Staff Picks: Brad's Ten Favorite Books
 Each month, we ask one employee to tell us about their ten favorite books. This list is no holds barred -- any genre, any size -- whatever they really want to talk about. The only restriction is that the books still be in print so that we can help you find them if they sound good.This month's presenter is Brad. |
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 Gravity's Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon  "Pynchon writes sentences like novels and puts one right after the other to make a book so huge one wonders how it fits on a single shelf much less inside a single volume on 750 measly pages." |
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 The Portable Dorothy Parkeredited by Brendan Gill "Cheater's choice. Laments for the Living and After Such Pleasures, Dorthy Parker's short-story collections, and Enough Rope, Sunset Gun and Death and Taxes, her poetry volumes, plus uncollected material, all bound together in one little book that should be placed in the bottom drawer of every hotel room in America." |
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 Wisconsin Death Tripby Michael Lesy "Lesy assembles a beautiful and terrifying document of life and madness in the rural, turn of the centruy American midwest." |
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 Master and Margaritaby Mikhail Bulgakov "This brilliant novel features a man-sized, cigar-smoking cat and a really good passage where the beautiful and faithful Margarita flies naked on a broomstick in the moonlight and vandalizes a critic's apartment, and these aren't even the best parts." |
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 The Real Cool Killersby Chester Himes "Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones make Shaft and Superfly look like the Hardy Boys as Himes creates scenes and plotlines that are fantastic and outlandish yet somehow still gritty and authentic." |
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 The Long Goodbyeby Raymond Chandler "Chandler at full throttle, Marlowe as hero by default, no better than the world he lives in, covered in the same muck as everyone else but still striving for honor, or something, surviving not so much by his wits as by his ability to take a punch." |
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 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrichby Philip K. Dick "Late-Berkeleyite and paranoid visionary P.K. Dick's (the man who brought you Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? aka Blade Runner), exploration of the mysteries of transcendence and eternity disguised as a hipster/ dopesploitation novel." |
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 Where Water Comes Together with Other Waterby Raymond Carver "Poems by the one-time king of the short story, that seem to almost materialize out of the air onto the page." |
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 Three by Flannery O'Connorby Flannery O'Connor "Another cheater. Three nearly perfect short novels in one little book." |
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 We Have Always Lived in the Castleby Shirley Jackson "Sweet and scary, tender and creepy, an enchanting coming of age tale of terror by the author of The Lottery." |
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