Here's a quick look at books that may be slightly obscure. You won't find them on any bestseller list, but if you're searching for a gift for an atypical reader, here's some good suggestions.
"Jane Franklin was an amazing woman who raised her children and grandchildren while still having the time to read and think for herself. We can only see into her mind because her correspondent was famous and because a vastly talented biographer reassembled her for us."
New Yorker writer Lepore (History/Harvard Univ.; The Story of America, 2012) masterfully formulates the story of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, who will be virtually unknown to many readers, using only a few of her letters and a small archive of births and deaths. (Kirkus Reviews)
THE SEARCHERS: The Making of an American Legend
By Glenn Frankel
A gracefully presented narrative of the 1956 John Ford film The Searchers, which was based on a 1954 novel that was based on an actual Comanche kidnapping of a white girl in 1836.
Pulitzer Prize–winning former Washington Post reporter Frankel (Journalism/Univ. of Texas; Rivonia's Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa, 1999, etc.) focuses on the American Southwest and the relationships between American Indians and whites.
The author begins in 1954 with a shocking moment—director Ford, well into his cups, punching Henry Fonda in the nose.
And away we go on a remarkable journey from Hollywood to Monument Valley and into the past as Frankel digs into American cultural history, unearthing some gold....
THE APARTMENT
BY GREG BAXTER
Following the lead of James Joyce, Don DeLillo and others, the novel takes place over the course of a single day in the life of its protagonist as he makes his way across an unnamed European city in search of the titular apartment.
Christmas approaches, but the 41-year-old American seems immune to the holiday spirit and to much in the way of human warmth, as he obliquely recounts the life of dislocation that has brought him to this place that might serve as a final destination but never home.....
CITY OF GLASS
BY Paul Auster
In this fast-paced thriller, poet and essayist Auster transforms a conventional detective story into a post-modern theoretical diversion, without sacrificing intrigue or readability. The first volume of his New York Trilogy, it represents the latest entry in this small press's New American Fiction Series.
A wrong number in the middle of the night ensnares Daniel Quinn (once a serious poet and essayist, now the pseudonymous author of pulp mysteries) into a case far more bizarre than any he's invented in his fictions. Peter Stillman's father, an insane scholar who kept his son in a room for nine years, is soon to be released from the sanitarium. Quinn's assignment is simple: Keep the old man away
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