Anchor The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

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There are few images in literary history more ubiquitous, more recognizable—and dreadfully, more relevant today than ever—than the red-hooded handmaids of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. Set in New England after a totalitarian, patriarchal, theological state has overthrown the United States government, this dystopian story follows Offred, a woman who belongs to the class of handmaids: the only remaining fertile women in society, assigned to the most powerful men in order to bear their children. As the militant, fanatical regime of The Handmaid’s Tale increasingly resembles our present-day America, where reproductive rights are actively being stripped away by the highest court in the land, Atwood’s novel is a thunderous, stark plea for the world to wake up—and also a reminder that the resistance will always persevere. —Lauren Kranc

Vintage The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin

Now 33% Off

This book contains two of the most foundational essays about race in America side by side: “My Dungeon Shook” and “Down at the Cross.” Their influence is so great that you may feel a sort of déja vu while reading them. Baldwin addresses his nephew in the first, writing, “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.” These words now feel so unimpeachable that it’s hard to imagine a world before he wrote them, and yet they feel as reverberant as ever. Follow The Fire Next Time with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 open letter to his son, Between the World and Me, but be sure to read Baldwin first. —Kelly Stout

Picador A Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin

Now 60% Off

“Forgotten genius” or “America’s best-kept secret” are the words sometimes used by writers to describe another writer who never received the recognition they deserved. Lucia Berlin is such a writer. The forty-three stories in this collection, written in a span of twenty-seven years, were published as a collection in 2015, eleven years after her death. Berlin’s settings of laundromats and doctor’s offices may be nondescript, but the action that takes place within them is honestly sly. In one story, a dentist without a door to separate his work area from his waiting room waves to patients with his drill while he works. In another, a character gives her apartment keys to the narrator and tells her that if she doesn’t see her on their appointed laundry day, it means she’s dead, and could she please find her body? The narrator says it’s a terrible thing to ask someone, even more so because now she has to continue doing her laundry on the same day. Like any good short story, Berlin’s are lively, perceptive, and written with unflinching clarity. —Kevin McDonnell

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Turner Ball Four, by Jim Bouton

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Swollen contracts and super agents weren’t around in 1969 when Jim Bouton wrote Ball Four, which begins with the author, a journeyman relief pitcher for the 1969 Seattle Pilots, scheming to sweeten the pot of his $22,000 contract. In this tell-all, one of the sports world’s first, Bouton gives us a funny and well-written account of what happens off the diamond after the tarp is rolled over the infield. Given what we know today about the men who play our national pastime, Bouton’s tales of baseball Annies (groupies), greenies (amphetamines), and players breaking team curfews may appear as quaint and outdated as the number of zeroes in his contract. But Bouton’s recollections are worth every dollar. —Kevin McDonnell

ESPN It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, by John Ed Bradley

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John Ed Bradley was a starting offensive lineman for the LSU Tigers in the late ’70s. For the son of a Louisiana football coach, life couldn't get much better. Bradley had NFL talent, but he wanted to be a writer. At The Washington Post in the ‘80s, he made a name for himself as a gifted reporter and an even better stylist; he also contributed smart, in-depth magazine pieces to Esquire and Sports Illustrated. Then, starting with Tupelo Nights, he delivered seven aching, carefully-crafted novels. In It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, Bradley revisits his days playing for the LSU Tigers. It’s a disarmingly emotional tale without self-indulgence. How do you move on with life after being a star at 19? Bradley is unsparing and frank when it comes to himself, and unfailingly courteous and generous when describing others. Melancholy without being maudlin, thoughtful and restrained, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium is a thoroughly beautiful work. —Alex Belth

MCD The Mamba Mentality, by Kobe Bryant

Now 56% Off

​​We’ve heard the stories about Bryant’s intense work habits and witnessed the results on the basketball court. But to get a step-by-step reading of how he approaches the game of basketball makes for an inspiring read. While The Mamba Mentality details Bryant’s approach to being the best basketball player, his intention to be the best crosses over into his life off the court, too. Pick this one up to be wowed by Bryant’s profound curiosity about life and his chosen vocation. —Darryl Robertson

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Beacon Press Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler

