Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): I just finished Tin House Books’s own Me and Mr. Booker by Cory Taylor. I’m generally a slow reader, but I drunk this book down in one swift, gleeful gulp. The eponymous Mr. Booker, a dapper English film professor whose flirtatious coyness might actually be avoidance, had me thinking of the older man in An Education in the best possible way. But where that tale’s male lead is fundamentally a conman, Mr. Booker and his teenage mistress, Martha, are partners in crime, equally guilty of looking past the truth to keep a damned relationship afloat.

What drives the book forward, and what separates it from its teenage affair story competition, is Martha’s voice. She’s perceptive, candid, wry in a way only Australians can be, completely equipped to parry with Mr. Booker–and still just a kid. She and I both couldn’t turn away from what was happening, even when we both knew she was headed nowhere good.

Desiree Andrews (Assistant Editor, Tin House magazine): This isn’t a Friday Read—more of a lost and never found situation. When I was volunteering in Kolkata a few years ago, I ran across a copy of a book called The Affair.  The book was dingy, yellow and clearly very old but it looked like it had never been opened. As I read it, the binding glue disintegrated and pages feel out in chunks.

The book was about a scientist who had once taught at a prestigious British university but had left for the private sector. He is called back into the cloistered world of academia when an old colleague whom everyone hates (partly because of his terrible personality and partly because of his affiliations with the communist party) is accused of falsifying test results in an experiment. Although the narrator also hates the accused, he goes back to act as his attorney in a case that pits the academic old guard against the younger, more progressive professors.

All of the characters in this book are British men over 45. There’s no sex, no crime (other than the crime of scapegoating an apparent asshole) and the whole thing takes place on a dreary university campus circa 1970. There is no reason why I should like this book yet I’ve been explicably obsessed with it since I left India. I wrote the author’s name down in a journal that was lost in transit. Armed with only the loose description I’ve shared here, the Internet has been no help. I think it just goes to show we only want what we can’t have and I want to read The Affair this Friday.

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): I just picked up a second-hand copy of Marguerite Duras’ short novel Summer Rain and haven’t been able to put it down. Lyrical and intense, abstract in the best sense and with a peripatetic and at times surprising rhythm, it is the jagged and moving story of a large immigrant family living in the grey cement suburbs of Paris. With spare and crystalline writing, Duras brings forward and into focus the humanity of and intimacy within this rambling family of nine, while the bleakness of the city’s outskirts fades in the background. As Duras writes in Summer Rain, “Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.”

Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): I am halfway through the craziest book I have ever loved. At AWP, I picked up an ARC of The Carp Castle, which Overlook Press is publishing this coming September. It is the only unpublished novel by MacDonald Harris (the pseudonym for Donald Heiney), who lived from 1921 to 1993 and was the author of sixteen novels. Set in post–World War I Europe (at least, so far), The Carp Castle opens with a metaphysician chasing his soon-to-be lover through a German forest, each of them flinging off clothes throughout the chase. At the moment their relationship is consummated, the sky darkens, not because of a storm cloud, but because of a zeppelin, which, it turns out, is the vessel that will take them, the mystic/cult leader Moira, whom they follow, and other equally nutty (at least, so far) characters to a place that Moira calls “Gioconda” and the cover copy calls “a better future.” Best of all, the zeppelin is named The League of Nations. Stay tuned . . .

Masie Cochran (Associate Editor, Tin House Books): I’m reading Airships by Barry Hannah. I read this collection in high school, again in college, and keep coming back to it every few years.  I love “Testimony of Pilot, “(take a second and read An Amazing Sentence Shape by Kate Brittain), “Green Gets It,” and “Our Second Home.” But this week, for whatever reason, I’ve read “Love too Long” twice. It’s angry and sloppy and wild and raw and so, so good. It’s about a lot of things, but mainly a man who loved a woman too much. “Maybe I need to go to church, I said to myself. I can’t stand this alone. I wished I was Jesus. Somebody who never drank or wanted nooky. Or knew Jane.”

