Hello! Welcome to the first WORD Recommends email. We'll be sending you one email a month filled to the brim with book recommendations for books new and old, paper and electronic, awesome and awesomer. 

You've probably heard about many of our new favorites, like The Tiger's Wife, Blood, Bones, and Butter, and The Pale King. And while we recommend them all, we'd also like to draw your attention to some books we love that you might not have seen yet:    

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier. From Jenn: "A stunning meditation on pain and beauty. After reading, I walked around expecting everyone I saw to glow. Dark and bright, scary and uplifting. READ! IT!"

The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry. A woman with undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome loses her parents and fights with her sister about what happens next in their lives. She also accidentally discovers she can summon ghosts by cooking -- which sounds gimmicky, but isn't at all. An affecting and well-told novel; plus if you are a foodie you might die of happy over the recipes involved. Read her interview (part 1 and part 2)on our blog to get to know more about Jael and the book. 

Funeral For A Dog by Thomas Pletzinger. Imagine our surprise when we found that aside from being really good, the book mentioned Greenpoint's own Enid's just a few pages in! We couldn't pass up the chance to share it, so we sent it out in our WORD To Your Mailbox program this month. The New York Times Book Review agreed, saying: "The book has known such success not because it is in any clear literary lineage, nor because it discusses extreme states and epochal events, but simply because it is brilliantly constructed and finely written."

Born To Run by Christopher McDougall. Okay, okay, you've probably heard about this book before. Probably from our manager Stephanie, who has not shut up about it for the last year. But it's finally in paperback, so you no longer have a single excuse not to read it! It's an adventure story, it's a sports story, it's a science story, and it's a book that can literally change your life, if you let it. 

Press Here by Herve Tullet. This goofy book is just as enchanting to kids as adults. Press the yellow circle in the middle of the page, and like magic, there are two circles on the second page! So much fun.   

And don't forget, it's Mother's Day in a few weeks. We've got a bunch of great cards to send to Mom, and if she's the book-loving type (which she probably is, since we hear it's genetic) here are some recommendations:

At WORD, we try to love books with a few miles on them just as much as the shiny new ones. In this section, we'll highlight a few books you might have missed the first time around:   

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. This strange book is much loved by several WORD staffers, so we're excited to be discussing it with WORD book group next month. But even if you're not the book group sort, we still think you'd love this clever and quirky novel. Set on a fictional island that is losing the use of one letter after another due to their devotion to Nevin Nollop (author of the phrase "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog") and a totalitarian government, this epistolary novel is both fun and awe-inspiring.

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sarah MacLean. With the release of the final book in this series (Eleven Scandals To Start To Win A Duke's Heart) right around the corner, there's no better time to start this racy Regency series, one of our most loved romances in the store. Once you're part of the world of the St. John brothers, you'll wish you too were a member of the ton. This is the book that made Stephanie into a romance reader; it'll do the same thing to you. 

Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs! by Sandra Boynton. A new favorite of Adrian (Christine's two-year-old son, our number one source for kids' book recommendations). These are some crazy dinosaurs: they play volleyball, they dance, they're every color under the sun. And this might be a book that you wouldn't mind reading over and over and over. Well, you'll like it at least through the three hundredth read. 

The Days of Abandonment, by Elana Ferrante. The one word Christine always uses to talk about this book is INTENSE. It's a journey into the brain of a woman whose husband has left her for someone else, and her slow spiral into insanity as she deals with the loss. You will feel as if if you're right there in it with her, experiencing every violent impulse and desperate thought over the course of just a few days. It's a quick read and just when you think that you won't be able to handle her insanity anymore, it's done. Written by one of Italy's most popular novelists, whose real identity is actually a mystery. It's one to check out, for sure.