Each month, Green Apple selects a brand-new book that we love and recommend unconditionally.  In fact, we guarantee you'll love the book--if not, we'll refund your money.

Since we know you like to laugh, we have produced an amusing video to accompany this month's selection.  If you like it, pass it on.

This month's book is a first novel by an ex-SF writer.  Her earlier collection of short stories (How to Breathe Underwater) was highly lauded, and her debut novel, The Invisible Bridge is also receiving wonderful reviews, like this and this. 

Here's Samantha's "shelf-talker": 

It is hard to list all the ways in which this ambitious novel (set in Paris & Hungary before & during WWII) succeeds. It is a sweeping historical account (I swear I kept thinking of Anna Karenina as I read) grounded in what is, at its core, a love story.

To try to do justice to its long and looping plot would be to sell it short, so suffice it to say that it's the best book I've read in at least a year (and I read a lot of books) and that it manages to be both thoroughly engaging and important, with a capital I. I'm in awe of Orringer's talents as a story teller. And now I'm just gushing.  You will, too.

Convinced yet?  Buy the book by clicking here.

June 3: Glorious World Cup with Alan Black & David Sterry
Join us in welcoming the editors of this unorthodox guide to the world's summer obsession for 2010. The teams, the fans, the goals, the saves, the divas, the divers, the myths, the madness--they're all part of the world-wide spectacle that is soccer's ultimate tournament, and they're all here in this turbo�charged guide. Packed with trivia, tall tales, stats, quizzes, and photos. 7pm at Green Apple.  Click here for more.

June 10: The Renegade Sportsman by Zach Dundas
You could call this book a first-hand account from the DIY underbelly
of American sports, or a report on a transformative grassroots
movement, or just a particularly weird take on athletics in general. 7pm at Green Apple.  Click here for more.  (Beer will likely be involved.)

June 13: World Cup 2010: The Indispensable Guide by Steven Stark
This year is the first time the tournament has been held on the continent of Africa, and this book features introductory essays on the cultural importance of soccer, the World Cup, this tournament in particular, and on African soccer.  7:30pm at Green Apple.  Click here for more info.


June 14: Lapham's Quarterly with Lewis Lapham
Join us in welcoming editor and author Lewis Lapham back to Green Apple.  We'll be celebrating the launch of the summer Quarterly, on "Sports & Games."  7pm at Green Apple.  Click here for more. 

Our new release displays are chock full of new fiction, non-fiction, gift books, and more.  We hope you can come in soon to browse, but if not, here are some new releases we find especially promising.

Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions)
Carson's fans know her interest in deconstructing and re-appropriating all things ancient--Greek myth, Sappho, the tango--in her haunting poetic verse.  And so it is fitting, while tragic, that her latest work is a scrapbook of sorts eulogizing her late brother.  Aside from being an eerily gorgeous object, this uniquely bound book will surely resonate with anyone who has lost someone and attempted to piece together what they left behind, and is a must-have for lovers of Carson's work.

Antwerp by Roberto Bolano (New Directions)
"The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is Antwerp."  Strong words from Chile's most noted author. Though Antwerp is the first novel Bolano ever wrote, it wasn't published until much later in his career. This slim little book, though not his most accessible, is quintessential Bolano.  It blends his poetic sensibilities with the noir aspects of his later fiction.  I read it 3 times in a row, pulling more and more amazing imagery and subtext each time.  --Nick

Henry Clay: The Essential American by David S. Heidler &
Jeanne T. Heidler (Random House)
Green Appler Martin says, "Having recently read biographies of Andrew Jackson and James Polk, I think this excellent biography of Henry Clay is a perfect follow-up to the first two.  I came to realize that an understanding of Clay and his times is a must for any student of American history."  Clay was the Great Compromiser, a canny and colorful legislator and leader whose life mirrors the story of America from its founding until the eve of the Civil War.

For Better by Tara Parker-Pope (Dutton)
This book is an engaging look at the science of why marriages work (or fail).  The author, a New York Times health and wellness writer looking for answers after her own divorce, turned to some of the top biologists, neurologists, psychologists, and other scientists for the facts about marriage and divorce.  It's interesting and potentially helpful, including tools, tests, and diagnostics.  Anyone in any stage of a relationship should enjoy this optimistic popular science book.

