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Mike Everett-Lane's Picks
Not a "top list" by any means, but some books you might not already have on
your shelf. |
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee, Walker Evans |
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| Agee's writing, Walker Evans' photos, capture the world of a sharecropper's family. Lyrical. |
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Impro
Keith Johnstone |
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| Keith Johnstone's book is a bible to improvisers, and essential reading for anyone who creates or teaches. Which means you. |
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To The Wedding
John Berger
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| If you don't cry, your heart is made of gravel. |
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A Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin |
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| Helprin brings magical realism to New York City. |
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In Watermelon Sugar
Richard Brautigan |
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| Brautigan moves into pure fantasy. Hallucinatory & short. |
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The Zebra Storyteller
Spencer Holst |
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| Spencer Holst writes these strange little parables. You can read one in my very first blog posting at Ishbadiddle.
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Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges |
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| I attribute my strange childhood to reading too many Borges stories. |
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The Famished Road
Ben Okri |
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| Ben Okri's novel about a "spirit child" in a Nigerian village. It stays with you. |
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House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski |
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| If Borges, Nabokov & David Foster Wallace had written the screenplay to the Blair Witch Project, it wouldn't be this. But it might be
close. |
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Sandman
Neil Gaiman |
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| Can I include a 11 volume graphic novel cycle in the list? Gaiman has created a new mythology with a tragic figure at its heart. |
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All The King's Men
Robert Penn Warren |
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| Robert Penn Warren brings a poet's eye to this novel, which is about a fictionalized Huey Long, but really about self-discovery. |
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