The Staff Shelf: Malvern 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 Malvern Books what’s on their shelves.

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SLIDESHOW: Malvern Books Staff Shelf

: FERNANDO (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: These strange, often humorous and dark tales originally published together in 1951 went on to inspire the The Twilight Zone, which Collier also helped create, and write for. Fans of macabre fantasy, Collier is the man for you.

: FERNANDO (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: The mafia will take over your block, your town, your state, your country. And like that you will live in a society where nobody knows anything, yet everybody knows everything. Just ask anyone who lived through the 30’s or 40’s in Sicily. Or anybody who’s seen Mexico change in the past 20 years. Or, better yet, pick up The Day of the Owl, it’s a short and entertaining read. It’s more relevant now than you would think.

: FERNANDO (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: Once I started this book, I couldn’t put it down—Borges’ thoughts about art, religion, and philosophy are a total delight for the mind and heart. This isn’t just a book to enjoy, but to fall in love with.

: FERNANDO (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: If you can find me a better depiction of a mermaid in literature pull me up a chair. The build-up and execution here is very impressive, a great contribution to 20th century literature of the fantastic.

: FERNANDO (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: The author of this book came from a family of lazy people that elevated laziness to an artform, depicted comically and full of color here. This writer is one of my favorite discoveries of the past year, and Henry Miller was also a big fan.

: FERNANDO (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: The preoccupations and lives of these characters are strangely fascinating to me. Nothing grandiose happens, but the small moments in these stories accumulate to something that keeps bringing me back. Like a more subtle Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, with a variety of voices from lady characters that sit around and dream, like only the upper British classes do.

: LAYNE (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: This series has quick wit, big heart, and a feminist imagination—gender and sexuality are explored with authentic, expansive complexity. Fans of Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels will feel right at home.

: ADAM (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: Wilson, a Marxist journalist in Colombia, and his girlfriend, a young writer as well, are forced to go on the lam during the country’s brutal drug war after Wilson writes unfavorable articles about the government. Whether it’s the paramilitary police burning down the coca fields, the ruthless drug dealers fighting over territory, or the state’s Guerrilla army performing random executions, the plot never loses momentum.

: SCHANDRA (ASSISTANT MANAGER) RECOMMENDS: This book is a puzzle worth puzzling over. Lispector defines what it is to be a female existentialist in an existence codified by male lovers, male rulers, and male gods. To borrow its final line, “I adore it.”

: TAYLOR (LEAD SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: This book is dark & lovely & written for a dying child prostitute. in 1891 Marcel fell in love with Louise. in 1893 Louise contracted tuberculosis. to comfort M. wrote her fairytales that he would read to her every night. the prose is excellent. the stories are charming & moving. the characters innocent, playful & heartbreaking. your life is incomplete without it.

: BECKY (MANAGER) RECOMMENDS: This isn’t Frommer’s Dublin. And I doubt the Irish Tourism Board would recommend trying to reconstruct a walking tour of Dublin Noir’s story locations. But if you like your fiction short with a touch of dark humor and an often brutal twist at the end, these stories are for you. Watch it! Don’t let that blood get on your shoe…

: TAYLOR (LEAD SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: A hallucinatory & incandescent adventure in art, eroticism & adrenaline. “the darkness of matter is soundless”

: TAYLOR (LEAD SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: Eunoia is the shortest word in English that contains all 5 vowels & litteraly means beautiful thinking. Each section of this book is restricted to using only one vowel at a time. It took Christian Bök 7 years to turn this simple concept into a book of poems.

: TAYLOR (LEAD SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: Frank, fearless letters from poets of all colors, genders, classes about the material condition under which their art is made.

: ANNAR (SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: I’ve read this book three times in the last week, and I can’t wait to read it again! I love the crisp, clear language of Jacobsen’s poems. Buses, snails, telescopes, loss—Jacobsen can find value in it all. This collection is beautiful, accessible, and definitely worth multiple readings.

: MARK (LEAD SALES ASSOCIATE) RECOMMENDS: One of the finest examples of American surrealism. This book has it all, mutiny at sea, suicide, family tragedy, snowball fights, car chases. Recommended for any fan of thought provoking adventure novels.