Staff Recommendations
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UFOs, ghosts, witches, vampires - our stacks are packed with books on the scary and unexplained. Circulation Assistant Stephanie Merchant offers a tour of the more esoteric subjects in our collection.
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Wanderlust is a short-term exhibition where Library members and staff share their love of travel and travel books. Find your next book to read or your next travel destination.
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More grist for your reading list. Another highly subjective selection of titles recently added to the collection during late spring - summer 2019. These are the overlooked and perhaps under-promoted, old and new, imported and domestic, from small presses and large, covering the mainstream and the obscure—but all books that caught our eye.
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Along with the arrival of warm weather and longer days comes the hope that a slower summer pace will allow more time for getting lost in good books. Here are a few that Library staff have enjoyed or plan to enjoy this season.
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June is LGBTQ Pride Month, and 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the pivotal Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village. To celebrate, staff members recommend favorite books in our collection—new and old—on gay culture, life, and history in New York City. A list of further reading follows.
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Another highly subjective selection of titles recently added to our collection (mostly late winter - spring 2019).
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In the fall of 2016, we were thrilled to have Library member and esteemed film critic Molly Haskell recommend some of her favorite books on film for our website. In this installment of book recommendations, we asked Library staff (and one Library member) to do the same.
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Some recent arrivals (late fall 2018 - February 2019) that caught our eye.
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Staff members run down personal highlights from a year of reading.
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Another selection of noteworthy titles recently added to our collection.
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Books recommended by Library members during our first Stacks Week.
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Happy Halloween! With the witching season upon us, why not take a trip to the stacks and investigate our collection of vintage horror? In conjunction with our #HorrorTuesday Instagram postings, Circulation Assistant Stephanie Merchant highlights a handful of goodies buried in our stacks sure to provide terrifying spooks this Halloween.
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Following the closing of The New York World of Willa Cather, we offer a short-term exhibition called On the Town: Your Favorite New York City Reads, which will remain on view through December 31st in the Peluso Exhibition Gallery. Books on New York are one of the the strengths of our collection, and for this exhibition we asked members and staff to share their favorite books about or set in our city. The selection is as varied and exciting as New York itself.
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Maggie Jackson on The Road to Distraction: A Reading List on the Roots of Our Climate of Inattention
The author of Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, Maggie Jackson will lecture at the Library on September 12th in the Members' Room. The Library will also host an informal book discussion about Distracted on September 26th in the Whitridge Roo
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The following list includes a selection of titles received in spring/early summer that didn’t receive high-profile reviews or benefit from big promotion budgets, but that caught our eye. Keep your eyes on this space for future lists.
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After a long winter, summer has finally arrived. As the days grow longer, we hope that the (slightly) slower pace of life allows for getting lost in a good book. Here are a few that Library staff have enjoyed or plan to enjoy this season.
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The Library's Young Adult collection is having a growth spurt, with so many great reads whether you're a teen or not.
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The Library hosts The Art and Activism of the Anthropocene in cooperation with Guernica magazine this April and May. The three-part series brings together writers, journalists, and artists to discuss how they address climate change, and why their work is particularly important in the Anthropocene Era. Inspired by this theme, the Library recommends a variety of books on the environment and the natural world.
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Professor Andrew Jewell (editor of the Willa Cather Archive and co-editor of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather) recommends books on Willa Cather's life and work. All books can be found in the Library stacks.
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Our annual look back at reading highlights from the previous year. Old, new, fiction, nonfiction--a varied selection of reading recommendations from the Library's staff.
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Library staff offer gift suggestions for the book lovers on your holiday list.
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Here are nine recommended titles about those particular creatures with nine lives.
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“The covers of this book are too far apart.” —Ambrose Bierce
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We recently asked Library members and staff what they consider to be their absolute all-time favorite book, the one they look forward to revisiting again and again. The books they chose are featured in What Stacks Up: Favorite Books, our current exhibition in the Peluso Family Exhibition Gallery. You may be surprised—and inspired—by what you see.The books on display, with reader comments, are listed below.
