Staff Picks: Brian Etling’s Favorites
Welcome, weary travelers, to my shop! My name is Brian (@jbetling) and I work in Sales. My department, Account Marketing, works with all of our much-loved indie bookstore accounts, and I do a bit of everything from collecting bookseller quotes to mailing out galleys to orchestrating our regional trade show presence to whatever else comes up in a day. If you know one thing about me, you know I’m always reading – it’s no surprise to anyone I grew up with that I ended up in publishing. I read across all genres, but I have a soft spot for sad, lacerating fiction, pretty much all poetry, and literary non-fiction. The weirder the better.
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1
Black Light
by Kimberly King Parsons
This book was one of the most rewarding literary surprises of the year for me. I picked up a galley of Black Light on a whim with no idea that I’d just picked up one of the best story collections in years – I would put “Foxes” on my Top Stories of Many Many Years list without batting an eye. Her stories are kind of about Texas and kind of about addiction and kind of about messiness and kind of about pain and they are all kind of genius. And the sentences, oh god, the sentences!
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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2
Crossing
by Pajtim Statovci
Crossing is a tough novel to pin down, and I think that’s kind of the point. Nutshell: two friends leave their lives in Albania to try their luck in Italy. It’s about boundaries and what it means to feel at home, both geographically and in one’s own body. Think Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, think Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl … definitely just keep thinking. Good news if you like this one: Pajtim’s first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia is another knockout that centers loosely on a huge boa constrictor and a relationship with a sexy, suave, quasi-abusive cat.
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$25.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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3
Fever Dream
by Samanta Schweblin
A stagnant pond, a weird horse, a creepy kid, brain worms!? Count me in. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life – though not so much “body horror” as “psychological, yikes, who-am-I-and-what-are-my-relationships horror.” It is the most profoundly unsettling book I’ve ever read. One of my favorite things about it? Clocking in at a slim 192 pages in a slender trim size, you can blow through it in one horrifying, white-knuckle reading session.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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4
Home Remedies
by Xuan Juliana Wang
If you follow me on Instagram you will remember me shouting about this book. You probably thought I was finished … joke’s on you! Home Remedies is an incredible collection of stories from a writer I would follow anywhere. The title story finds the author offering up remedies for such non-life-threatening ailments as “Grief (not your own grief, but your father’s grief after your fourteen-year-old-dog-dies” and “Inappropriate Feelings (towards married Contemporary British Drama professors).” It’s a wild ride.
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