Brightest Young Things

More than anything a lengthy love letter to New York City. The winter descriptions of setting are surreal, swathed in snowy cityscapes, plumed with steam columns and milky fog patches, covering things yet to be discovered. Peter Lake, the hero of the novel, feels that it's his mission to "stop time and bring back the dead." The dead specifically being the woman he loves. The cast of characters is as nuanced as Dickens' best efforts. Easily the most imaginative, expansive, and ethereal novel I've come across.

Essay for Men Haters
"S.C.U.M. Manifesto" - Valerie Solanos
Excerpt: "The male is a biological accident: the y(male) gene is an incomplete x(female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples." Yipes.

Book for Women Haters
Lady Chatterly's - DH Lawrence
Every novel by Lawrence characterizes females as annoying, unaware, and ornamental. He makes Henry James and Ernest Hemingway's portrayal of women look like Georgia O'Keefe day on Oprah during Breast Cancer Awareness month. Lawrence's language level is nice, but his dichotomy of 'men vs. women' is poorly executed due to his clear ignorance of the feminine psyche.

Book for the Over or Under Sexed
Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby
When Nick Hornby came to Politics & Prose several months ago, he described the inspiration for this novel to be the classic rock'n'roll star hypothetical : If your significant other had chance to sleep with one of their idols, would you give him/her a free pass? That's not what the novel explicitly explores, but nonetheless it's a fun read, delighting music nerds while studying three desperate characters in search of sex, friendship, and looove!

Book for the Cynical Monogamist
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
You might've already seen the adaptation of this amazing novel last year in the Sam Mendes American Beauty-redux piece, rehashing American suburban suckage, nobody getting what they want, and how marriage inevitably fails. Even if you've seen the movie I implore you to read the book. Harrowing and anguish-filled, sure, but it's healthy to suffer every now and then.

Book for the Hopeless Male Romantic
Peter Camenzind - Hermann Hesse

Almost all of Hesse's novels involve a young male at odds with modern society, grappling to find meaning, belonging, and love. Oh yes, innocence and naivete will be lost. If we knew one of these characters in real life we'd be quick to condescend and tongue cluck a man with such sorrowful longings (fuckin' emo kid). But who are you kidding, you know you're lonely. Or at least that's how horniness chooses to manifest itself.

Book for the Hopeless Female Romantic
This is a substantial genre. Just walk into any book store or library and head toward the rows of muscular, long haired men with airbrushed 8-packs cradling the woman we presume he'll soon mesmerize with chivalry, steamy shower sex, and money. But if you want something more "literary," go for Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Second best South American book about Stockholm Syndrome I've read.

Book for Manifested Latent Feelings
Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima
Are you a "straight" male that has a private longing for masculine beauty but find yourself embarrassed and confused about the emotions such introspections produce? Then this book is for you, or any priest you know.

Book for People in Healthy Relationships
Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner
So you're in love and you have little to no relationship anxiety. Great, the next step is to find amazing friends so the both of you can avoid having time to find flaws in each other that most certainly exist. This one's about finding pals who relate to your experiences, share your hopes and fears and weigh them with tender consideration, the sort of friends that can leave you smiling like a dog in the back of a pickup. For me the book is slightly annoying the way it exalts the life of academia, but it's refreshing to read a well written love story dedicated to friends and not lovers.

Book for Relationships That Always Go Wrong
Like Life - Lorrie Moore
This short story collection chronicles the lives of women whose romances wither, blister, or begin peeling. But Moore´s wonderful ability to color her stories with plenty of black humor quells tensions. The jaded main character of the collection's opener, "Two Boys," nonchalantly shepherds the reader closer to the void of relationship nihilism. Each story follows the same sardonic suit, delighting the reader's twisted fascination with watching things fall apart.

Book for Relationships That Always Go Right
A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
Pechorin, the anti-hero everyone in the novel is fixated with, is a pee-yomp. And like any great mac, he doesn't really give a fuck that people admire him, or what they think of him in general. The way I've categorized this book is a bit misleading, but explaining so would ruin an excellent read. Although it's technically a novel, it's broken into five episodic sections with a total of three different narrators.

