Staff Favorites/ Who & What 2

Who We Are & What We're Reading

Maple Street Staff & Books We Love – Jennifer's Favorites

Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore (fiction)
Lorrie Moore is one of the best short story writers penning characters today. And her novels are great, too. She has a dark, dry humor and an uncanny ability to really know the characters she writes about.

Love Warps the Mind a Little by John Dufresne (fiction)
An unemployed aspiring writer, his dog and his typewriter are thrown out of the house when his wife realizes he’s having an affair. Again. He moves in with his mistress, but is always on the prowl for a girlfriend. Witty, touching and, ultimately, a redemptive story.

Big Bad Love by Larry Brown (fiction)
Larry Brown knows how to tell a story. These drunk skirt-chasers are not characters you’d think you’d like. But you will.

Anagrams by Lorrie Moore (fiction)
I want to have written this book!

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman (essay)
This is a necessity for anyone who loves books. And it doesn’t hurt to be fanatical about grammar. As Cynthia Ozick says, Fadiman’s essays "carry the golden weight of art."

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (armchair travel)
Strange and charming. Nobody writes like Chatwin. This story begins with his hunt for a piece of Brontosaurus skin like the one his grandmother had when he was little. He is serious.

The Archivist by Martha Cooley (fiction)
This was my favorite novel of summer ’98, and I think about it often. It is a beautiful and sad story of preservation, lost love and mental illness.

Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera (fiction)
Read this. Read him. Read anything by him. Read everything by him. This is what fiction should be.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (fiction)
I never dreamed of reading this book until author after author (Richard Ford, Richard Bausch–maybe it’s the name!) that I heard speak kept recommending it. At a talk he gave in New Orleans, Richard Ford said over and over, "Read Dick Yates." I read him. They were right. What a good book!

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy (essay/memoir)
On a national radio broadcast, Lillian Hellman said of Mary McCarthy, "Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’" Regardless, the essays are well-written and intriguing.

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