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The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland |
 The first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore. Meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And Roger’s co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6. These two retail workers then strike up an extraordinary epistolary relationship. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief reveals the comedy, loneliness, and strange comforts of contemporary life. |
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The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa |
 Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as “Lily” in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting “Comrade Arlette,” an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit n icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the ily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. |
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Exit Ghost by Philip Roth |
 Alone in his New England mountain, Nathan Zukerman had been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, and no news. Now, back in New York City, walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire and animosity, Zukerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities. Haunted by Roth's earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction |
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz |
 The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake. This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I've read in a long time. My head is still buzzing with the memory of dozens of killer passages that I dog-eared throughout the book. The rope-a-dope narrative is funny, hip, tragic, soulful, and bursting with desire. Make some room for Oscar Wao on your bookshelf--you won't be disappointed. |
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