Kristin Ohlson is the author of Stalking the Divine, a spiritual memoir named the best nonfiction book of 2004 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors. It is now out in paperback.
Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner (New York Review of Books, $13). An underappreciated masterpiece, published in 1926 and the surprise first pick of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Lolly Willowes is a girl who’s an oddity in upper-crust England for her bookish, nature-wandering ways, and she grows up to be an even odder spinster. She eventually bolts for a life of…but, I can’t spoil the ending.
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So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (Vintage, $11). A small gem of a book about two lonely Illinois farm boys whose friendship is ruptured by a murder committed by one of their fathers. What haunts the other boy well into his manhood, though, is his own missed moment of humanity.
American Beach by Russ Rymer (out of print). This book should be required reading for all Americans. In it, journalist Russ Rymer tells the story of American Beach, an early-20th-century Florida resort for wealthy African-Americans. All that remains of this world is the granddaughter of the resort’s millionaire founder, penniless and proselytizing from a lounge chair on the beach.
In the Memory of the Forest by Charles Powers (Penguin, $14). This novel is set in a Polish village after the Cold War, as the villagers sort out the previous decades of betrayal and secrecy. This dense and ambitious book has it all—vivid characters, rich language, history, politics, and even a love story.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (ACE Charter, $8). In this wonderfully intriguing science fiction novel, an emissary from Earth finds himself on a planet where the inhabitants are genderless until their monthly heat, when each becomes, by chance, either male or female. Our hero is unsettled: How is he supposed to know how to feel toward any of them when they’re not reliably one or the other?
High Albania: A Victorian Traveller’s Balkan Odyssey
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