eBook Staff Picks

My heart is bursting with gratitude for Justin Spring for his exhaustively researched and exciting Secret Historian. And thanks, too, to self-invented, self-identified sexual rebel (though no label suffices) Sam Steward, the esteemed professor turned Hells Angels' tattooist, turned above average erotic fiction writer, all while fighting a valiant battle with barbiturates. Spring spent 10 years studying Steward's journals, letters and notorious card catalog of notes on casual sex left behind in his Oakland attic. This necessary and fulfilling bio, rejected by 10 publishers before FSG stepped up, will make a lovely holiday gift, even if the recipient, (unlike Steward) does not favor beatings and humiliation by straight guys in dirty socks.

Before I got around to reading this amazing book, I'd assumed Dylan would be the last person who would have anything to say about his own life. He seems so...removed. I was wrong. His secret is that he doesn't attempt anything close to a linear narrative(or even what one might think of as a memoir) but instead picks a handful of chapters from his own life, starting with his arrival in Greenwich Village. Things like names and dates are scant; instead, we get a sense of what it is like to be Bob Dylan. Awesome! -KPR

Don't be fooled by the use of Harry Potter references in the blurbs about this book -- when Kelly Link says magic, she means the real kind. The unsettling, wonderful magic of our day-to-day, as it would be if all impropable daydreams and metaphors and worst nightmares really happened that way. Simply put, this collection is a great read but manages to accompish something more surprising than that -- Link dismantles story, reality, and genre and then puts it back together right in front of us. This is one of the books that changed what I think short fiction can do. -MP

Laurie Sheck's version of Frankenstein's monster is a cast-off narrator adrift in a sort of timeless history, making notes in search of some definition of himself and of his original creator, Mary Shelley. The result is a lyrical pastiche of musings on selfhood, monstrosity, and the quest for knowledge with digressions on subjects as wide ranging as the Franklin Expedition and the music of John Cage. Both a worthy supplement to Shelley's masterpiece and a haunting story from a source all its own.

Yes, the book came first. Yes, it's just as atmospheric and creepy as the best vampire movie ever. Yes, there is a depth of character and nuance that is seldom encountered in a "horror" novel. NO, if you kids liked the Twilight books, they should not read this...it's grown-up time! -KH

One of the things that makes a work of fiction into a work of literature is when it transports the reader into a new world, be it into a time or place (or reality) wholly different from our own, or into the head of a character like no other. Such a book is Motherless Brooklyn, which takes us into the head of one Lionel Essrog. Lionel is an orphan with a bad case of Tourette's Syndrome, and he fairly overflows with odd habits and compulsions, his mind continuously revolting against him in lurid outbursts of strange verbiage. He is drawn into playing detective to try to solve the murder of his small-time crook of a boss, but this book is not about plot. It is about language, and a character struggling to control the words and sounds that bubble up from within him. And did I mention that it is hilarious? -KPR