Irresistable Spring Picks At Red Hill

Despite the harsh rains of March, and the lingering colds of February, warm and languorous days are right around the corner when the fever for companionable books will be overwhelming.
To assist you with your impending spring fever, I'd like to recommend some invigorating spring titles that are for sale to the epicurious at Red Hill.

1. Little, Big by John Crowley

How can fated love and apocalyptic portents, secret histories and family dramas, fairies and lost souls, the Seen and the Unseen meld so lushly into one indescribable American fantasy epic? I don't know how Crowley did it -- but this is one book that will make you want to stalk the denizens of the invisible world, to take road trips to abandoned glass factories and ruined temples, to take up the study of forgotten lore and, in general, to renew your commitment to mystery and wonder in all their hybrid forms. Easily, one of my FAVORITE NOVELS EVER.

2. Tales From Neveryon by Samuel R. Delany

One of the most imposing intellects in American letters, Delany has tackled every genre imaginable and with the Neveryon series has created his very own. This first book in the series is a collection of connected tales about a city long ago, and far away, in which an escaped slave undergoes a series of adventures and mishaps that educate him (and the beguiled reader) about the contingencies and wiles of civilization. Delany has a startling way of packing so much meaning into every sentence and this is a book to be savored for the subtle and often beautiful information that is so meticulously conveyed. The story, itself, is an amusing, complex, often comical interrogation of what constitutes the Civilized World using a blend of fantasy and fairy tale modes. You will be enchanted AND educated AND refreshingly perplexed.

3. Collected Poems Of Anne Sexton by Anne Sexton

For something completely different, it's a true find to stumble upon a USED copy of Sexton's splendidly visceral and luminous poetry. If you ask me, her Love Poems are perfect for those spring days when you want to feel your blood pump a little more maniacally, your instincts sharpen in sync with the pungent smells in the air of profligate life blooming everywhere. Her poetry is a dark tonic for dark times, and they shine a comforting light on our all-too-common afflictions.

4. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen

Most people know Cohen as the preeminent songwriter of his generation, responsible for a whole slew of "sad, drunken songs" that you play during a breakup. Not many people know he wrote one of the weirdest and most spiritedly obscene novels in recent times. This is definitely high brow beach reading for the neo-bohemian, absinthe-swilling set, perhaps on a black sand beach off Sardinia while wearing a steampunk bikini. There are scenes in here that you will never forget, torrents of language that you will be chanting in late night bar disasters that spill out into the perfumed alleyways of your post-industrial cityscape of choice.

5. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

These stories are acidic elegies. Drugs and bad decisions and bad jobs. Books and lunatic obsessions. Art and death. Sex and dirty sidewalks and abject curiosities. These stories exist to make you feel better about your own perks and pathologies. And they are written beautifully -- like poetry. They are the equivalent of your best and most flawed friend sitting down with you at a dive you know you should be tired of, swapping tales of springtime mayhem, with voices that are non-judgmental, voices that love you despite the holes in your pants and the stains on your shoes.

6. Selected Poems Of H.D. by H.D.

I must champion more poetry -- because Spring is the season of poems! Especially these poems which seem suffused with spring light. H.D., also known as Hilda Doolittle, was the muse of everyone from Ezra Pound to D.H. Lawrence to, for a brief period, Sigmund Freud. One of the founders of Imagism, her output is larger and more various than people would think. She evokes the natural world in stark and lively lyrics, in hymns to ancient feelings, primeval repositories of sensation. Seas, gardens, stones, fruits -- and the ancient deities that are contained within them -- all comes to life in her work. Her poems feel like they were written ages ago on the brittle rims of tide pools. Beautiful, enchanting stuff!

7. The Astonished Man by Blaise Cendrars

Everyone's favorite one-armed poet-adventurer from World War I wrote a series of "autobiographical novels" that contained SO much incident and poetry and fervor that nobody knew what to call them. They were hybrid monsters of indestructible life. This book, one of the four in this odd genre that he wrote near the end of his life, is all about gypsies and road trips and books and ruins and strange characters. It's also about outer space, solitude and the fate of the soul. The book is structured like a mosaic of dream and association, episode and reverie -- something you can get lost in and that will make you want to examine your own life in a similarly kaleidoscopic way.