker ex-husband by infamous North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. His goal: improve North Korea’s cinematic reputation on the world stage by “recruiting” Shin and Choi to make high-quality propaganda films. A flabbergasting read.

: GLENN TRANTER RECOMMENDS: Viv Albertine formed the legendary London punk band The Slits in 1977. The original riot girls, the band had all but burnt themselves out at the beginning of the eighties. Split into two parts, Side One chronicles her life from the working class council houses of north London and the problems that she faced forming an all-girl band in a city and age that was both patronizing and sexist. Side Two deals with a woman re-inventing herself amid self doubts and motherhood. A pioneer…and a true warrior.

: SARAH GOEWEY RECOMMENDS: A transplanetary Western that’s also a coming-of-age story. The image of the ‘household deer’ on the Planet of the Archbuilders has stayed with me since I first read this a decade ago.

: ANDREW UNGER RECOMMENDS: Tom McCarthy makes being smarter than you a sport. In this new book—a page-turner void of plot, characterization, or pretty much anything else that makes a novel tick—he somehow manages to summarize whole tenets of Levi-Strauss in smooth, chatty prose, grounds you in the work-a-day hubbub of a consultant’s office, and makes you care—care very deeply—for people who are barely more than names on a page.

: DAN POPPICK RECOMMENDS: Moxley’s newest collection explores personal memory as it intersects with poetry’s collective tradition, “the fame of erasure into the network of this word / next to that”–a raucous past as it comes to bear on the contemporary. Among many high points, the long poem “Coastal” is one of my favorite poems on making art after 9/11. A perfect entry point to her stunning body of work.

: LAUREN WALLACH RECOMMENDS: Walser is a of a unique and special lineage of writers who created some of their most profound work during lapses in mental illness. His work largely ignored during his lifetime, Walser spent the later part of his life in sanatoriums, where he was said to have taken long walks. In this collection, my favorite stories are those that have animal characters, such as “She-Owl” and “Stork and Hedgehog”. These read like elegiac fairytales for the psyche.

: SOPHIE STEWART RECOMMENDS: Edith Pearlman’s characters don’t live especially exceptional lives, like most people we know. But as we become better acquainted with a hotel concierge, a caterer, a pedicurist, and others, they become universes unto themselves. By the end of each story, Pearlman has always revealed something extraordinary and unexpected. She is generous, funny, wonderful.

: GLENN TRANTER RECOMMENDS: Emerick was not only present at EMI Studios during the entire Beatles recordings there, but was directly responsible for the sound on some of their most enduring songs, notably on Revolver (it was Emerick’s idea to record Lennon’s vocal through a Leslie speaker on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows‘), Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road.