Annie's Staff Picks

WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF THE VIEW'S SUMMER READ 2019 PICKS!

"A beautiful book ... a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love." --Wall Street Journal

"A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory...Nunez has a wry, withering wit." --NPR

"Dry, allusive and charming...the comedy here writes itself." The New York Times

A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: I, too, dislike it, wrote Marianne Moore. Many more people agree they hate poetry, Ben Lerner writes, than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

The hugely acclaimed New York Times Best Seller, now available in paperback!

*A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist*

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2014:
The New York Times Book Review (Top 10), Entertainment Weekly (Top 10), New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune (Top 10), Publishers Weekly (Top 10), Time Out New York (Top 10), Los Angeles Times, Kirkus, Booklist, NPR's Science Friday, Newsday, Slate, Refinery 29, and many more...

In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children's air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children, or ourselves, against the world. As she explores the metaphors surrounding immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire's Candide, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.

Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel, Save Me The Waltz (1932) was written in six weeks and covers the period of her life that her husband F Scott Fitzgerald had been drawing on for years while writing Tender is the Night (1934). She died in 1948. Save Me The Waltz is now recognised as a classic novel of the woman's experience in fast-moving American Jazz Age society. The novel opens during the First World War. Alabama Beggs is a Southern belle who makes her début into adulthood with wild parties, dancing and drinking, and flirting with the young officers posted to her home town. When the artist Lieutenant David Knight arrives to join her line of suitors, Alabama marries him. Their life in New York, Paris and the South of France closely mirrors the Fitzgeralds' own life and their prominent socialising in the 1920s and 1930s as part of what was later called the Lost Generation. Like Zelda, Alabama became passionate about dance. She attends ballet class in Paris every day. She refuses to accept that she might not become the great dancer that she ardently longs to be, and this threatens her mental health and her marriage. Erin Templeton's introduction to Zelda Fitzgerald's finest literary work shows how these struggles to become a dancer were the result of Zelda's need to have a life of her own rather than living in her husband's shadow.

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The fiction of Rachel Ingalls has haunted me for years. The plots are dramatic, even exaggerated, but the books are quiet and short. The language is plain but curious. I've gathered here three works of hers. Two of these are frightening and one less so, although I sometimes change my mind about which one that is. --from the Introduction by Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler assembled this collection from Rachel Ingalls' wide selection of novellas as a perfect introduction to her beguiling talent. I See a Long Journey and On Ice, novellas Mr. Handler considers basically perfect, originally appeared with a third, Blessed Art Thou, a story he considers to be in an entirely different tone. He felt that Friends in the Country from Ms. Ingalls' later collection, The End of Tragedy, was a more natural companion to the two earlier works. The author happily agreed.

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