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 bestselling books of the month.
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| Spotlight Title: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston | 
If you love crime fiction--preferably wickedly profane, unabashedly grisly, and laugh-out-loud funny "pulp" fiction--your number one New Year's resolution needs to be to read Charlie Huston. It only takes one to get you so hooked you'll read everything you can get your hands on, so take a couple of days off and give yourself room to binge on the brutal and hilarious Hank Thompson and Joe Pitt series, the blistering Shotgun Rule, and this latest and greatest stand-alone, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. The best thing about reading a Huston novel is that you never see it coming--laughter, tears, the passing urge to vomit--everything is a surprise, creating a wholly unsettling and exciting reading experience. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has all the makings of a perfect Charlie Huston novel--the down-but-not-out antihero, the outrageous supporting characters (each of whom deserves their own spin-off), the very bad situation involving money and violence, and the hilariously inappropriate dialogue that is Huston's signature--but with one surprising addition, hope. It does little good to break down the the plot of a book this bizarre and brilliant. You're just going to have to trust us (and our Guest Reviewer Stephen King), and read it. --Daphne |
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Read Stephen King's exclusive Guest Review
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| Going to See the Elephant by Rodes Fishburne | | The Next 100 Years by George Friedman | 
Veering from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous, Rodes Fishburne's Going to See the Elephant is a story backed by an orchestra, saturated with a mystic glow that tints Technicolor a city full of fantastic personalities. From the moment Slater Brown and his trunk of first-edition 19th-century novels arrive in San Francisco, he stands poised for a "synchronous explosion of fate and destiny." He wants to devour the city ("preferably with both hands"), and to employ its more savory bits in a novel that will live for generations. When financial necessity drives him to a reporting post with the third-rate Morning Trumpet, a marvelous coincidence offers him a private line to the city's secrets, which Slater parlays into sensational stories that save the Trumpet--and enrage the nefarious mayor. While Slater falls for a brilliant and lovely chess champion (who miraculously loves him back), the mayor plots his undoing and an eccentric genius's weather experiments imperil the city. Happiness that seemed inevitable must be pursued as if Slater's life depends on it (as it does), and a story that seemed larger-than-life winds up movingly human. --Mari | | 
"Be Practical, Expect the Impossible." So declares George Friedman, chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Gathering information from its global network of operatives and analysts (drawing the nickname "the Shadow CIA"), Stratfor produces thoughtful and genuinely engrossing analysis of international events daily, from possible outcomes of the latest Pakistan/India tensions to the hierarchy of Mexican drug cartels to challenges to Obama's nascent administration. In The Next 100 Years, Friedman undertakes the impossible (or improbable) challenge of forecasting world events through the 21st century. Starting with the premises that "conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination" and "common sense will be wrong," Friedman maps what he sees as the likeliest developments of the future, some intuitive, some surprising: more (but less catastrophic) wars; Russia's re-emergence as an aggressive hegemonic power; China's diminished influence in international affairs due to traditional social and economic imbalances; and the dawn of an American "Golden Age" in the second half of the century. Friedman is well aware that much of what he predicts will be wrong--unforeseeable events are, of course, unforeseen--but through his interpretation of geopolitics, one gets the sense that Friedman's guess is better than most. --Jon |
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| Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos | | Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun | 
Trafficking between the here and the hereafter is an enticing premise for fiction, rich with opportunities for the kind of deus ex machina-esque plot twists that--in the right hands--can reel a reader right in. Stephanie Kallos explores this peculiar nexus of living and dead in Sing Them Home, where we're introduced to the Joneses, a Nebraskan family struck twice by meteorological disaster. The three Jones children never quite recover from the first blight (their mother Hope is inexplicably lost in a violent tornado), and Kallos renders their charms and failings as if she herself were like so many of the departed folks who stand sentinel in this small Midwestern town, seeing more than any living eye does. When the second tragedy strikes and the now-grown children lose their father, it's the chorus of the dead (Hope among them) and the living together that eases their homecoming. It's a significant imaginative leap, and you can't help but admire Kallos for taking it: she knows these characters so intimately and spins their stories with such confidence that you'll follow her right to the end, no questions asked. --Anne | | 
