Brandon Abrahams Summer 2008 Reading List

Explore Brandon Abrahams' Summer 2008 Reading List featuring top book picks and must-reads from 2008. Discover his curated selection of Abrahams' favorite summer reads!

Telex from Cuba Cover
Book

Telex from Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

Coming of age in mid-1950s Cuba where the local sugar and nickel production are controlled by American interests, Everly Lederer and KC Stites observe the indulgences and betrayals of the adult world and are swept up by the political underground and the revolt led by Fidel and Raul Castro. 75,000 first printing.
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ID: 0374522839
(Type: books)
Slumberland Cover
Book

Slumberland

by Paul Beatty

Hailed by "The New York Times" and the "Los Angeles Times" as one of the best writers of his generation, Beatty turns his incisive eye to man's search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world.
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ID: 1594489890
(Type: books)
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ID: 1897299370
(Type: books)
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ID: 0811216888
(Type: books)
The Savage Detectives Cover
Book

The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. National Bestseller New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances. A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
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ID: 0811217051
(Type: books)
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ID: 0805088601
(Type: books)
The Spies of Warsaw Cover
Book

The Spies of Warsaw

by Alan Furst

In 1937 Warsaw, on the eve of World War II, intelligence operatives on both sides of the forthcoming struggle wage their own espionage battle in a world of betrayal, intrigue, and abduction, including Colonel Jean-Franois Mercier, a decorated hero drawn into a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. 75,000 first printing.
Night Soldiers Cover
Book

Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin’s purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-creates the European world of 1934–45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand scale.
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ID: 0812976703
(Type: books)