Pegasus Oakland Staff Picks

-Anderson Lake is a Calorie Man, working undercover for AgriGen to find any foothold for their bio-engineered foodstuffs in the kingdom of Thailand.

-Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, a self-righteous, headstrong captain in the 'white shirts', a mostly-corrupt organization tasked with guarding Thailand from foreign influence.

-Hock Seng, a 'yellow card', refugee survivor of Malayan pogroms, struggling to regain everything lost to him at any cost.

-Emiko-the windup girl-an artificial human grown specifically to be a pleasure toy but now abandoned to this violent, dangerous kingdom, whose very existence threatens to bring them all down.

 

This is well-written, high-concept science fiction with lively, compelling characters and a satisfying plot. Highly recommended! -cm-

Shirley Jackson is by no means an obscure author. She wrote the short story “The Lottery” which has been read by nearly every high school student since the 70’s and has been satirized in everything from McSweeney’s to South Park. She also wrote the novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” which spawned one very good and one very bad film. She has all of the major requirements to allow her into the Great American Writers Club: film adaptations, term papers, bouts with censors, a Simpsons episode. However, I still believe that she is one of the most underrated American authors of the 20th century and easily the most underrated of the Southern gothic genre: darker than Carson McCullers, funnier than Flannery O’Conner. Take all the quirky charm of contemporary authors like Miranda July or Aimee Bender, mix it with Patricia Highsmith’s misanthropy, and let it steep for a few years in the Grey Garden of documentary film fame and you have “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.”

 

*Bonus points for giving this to the goth teenager in your life: it’s short, easy to read, and speaks to the inner creepy kid in all of us. Kind of a “Secret Garden” for the eyeliner and fishnet set.

Capote so elegantly blends fantasy and reality that it can be hard to pick out which of his stories in this collection are fiction or non-fiction, even (or perhaps particularly) when he's writing autobiographical snippets. Music for Chameleons, written in one of Capote's last spurts of creativity after his well documented ruination after writing 'In Cold Blood' contains one of the best artifacts of American crime writing and small town portraiture there is, "Handcarved Coffins," and many other gems besides.

They vary widely in subject matter, ranging from Capote going about the never ending business of refining and crystallizing his own legend, to the humidly atmospheric title story, where he sinks the reader into an afternoon spent under the interrogating gaze of an aged and beautiful Martinique woman and the wild chameleons who creep into her salon, hiding away from the sun to the sound of Mozart. -LMH-

Every story in Highsmith's "Eleven" is a mini-masterpiece of claustrophobic apprehension, each in its own way perfect, beautiful, and terrifying. -cm-

Blood Meridian is an American masterpiece, biblical in scope and language. The setting is based on the historical Texas-Mexico border in the 1850's. What was happening there in the 1850's, you ask? The wholesale slaughter of Indians for their scalps which could then be turned in for silver.

This book traces the fortunes of the Kid who falls in with a group of marauders headed by the Judge, a seven foot tall bald man who is well-versed in philosophy and the natural sciences. He is also the devil incarnate.

"And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys."

-bb-

Ghostwritten, like his later novel Cloud Atlas, succeeds because of how well Mitchell is able to inhabit the lives and voices of his characters. Different people from different cultures, living under different circumstances (with one character even existing in a different state of being), all joined together by the most tenuous and subtle of threads, and all hurtling towards one particular moment in time. A timely, thought-provoking meditation on the interconnectedness of human lives, Ghostwritten pushes David Mitchell to the top of my “must read” list.

Clementine is a good book.  Sometimes life just isn’t fair, especially when you have a brother who didn’t get stuck with a food name. 

     Besides, it’s not Clementine’s fault if she gets in trouble all the time. --Josie

 

Josie has read this book and its sequels over and over and over.  I’m a fan of Marla Frazee’s sweet illustrations too.   --Eve (Josie’s mom) 

I admit it’s a bit of a headscratcher that the parents’ threat to their misbehaving son is they’ll get him a blue whale. But maybe it makes perfect sense to a kid that having the responsibility of caring for a blue whale is a terrible headache because my 5-yr-old just loves this book.      And really anything Adam Rex puts his pen to is genius.  We just adore him around here.  Just look at these pictures!  –-ES