The Argonauts is “a genre-bending memoir, a work of ‘auto-theory’ offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language.” I like…

This classic by Toni Morrison is “stunningly beautiful” — “a novel that will endure” — “exuberantly constructed” — “full of lyrical variety and allusiveness”. It seems to have a pretty…

I found this one in a poetry bookshop (Berl’s, in Brooklyn). Despite mysterious contents, it somehow caught my eye. The introduction doesn’t immediately clear things up, indicating that the book…

A book about a strange French “cultural export”, ‘pataphysics — “the science of imaginary solutions and the laws governing exceptions.” An interesting preamble confronts the challenges and weirdness of writing…

This book is “A Comprehensive ‘How-To’ Book for Learning Any Language” — one of several included here I wish I’d read in school, when my brain was more malleable! It’s…

I loved Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, and this looks similarly interesting, focusing more particularly on the economic forces that shape cities, and on the large scale…

This text, by famed nurse Florence Nightingale, represents her “conclusions drawn…after more than fourteen years of observation and thought on the subject of bedside care of the sick.” It’s not…

I’m struck by this book’s unique form: Sacco uses “short-form comics journalism to report from conflict zones around the world.” It’s generically categorized as a “graphic novel”, but is actually…

A twisty turny topsy turvy tome about math, topology, higher dimensional physics, and other heady material, made fun via a blend of “[t]ext, pictures, and puzzles” and more. Rucker takes…

House of Leaves apparently started out as a “badly bundled heap of paper” passed around with a cult following. Whether true origin story, or part of the book’s narrative meta-myth,…