There's a moment in Miles from Nowhere, Nami Mun's first novel, when a flashlight dangling from the ceiling of a squatter's apartment in an abandoned building "made pretty everything it touched--an open can of ravioli, the bandage just below his knee, a green leather purse." Mun's writing does the same to the often grim details of her teenage runaway's tale, but it's not so much what she sees as the way she looks that's beautiful--a cashier at a dance hostess club has "small wrinkled ears that reminded me of walnuts," the smoking room at a nursing facility "looked more like a dried-up aquarium, embedded with ashtray stands, oxygen tanks, and old people made of cloth." Joon, only 12 when she leaves her family in the Bronx for the streets, can't make much of a connected story of her life, but that clear-eyed attention, which brings a stone-faced kindness, unfaltering and unflinching, to the most sordid of scenes, gives you some hope that she will. Like Denis Johnson's junkie masterpiece, Jesus' Son, the episodes of Miles from Nowhere are held together not by a sense of progress (though it does stir for Joon toward the end) but by a strength of vision, which fights to hold the world together when it seems nothing else will. --Tom |
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| Sex, Death, and Oysters by Robb Walsh | | Banquet at Delmonico's by Barry Werth | 
Once called "the Indiana Jones of food writers," Texan Robb Walsh has developed a cult of devoted readers who have ridden shotgun with him on his obsessive culinary adventures--from the quest for the perfect cup of coffee, to barbecue battles, to Dr. Pepper bootleggers. Who better then to take a five-year quest in search of the perfect oyster, "the world's most profitable aphrodisiac," than the James Beard Award-winning author, who hangs his hat as the restaurant critic for The Houston Press and has written several books, including Are You Really Going to Eat That? and The Tex-Mex Cookbook. Sex, Death, and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover's World Tour chronicles a global culinary road trip that takes Walsh from his local Galveston Bay to the coasts of North America, and off to Ireland, England, and France. Fact-filled and laced throughout with his wry humor, Walsh recounts the hundreds of oysters shucked and prepared in myriad ways, and offers a fascinating history that goes beyond the expected, revealing coastal rivalries, recipes, shucking tips, and what to drink with your oyster. --Brad | |  Banquet at Delmonico's is a fascinating look at how the theory of evolution provided a much-needed challenge to 19th-century America. Although evolution itself was hardly a new concept--scholars had pondered transmutation and common descent for centuries--naturalist Charles Darwin ignited an intellectual bonfire during the 1860s with his hypothesis of natural selection. Author Barry Werth explains how the uproar reached far beyond the scientific community, as evolutionary ideas such as "survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined not by Darwin, but by English philosopher Herbert Spencer) became rallying cries for leaders in business, theology, and government. Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie gushed that "light came as in a flood and all was clear" while reading the works of Darwin and Spencer, while preacher Henry Ward Beecher embraced his role as a "Christian evolutionist." With post-Civil War America growing increasingly uneasy over irreconcilable differences between the modern world and old truths of theology, Werth thoughtfully explores how a bold leap into a new school of thought rejuvenated a weary nation. --Dave |
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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:
January Category Picks |
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| | Best Paperbacks of January |
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| Best Exhibition of Eggleston's Fearless Photos
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A lavish catalog from the Whitney's new retrospective covers four decades of provocative naturalism from the artist who redefined color photography as fine art. --Mari
Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 by William Eggleston
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Best Guide to Being a Humane Human
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Grandin, known for her insights into autism and animals, advises how we can best bridge the species gap based on the emotions we share. --Lauren
Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin
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Best Heir Apparent to Roald Dahl
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Quirky characters, a tight plot, and a knowing sense of humor that's just a touch wicked will keep you glued to the couch (sleeping kitty curled up by your ankles optional). --Anne
Scat by Carl Hiaasen
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Best Hit of Revolutionary Oxygen
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A lively, modern look at Joseph Priestley: friend of Franklin and Jefferson, religious rebel, discoverer of oxygen, hounded out of England, and accused of sedition in the U.S. --Tom
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
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Best Book for Reluctant Middle-grade Readers
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Don't be surprised if the kids put down the videogame controls and pick up the latest LOL installment of Kinney's blockbuster series. --Lauren
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney
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