Top ten books for the broken-hearted

Susie Steiner is the author of Missing, Presumed. One of her ten top books for the broken-hearted, as shared at the Guardian:

Solitude by Anthony Storr

Did Beethoven compose great works before snuggling up in happy coupledom? He did not. While the world harps on about relationships being the key to happiness, psychiatrist Storr argues in this very kindly work that we pay far too little attention to some of the other great satisfactions of life – work and creativity. This book is a rallying cry for the irascible, lonely curmudgeons. We have stuff going for us too, says Storr, with much reference to psychoanalytic theory, and the twin human instincts – outward towards attachment yes, but also inward towards self-sufficiency and the kind of contemplation that can only happen when we are alone.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of 2016's cleverest novels with great premises

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket/Gallery. He has published over thirty short stories as well. One title on Somers's list of ten of 2016's cleverest novels with great premises, as shared at B & N Reads:

Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, by Sunil Yapa

Set during the 1990 Seattle WTO protests, Yapa offers seven characters from both sides of the conflict, telling seven stories and weaving them together in a tense, deeply considered story that breaks hearts and offers insights into the modern world. This is one of those books whose elevator pitch—seven people’s lives intertwine during the protests—is both thrillingly simple and wonderfully deceptive, as the story is much more than the sum of its parts.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five YA reads for fans of the Wild West

Eric Smith is the author of The Geek’s Guide to Dating and Inked. One of five YA reads for fans of the Wild West that he tagged at the B&N Teen blog:

Under a Painted Sky, by Stacey Lee

A powerful friendship on the open trail is at the heart of Stacey Lee’s beautiful debut novel, with a diverse cast of characters on a heart-wrenching adventure. There’s Samantha, who abandons her dream and flees for her life with a runaway slave, Annamae. Disguised as boys, the two push forward, wrestling with their past as they search for a future. From the romance to the humor to the heart, there’s something for everyone in this debut, and I seriously can’t wait to read more historic YA from Lee. Outrun the Moon is due out in May, and I’d like it right now, please.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Under a Painted Sky is among Nicole Hill's five top historical YA novels about adventurous and independent-minded women, John Hansen's ten must-read YA novels you've probably never heard of, Sarah Skilton's top six YA books featuring cross-cultural friendships, and Dahlia Adler's seven top YA novels about best friendship.

My Book, The Movie: Under a Painted Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sebastian Faulks' six favorite books

Sebastian Faulks's novels include Birdsong, Human Traces, Charlotte Gray, and In Where My Heart Used To Beat. One of his six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Speaking of quirky prose...Conrad's colonial Far East is depicted in inch-thick layers of dark and luscious colors. Jim, the fallen, enigmatic hero, remains fascinating yet unknowable as moral study overlaps with high-seas adventure.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books with unforgettable sisters

Lee Kelly is the author of A Criminal Magic and City of Savages. One of her five favorite books with unforgettable sisters, as shared at Tor.com:

Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Saba lives with her brother Lugh, her little sister Emmi, and her Pa in a post-apocalyptic, sandstorm-plagued wasteland left by the previous “Wrecker” civilization. When Saba’s brother is kidnapped, Saba vows to cross her dangerous world to save him—but she’s forced to take her sister Emmi with her. The setting and plot of this post-apocalyptic tale are Mad Max-level epic: cage fighting, girl-gang revolutionaries and a corrupt, mind-controlling society. But what made this blockbuster story accessible for me was the complicated relationship between Saba and Emmi. At the beginning of the novel, Saba holds Emmi responsible for her mother’s death. But over the course of their quest, Emmi earns Saba’s respect, and their relationship evolves, matures and deepens.

Read about the other books on the list.

Blood Red Road is among Sarah Holding's top ten "cli-fi novels that make you think deeply about the human consequences of climate change."

--Marshal Zeringue

Clara Bensen: four books that changed me

Clara Bensen is the author of No Baggage: A Tale of Love and Wandering.

One of four books that changed her, as shared at the Sydney Morning Herald:

Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Rebecca Solnit​

Who knew that putting one foot in front of the other could be unpacked in so many different ways? In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit dissects the history of walking, guiding the reader through the politics, philosophy, and science of a movement many of us take for granted. I love when a book reveals a hidden world that's been in front of me the whole time. Wanderlust brings new meaning to even the simplest pedestrian acts.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gina McKee's six best books

Gina McKee is an English actor and producer, known for In the Loop (2009), Notting Hill (1999) and Atonement (2007). One of her six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:

TALES OF THE CITY by Armistead Maupin

I totally devoured this entertaining series.