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): The Duc de Saint-Simon, godson of Louis XIV, diplomat, writer and nobleman, was at the thriving, conniving heart of kingly intrigue, lust, love, war and and all things conspiratorial going down at the most powerful, sumptuous court of Europe, the incomparable Château de Versailles. Unlike most of the courtiers, Saint-Simon was a reverent, honest man who wrote with candor and clarity about the everyday affairs of the court. Intimate observer par excellence, not many of the Sun King’s secrets went unnoticed by his godson and were recorded with careful detail in his Memoirs of Louis De Rouvroy Duc De Saint. Of Louis XIV and his high court, he writes, “Others were not allowed to dream as he had lived,” while on a different note regarding newfangled instruments known as cutlery, Saint-Simon observes, “Seeing him eat olives with a fork!” Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past is said to have been inspired by Saint-Simon’s writings, possibly encapsulated in the Duc’s observation, “The shortness of each day was his only sorrow.” A book to be savored over macarons and tea cakes in late afternoon gardens.

Tony Perez (Editor, Tin House Books): This isn’t the first time that Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers has made an appearance on Friday Reads, based on what I’ve seen my colleagues carting around lately, I suspect it won’t be the last. What’s blown me away about the book is the way Kushner manages to maintain such momentum even while she’s moving around in time. The narrative is discursive and often anecdotal, but never loses its drive. Even while she’s flashing back and stepping aside, she’s always moving us forward (appropriate for a book that takes speed as one it’s primary subjects). I’ve got forty pages to go, and I fear withdrawals—thankfully I’ve got an ARC of Elliott Holt’s You Are One of Them to calm my shakes.

Nanci McCloskey (Director of Publicity and Rights, Tin House Books): I just read Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. I’ve read (and loved) Didion’s memoirs and essays, but I hadn’t read her novels. When I was browsing books in an LA bookstore, a perfect stranger said: You must read this. I just finished it, and I can’t stop talking about it. Sold. Play It As It Lays destroyed me (in the best way). It reminded me of reading Nathanael West for the first time. Didion works miracles in this book. The excruciatingly patient pacing. The elliptical storytelling. There’s nothing showy or pretentious; the book is profoundly moving.

Devon Walker-Domine (Open Bar Intern): Among my current reads is Adrian Oktenberg’s The Bosnia Elegies, a staggering work that, through the adept merging of journalistic and poetic styles, succeeds in conveying the vastness and complexity of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, both on a national and a personal level. The loss of a loved one, of a voice, of a personal history–these come together to form the collective loss of a moribund nation, and Oktenberg fearlessly and gracefully expresses this by imbedding in the very structure of her lines the patterning of loss and the visual representation of separations as they are coming into existence:

Nobody obeyed the command to kneel

some made a rush                        some stood stark and straight

a few fell at once        living and dead      lay mingled together

Here she lays the map of a fractured nation like a transparency over broken communities and the individuals composing those communities.  This kind of imagery essentially prohibits readers from maintaining an indifferent perspective, bringing them so close to the genocide that it can no longer remain a distant and vague outline of tragedy.

This is not a read for the faint of heart: its focus is set unwaveringly upon the fragile chain of instances composing human life, particularly as it exists against the backdrop of violent political upheaval. That said, if you can handle the unflinching gaze at humanity in conflict with itself, the reward is great. These are definitely some of the most stunning and intricately woven poems I have read in quite some time.

Lance Cleland (Murder Mystery Dinner Detective): An ordinary man who found himself embroiled in extraordinary circumstances. This is all I want said of my life. As such, I find myself constantly dipping back into the pool of spy novels I loved as a young reader. The first leisurely sunny day spent at the park will always find me with a paperback in hand, chasing German submarines, double-crossing the voluptuous, and trying like hell not to get my drink spiked in an underground Prague bar.

