Jennifer's Picks

An extraordinary novel of love, war, and art, based on the turbulent real-life romance of legendary photojournalists Gerda Taro and Robert Capa

Artists, Jews, nonconformists, exiles. Gerta Pohorylle meets AndrÉ Friedmann in Paris in 1935 and is drawn to his fierce dedication to justice, journalism, and the art of photography. Assuming new names, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa travel together to Spain, Europe’s most harrowing war zone, to document the rapidly intensifying turmoil of the Spanish Civil War. In the midst of the peril and chaos of brutal conflict, a romance for the ages is born, marked by passion and recklessness . . . until tragedy intervenes.

Already published to international acclaim, Waiting for Robert Capa is an exhilarating tale of art and love—and a moving tribute to all those who risk their lives to document the world’s violent transformations.

We often think of fringe culture as being not just the demographical exception, but als0 peripheral or experimental – edgy. The setting for Keith Scribner’s novel The Oregon Experiment, out in mid-June from Knopf, challenges these conceptions. Scanlon and Naomi Pratt, transplants from New York, arrive in the fictional Douglas, Oregon. Douglas is a town where the counter-culture of anarchists, secessionists, and neo-hippy single moms has become the norm, and mainstream is the new weird.

The writing is charged, urgent, sensual to the core. Scribner’s character development is so strong and convincing that spending time with this book has changed my sensory perception of the world around me. Through impassioned and acute writing, we don’t just envision the scene in Douglas, we are there.

Though set in Oregon, the themes and sensuality of The Oregon Experiment are universal, and readers anywhere will relate to the deep characters and lush description of setting and culture. I don’t say this lightly: I’ll be reading this book again within the year.

 A beautiful novel with insightful character development.  Fallenberg writes about eighty-five year old Teo, a retired world-renowned ballet choreographer and Vivi, a waitress half his age.  They meet in Tel Aviv and the sense of place is very strong in this intimate novel.  Their lives change as their friendship and relationship causes them to confront their individual pasts and histories.  Stunning.

 I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe for a minute, and I'm not really a 'humor person'.  Laughter is good for you so, apparently, is this book.

Translated from the German (original title Gut gegen Nordwind).  It's a fun love story of sorts - it's deeper than you'd think but has a fun format: nothing but emails between two strangers.  A fun beach read for those who don't like to actually read about the beach. :)  

It's a virtual romance that begins by chance. When Leo mistakenly receives e-mails from a stranger named Emmi, he replies--and Emmi writes back.  Soon, secrets are shared, sparks fly, and erotic tension simmers. Even though Emmi is married, it seems only a matter of time till they meet. But will their feelings survive a real-life encounter?  And, if so-what then? Funny and fast-paced, Love Virtually offers plenty of twists, turns, and satisfaction.

 The 100th book published by my favorite publisher!  Europa released Alisa Bronsky's latest novel early in May, and I just love it.  Rosa Achmetowna is a main character that is darkly hilarious, only because we don't actually know her.  A must read!

When Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its assessment of her characters’ drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Her name became an adjective: Beattiesque. Subtle, wry, and unnerving, she is a master observer of the unraveling of the American family, and also of the myriad small occurrences and affinities that unite us. Her characters, over nearly four decades, have moved from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace.

The stories in this collection run the gamut from playful to tragic, candid to enigmatic, but they all have one thing in common: they are no more than 25 words long.  Editor Robert Smartwood termed them "hint fiction" because the few chosen words suggest a larger, more complex chain of events.  The 125 gemlike stories in this collection come from such notable contributors as Joyce Carol Oates, Ha Jin, Peter Straub, and Janes Frey, as well as emerging writers.

For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dis­missed these stories—waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics. But in the past few decades, as a startling number of ships vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers realized something scary was brewing in the planet’s waters. They found their proof in February 2000, when a British research vessel was trapped in a vortex of impossibly mammoth waves in the North Sea—including several that approached 100 feet.

As scientists scramble to understand this phenomenon, others view the giant waves as the ultimate challenge. These are extreme surfers who fly around the world trying to ride the ocean’s most destructive monsters. The pioneer of extreme surfing is the legendary Laird Hamilton, who, with a group of friends in Hawaii, figured out how to board suicidally large waves of 70 and 80 feet. Casey follows this unique tribe of peo­ple as they seek to conquer the holy grail of their sport, a 100­foot wave.

In this mesmerizing account, the exploits of Hamilton and his fellow surfers are juxtaposed against scientists’ urgent efforts to understand the destructive powers of waves—from the tsunami that wiped out 250,000 people in the Pacific in 2004 to the 1,740-foot-wave that recently leveled part of the Alaskan coast.

Deep in the wilderness of the Laurentian mountain range lives a community of troubled souls. There's Lila, the landlady of the forest who shoulders a terrible guilt; the young, beautiful and carefree Violette, who bears deep childhood scars; and the boy Jeremie, who whispers his confessions to frogs and ants in the forest. There's Claire who writes murder scenes, and Simon, who cares for his brother's son while pining for various women. Each character has come to this forgiving Eden to escape some private trauma; forced to interact through loneliness and proximity, they learn each other's secrets, with stunning consequences. At once tender and uplifting, Wildlives is a beautiful novel about the nature of beauty and its infinite power to heal.

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Rene, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Rene is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. 
Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. 
Paloma and Rene hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Rene's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.