Wolf: The Lives of Jack London by James Haley (Basic)
The author claims that this is the first full-length, whole life biography of Jack London written for the general reader, which is surprising because, like Hemingway, London's reputation is based as much on the life he lived as on what he wrote. And what a life he lived. This is his story, from growing up dirt-poor in Oakland, to life as the highest paid writer in America, from oyster pirate to Klondike grubstaker to ardent socialist to war correspondent to sailing the South Seas to organic farmer up in Glen Ellen. London seems to have done it all in his 40 short years on earth.

The Letters of Sylvia Beach by Sylvia Beach (Columbia)
From Jeanette Winterson's review in the Times of London:  "Everybody came: Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Andr� Gide, William Carlos Williams. They didn't come sometimes, they came often, using the shop as a meeting place, a reading room, an accommodation agency, a think tank and a bank. . . .Beach's energy is very clear in her letters, collected here for the first time. They are a pleasure to read, in the way that letters are, perhaps especially now, when so few are written, and when collected e-mails and texts and tweets face us as a future. For anyone who loves books, and who mourns the loss of so many independent bookshops, and must now mourn the loss of the book itself and wonder at its ghostly reincarnation as an electronically disembodied text, the Sylvia Beach legacy has hope in it."

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen (Penguin)
This was our May 2009 Book of the Month, and now it's available in paperback.  For a change, the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data says it best; this book is about:
1. Child Cartographers - Montana - Fiction.  2. Voyages and Travels - Fiction.  3. Continental Divides - Fiction.  4. Sparrows - Fiction.  5. Beetles - Tiger Monk Beetles - Fiction.  6. Girls - Girls Who Like Pop Music - Fiction.  7. Whiskey Drinking - Fiction. 8. Rifles - 1886 Winchester Short Rifle .40-82 cal. - Fiction. 9. The Smithsonian Institution - Fiction. 10. The Megatherium Club - Fiction. 11. Hobos - Fiction. 12. Hobo Signs - Fiction. 13. The Resilience of Memory - Fiction. 14. The Oregon Trail Video Game for the Apple IIGS - Fiction. 15. Many Worlds Theory - Fiction. 16. Honey Nut Cheerios - Fiction. 17. Smiles - Duchenne Smiles - Fiction. 18. Lanyards - Fiction. 19. Food Pouches - Fiction. 20. The Inheritance of History - Fiction. 21. Inertia - Fiction. 22. Wormholes - Midwestern Wormholes - Fiction. 23. Mustaches - Fiction. 24. Parallel Longing - Fiction. 25. Moby-Dick - Fiction. 26. Mediocrity - Fiction. 27. Rules - The Three-Second Rule.

This Body of Death by Elizabeth George (Harper)
Who doesn't like a good page-turner?  From Publisher's Weekly: "offers an intricate plot that will satisfy even jaded fans of psychological suspense. Aggressively career-minded Isabelle Ardery, the new acting superintendent of London's Metropolitan Police, boldly manages to lure Lynley, who's been grieving over his wife's murder, back from Cornwall to look into a murder case. The body of Jemima Hastings, a young woman recently relocated from Hampshire, has turned up in a London cemetery. George tantalizes with glimpses of a horrific earlier murder case; showcases Lynley at his shrewdest, most diplomatic best; and confounds readers with a complex array of evidence, motives, and possible solutions."

Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead (Algonquin)
It is just so danged hard to sell fiction in San Francisco that has cowboys on the cover when it isn't written by a guy named Cormac.  But I'm telling you, Far Bright Star is the real deal.  Set in 1916, it is the story of a pair of aging brothers, cavalry veterans, sent to Mexico to turn a motley crew of "freebooters, felons, Christians, drifters, patriots, surgeons, mechanics, assassins" into a cavalry that can track down and kill Pancho Villa.  Things go awry under to white hot sun, and men die badly. Olmstead's prose is sharp as a bandito's machete and more melodious than a whorehouse piano.