The Vintage Book of Amnesia

Jonathan Lethem

An eccentric collection of short pieces that touch on the subject of memory loss, from writers as varied as Martin Amis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Oliver Sacks.

The Gift

Lewis Hyde

The original subtitle of this book defined it as “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” which hints at the real message better than the revision: that real art, no matter the price, is always a gift from the artist to the audience.

A Week at the Airport

Alain de Botton

A slim document observing the place most of us strive to avoid; a good lazy travel book.

The Names

Don Delillo

A dense novel, concerning a small group of American ex-patriots and a series of cult murders. Strange and beautiful.

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

“If we…do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

Decades after a pandemic has ravaged the planet, a roving group of actors and musicians called The Symphony return to a small town and find that things are not as they were before.

The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa

Objects are disappearing: not the things themselves, although that is soon to follow, but the memory of them, the recognition and understanding of what they are and have been.

Several Short Sentences About Writing

Verlyn Klinkenborg

I am rather enamored with this book from Verlyn Klinkenborg, which presumes that most writing instruction is bullshit.

Cubed

Nikil Saval

An insightful history of professional work, Nikil Saval’s Cubed interrogates how we work by digging into where we work, and the way those workplaces have changed and evolved.

Babel-17

Samuel R. Delany

Rydra Wong is a poet, a captain, an erstwhile cryptographer, and a burgeoning telepath.

The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel

Late one night, at a luxury hotel reachable only by boat, someone scrawls Why don’t you swallow broken glass on a huge picture window.

Nova

Samuel R. Delany

Mouse is a young cyborg stud who plays a stolen sensory syrynx—an instrument that projects sights, smells, and sounds all at once.

The Water Knife

Paolo Bacigalupi

In what reads like a plausible present (rather than the near future), the enforcer for the Southern Nevada Water Authority cuts a bloody fight over the little water that remains in the Colorado river.