Collected Fictions

Jorge Luis Borges

Short, surreal little tales that experiment with the form of the story and often take the library as their subject.

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

Tharp’s treatise on creativity applies as well to writing or design as it does to dance.

While You’re Reading

Gerard Unger

Directed at the layman instead of the serious typographer, Unger’s book is a breezy overview of the science of reading.

Omnivore’s Dilemma

Michael Pollan

Worth the hype, not because of the widely-hailed subject matter but because of the extraordinary writing.

Against the Grain

Richard Manning

A revisionist history that argues that we traded away much of our humanity in exchange for the little bit of security that agriculture promised.

Fateless

Imre Kertész

An autobiographical novel, in which Kertész addresses his childhood in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

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.

Modern Typography

Robin Kinross

A rare object—a book on typography that is as beautifully written as it is designed.

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.

Literary Theory

Terry Eagleton

The classic introduction to literary theory and a capable and somewhat subversive argument for Marxism.

Boxed In

Mark Crispin Miller

An academic thesis that applies the traditional methods of close reading to television commercials.

1984

George Orwell

The classic novel of authoritarianism. Also, the Bush administration’s how-to manual.

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