The Staff Shelf: Penn Book Center

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 Penn Book Center what they recommend.

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SLIDESHOW: Penn Book Center Staff Shelf

: DREW WADE (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone is one of those books—the kind that shows an author obsessed with writing perfect descriptions, trying new things (and succeeding), and being hell-bent on entertaining you. He’s one of the new Vonneguts, massively fun while still making you leave the book realizing you’ve witnessed something profound.

: ELLEN GARRISON (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: In The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson combines great storytelling, trenchant journalism and sardonic rumination to create an utterly engaging work of narrative nonfiction. The individuals he profiles are as fascinating as they are disturbing, and his own self-deprecating wit takes the edge off of a dark look into the strange possibilities of the human mind.

: PATRICK LOFGREN (BOOKSELLERS) RECOMMENDS: The Heart Goes last is a thoughtful exploration of a couple trying to hold their relationship together in the wake of a total economic collapse. The book explores our willingness to give up freedom for security, an important topic, and deeply relevant to our lives today.

: ASHLEY MONTAGUE (OWNER) RECOMMENDS: When Jem McCrail bursts into Alice Piling’s secondary school classroom, she refashions Alice’s conventional life into something magical. Jem, a rebel and a fabulist, introduces Alice to the delights of literature, opera and truancy. A comic exploration of female friendship, Temples of Delight, also considers the transformative power of love.

: ASH ACEVEDO (BOOKSELLERS) RECOMMENDS: Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws is a deeply humanizing chronicle of the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley. This book has given me a new found appreciation for Wollstonecraft and Shelley’s work, while encouraging me to continue to challenge my place in society as a woman.

: MICHAEL ROW (OWNER) RECOMMENDS: It’s the end of the world as we know it (And I feel fine). Well, maybe not fine. Superbugs, financial meltdown, collapse of the internet and/or electric grid, and other increasingly possible results of our increasingly complex and interconnected world will have you wishing for the good old days of worrying about getting mugged on the street or monsters under the bed. Is there hope? Maybe.

: JAMES GLEASON (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: Jean-Luc Marion’s Negative Certainties, translated from the French by Stephen E. Lewis, represent s an in interesting shift in his decades-long work toward what he considers the “broadening of the theater of phenomenality.” Seen as a conclusion to “the unfolding of the philosophical possibilities” of previous work such as Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology Of Giveness and The Erotic Phenomenon exploring the concept of the gift, it moves toward an evaluation of the limits of rational, objectifying thought and attempts, with exceptional rigor, to introduce into philosophy the concept of negative certainties. In five essays exploring certain immeasurable phenomenon, or aporias, Marion seeks to address this hypothesis: “in so far as [a certain paradoxical] question is always being asked and left without an answer, and it survives this absence, does it not give a reality to be thought? And does it not merit the rank of a negative certainty? For even denigration can be a matter of giveness.” A demanding but highly thorough and intriguing re-situation of the confines of catagorical understanding.