Eric Ambler’s Journey Into Fear never crosses the border into literature in the way a good Greene or le Carré treatment can, but his novel is damn good fun nonetheless. An English civil servant on his way home from Istanbul gets roped into an international arms race. Escaping an attempt on his life, our ordinary hero finds himself isolated at sea with a multinational cast of secondary characters (a seductive nightclub dancer, her seedy, Marxist husband, a mysterious tobacco importer!), who may or may not be on board to kill him. Sprinkled in amidst all the thrills are some genuinely sharp critiques of the British Empire, as well as some humorous asides about female persuasions. But make no mistake, Ambler is here to take you from A to B in as entertaining a manner as possible.

Journey Into Fear is a classic set up, executed perfectly. I hope they say the same thing about me someday.

Michelle Wildgen (Executive Editor, Tin House Magazine): I’m reading Rosie Schaap’s Drinking with Men: A Memoir right now, a memoir about her love of bars, specifically the neighborhood joint where one stops by after work for a glass, maybe to check in with regulars, maybe just to have a drink. She grew up in these places, in a lot of ways, with her gateway to a shall we say “altered” community being her time as a teenage Deadhead. (Her account confirms much of what I assumed to be true during a brief Dead-curious period in my freshman year of college, symbolized by my sporting a rawhide ankle bracelet hung with bells. But that’s not important right now.) There’s something in the way Schaap approaches the subject of drinking that I find oddly bold. That seems counter-intuitive. Americans really like to drink, we know, and I live in Wisconsin, which has elevated it to a religion. Maybe it is just the fact that Schaap is happy to discuss drinking not as an epicurean pursuit, not so much about the libation itself, but the process, the ritual of consuming alcohol, the place and company of that imbibing. As much as many of us love a drink, I do think most of us tend to couch it in other terms, like gastronomy or sports or an addiction narrative. But sometimes, this book reminds you, it’s just a part of community life.

Holly Laycock (Publicity Intern, Tin House Books): I have spent the past two weeks consciously trying to pace my reading of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman to prolong its delicious strangeness. The surreal world O’Brien creates follows a nameless man who commits a murder for money, and then slips into a dreamlike existence where police barracks change shape, policemen turn sound into energy, and bicycles violate their riders, all to little fanfare. He is also accompanied by another character named Joe, who to the best of my interpretations is his soul, and who often provides some comic relief on this bizarre journey. To tell what kind of journey this is would spoil the outcome of the book, so I will simply say that you should read it when you’re really ready to hunker down. No text has gotten me so far outside of myself, and so far enmeshed in its wobbly parameters for quite some time, and I’m only sorry that it’s not longer.

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): Since finishing Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia a few weeks ago, I’ve had a hard time finding fiction to dig into; everything I’ve started has felt a little precious by comparison. (I cannot say loudly enough: you must read this book.) Instead, I’ve been getting my fix by weaving in and out of Always Apprentices, The Believer’s fantastic anthology of conversations between writers. The pairings for the conversations, and often the settings where they take place, are like something from a dream: Bret Easton Ellis and Don DeLillo catch up in a Louis XIII room in Paris! Wells Tower rides shotgun in Barry Hannah’s Jeep, and they skulk around together beneath the windows of Faulkner’s old house! What’s really moving here, though, is the way these writers talk about each other’s work and about the craft they both love. Even when the two are meeting for the first time, there’s intimacy in the way they speak that seems to come from a sense of being members of the same club.

And another set of conversations that have been inspiring me this month: the collaborative art being made over at Ten Paces and Draw. [http://www.tenpacesanddraw.com/] Ten Paces and Draw hosts “swaps” in which paired artists are given a weekly theme, make a sketch inspired by that theme–and then give that sketch to the other artist to use as the basis for a work. The results are stunning, and it’s fascinating to see how one artist decides to riff off the other’s concept. I particularly recommend the Forbidden Love, Arrested Development, and Detectives swaps.

Desiree Andrews (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): My bother sent me a text the other day saying I had to watch The American Astronaut on Netflix.  He called the black and white space musical “messed up and awesome.” Of course I streamed it right away. I should start off by saying that this movie doesn’t seem to be meant for women. Being a woman, myself, I found this a little hard to get over. There are very few female characters. The ones that do exist are either only defined by their sexual appetites or are actual objects (a “Real Live Girl” grown from a box, who is also solely defined by her potential sexuality). The main female character is known as “the girl with the glass vagina.”  Maybe there’s a comment on gender politics that I’m missing but this film gave off a pretty “for boys only” vibe for my taste.

