Word’s pick: “Girl in a Band” by Kim Gordon
Quintessential cool chick Kim Gordon shares her life story in this very revealing and inspiring memoir of growing up in California, her band, marriage, and almost everything else a fan like myself has always wanted to know. “Girl in a Band” makes a rock goddess like Kim more relatable while making the reader feel more powerful. She really is just that cool.
— Kirby Schulz, Word [126 Franklin St. at Milton Street in Greenpoint, (718) 383–0096, www.wordbrooklyn.com].
Greenlight Bookstore’s pick: “The Musical Brain” by Cesar Aira
Cesar Aira’s “The Musical Brain” is a prism through which we’re allowed to glimpse our reality as a dream. Or was it the other way around? Or was it both at the same time? Whichever way you look at it, Aria’s stories meet you there — his narratives zip along at the speed of dreams and leave you grasping for the details after they’ve passed because, somehow, they all just seemed so real.
— Jarrod Annis, Greenlight Bookstore [686 Fulton St. between S. Elliott Place and S. Portland Avenue in Fort Greene, (718) 246–0200, www.greenlightbookstore.com].
Community Bookstore’s pick: “Dublinesque” by Enrique Vila-Matas
Just before Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” an aging Spanish publisher dreams of lying on the pavement outside a Dublin pub, drunk and mourning the death of literature. Thus starts Enrique Vila-Matas’s “Dublinesque,” a love-letter to Irish literature. Filled with drunken ramblings, essayistic asides on the modernist masters, and the mysterious specter of Beckett, Vila-Matas’s singular novel illustrates a life plagued by literature sickness. Odd stuff indeed, but for those of us readers who stare up from one book at a shelf full of others — who find ourselves literature sick — it’s uncut pleasure.
— Hal Hlavinka, Community Bookstore [43 Seventh Ave. between Carroll Street and Garfield Place in Park Slope, (718) 783–3075, www.commu
