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Paper Press-ents

Books are, quite simply, timeless gifts. They possess empowering knowledge, they help to bridge the sometimes huge societal divides created by race, sex, religion and culture and, just as important, they entertain us. Because we think books are so great, we wanted to find the very best ones published this year to recommend to you. To achieve this aim, we reached out to a few local literary figures, people who are in the business of writing and selling books. Following, you’ll find their suggestions.

Jonathan Welch is proprietor of Talking Leaves Books, Buffalo’s oldest independent bookstore. With two locations in the city, Talking Leaves has been providing Western New Yorkers with a distinctive and unusual selection of the finest writing and thinking bound into books for 36 years.

Bill McKibben, Deep Economy (Holt)

Allen Weisman, The World Without Us (St. Martin’s Press)

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Harper Collins)

Welch says, “All three make intelligent, persuasive cases--political, economic & environmental--for changing how we live, think and shop.”

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear (Pantheon)

Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise (University of California Press)

“These are two essential writers whose new work should always be attended to.”

Mark Goldman, City on the Edge (Prometheus) “An entertaining and affectionate local history, especially compelling about the modernist/avant-garde arts and culture of an apparently quintessential blue-collar town,” Welch says.

Allen Shelton, Dreamworlds of Alabama (University of Minnesota Press) “A compelling amalgam of personal narrative and social theory written by Buffalo State Sociology professor Allen Shelton.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Howard Frank Mosher, On Kingdom Mountain (Houghton Mifflin)

Annie Dillard, The Maytrees (Harper Collins)

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus)

Welch says, “These are four very different writers with powerful stories uniquely rendered.”

Cesar Vallejo, Complete Poetry (University of California Press)

Edward Dorn, Way More West (Penguin)

Tracy Smith, Duende (Graywolf)

Kyle Schlesinger et al, I Have Imagined a Center/Wilder Than This Region: A Tribute to Susan Howe (Cuneiform Press)

Alice Notley, In the Pines (Penguin)

Though he’s a retired professor of mathematics, Gerry Rising keeps his mind and his pencil sharp by reviewing books for Artvoice.

Valierie Plame Wilson, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (Simon & Schuster) “The definition of treason seems to have escaped this administration.”

R. Barker Bansell, Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Oxford) “We finally get experimental results and they are damning.”

Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs (Knopf) “Small town life in our Rust Belt perfectly captured.”

Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Sarah Crichton) “With help this child escaped; a million are left behind.”

Bruce Jackson, The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple) “Best for its perfect examples with a cast of Buffalo characters.”

Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Hachette) “Hitchens knows religious texts better than those who debate him.”

Peter Lovesey, The Secret Hangman (Soho) “Best mystery of the year.”

Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (Penguin) “A useful but disturbing summary of what’s wrong with today’s political discourse.”

Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Atlas) “A great storyteller briefly summarizes our greatest dramatist.”

Author Mick Cochrane has penned two novels, Flesh Wounds (Penguin, 1999) and Sport (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). He’s also a professor at Canisius College, where he teaches writing and contemporary fiction.

Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse (Broadway Books) Cochrane says, “A literate, entertaining discussion of language by a writer who loves a phrase like “pimp my ride” because it “illustrates a deep and wonderful truth about the parts of speech: they change like the dickens.”

Calvin Trillin, About Alice (Random House) “This is Trillin’s heartfelt, moving, and also very funny essay about his wife Alice, who died in 2001.”

Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance (Holt) “This is a relentlessly interesting book not just about medicine and doctoring but ultimately about the ways human beings learn to do anything better,” says Cochrane.

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays (Riverhead) “Saunders is always smart and humane and surprising—he may be incapable of writing a dull sentence. In this collection there is literary criticism (of Huck Finn and Kurt Vonnegut), short New Yorker humor pieces, travel writing and a scathing indictment of today’s media (the brain-dead megaphone).”

Rishi Reddi, Karma (Harper Collins) “A first collection of sharply observed and gracefully written stories of Indian American families near Boston.”

Duff Brenna, The Law of Falling Bodies (Hopewell) “The new book by the best novelist you’ve probably never heard of. It’s a powerful exploration of different kinds of warfare: a boy battling for survival on a Minnesota dairy farm, his brother in Vietnam—“high-wire Faulkner gone Fargo,” says one critic.”

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) “His first novel, ten years since his story collection, Drown, and well worth the wait. It’s a book with an utterly original voice and a big heart.”

Carl Dennis, Unknown Friends (Penguin) “The new collection of poems from our own Pulitzer Prize winner. Smart, funny and wise—if more people read Carl Dennis, fewer would dislike poetry.”

John and Dana Rigney own Second Reader Bookshop on Hertel Ave. Their bookshop carries used copies of current and out-of-print titles, but likes to tout the one-of-a-kind, serendipitous discoveries shoppers find there: vintage fiction and mysteries with amazing cover art; international auction and art exhibition catalogs; old periodicals, prints and vintage street maps, to name a few.

Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press) “Hardly the last word on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas in Paris, but Malcolm’s prose is wonderful and the real nugget here is her exploration of how two elderly Jewish women survived the German occupation of France.”

In addition to being the artistic director at Just Buffalo Literary Center, Mike Kelleher is also a working poet. He’s published two books of poetry, To Be Sung (BlazeVOX, 2004) and Human Scale (BlazeVOX, 2007), which he recently toured the country in support of.

Robert Creeley, Collected Poems of Robert Creeley (University of California Press)

Peter Gizzi, The Outernationale (Wesleyan)

Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract (New Directions)

Matvei Yankelevich, The Present Work (Palm Press)