The Staff Shelf: Green Apple Books

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 Green Apple Books what they recommends.

SLIDESHOW: Green Apple Books Staff Shelf

: MAX (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: This book haunts and harrows, hunts and hypnotizes. There is no other like it. Pessoa wrote entire volumes of prose, poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism under several different names (heteronyms) over the course of his life, but this book of “fiction” is undoubtedly his magnum opus. Every sentence in here is one I could read over and over. I can’t tell if I read this book or if it read me.

: CHRIS (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: Ostensibly a book about poetry, Madness, Rack, and Honey is really about self-doubt and the marvelous ability we have to see past our failures–even though it feels like an impossible thing!–in order to express ourselves. I recommend it to anyone with a creative bone in their body (i.e., everyone).

: EMILY (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: It’s hard to know where to begin with a book like this besides saying it’s amazing. Imagine if Joan Didion or Maggie Nelson wrote true crime. Thernstrom’s pain and confusion over the loss of her friend bleeds through every page, yet she is quick to examine her own feeling: how much of her grief is real, she asks, and how much is simply a product of the story she is telling? Dead Girl is a complex and brilliant meditation on the ways we deal with trauma.

: KEVIN (CO-OWNER) RECOMMENDS: At last! My bookselling days are now complete! With Feral House reissuing my favorite book of all time, I can ride the rails into the sunset, as my “want list as long as my arm” customers can buy a new copy of this and not have to wait for a rare, OP copy to stumble in. Much more than crime, much more than an autobiography of San Francisco’s greatest hobo thief, You Can’t Win is an entertaining, engrossing testament to an era very long gone. Masterful!

: JOHN (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: If you like the Metamorphosis. If you like beaches. If you like rain. If you like raining fish. If you like raining leeches. If you like bibliophiles (or are one). If you like telepathic dogs and garrulous cats. If you like Jonnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. If you like hallucinations. If you like it when people don’t explain things to you. If you like whodunits. If you like novels told from the first, second, and third person. If you like Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. If you like alternate universes and interweaving plotlines. If you like Oedipus complexes. If you like the woods. If you like painting. If you like retrograde amnesia. If you like crows. If you’d like a good read…

: STEPHEN (BUYER) RECOMMENDS: To call J.A. Baker’s book a book about birds is similar to saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. This is so much more than ornithology. It’s a marvelously textured, understated, and beautifully written account of a man’s quest to learn certain aspects of the natural world–to become part of the corner of the universe he’s come to inhabit. Baker’s language is precise and poetic and his insights, on the behavior of birds and man, are remarkable. I love this book all out of proportion.

: SPIROS (USED BOOK BUYER) RECOMMENDS: As the Great War fitfully starts in the Austrian Empire, we are introduced to our hero, Svejk, who has been “finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile.” Reconscripted despite his rheumatism (and certified imbecility), we follow Svejk in his progress through a loonybin, an army brig, a prolonged anabasis through Bohemia, and his incarceration as a Russian prisoner of war. Practically all of Svejk’s actions precipitate chaotic, if not downright catastrophic results; nevertheless, Svejk will endure because, while he may be an imbecile, he is most certainly nobody’s fool.

: LINNE (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: Do you like your sailor stories booze-soaked, murderous, and whittled to a sharp, graceful point? Do you like novellas so compelling you stay up late despite yourself, knowing that you’re riding a beautiful train bound for certain doom? Do you like writers who have published in The Paris Review? I like all of those things, and this brutal, gorgeous tome made me feel empathy, anxiety, resilience, and despair in equal measure. For such a dastardly dude, McGlue stole my wary heart within a few short pages, and Moshfegh’s prose had me sending out the literary bat-signal to all of my reader friends. Treat yourself, finish it in a day, then pass it on.

: SAMMY (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: Raunchy and smart, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa leaves no perverse stone unturned. Yet Celeste Price is a highly likable–if not chilling–protagonist who will make you both laugh and gasp. This book is about as irreverent as it gets. A darkly entertaining read that explores the complex relationship between our sexuality and our morality.