Book for Sexual Predators

Lolita - Vladmir NabokovYou sick, sick fuck. Or maybe we're the delinquents for reading the book and enjoying it. The first quarter of this book contains some of the finest passages I've ever come across. Poetry drips from the lips of 'ol Vladdy-Nab. It tapers off in the second half, but still, it's a classic, and you should (have already) read it.

Book for Sado-Masochists
The Piano Teacher - Elfriede Jelinek
After seeing the supremely fucked up movie version by Michael Haneke, I had the inexplicable urge to further understand the main character's macabre motivations. The novel follows a sexually repressed piano teacher that slowly succumbs to the seductions of her most talented student, only the homework she assigns him will leave your brows knotted and mouth agape. I especially love books whose primary subject involves music. It's potential for linguistic malleability and creativity can take the reader to beautiful abstractions, which is what this novel does so well, striking a provocative dichotomy with its hideous sexuality.

This isn't a Chuck Klosterman piece where reality is filtered through pop culture references. It's about a man living in New Orleans - which is depicted with stunning accuracy - after the Korean War and can only find meaning in life at the cinema or in books. A lot of Percy's other work is darkly existential, but this one is Kierkegaard-lite, so put away your Zoloft. Above all it's about the struggle to truly connect with someone beyond superficial levels, not merely sharing similar interests in arts and entertainment.

What's great about this book is that it's part biography, part self-help, though not in a syrupy, cheertastic manner that projects its world as if you´re skipping through fields of twittering cartoon bluebirds with Uncle Remus (plateauing on the 5th plane of existence via NyQuil purple drank can achieve this, btw). Instead it focuses on how miserable Marcel Proust was during his life time: his poor self-esteem, cynicism, waning health, and searing envy of James Joyce. You get the sense that all artistic geniuses suffer from massive insecurities, or were insane, drug abusers, communist, sexually confused, or suffered a cluster of any or all of said afflictions. It's a book that will make you feel grounded rather than attempt to loft you into the clouds. And with any hope it will inspire you to read Swann's Way.

Without knowing anything about the novel, you would have never guessed that this is Roy's débutante effort. The prose is rich and exotic, yet familiar. It's equal parts comic and tragic. The locales may be unfamiliar to Western audiences, the traditions only half understood; but Roy keeps your understanding tethered through the lens of two experience-ignorant children. And experience is a demon bitch. Roy knows that it´s impossible to escape from our past, yet that's what her characters attempt over and over.

Understatement: I'm not the world's biggest poetry enthusiast. Much of it comes across as purposefully obscured and pretentious. However the simple language of Rose instantly evokes understanding and pathos. You'll marvel at the tapestry of emotion that unravels as you move from verse to verse. His diction is so straightforward that he might fool you into thinking each poem was written off the cuff, but rest assured each word was weighed with meticulous consideration. Lee Young-Li explores love at all levels: familial, platonic, sexual, and natural. He especially exalts nature. It's very elemental, and there's a holy, reverential respect for family and natural metaphors.

How do you express something as subjective and abstract as love? No need to when one hundred and fifty other people try and do it for you. The great thing about this collection is the variety of context in which people are writing. You have awkward, initial advances, the passionate adulation of married couples, bemoaning love lost, and everything in between. It makes for a great "coffee table book" because it's difficult to digest as a straight read. Keep it around and pick it up at irregular intervals to relish letters on an individual level. Shapiro shows great discretion in selecting letters that lend an element of truth and understanding to human experience.

I'm not the most avid reader of non-fiction, but I do stick a toe into the pool of exposition every now and then.

Everyone wants sex and power. This book collects different techniques of seduction that have been used throughout the ages. I was reading some of the Amazon reviews of this book to refresh my memory, and apparently a lot of people "use this book for evil." What more of a selling point do you need than that?