Putting the hyper masculinity aside, there are at least two scenes that make the whole movie worth watching. The first is a dance scene in a public men’s room where two men sing to torment the hero, trapped in a toilet stall.  The second: a stark image of a mad scientist walking among the bodies he’s just killed. The bodies have all turned to piles of ash. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize that every scene has something pretty spectacular or utterly weird to offer. Although I’m not sure how this film hung together as a whole, it was definitely a better use of my time than watching all 26 episodes of The Killing.

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): Brilliant guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose first name literally means ”I awake” in Romani, grew up in the Romani camps near Paris in the 1920s and received his first banjo-guitar when he was twelve. Luckily for jazz lovers and music aficionados, Reinhardt was hooked. He explains, “Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision . . .” In the 1930s in Paris, he played regularly at le Hot Club de France with his Quintet that included fantastic violinist Stéphane Grappelli. They continuously enchanted audiences with tunes like their 1930s zippy version of “Tiger Rag” or their swingy 1937 “The Sheik of Araby.” Perfect music for sitting out on the porch or terrace with a little glass of cloudy Pernod or an iced lemonade.

Jakob Vala (Graphic Designer): I’ve been listening to Milk Music’s debut LP, Cruise Your Illusion, ever since my brother passed it to me last month. Our childhood friends Joe Rutter (drums) and his younger brother Alex Coxen (guitar and vocals) make up one half of the quartet. I’m clearly biased, but about halfway through the first song, I forget I’m listening to former Trick-or-Treating allies and enjoy the album for what it is—a skillfully crafted piece of rock.

Growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest does something to a musician; it breeds a sort of nostalgic punk aesthetic and lends a grimy lilt to the tightest of melodies. It encourages a mixing of genres. The members of Milk Music are scholars of music. They know their influences and they honor them with a sincere lack of irony. Drawing on its punk predecessors, the Olympia music scene (past and present), and of course, Neil Young, Cruise Your Illusion is a solid album that warrants multiple listens.

And here’s a link to their site: http://www.milkmusic.us

 

Michelle Wildgen (Executive Editor, Tin House Magazine): I have not been the most fascinating consumer of culture this month, but I can tell you this: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is so far so authoritative, unexpected, and compelling—my favorite in my early reading of it is a scene in which the narrator happens upon a couple in a bar and just stays with them throughout the evening as it expands and moves from one place and crew of people to another, and it captures so perfectly the way these nights can occur when you are at a certain age, a certain unfetteredness, naivete and openness, and maybe a certain sheer foolishness and bravery too.

I feel as if a lot of people were recently talking about the BBC series Call the Midwife, and I have not yet watched it but have been reading the book, choosing for some reason to do so when I cannot sleep in the middle of the night. Sometimes it soothes and sometimes it doesn’t, but what it demonstrates, again and again, is this unalloyed truth: inventing birth control is probably the single best thing the human race has ever done. When I read an account of these women in 1950s East End London held hostage to baby after baby and think of the Republicans trying to actually take it away, it makes me want to tear someone’s face off. See, now I won’t sleep tonight, either.

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): First published in 1972, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing explores how we look at art and by extension how we see—literally and figuratively. A rich mix of art history and cultural theory, three out of the seven essays consist solely of images—classical paintings like Rembrandt or Velasquez, early 70s advertisements and pop images of women or food. As Berger writes, “Seeing comes before words.” A thin pocket-sized book in black and white, it’s perfect to slip into your purse or backpack for long afternoons in coffee shops or short subway rides.  I’m also reading the stunning sonnets of Gaspara Stampa, an Italian female poet of the Renaissance with an extremely modern sensibility who turned and returned to the sonnet form with more than 300 examples for the paramour who spurned her. “Let all the minds and tongues on earth come forth / With every style of prose as well as verse . . .”

