Welcome to our Best of the Month page, where, in addition to our regular Significant Seven picks (our favorite books of the month, which we offer all month long at 40% off), you can find seven more picks on the side (since we always have more books we want to share), our favorite new paperbacks, and up-to-date lists of the topselling and most discussed books of the month.
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| Spotlight Title: Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg | 
Michael Greenberg's spare, unflinching memoir begins with a bang: "On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad." Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the summer when 15-year-old Sally experienced her first full-blown manic episode--an event that in a "single stroke" changed her identity and, by extension, that of her entire family. Simply told and beautifully written, Greenberg's memoir shines a stark light on mental illness, painting a vivid picture of a brain and body under siege by a mania that seems a separate living thing squatting within the patient. As a writer who lives "so much in his head," Greenberg is particularly anguished by his daughter's fractured psyche, and his honesty about being both sickened and fascinated by his daughter's condition is breathtaking: "During the worst moments, I think of her as my disease--the disease I must bear.... I am intoxicated with Sally's madness in both senses of the word: inebriated and poisoned." So desperate is he to understand her that he relentlessly researches mental illness (the book is peppered with fascinating insights into drug therapy and anecdotes about writers who struggled with madness), and even goes so far as to sample a full dose of his daughter's medication. Startling, heart-wrenching, and yet unwaveringly unsentimental, Hurry Down Sunshine is an unforgettable story of a young girl's descent into madness, told through the eyes of a harried and helpless father trying desperately to bring her back. --Daphne |
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| The Irregulars by Jennet Conant | | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson | 
Long before Willy Wonka sent out those five Golden Tickets, Roald Dahl lived a life that was more James Bond than James and the Giant Peach. After blinding headaches cut short his distinguished career as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, Dahl became part of an elite group of British spies working against the United States' neutrality at the onset of World War II. The Irregulars is a brilliant profile of Dahl's lesser-known profession, embracing a real-life storyline of suave debauchery, clandestine motives, and afternoon cocktails. If this sounds oddly familiar, it's no coincidence: both Ian Fleming (the creator of 007) and Bill Stephenson (the legendary spymaster rumored to be the inspiration for Bond) were members of the same outfit. Although "Dahl...Roald Dahl" doesn't quite carry the same debonair ring, there is no discrediting this fascinating look at the British author's covert service to the Allied cause during WWII. --Dave | | 
Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back. This debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. --Dave |
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Read the first chapter of The Irregulars
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Read the prologue of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
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| Goldengrove by Francine Prose | | Home by Marilynne Robinson | 
Francine Prose's latest novel Goldengrove will be something of a surprise to readers familiar with her famously razor-sharp dialogue and tough-love attitude towards her memorable characters. In this affecting coming-of-age novel, Prose introduces us to Nico, a chubby 13-year old girl who imagines nothing more than keeping her parents at arms length and hanging out with her older sister, Margaret, and her charismatic boyfriend during the long summer break. Instead, Nico finds herself navigating the perilous course of mourning after her beloved sister drowns in the lake just beyond the family's home. With little support from her grief-stricken parents, she must come to terms with the tragedy largely on her own. Prose's ability to situate the adult reader within the heart and mind of young Nico is quite remarkable, and verges on the poetic. Goldengrove is a poignant and rewarding story that prompts us to retrace those often long-forgotten but monumental early steps towards acceptance and understanding. --Lauren | | 
"What does it mean to come home?" In one way or another, every character in Home attempts to answer this question. Glory Boughton, the baby of her family but now 38 and lovelorn, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Her wayward brother Jack also finds his way back, though his is an uneasy homecoming, reverberating with the scandal that drove him away 20 years earlier. Glory and Jack unravel their stories slowly, speaking to each other more in movements than in words--a careful glance here, a chair pulled out from the table there--against a domestic backdrop so richly imagined you may be fooled into believing their house is your own. Meanwhile, their father, whose ebullient love for his children is a welcome counterpoint to Glory and Jack's own conflicted emotions, experiences his own kind of reckoning as he yearns to be close to Jack again, only to realize how lost his son really is. There's a simplicity to this story that belies the complexity of its characters--they're bound together by a profound capacity for love and by an equally powerful sense of private conviction that tries the ties that bind, but never breaks them. It's a delicate sort of tension that you think would resist exposition--and in fact these characters seem to want nothing more than, as Glory says, to treat "one another's deceptions like truth"--but Marilynne Robinson's fine, tender prose imbues this family's secrets with an overwhelming grace. --Anne |
