The Picador Book Room

Here we are, in our first post-summer Friday. Here’s what the Picador team is diving into this weekend. Happy reading!

Alaina is continuing to cull the backlist shelves of the book room, and this time she came up with Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind.

The book tells the story of two very different women who are college roommates at Barnard in the late 1960s. When one of them discovers, years after their friendship has ended, that the other has been convicted of a violent crime, she looks back at their shared history and comes to a certain understanding of the woman’s place in her life, in spite of their separation. I’m waiting to get further into this one to make judgment, but so far Nunez has proven masterful at portraying female friendship.

A sucker for a good pop culture essay, Gabrielle is reading Dubravka Ugresic’s collection Karaoke Culture.

At first I was concerned that the book would be all about karaoke but as it turns out, Ugresic uses it as a metaphor to explore politics and the arts. So far, it’s a lot of fun.

PJ is reading Gig, a collection of short stories about the ins and outs of people’s jobs.

It is simply a collection of people with disparate jobs talking about what said jobs are like, giving various anecdotes. Surprisingly, ones like “systems administrator” have been more fascinating than “sex worker” or “drug dealer.” Also, like much of the world I’m sure, I’m reading the new DFW biography.

Elizabeth snagged a copy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s upcoming title, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, a story of a “bookstore that’s more than a bookstore.” (That jacket is pretty awesome, as well.)

Justin is reading The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.

On living in his neighborhood in New Jersey: “Perfect Babbitts, really, all of us, even though to some extent we understood that.”

Kolt is working on Hanna Pylväinen’s debut, We Sinners. Each chapter is told by one of the nine Rovaniemi children, as they come of age in the extremely strict Laestadian church.

“Oy vey! Life’s too short for bad matzoh ball soup!” Read this book.