Cheston Knapp (Managing Editor, Tin House Magazine): Like all readers, I stockpile recommendations. Every unread book on my shelf—and it often feels like hundreds—has a peculiar and distinct lineage. Time to time, in a mood pointedly sappy or stoned, I like to imagine the sprawling kinship map of my library, all the rambling and vivifying and argumentative and, yes, often stoned conversations I’ve had that led me to buy these books. Anyway, several years ago, during one of our summer workshops, Susan Bell told me about this overlooked Victorian masterpiece called New Grub Street, by George Gissing. I picked up a nice, cheap Modern Library hard cover copy and placed it on my shelf, right between my trapped Gass and my clip-winged Hawkes. As often happens with these things, though, more people recommended the book to me and I recently reached a breaking point while proofing our summer issue, which contains a fine Lost & Found by Pamela Erens, whose novel, The Virgins, Tin House Books will publish in August. I liked her essay so much that I pulled the book from my shelf and started reading. I liked it so much, in fact, that I started reading her book as well. Neither has been a disappointment: not the book I’d intended to read for so long and hadn’t or the book I wouldn’t have read so soon without it.

Rob Spillman (Editor of Tin House): The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. Believe the hype. Kushner can flat-out write. From the Bonneville Salt Flats to the pits of Italian politics, covering what it means to love and what it means to make art, this is a serious and deeply engaging novel. “I was in an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed.”

Jakob Vala (Graphic Designer): Many years ago, when I still worked in a bookstore, a woman I’d never seen before walked in with a crumbling box of books. After I explained that we didn’t buy used books, she pulled a slim paperback from the pile. “Have you read Travels with Charley?” she asked, “I think you’d like it.” I told her that no, I hadn’t read it, but that I’d always wanted to (this was mostly a lie—a standard practice among booksellers). Leaning over the counter, she inscribed the first page, “To Jacob [sic] from Brigette. Now you have it!” And then she walked out of my life forever.

Travels with Charley has lived in the bottom left corner of my bookshelf, untouched, for about eight years. I cracked it open last night while experiencing a bit of wanderlust. Brigette was right. I do like it.

Devon Walker-Domine (Editorial Intern, The Open Bar): Lately, I find myself craving the comfort that comes with returning to old favorites, to the beloved dog-eared volumes that have braved the storm of purses, backpacks, glove compartments, and moves innumerable: no surprise then that I should have pulled Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead off the shelf last week.  And I am, of course, glad that I did: as always, I am struck by the elegant candor of her narrator, his matter-of-fact tone threaded as it is with a sadness strangely at peace with itself.

The story is told from the perspective of John Ames, an aging Congregationalist minister in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, who, after finding out his heart is failing him, decides to leave an account of his life behind for his young son whom he will not live to raise.  And this book, to me, reads as an account in the truest sense of the word: Ames acts as a witness to his own life as he stands at the end of it, looking back and taking stock of so much longing and loneliness and grief, but also of wonder, beauty, and the ephemeral perfections imbedded in the everyday.

Gilead, in addition to being an account, reads as a prayer, full of reverence and intention and, at times even, a flicker of genuine anger that attempts, through language, to escape the soul.  But this is not just any prayer, or merely an account of one life, because Ames’s language is clearly directed toward a human rather than a divine audience—something that leaves his readers with the question of what constitutes a prayer.  For my own part, I leave this text wondering if those quiet questions a person raises up only to him- or herself could be prayers in their own hidden way, or, if not prayers, a secret sacrament of the self, a baptism of desire, a simultaneous greeting of and farewell to life itself.  And it is, in large part, the unanswerable questions this book raises (with so much compassion and dignity) that draw me so readily back to its pages, to the steady thrum of its meditations and the quiet clarity of the words composing each thought.

Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): I read Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report in two sittings. Told in one-to-three-page chapters, Baillie’s novel is the best kind of quick read: a quick shot to the heart. Miriam, the librarian-narrator, reports her interactions with the regular (and often slightly disturbed and nutty) library patrons alongside her own story of grief over her father’s death and her slow willingness to fall in love with a man she meets on a park bench. She also keeps finding notes tucked in various places throughout the library; the notes are written by someone who believes he is Rigoletto, from Verdi’s opera, and that Miriam is his daughter, whom he must protect. Despite its seemingly straightforward approach and distant narrator, The Incident Report is a nuanced chronicle of grief, love, and the tensions between our private and public selves.

Diane Chonette (Art Director of Tin House): A short while after my son was born last year I was listening to Radiolab on NPR. In the episode titled, “Voices in Your Head”, Jad Abumrad talked to psychologist and novelist, Charles Fernyhough, about the connection between thought and the voice in your head. Fernyhough talked about his book, A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind, and I immediately knew I had to get it. It’s been a year since I purchased it, but I am finally digging in to his wonderfully intimate study of memory and cognitive development. In a way, it may be too soon for me to begin the analysis of what is known and remains unknown about the tiny but complex brains of our babies, but it is reminding me to pay attention to and cherish as many of the extraordinary moments of awakening as I can as my little one defines himself. He won’t remember these days but I will.

Masie Cochran (Associate Editor, Tin House Books): I am reading Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany edited by Jay Jennings. I’m partial to Portis, party because he’s from Arkansas, earning his journalism degree in my hometown of Fayetteville. The title of the collection comes from my favorite Portis novel, Dog of the South: “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”

Portis’ newspaper reporting and writing has been, so far, the biggest treat. He covers the death of Elvis Presley’s mother, a hospital’s antismoking program, and a Klan Rally in Birmingham in 1963. It’s reportage, but it’s also Portis with killer lines like when Elvis ruminates outside  his mother’s hospital room, “Leaning on a windowsill in the hallway yesterday, he reflected moodily on the family’s pre-Cadillac days: ‘I like to do what I can for my folks. We didn’t have nothin’ before, nothin’ but a hard way to go.’”

Michelle Wildgen (Executive Editor, Tin House Magazine): I really wish I had read  John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead in time to give the book to my nonfiction students last fall. It’s not just that he’s extremely funny on subjects like a Christian rock festival or MTV’s Real World complex, though he is. For three days now I have been laughing at the line, “I’d assumed that my days at Creation would be fairly lonely and end with my ritual murder,” but Sullivan reaches well beyond obvious music fest targets and into something more expansive when he meets up with a crew of very devout, maybe crazy, but mostly kind and welcoming guys. An essay on his brother’s recovery from accidental electrocution feels haunting, strange and funny, but I think my favorite writing in here is on pop culture. Sullivan is particualrly wonderful at considering figures like Michael Jackson or Axl Rose, and hitting upon what it was like to see experience their iconic performances and the oddities into which they devolved. He manages to encompass it all: the physical presence of a performer, the emotional states they evoked and out of which they seemed to spring, and he makes the moments that stick in our collective cultural head feel both new and familiar. It makes me want to randomly assign him subjects just to see what he’ll do with them. “Specialty foods shows! Arthur Murray’s Dance Academy! Software development! Go!”

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): Jacques Réda’s The Ruins of Paris guides the reader through the city’s neighborhoods and suburbs–from beautiful to gritty, noble to popular, spirited to silent. A true flâneur (stroller or walker or loafer), Réda moves from Montmartre to Belleville to St. Germain des Prés to everywhere in between. His love of jazz music is evident in his syncopated, lyrical and at times disjointed prose. “A courtyard, no, an impasse that is illuminated by a solitary tree–I stop. But it’s not out of curiosity that I keep walking past the dark wood . . .”

