All books
Fateless
Imre Kertesz
An autobiographical novel, in which Kertész addresses his childhood in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Kertész’s writing is spare and damning, akin to the filmmaking of Michael Haneke. more
The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst
The typographer’s bible; a book that is never too far from reach. more
Slow Learner
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s early stories are facile at best, but the introduction to the collection—in which Pynchon addresses his readers and talks about his writing—is invaluable. more
Modern typography
Robin Kinross
A rare object—a book on typography that is as beautifully written as it is designed. more
Diary of a Bad Year
J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s latest novel is written as two, entwined diaries—his own and that of a younger woman who he comes to pass the time with. Subtle and capable typography allows the trick to come off. more
Literary Theory
Terry Eagleton
The classic introduction to literary theory and a capable and somewhat subversive argument for Marxism. more
Boxed In
Mark Crispin Miller
An academic thesis that applies the traditional methods of close reading to television commercials. more
1984
George Orwell
The classic novel of authoritarianism. Also, the Bush administration’s how-to manual. more
Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s famously difficult masterpiece. I destroyed three copies in a (failed) effort to grasp it completely. But despite the challenges, the story is enormously charming; I have very warm feelings about the time I spent with it, and I still think of Byron each time I have to change a bulb. more
The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
Klein expertly and devastatingly reveals the history behind a model of capitalism that first fed on disaster, then fomented it. (I tossed the jacket, on account of it being unbearably ugly.) more
Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s most important novel, sadly more relevant everyday. Perhaps the writer I most admire. more
Limbo
Bernard Wolfe
A bizarre dystopia in which the elite voluntarily amputate their limbs and have them replaced with high performing machines. Deeply misogynistic. more
The Ecocriticism Reader
Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm
An introductory collection in literary ecology, the movement that aims to do for environmentalism what gender and race studies did for civil rights. more
The Comedy of Survival
Joseph Meeker
Meeker argues that the destructive aspects of western civilization are founded on the tragic mode, while the comic mode offers a path for redemption. The foundational work of ecocriticism. more
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