Liz HIGHLY recommends...

Liz highly, highly, HIGHLY recommends Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li.

Please, trust me, this is an extraordinary book. An epiphany. I have read many wonderful books this year, but none compares to this book. (Well, The Changeling, by Kenzaburo Oe, comes close.)

Yiyun Li is a great author, and I loved her novel Vagrants, but this book of her short shroties is even better, and that is saying a lot. The beauty of her writing moves me to tears. It just doesn't get better than this.

Please read this book. If you want to know more, come in the store and ask me.

Thanks,

Liz

Liz Recommends...

"Le Grand Fromage" (p. 105, The Hilliker Curse) a.k.a. James Ellroy, is trop grand fromage for a signing at Chevalier's, the bookstore he stole from as a teenager. Nevertheless and in spite of, I'm going to recommend his new book, The Hilliker Curse, to all the James Ellroy fans in the neighborhood. Especially interesting if you've read Blood's a Rover.

If you're not yet a fan, read his brilliant memoir, My Dark Places. Then read his novels, and finally you'll be ready for The Hilliker Curse, his (between novels) obsession about the women in his life. You might want to skip the last obsequious chapters about Erika, Ellroy's current passion.

I would also like to recommend (even more hightly) two other books. One is The Changeling, a Japanese novel by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by Deborah Beohm. Read this and you will understand why Oe won the Nobel prize.

The other is The Villain, a Japanese mystery novel by Shuichi Yushida, translated by Phillip Gabriel. Although Yushida is well known in Japan, this is his first novel to be translated into English.

We also just got in Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World, by Gil Marks. Although it's not a new cookbook, it's a fascinating one. Come by and check it out.

-Liz

Signing with Gary R. Austin

Gary R. Austin will be signing copies of his new book Murder in the Pigsty: A Southern Family's Story this Saturday, September 11th, from 1-3 pm.

Murder in the Pigsty is set on a rural farm in Arkansas in 1956, where four teenage siblings are paying the obligatory visit to their grandparents and their adult uncle Romey who has Down Syndrome.

The vacation seems as though it will be the same as the last one and the one before that. But the arrival of an aunt and uncle and cousin makes things more interesting, and brings a long-held secret to light.

With the discovery of buried human remains, the story unfolds into one of dark secrets, assault, deception, lies, dead bodies, ghosts and murders, affectin the lives of the family members forever.