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): Seeing Maggie Nelson read with Wayne Koestenbaum at St. Mark’s a few weeks ago inspired me to dip back into some (relatively) vintage Nelson, her collection Something Bright, Then Holes.  This book holds a particular charge for me in its second section, where Nelson writes about a trauma in the life of someone I happen to know. At St. Mark’s, Nelson was asked whether her willingness to bring her readers so close to fraught personal material has lead them to tell her that they ‘feel like they know her.’ I understand exactly the reading experience behind that question. Yet even more astonishing to me is the closeness and care and perceptivity with which she attends to the emotional life of the world on beyond herself. Nelson is so deeply smart and fearless that it’s easy to look past how deeply kind her writing is, too, and there’s maybe no better reminder of that than this book.

Jakob Vala (Graphic Designer): What if Robert Oppenheimer’s famous declaration, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” was not just a reflection on the creation of the atomic bomb, but a warning of intergalactic proportions? In The Manhattan Projects, a comic series by Jonathan Hickman, the Project serves as a front for more mysterious experiments. The solid cast of characters (Einstein, Feynman, Fermi, Von Braun) is made stronger by Hickman’s knowledge of real history and by his addition of fictional complexities (Hint: Oppenheimer is not what he seems).

Artist Nick Pitarra has a style that complements this disturbing alternate history in a way that is both gritty and refined. His use of color, especially his technique of changing palettes to tell parallel stories, is effective and striking. And, I will admit that my initial interest in the series was based entirely on Pitarra’s gorgeous minimalist covers.

I just finished the first trade edition (issues 1-5) and can’t wait to see where this story of the world’s most elite and insane scientists takes me.

Desiree Andrews (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): This week I read A Room with a View for the first time. Victorian literature sure knows where a girl’s heart lies, which is to say that men who are emotionally unavailable, vaguely troubled, and certainly unattainable, are attractive, even when they don’t get much time in scene. This book cashes in on the romantic imprint that forbidden love/radical freethinking is sexy and conventional thinking is not; it does it in a pretty brilliant way and I ate it up like candy.

Diane Chonette (Art Director): In the brief window of time between putting Oliver to bed and tucking myself in, there is room for a bit of mindless entertainment. If we are between seasons on the current favorites, our go-to Netflix choices oscillate between anime, old sci-fi, and old British travel shows. In the last month, we’ve been heavy on Doctor Who, which covers nearly all those categories. We are in the David Tennant years now and have most definitely fallen for his quirky charm and boyish good looks. Most recently we saw one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes yet, featuring a little of The Doctor and a lot of Carey Mulligan (as Sally Sparrow). The episode, titled Blink, was smart, scary and full of the time travel puzzles that keep you awake at night. Decidedly different from the corny plots and ridiculous effects that make Doctor Who so fun to watch, this one had me truly engaged. Come to find out it was an anomaly of the 2007 series, written by Steven Moffat, who later becomes the main writer for the 2009 series. A diamond in the rough, as it were. Now, back to the Tardis!

Tony Perez (Editor, Tin House Books): I’m probably a few years late in recommending Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, but I think it’s worth mentioning how wonderful the audio version is. Urrea reads the book himself, and if you’ve ever seen the man read–or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say orate, recite, preach–you know he can perform. I’ve been on a audio-nonfiction kick, but I typically avoid books where I want to savor the sentences. Here, however, I feel like Urrea’s voice and intonations only add to the effect.

Rob Spillman (Editor of Tin House): Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives. Memory is the material for Hemon’s memoir-like first book of nonfiction, and he packs a lot–linguistically, stylistically, and emotionally–into the short pieces.

Michelle Wildgen (Executive Editor, Tin House Magazine): I just came off a glorious spate of neglecting other duties in favor of tearing through a pile of books, and I must say it did me good. At the top of my list was Ty Burr’s Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame, which examines the bizarre cult of Hollywood celebrity, from silent films’ Florence Lawrence to Angelina Jolie, and Burr is especially wonderful at illuminating the particulars of each star’s appeal, breaking down what feels like mere gut feeling into a complex convergence of physical and dramatic characteristics, our own desires and perceptions, and cultural contexts.

In Michael Hainey’s After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Story, the GQ deputy editor delves into the mysteries surrounding his father’s death back in 1970. This isn’t a murder mystery, so it’s less the uncertainty in the cause of death that carries such weight than the silences and blank spots surrounding the man himself, where he was that night and why, and the long shadow cast by his absence.

