Holiday Staff Picks 2021
The best poetry anthology I've ever read. Young brings together canonical figures like Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks alongside underrated experimentalists such as Mae V. Cowdery, Melvin B. Tolson, and Douglas Kearney. Any serious reader of poetry needs this volume on their bookshelf. - HANK
The official illustrated history of the World's Greatest Roleplaying Game!, editions one through five, point-fives included. Contains advertising, packaging, visual development, concept art, and even D&D's incursions into mainstream pop culture (when it wasn't mainstream pop culture-- it's cool now, MOM). Check out page 253 for the background on my favorite setting, Planescape, inspired by Basho, Dictionary of the Khazars, and the works of Algernon Charles Swinburne! - EMILY
An absolute cult classic. Deserves a much wider audience. Like the great Sun Ra, Dumas is an artistic shape-shifter who blends genres effortlessly. It all works. Powerful, mythic stuff awaits. Dig it. - JOE
So, so beautiful. A poet and her love of and obsession with an ancient Irish lament. Ní Ghríofa lays motherhood, art, love open with unsparing beauty. - KEELIN
What begins as a dystopian noir expands into something like a short story collection, before its narraives collapse back into one. It's like Huxley with a strong dose of Western esotericism, a hermetic meta-novel that blurs the lines between people, books, memories, ideas, and data. It completely knocked my socks off. - GRAHAM
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Kazuo Ishiguro has described this as something of a companion piece to Never Let Me Go. This is fitting because it also uses its fictional society, shaped by a wondrous new technology, to examine human nature (and that which we exclude from it). Also because it'll cleave a hole in your heart and leave you thinking about it for the rest of your life. - GRAHAM
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An encyclopedia of horrid acts, a cornucopia of gruesome detail, and just a whole lot of fun. Watch out for Belle Gunness, the mass-murdering Indiana widow, and Joseph Vacher, the bearded French anarchist with a penchant for biting his victims. This is the perfect coffee table book for anyone obsessed with history and the macabre. - HANK
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Just flip through these pages and you'll find yourself wishing all manga were painted in vivid watercolor. Even as a single-volume graphic novel, the story feels surprisingly epic, like an 80s anime film that was never made. - GRAHAM
One of the more satisfying epic fantasies I've read, with exactly the right measure of Weird (talking snakes! interstellar empire! necromancy! geopolitics!). - EMILY
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Velvet Was the Night is a Mexican pulp romance mixed with a twisty political thriller. It's a fun, frothy page turner and an excellent read! - DAVID
Whiskey landed below my radar when it appeared in 2018 but recommended by a friend, I found this tale of the American Old West to be just the brief escape from divisive politics and pandemic I needed. If you long to escape from everything happening around us that we can’t control, this debut page-turning, American epic western will fit the bill. In 1885, left orphaned and alone when her father dies, 17-year-old Jessilyn dresses in men’s clothing and sets out from the family homestead as “Jess” to find her outlaw brother and bring him home. It’s a wild ride complete with land-grabbers, corrupt politicians, good guys, bad guys, harrowing escapes, reunion, and love. Jess eventually joins her brother’s outlaw band, a Robin Hood take from the rich, give to the poor endeavor. She’s befriended by Annette, one of the gang, who becomes more than a friend. Amid modern themes of race, gender, corruption, love - think True Grit meets Thelma and Louise meets Brokeback Mountain. Satisfying in every way, Jess’s distinct voice will take you away from our strained present on an incredible historical journey to the untamed American West. - JEAN
Casey lives in Cambridge, MA, waits tables, worries about her debt, falls for the wrong man and the right one. She dreams, and she grieves, and she worries about her health. In spite of it all, she manages to finish her novel. Lily King's assured, closely observed book Writers & Lovers is a loving portrait of Casey and the writing life. I don't think there's a single unnecessary word in the whole thing. Writers & Lovers is a joy to read, a gift from a writer at the top of her game. - DAVID