Sparks' Staff Picks

Sidewalks By Valeria Luiselli, Christina Macsweeney (Translator), Cees Nooteboom (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Valeria Luiselli, Christina Macsweeney (Translator), Cees Nooteboom (Introduction by)
$16.95
ISBN: 9781566893565
Availability: Click the TITLE to view store availability
Published: Coffee House Press - May 13th, 2014

Valeria Luiselli's debut essay collection immediately establishes her as an exciting writer to watch and admire.


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The Peregrine By J. A. Baker, Robert Macfarlane (Introduction by) Cover Image
By J. A. Baker, Robert Macfarlane (Introduction by)
$16.95
ISBN: 9781590171332
Availability: Click the TITLE to view store availability
Published: NYRB Classics - December 31st, 2004

To call J.A. Baker's book a book about birds is similar to saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. This is so much more than ornithology. It's a marvelously textured, understated, and beautifully written account of a man's quest to learn certain aspects of the natural world--to become part of the corner of the universe he's come to inhabit. Baker's language is precise and poetic and his insights, on the behavior of birds and man, are remarkable. I love this book all out of proportion.


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An Elemental Thing By Eliot Weinberger Cover Image
$17.95
ISBN: 9780811216944
Availability: NOT on our shelves now. Usually ships from warehouse in several days.
Published: New Directions - May 17th, 2007

Eliot Weinberger, a college drop-out turned tanslator (of Paz, Borges, Bei Dao, and others) writes essays unlike anything you've read. These pieces -- erudite, wide-ranging, poetic -- are of universal scope, touching on topics as diverse (and cohesive) as the varieties of Chinese wind, a history of the rhinocerous in Europe, the Nazca lines in the Peruvian desert, and a reverie on the stars that is breathtakingly beautiful. Weinberger's vast learning is matched by an equally encompassing sense of wonder, and his ability to draw the "exotic" closer, while still permitting it an air of mystery, is a thing to marvel at.


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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes #3) By Robert Macfarlane Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9780147509796
Availability: Click the TITLE to view store availability
Published: Penguin Books - September 24th, 2013

If the best books are those that make you itch for something new—or, in this case, something as ancient as walking—Robert Macfarlane’s poetic travel memoir is certainly one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Tracing his ramblings across moors and seas, up mountains, and along meandering paths, Macfarlane describes in lush, precise prose a natural (and human) world that reveals itself leisurely, step by step. Full of remarkable scenes and a memorable cast of characters, The Old Ways brings to mind recent memoirs like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and classic nature writing a la Peter Matthiessen. I recommend it with only one caveat: read it with your hiking boots on; it’ll make you want to get up and go.


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Wittgenstein's Mistress (American Literature) By David Markson, Steven Moore (Afterword by) Cover Image
By David Markson, Steven Moore (Afterword by)
$16.95
Temporarily Unavailable
ISBN: 9781564782113
Published: Dalkey Archive Press - May 1st, 1988

You're the last woman alive. (Or are you?) You find shelter in museums, burn artwork to keep warm on chilly nights. You travel the world, piecing together what's been lost, hoping to find evidence that you are not alone. More than anything, you remember: ancient things like Achilles' rage and personal things like the loss of a child. David Markson's profoundly unsettling and affecting masterpiece--which was rejected fifty-four times--was called upon its publication "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country" by none other than David Foster Wallace.


Eros the Bittersweet (American Literature) By Anne Carson Cover Image
$14.95
Temporarily Unavailable
ISBN: 9781564781888
Published: Dalkey Archive Press - March 1st, 1998

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time


Kassandra and the Wolf By Margarita Karapanou Cover Image
$16.95
Temporarily Unavailable
ISBN: 9781566567718
Published: Clockroot Books - October 1st, 2009

Margarita Karapanou’s Kassandra and the Wolf was first published in 1974, and went on to become a contemporary classic in Greece, receive international acclaim, and establish its 28-year-old author as an intensely original new talent, who garnered comparisons to Proust and Schulz.


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The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary By Caspar Henderson Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9780226213200
Availability: Click the TITLE to view store availability
Published: University of Chicago Press - November 10th, 2014

Taking as his inspiration Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, Caspar Henderson set out to investigate those seemingly too strange to be real creatures that are, in fact, alive on our strange planet. From the axolotl to the zebra fish, this book demonstrates just how wondrous biology is and how bizarre the journey to get to this point has been.