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Boris Vian tunes, the French trumpeter—and also novelist, poet and singer—who played in Paris nightclubs like Le Tabou and Le Caveau de la Huchette (still in existence) in the 1940s and 1950s. Running with the Left Bank jazz-loving crowd, Vian was friends with Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Raymond Queneau and is probably best known for his whimsically dark novel, Foam of the Daze: L’Ecume Des Jours. His songs range from purely delightful jazz numbers like “Jazz Me Blues” to the anti-war song “Le Deserteur” to pure blues with “Rose Room.”  Spring seems a particularly wonderful season to listen to Vian, windows open, light leaning longer into the night.

Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): One of the books I picked up at AWP was Justin Torres’s debut, We the Animals, which I devoured on the plane ride home. Composed of sections that don’t so much tell stories as provide glimpses into the home life of a pack of mixed-race brothers, this short novel nonetheless comes together as an overall narrative and packs a heartbreaking wallop. Torres’s prose is stunning, and his characters and the events of their adolescent lives will haunt you for quite a while. I very much look forward to his next work.

Masie Cochran (Associate Editor, Tin House Books): At the urging of Nanci McCloskey, Tin House Director of Publicity, I am reading A.L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss. I’m in the homestretch, but it’s the kind of book I hate to finish. I read a few pages before going to sleep, and instead of going on, I reread and let the prose linger. It might not be the best book to read before bed—Kennedy gets me thinking instead of sleeping. The book is slight, just over 200 pages, but incredibly full. Helen Brindle—an abused housewife who recently lost her faith—makes for a grim subject, but Kennedy has a talent for handling the prickliest of scenarios with a brilliantly light touch.

Lance Cleland (Workshop Director): What to read on the plane…. is there a worse dilemma for a book lover (other than which first editions to sell to make rent)? Having long been bullied by our managing editor for not experiencing the pleasure that is Don DeLillo, I texted him prior to a recent departure and asked him to bring along the Don novel best suited for a cross country flight. End Zone is what landed in my lap.

I was shocked by how funny the book is. I never took the author to be a jokester, but the novel is filled with numerous laugh out loud moments, ranging from one line zingers to wonderfully constructed scenes that teeter between parody and true sentiment. By the time I got to the (famous?) scene of the players engaging in a wild game of pickup football in the snow, I was both laughing at the setup and fully invested in who would emerge victorious. Despite the ominous metaphor hanging in the background (football as nuclear warfare), this is a joyful novel, a perfect read for the plane, the beach, or in the stands.

Lauren Lederman (Editorial Intern, Tin House Books): I don’t reread books often, but recently I’ve been wanting more poetry in my life. I decided I’d revisit a collection I discovered a few years ago and fell in love with: One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds. Diving into this book again has reminded me how much I admire Olds’ ability to create incredibly vivid and intimate portraits of, among many things, a mother-daughter relationship. The collection tackles so many aspects of life and family and it amazes me how she never shies away from the tenderness and toughness and the dark humor of it all.  It also makes me wonder why I haven’t reread this book sooner and reminds me that I need to get her newest book as soon as possible.

Jakob Vala (Graphic Designer): Last week I was very busy lying on the beach and inventing simple syrups for complicated cocktails. Despite these hardships, I was able to fit a bit of reading into my schedule.

A long flight allowed me to immerse myself in the brutal saga of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I read it slowly and let every achingly perfect line berate me for never practicing my own craft.

Also in my suitcase was Jodi Angel’s The History of Vegas. As a huge fan of You Only Get Letters from Jail, I was excited to dig into her first collection. Angel’s newer work is superior, but these earlier stories are equally compelling and tragic.

My most vacation-appropriate (though still quite dark) read was probably Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Russell can definitely write and these stories showcase her ability to seamlessly mix the fantastical with the everyday. My favorite piece, “Proving Up,” is atmospheric and unsettling, with a mysterious figure who would feel at home riding alongside McCarthy’s Judge.