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Kindred is a master class in the ability of speculative fiction to speak to the contemporary moment. This is the story of Dana, a Black woman in Los Angeles circa 1976, who finds herself violently transported back in time to the antebellum plantation where her ancestors were enslaved. Each time she pinballs through past and present, Dana’s stays at the plantation become longer and more dangerous, forcing her to confront the gruesome legacies of slavery, misogynoir, and white supremacy. As Harlan Ellison once said, “Kindred is that rare magical artifact… the novel one returns to, again and again.” Almost like time travel, we keep coming back to it. —Adrienne Westenfeld

Vintage The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro

Now 23% Off

If you’ve ever cursed how long it takes to get back into NYC after a weekend out of town, boy do we have the book for you. It’s a history of New York City told through the life of the power-hungry mid-century parks director(!) Robert Moses. This guy had beef with everyone and bulldozed his way literally and figuratively through the city in the 20th century. I know, it’s long, but just be glad we didn’t assign you Caro’s thousand-part biography on the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson. —Kelly Stout

Simon & Schuster The Letters of John Cheever

Now 60% Off

The godfather of the American short story reveals himself to be as gracious and warm in the epistolary form as he was turbulent and unsparing in his fiction. His humor, too, is in full flower. In one letter to friends, Cheever writes in the voice of his dog, who while riding to New Hampshire in the back seat of the family Dodge, complains that the “old man” hasn’t let him out to pee since Massachusetts. In another, Cheever writes that he goes to the Four Seasons for family quarrels because it's cheaper than La Côte Basque. Lovingly edited by his son Benjamin, these letters will not pull back the curtain on Cheever’s writing process, nor will they offer insight into his alcoholism or bisexuality. But they will reveal a writer who cared deeply for his family, was grateful to his benefactors, and who cherished the lost art of letter writing. —Kevin McDonnell

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Artist Unknown Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

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A friend who graduated from notoriously crunchy UC Santa Cruz once half-jokingly told me that copies of Be Here Now were included in the school’s welcome packet. While new age guru Ram Dass’s easy-to-digest spiritual epic served as a gateway for generations of people seeking to learn about Eastern philosophy, yoga, and the benefits of LSD, the tome has also had an outsized influence on pop culture and technology. Steve Jobs cited Be Here Now as having a profound impact on him after reading it as a freshman at Reid College. Thumbing through the pages, it’s easy to see just what that impact is. Consider the freewheeling second chapter, which is essentially a collection of illustrations coupled with a free verse poem, and how it feels spiritually similar to the intuitive operating system present on iPhones and Mac computers we use today. —Daniel Dumas

Digireads.com The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

Though biographies of Emily Dickinson make her life seem small, confined for three decades to one solitary bedroom, her interior life was boundless. Recent scholarship suggests that Dickinson wasn’t the virginal spinster presented by literary canon—rather, she lived a quietly transgressive life, shunning the local sewing society, eschewing marriage, and opting out of organized religion. Yet it was in her poetry where Dickinson was at her most transgressive, bursting with formal daring and an electric, accessible extremity of feeling. Dickinson snaps American English like rubber, using a powerful economy of plainspoken language to probe the wonders of nature and the mysteries of the self. Some of her poems are in such frequent circulation as to numb us to their power, but if you see them with fresh eyes—really see them—their gifts are profound. That’s Dickinson’s superpower: somehow, a poem like “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” remains a tonic for our American malaise, still speaking to us across the centuries. —Adrienne Westenfeld

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion

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Alternate title for this essay collection: The Joan Didion Starter Pack. This is the legendary writer’s first collection, but it’s the one with all the hits: sex, murder, John Wayne, and getting the hell out of New York. —Kelly Stout

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Penguin Classics The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

Now 49% Off

When a work of literature can cover themes of vengeance, justice, forgiveness, and mercy while also detailing historical events, there’s a good chance that millions of readers will be captivated by the story. The Count of Monte Cristo is that book. But beyond the intricate revenge plot, Dumas also focuses on the corrupt financial and political world of France. With simmering political corruption included in this universal story, The Count of Monte Cristo tells us why it’s important to be fully aware of the Clarence Thomases—I mean, the people we put into office. —Darryl Robertson

