Monday, April 20, 2020

Stay-at-home shelfie #24


This shelf is sponsored by the letters E through K.

Kimi Eisele, author of the critically acclaimed The Lightest Object in the Universe, and I went to Penn State at the same time and worked together on the staff of The Daily Collegian. I've lost track of how many other former classmates and colleagues of mine have published books. It would be a fool's errand to try to list them all, but I'll do it anyway: Larry Alexander, Buffy Andrews, Ted Anthony, Mike Argento, Alisa Bowman, Joan Concilio, Dan Connolly, Bridget Doherty, Megan Erickson, Andrew Ervin, Leigh Gallagher, Mike Gross, Dennis Hetzel, Tom Joyce, Bill Landauer, Lauri Lebo, Caroline Luzzatto, James McClure, Rissa Miller, Isabel Molina-Guzman, Dana O'Neil, Gregory Scopino, Leslie Gray Streeter, Beth Vrabel, Michael Weinreb and Laura Wexler. This is absolutely not a complete list! I will come back and add those I missed.

This is a fairly eclectic shelf. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2017, is a short novel that will stick with you. It's probably worth a re-read, too, for a different kind of relevance in these quarantine times. Another incredible short read is Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera's novel, as translated by Lisa Dillman. The translator's coinage of "anglogaggle" is one of the best new words I've come across, and I'm not alone in that thought.

I discovered MacKinlay Kantor's Spirit Lake during a long browsing session at The York Emporium. What sold me on it were the dust jacket blurb and the inscription on the first page, which I wrote about in February, which seems like a million years and a different planet ago.

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