If my train was held up, I’d think: “Great, another few pages.”

A young woman arrives in San Francisco and you meet the people she gets to know, particularly among the gay community.

I came to London in 1982 and lived in a shared house so I recognised the pattern.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable books about weird spies

Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award. He is the author of the Craft Sequence of books about undead gods and skeletal law wizards—Full Fathom Five, Three Parts Dead,  Two Serpents Rise, and Last First Snow—and one of the authors of the new series The Witch Who Came in From the Cold at Serial Box. One of five books about weird spies that Gladstone tagged at Tor.com:

The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett

The past’s not just another country, it’s a whole damn other world. Dorothy Dunnett’s hero, Francis Crawford of Lymond, spends much of his titular series as a sort of freelance intelligence agent, frequently in Scotland’s service, but often in the service of Scotland’s greater interests regardless of whatever Scotland’s current government might have to say about the subject. Lymond swings between professions—fugitive, mercenary captain, nation-builder—but he’s always a bit of a spy. It’s a stretch including him on this list, but historical fiction taken this seriously has as much world building as any work of fantasy or science fiction—and once you add in the peculiarities of Lymond’s world (the separate order of geniuses to which he and a few select other characters belong, the Dame de Doubtance, etc.), we’re practically in another universe altogether.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about cancer

Austin Duffy grew up in Ireland and studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin. He is a practicing medical oncologist at the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC. This Living and Immortal Thing is his first novel. One of the author's ten top books about cancer, as shared at the Guardian:

Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth

One of the books where the illness is confined to a devastating side role. Although you could say the themes of Roth’s book – bodily cravings, pushed to their limit – are part of the same spectrum, the other end of it maybe. I had just moved to New York to begin a hospital fellowship when I read the part where Drenka, Mickey Sabbath’s lover, lies in the final stages of ovarian cancer. I remember well the terrible stillness in which I sat for minutes, the book closed in front of me, stunned by Roth’s highly specific language, the best depiction of a cancer patient I have ever read, before getting up and crossing First Avenue to go to clinic.

Read about the other books on the list.

Sabbath's Theater is among Sam Lipsyte's five favorite humorous yet weighty novels, Ben Schrank's top six books on love, betrayal, and creative people who behave badly, Edward Docx's top ten deranged characters, and Howard Jacobson's five best novels on failure.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten best books set in the American West

Callan Wink's new story collection is Dog Run Moon. A fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River, he is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

One of Wink'ss ten best books set in the American West, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Disparaging Cormac McCarthy seems somewhat fashionable these days amongst urbane MFA and lit-crit intelligentsia but this novel still knocks me over every time I read it. In fact, I have read it at least once a year for the past ten or so and it is still as unrelentingly grim and powerful as the first time I picked it up. Comparisons to Moby-Dick are common and, I think, justified.

Read about the other books on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Simon Sebag Montefiore's six favorite books, Richard Kadrey's five books about awful, awful people, Jason Sizemore's top five books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, Robert Allison's top ten novels of desert war, Alexandra Silverman's top fourteen wrathful stories, James Franco's six favorite books, Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six critical reads for Black History Month

Sona Charaipotra is a New York City-based writer and editor with more than a decade’s worth of experience in print and online media. For B & N Reads she tagged "six timeless and timely must-reads" for Black History Month, including:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

In her astoundingly sharp and moving debut memoir, nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, literary hero Angelou reveals the everyday beauty and brutality of growing up black in the old school South of the 1930s and ’40s—the aggressions and transgressions that shattered her young spirit, and the shelters of faith and community and literature that helped put her back together, bit by bit. Angelou’s rhythmic, nuanced storytelling feels like a throwback, but it’s still relevant today. A seminal work of American literature.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books about people trapped in oppressive systems

Anjan Sundaram is the author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo. An award-winning journalist, he has reported from Africa and the Middle East for the New York Times and the Associated Press. His writing on Africa has also appeared in Foreign Policy, Fortune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, and the Huffington Post. His war correspondence from the Central African Republic won a Frontline Club Award in 2015, and his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo's rainforests won a Reuters prize in 2006. His work has also been shortlisted for the Prix Bayeux and the Kurt Schork award. Stringer was a Royal African Society Book of the Year in 2014.

One of Sundaram's six favorite books about people trapped in oppressive systems, as shared at The Week magazine:

Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey

We never meet the deposed dictator around whom Dovey's debut novel revolves. Instead, we come to know him through the stories of his chef, his portraitist, and his barber. Through them, we learn the mysterious and insidious ways in which power, and the tendency to abuse it, work within us.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Stringer.

--Marshal Zeringue