Picador Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

Now 22% Off

Poverty isn’t really anything like how politicians describe it—especially not the architects of welfare reform in the 1990s whose “just get a job” rhetoric made Ehrenreich wonder if just getting a job could actually work. (Spoiler: it doesn’t work out great.) The trouble with books about poverty is that they’re often either too heartbreaking or too dense to get through, but this is neither, and is the model for the many “I tried it to see how hard it is” books that came after it. It’s a book about policy disguised as a series of gambits to make life livable. —Kelly Stout

Anchor A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

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Egan’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel consists of 13 interlocking stories that span all the way from the raucous 1980s San Francisco punk scene to turn of the millennium New York, then into a near future where both global warming and technology addiction are ubiquitous. Prescient! While Egan has stated that Goon Squad’s unusual structure was heavily inspired by Pulp Fiction’s nonlinear script, she pioneers some truly groundbreaking storytelling techniques of her own, including an entire chapter written in PowerPoint. In a less skilled writer’s hands such a thing might come off as gimmicky, but Egan deftly uses this unorthodox framework to explore themes of happiness, love, longing, and the unrelenting nature of time. —Daniel Dumas

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Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel

Now 55% Off

Beginning unforgettably with a young girl’s high-octane escape from a Catholic reform school, Engel’s short but sweeping novel gives voice to three generations of a Colombian family torn apart by man-made borders. When Elena and Mauro move their children to the United States, the cruelty of deportation sunders their family, but never their bonds. Gorgeously woven through with Andean myths and the bitter realities of living undocumented, Infinite Country tells a breathtaking story of the unimaginable prices paid for a better life. So too does it reckon with the complex interior world of immigration, from profound questions of identity to the daily pain of longing for a lost homeland. —Adrienne Westenfeld

Europa Editions My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante

Now 16% Off

The first of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels has everything: betrayal, violence, the mob, muscle cars, cannolis, and sex galore, all set in a poor, violent neighborhood in 1950s Naples, Italy. It opens when the narrator’s lifelong friend goes mysteriously missing, and nothing gets less harrowing from there. Bonus plot twist: Ferrante is a famous recluse known to talk to fans and the press only through her legendary English language translator, Ann Goldstein. —Kelly Stout

Vintage This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Now 42% Off

We have doomed Fitzgerald’s first novel to live in the shadows of its better received, younger by five years sibling, The Great Gatsby. The latter, a seething portrayal of Jazz Age swells, is an almost perfect work of American fiction. In his debut, meandering and juvenile as it may be, Fitzgerald exposes his fascination with the themes of lineage and wealth—themes that would prevail in Gatsby and consume its author, both artistically and personally, throughout his life. Fitzgerald’s protagonist and self-described “cynical idealist” Amory Blaine, an upper-crust young man from the Midwest, comes East to attend Princeton —as did his creator. Amory seeks romantic fulfillment while navigating the social excess of the Jazz Age. This Side of Paradise is a less powerful novel and doesn’t confront the American condition as well as Gatsby, but it's worth the read, if only to see the green shoots of a remarkable talent. —Kevin McDonnell

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Thomas & Mercer You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming

I am slightly ashamed to admit, despite being a lifelong James Bond fan, that I have only read one of Ian Fleming’s novels cover to cover. You Only Live Twice was the last story published during the writer’s lifetime. It's full of the spare, blunt prose and unaffected dialogue that make all the Bond books great, brainless beach reads. In You Only Live Twice, Bond has been screwing up, largely due to grief over his dead wife and his prodigious drinking habits. He's taken off 00 duty and sent to Japan on a pseudo-diplomatic mission. While there, he's asked to off the fantastically named Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, who in fact (surprise, surprise) turns out to be his arch nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Adventure ensues. You Only Live Twice has a significantly different plot from its movie adaptation, but reassuringly, it includes the most preposterous bit of the movie: an attempt to disguise Bond as a deaf Japanese miner. —Nick Sullivan

NYRB Classics Fat City, by Leonard Gardner

Now 27% Off

Gardner’s terse masterpiece about the unhappy lives of a pair of boxers in Stockton, California is often considered the best boxing novel ever written, but it’s more than an unsentimental sports book. This grim, moving portrait of desperate lives in rural California is written in a lean, economical prose that would have made Strunk and White proud. It’s so contained that it’s a perfect work. No wonder Gardner never wrote another book. —Alex Belth

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