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| Indignation by Philip Roth | | Eat Me by Kenny Shopsin | 
Enter once again into the echo chamber of Philip Roth's memory and imagination. In the second year of the Korean War, a butcher's son--a straight-A student wound tight with aspiration--flees Newark and his father's increasingly unhinged fears for his safety. Heading midwest, he finds a strange collegiate land of fraternities, football heroes, V-neck pullover sweaters and white buckskin shoes, panty raids, and mandatory chapel services, and, most startlingly, a young woman with desires of her own. Like another fiction grandmaster of his generation, Alice Munro, Roth seems able to spin infinite surprising tales from a few familiar building blocks, and in Indignation, his 25th novel, he has constructed a taut, haunting (and, as always, funny) story that ranks among his best. Reading at times like a buttoned-down Portnoy's Complaint (if it's possible to imagine such a thing), Indignation records a series of small explosions against '50s propriety and the dire consequences they lead to, capturing the misery of desire amid repression, along with the greater terror of being trapped in endless, relentless memory. --Tom | | 
The eccentric and engaging food-lit manifesto, Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, collects the wisdom, rants, and recipes of New York's most legendarily cranky, publicity-hating short-order cook. The foul-mouthed genius of Kenny Shopsin has been captured before, most notably in Calvin Trillin's wonderful New Yorker profile and the documentary I Like Killing Flies, but Eat Me gives a from-the-cook's-mouth take on life behind the counter, with the layout of a quirky, illustrated textbook. Chapter titles like "Selling Water, or the Secret of the Restaurant Business" and "The Story of Shopsin's Turkey, or Why I Hate the Health Department" should give you a taste of what's in store. Formerly located in Greenwich Village, Shopin's now sets up camp at Stall No. 16 at the Essex Street Market, where you'll find dozens of soups, sandwiches, burgers, milkshakes, breakfast plates, and pancakes (from Plain to White Mint Chocolate Chip), along with original comfort-food classics like Blisters on My Sisters (tortillas, cheese, fried eggs, beans, and rice), gracing the crammed 900-item menu. Getting tossed out of Shopsin's (for whatever offense) has taken on badge-of-honor status among diners--the culinary equivalent of being on the business end of a Don Rickles zinger. Reading Eat Me feels like the next best thing. --Brad |
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| | | | | More Media Picks | 
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See the monthly favorites of our other editorial teams:
• Music
• Movies & TV
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| More to Watch For:
September Category Picks |
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| | Best Paperbacks of September |
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| Best Reason to Play Hooky
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Be prepared to dump your plans (work, school, dates) for Chelsea Cain's taut, deliciously unpredictable sequel to Heartsick. --Daphne
Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain
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Best Reason to Brush Up on Your Sophocles
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Michael Kelly, a classic hardboiled PI with a taste for classical literature, returns in Harvey's tense and tough follow-up to The Chicago Way. --Jon
The Fifth Floor by Michael Harvey
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Best Book to Read to Your Teddy Bear
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Karen Hesse's long-awaited new children's novel is an imaginative retelling of a precious story long-forgotten. (It's also a pretty wonderful nostalgic tribute to Brooklyn.)
--Anne
Brooklyn Bridge by Karen Hesse
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Best Small Town Tragicomedy
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Welcome to Owl, North Dakota--a bleaker version of Lake Wobegon, with a much better high school football program--and its citizens' misguided attempts to find meaning in everyday life. --Dave
Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman
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Best For-a-Good-Cause Book that Isn't from McSweeney's
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In 20 odd and affecting stories (each illustrated by a top artist) Joe Meno aces a perfect landing in a quirky literary world of whimsy and heartbreak. --Brad
Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno
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Best Book Based on an Odd-Looking Gummy Bear
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We're gaga for artist Tao Nyeu's groovy (and wordless) picture book, inspired by an unusual gummy bear with magical powers. --Lauren
Wonder Bear by Tao Nyeu
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