Staff Picks: Best of the Decade
Staff Picks: Best of the Decade
By White Whale Bookstore
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
Lucia Berlin
$20.00 $18.60The GOAT story collection, don’t @ me. -Adlai
The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography
Deborah Levy
$16.99 $15.80I read this book after reading an essay in which the writer's friends could not stop passing it around. Sure enough, I went on to buy about twenty copies to send to all the people I love best (and then read every other book by Levy I could get my hands on). Deborah Levy, writing about an orange, makes you feel as if you're tasting fruit for the very first time. And truly, each and every sentence in this "working autobiography" is juicy and full of zest and only a little bitter. She makes you want to do life her way. Whatever the cost, I'll pay it. -Jill
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Carmen Maria Machado
$17.00 $15.81A collection of short stories that's also a collection of queer feminist riffs on the horror/thriller genre. My favorite is the novella in the middle that puts Detective Benson of Law and Order: SVU at the center of a terrifying sci-fi whodunnit with no real end. ADORED this book. -Anna
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
$26.00 $24.18Drafted during the early years of the BLM movement and published during the Obama Administration's final years, this book is a letter to Coates' son, but is also a piece of history, a plea, a treatise Toni Morrison believed might "fill the intellectual void" left by James Baldwin. -Nick
Station Eleven: A Novel (National Book Award Finalist)
Emily St John Mandel
$18.00 $16.74One of the best books I've ever read. I tore through its pages in two days. Follow the survivors of a flu pandemic as they navigate survival and reestablish civilization as best as they can. -Jess
The Narrator
Michael Cisco
$25.99The Blood Meridian of fantasy novels. We have far too many fantasy novels that romanticize war. In The Narrator, the world is just as surreal and unreasonable as war is. Low may also be my favorite protagonist of any novel I've read. -Tyler
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine
$20.00 $18.60Code switching, microaggressions, stop-and-frisk, lynchings, Trayvon Martin, Serena Williams, poetry, essays, photography, art, CITIZEN felt groundbreaking when it was published in 2014. -Adlai
Euphoria
Lily King
$17.00 $15.81Based on Margaret Mead's anthropological excursions to Papua New Guinea in the 1920s, King's novel is a tense, heady mix of sex and scholarship that is as much about the opaque unknowability of those we love as it is about a clash of cultures. I inhaled this book when it came out, and five years later it's still one of my go-to recommendations for those seeking a story in which to fully disappear. -Jill
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
Viet Thanh Nguyen
$22.00 $20.46Both a deeply researched and reported book, and an intimate, personal look at how the Vietnam (or American) War affected not only the policy and culture but also memory and history. Essential reading for anyone interested in the impacts of American engagement abroad. -Anna
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Michael Pollan
$18.00 $16.74Michael Pollan will, I suspect, swiftly uproot much of what you know and understand about American history, religion, addiction, mental health, your own perception, and reality itself. -Nick
Children of Blood and Bone
Tomi Adeyemi
$21.99 $20.45A twisting, heart-wrenching book based on Nigerian myths about magic and magic folk. Good for young adults and older. If you love this one, check out the sequel, Children of Virtue and Vengeance. -Jess
A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause
Shawn Wen
$17.95 $16.69I never would have predicted one of my favorite books of the decade would be about miming. Shawn Wen reanimates and thoughtfully interrogates the life of world-renowned mime Marcel Marceau in the most lyric essay--let alone biography--I've ever read. -Tyler
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
$16.00 $14.88Part memoir and part criticism, Nelson’s landmark work explores gender, sexuality, family, and is done so with a remarkable force of intellect, scholarship, and empathy. Or to put it another way: This book will fucking blow your mind and change you as a person. -Adlai
Goodbye, Vitamin
Rachel Khong
$17.99 $16.73When life gives you lemons, sometimes the best thing to do is pack up and go home. You just might find some lemonade there waiting for you. By turns hilarious, touching, and relatable, this is a pill that goes down easily. More generous, uplifting books like this, please. -Jill
Freshwater
Akwaeke Emezi
$18.00 $16.74Every now and then, we're blessed with a book like this that turns inside out what you may imagine literature to be. A child, Ada, understands at a young age that she is made of many selves, most of which her Nigerian family tries to cancel. The jaded edges of Emezi's writing will cut you to the bone. -Anna
Everything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng
$17.00 $15.81The stunning debut novel by Celeste Ng about a seemingly normal family with secrets we all have. How well do you know the ones you think you know best? -Jess
You Got Older: A Play
Clare Barron
$15.00 $13.95If Clare Barron doesn't win a Pulitzer in Drama this decade I'll eat my hat. -Tyler
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
$17.99 $16.73In her National Book Award-winning novel, Jesmyn Ward writes about community and family on the rural Gulf Coast. Katrina is swirling inland, and fourteen-year-old Esch is pregnant, and these two inescapable facts drive the novel forward. Beyond the heartbreak, what you'll remember is Esch's strong, singular voice--deftly evoked through Ward's poetic yet unflinching prose. A modern classic. -Jill
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Ross Gay
$18.00 $16.74This is the kind of poetry collection that you can't help but savor, can't help but read straight through without stopping, can't help but read with tears in your eyes because it inspires the full spectrum of human emotion. It's a full meal, a whole life lived and loved, in just 98 pages. -Anna
The Word for Woman Is Wilderness
Abi Andrews
$17.95 $16.69This book really surprised me. I am not one to normally read wilderness literature but I couldn't put this one down. Beautifully written, concise, this book says so much about what it is to be a woman in both civilization and the wilderness. -Jess
Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place
Scott McClanahan
$16.00 $14.88I will remember kindness and joy. I will continue to reach for the mountaintops, even from the holler. This book is a mountaintop. More mountaintops, please. More mountaintops. -Tyler
All My Puny Sorrows
Miriam Toews
$17.99 $16.73Full of heart even as it brings you to your knees, Toews' spare and perfect novel about two sisters--one of whom wants, relentlessly, to die--feels like a long letter from a dear friend. You trust one another implicitly, and you laugh together when you're in the thick of it, because what else is there to do? Bring tissues, and maybe don't read in public. -Jill
The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit
$18.00 $16.74This book changed what I thought both memoirs and essays could do and made me fall in love with Solnit forever. She is so good, one of the very best, at capturing place, relationships, and storytelling in clear, precise ways, and I love how this hybrid work in particular captures intense emotions about family and the self in astonishing ways. -Anna
Pulphead
John Jeremiah Sullivan
$20.00 $18.60These essays glitter ominously. They are personal and political, real and unreal; forays into banality's high strangeness and into a culture in flux. Sullivan takes risks on the page. Some work, others do not, but the collection stands, either way, as something of a masterpiece. -Nick