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Earlier this year, I posted a piece called Forgotten but Not Gone on the Library's blog. The article briefly summarized the lives and careers of nine exceptionally prolific, once-popular, now largely forgotten authors from decades past who continue to occupy substantial real estate on our fiction shelves. In response, Library member Kim Davis recently sent us the following article highlighting a few of his prolific forgotten favorites.
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Several well-known writers have also been talented, prolific photographers. This book recommendations piece features books of photography by Philip Larkin, Eudora Welty, Jack London, Teju Cole and other novelists and poets in our circulating collection, as well as a slide show including samples of their work.
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As the weather gets warm and the days grow long, the ideal companion is a good book. The following are our annual summer reading recommendations, as well as titles we look forward to reading this summer. For more summer reading, see posts from previous years: 2016, 2015, 2014. To see highlights of the summer publishing season, have a look at this recent blog post.
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A list of recommended reads featuring the "great mice" of literature.
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"Read any good books lately?" We recently asked Library staff, and here is how they responded.
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If you are curious about how the well-established writers of past centuries were viewed during their own era, these scholarly series in the Library’s collection can bring you back to a time before canonization, reputation, critical theory, and passing years had an influence.
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Head of Events Sara Holliday recommends books on the Pacific theater and prisoners of war during World War II.
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Visiting YA Panel recommends their favorite recent books.
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Staff members look back on the books we read in 2016.
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On September 21, 2016, the Library hosted The Golden Age of Mysteries: Tracing the Bloodline of Crime Fiction, a panel discussion co-sponsored by Mystery Writers of America New York. The evening was lively, opinionated, fun, and informative—and a rich source of book recommendations for mystery readers.
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Molly Haskell is one of cinema’s most insightful, influential, and intelligent critics. A Library member and friend since 1977, we recently asked Ms. Haskell to recommend a list of essential books on film
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A collection of our favorites among the forgotten-but-not-gone, the literary curios, the has-beens and never-weres, and the also-rans of the established literature canon. Good books waiting patiently (sometimes very patiently) in the stacks for the right reader to come along.
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Recommended novels and short story collections set in the American West that embrace some standard Western characters and settings, but can't be categorized as "merely" genre fiction..
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Staff horror aficionado Liam Delaney presents a frightening short-list of horror fiction recommendations. A list of horror anthologies and some recent arrivals follows Liam's recommendations.
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Before you explore the city's surprisingly abundant flora and fauna, be sure to explore our stacks. Our collection contains a variety of books that illuminate the natural wonders of the city.
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Staff recommend books for the summer and reveal what we hope to read as days grow warm and the pace of life allows for more time reading.
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A guided tour of the Library's collection of sound recordings featuring poets reading their own work.
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A look at published interviews available in the Library stacks.
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See what Library staff most enjoyed reading in 2015.
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16th century travel chronicles, housewives in wartime England, gossip and name-dropping in Paris, movie-making in the Amazon, and more. Here are the staff's favorite published diaries held in the Library's collection.
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Celebrating the launch of our new High School collection, our staff recommend great reads for young adults.
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Our staff recommend old favorites and recent books from around the world translated into English.
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From epic sagas to vintage noir, from art forgery to the forgotten American sport of pedestrianism, Library staff recommend books for the long summer days ahead.
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Since 1995, the Library has honored exceptional books about the city with our New York City Book Awards, and to celebrate the recent announcement of this year’s winners, Library staff recommend their favorite New York books from the stacks.
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Hollywood provides the perfect setting for fiction that wants to get at the heart of America. It is the uneasy (but often glorious) collision of art vs. commerce, of simulation vs. reality. A place where the ambitious run into other members of their species, and are often undone by same. A place with no natives. Best of all, it’s a place that doesn’t really exist but is instantly recognizable to a reader.
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The Library has long considered its biography collection one of the strengths of the stacks. Over 30,000 biographies are in the building, most in stack 7 where near-full shelves groan under the lives of the heroic, the villainous, the famous, the forgotten, and the obscure. In this edition of Book Recommendations, Library staff highlights some of our favorite biographies from the stacks with hopes that you find something to read and enjoy among our selections. Also see Writing My Life, a previous post devoted to memoirs and autobiography.