the mediastore
the book department...expand your mind and learn by example
Whether you just want a good book to read or something to complement your writing, we've got it. The book department is divided into three sections: modern classics, recent favorites, and anthologies. The classics have stood the test of time and our favorites are either just fun to read or quickly on the way to becoming a classic in their own right. The anthologies, on the other hand, are collections of the best short stories that have been published in the past year, and are designed to give you a glimpse at the kind of writing that not only gets published but wins awards and critical acclaim. After all, the best way to learn is by example.
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 modern classics
1. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
Though born into a privileged life, Siddhartha still finds himself unhappy. This is the spiritual story of a search for enlightenment and the meaning of life, things that can only be found through experience and the conquering of the self. learn more at amazon.com
2. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller. learn more at amazon.com
3. Howl & Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg published this volume of poetry which broke so many social taboos that copies were impounded as obscene, and the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested. Ginsberg went on from this beginning to become a cultural icon of sixties radicalism. This work's seminal place in the culture is indicated in Czeslaw Milosz's poetic tribute to Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality". learn more at amazon.com
4. The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy
The Arabian Nights is just one of the many classic mythological tales that inspire writers down through the ages, by influencing plot, characters or metaphor and allusions. This version is a new translation--no Victorian English to deal with here. Better yet, it's not a sanitized kids' version--this is the uncensored 1001 Nights as it was meant to be. learn more at amazon.com
5. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion. learn more at amazon.com
6. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. It limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. learn more at amazon.com
7. Night, by Elie Wiesel
The protagonist is a scholarly, pious teenager racked with guilt at having survived the Holocaust. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. learn more at amazon.com
8. Twenty Love Poems: And a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda
This collection of poems, first published by Neruda at the age of 19 in 1924, caused something of a scandal because of its frank and intense sexuality. It later became one of Neruda's best-loved works, selling two million copies by the 1960s. Why? With image after arresting image, Neruda charts the oceanic movements of passion. learn more at amazon.com
9. Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre
An existential story of a man coming to terms with the subjective reality of his life. The protagonist, Roquetin, gets "the nausea" as he begins to realize that he must face the idea that in everything existence precedes essence, or that he, as a man, is capable of and responsible for defining everything he sees; that there is no essence, be it to objects, feelings or memories that is anything but what a subjective individual makes of them. The Nausea is a visceral, undigested realization that becomes less and less physical as Roquetin begins to accept this realization and live his life accordingly.
learn more at amazon.com
10. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
This is Bradbury's best-known novel. The science fiction tale concerns censorship and anti-intellectualism, carried on in an alternate society that conducts huge book burnings as part of the social agenda. It is a spooky and yet uplifting book. learn more at amazon.com
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recent favorites
1. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. learn more at amazon.com
2. The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
This inspirational fable by Brazilian author Coelho has been a runaway bestseller throughout Latin America. The charming tale of Santiago, a shepherd boy, who dreams of seeing the world, is compelling in its own right, but gains resonance through the many lessons Santiago learns during his adventures. He journeys from Spain to Morocco in search of worldly success, and eventually to Egypt, where a fateful encounter with an alchemist brings him at last to self-understanding and spiritual enlightenment. learn more at amazon.com
3. 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, this novel follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism. learn more at amazon.com
4. Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, by Billy Collins
Collins, that rarest of creatures, a truly popular living poet, is currently poet laureate, an appointment well celebrated with this fertile gathering of nearly 100 poems...Mischievous and deeply attentive, inventive and grateful, Collins moves stealthily toward the essentials, quietly celebrating the simple and reflective life and gently reminding readers to respect and treasure our species' tenuous place on the great thrumming web of life. learn more at amazon.com
5. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
Literary self-consciousness and technical invention mix unexpectedly in this engaging memoir by Eggers who subverts the conventions of the memoir by questioning his memory, motivations and interpretations so thoroughly that the form itself becomes comic. Despite the layers of ironic hesitation, the reader soon discerns that the emotions informing the book are raw and, more importantly, authentic. learn more at amazon.com
6. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
This novel is narrated from heaven by murdered 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who watches life continue without her in the weeks following her death. With compassion, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie sees her loved ones pass through grief and begin to mend. Her father embarks on a risky quest to snare her killer, her sisterundertakes a feat of remarkable daring, and the boy Susie cares for moves on. learn more at amazon.com
7. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, a 30-year-old medievalist who lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. learn more at amazon.com
8. Live From Death Row, by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Once a prominent radio reporter, Mumia Abu-Jamal is now in a Pennsylvania prison awaiting his state-sactioned execution. In 1982 he was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer after a trial many have criticized as profoundly biased. This is a collection of his prison writings--an impassioned yet unflinching account of the brutalities and humiliations of prison life. It is also a scathing indictment of racism and political bias in the American judicial system that is certain to fuel the controversy surrounding the death penalty and freedom of speech. learn more at amazon.com
9. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
A witty and sometimes touching story of two talented Jewish cousins--one a writer, the other an artist. At the beginning of WWII they collaborate and create comic book action heroes who battle Hitler and his minions. Despite all the wit, there is some serious stuff lurking below the surface and human tragedy around the corner. learn more at amazon.com
10. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
Born at the stroke of midnight at the precise moment of India's independence in 1947, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the pess and welcomed by the Prime Minister. But this coincidence of birth has consequences Saleem is not prepared for: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other "midnight's children"--all born within an hour of India's independence--and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out dangers others can't perceive. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's biography is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious. learn more at amazon.com
11. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our private actions, but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. learn more at amazon.com
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anthologies
1. Bum Rush the Page, Tony Medina, Editor
Solid volume of smart and exhilarating poetry by poets from diverse backgrounds who participate in poetry slams across the country. Poems by well-known front-liners are interleaved with poems by emerging poets forging dramatic new forms to express outrage and sorrow over the endless cascade of tragedies born of racism and greed. Here are poems about sex, love, family, poverty, police brutality, Hollywood's perpetuation of stereotypes, and the willful blindness of Washington. Poets of the body, the home, the neighborhood, and the world-at-large, Medina and Rivera's contributors are passionate, witty, wise, socially conscious, and artistically adventurous. learn more at amazon.com
2. The Pushcart Prize XXVII: The Best of the Small Presses, 2003 Edition
The Pushcart Prize awards the best literary work published in the small press over the year. This annual volume showcases the award-winners. learn more at amazon.com
3. Censored 2003: The Top 25 Censored Stories, Peter Phillips, Editor
Although its table of contents reads like a list of stories from any issue of The Onion, every one of the articles is true. With chapter titles like "United States' Policies in Columbia Support Mass Murder," "U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water System" and "Bush Appoints Former Criminals to Key Government Roles," the collection covers important news stories that were censored for various reasons. The articles, selected by Peter Phillips and Project Censored, range from an explanation of how NAFTA has ruined rural farmers in North America to a look at how the federal government bails out failing private prisons. Cartoons by Tom Tomorrow are sprinkled throughout. learn more at amazon.com
4. Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, Billy Collins, Editor
A 180-degree turn implies a turning back--in this case, to poetry. A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance. learn more at amazon.com
4. Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times
Contributors to this intimate, chatty collection range from literary icons Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, and Alice Walker to writers who are not yet household names. What emerges is a sense of the mysterious way in which fiction chooses those with not merely good stories to tell but dedication to the physical act of writing itself. learn more at amazon.com
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We Need You!
We're looking for your favorite books! Have anything that you think other Xenith readers would be interested in? Then send an e-mail to centaurus7@aol.com with the title and author's name and we'll post it in our Reader's Choice section.
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