Elly's Picks
Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance
Bicycle/Race paints an unforgettable picture of Los Angeles—and the United States—from the perspective of two…
Cats I've Known: On Love, Loss, and Being Graciously Ignored
From deep friendships to brief encounters, this is the story of the cats in Katie Haegele's life, or rather the story of…
Fuck Happiness: How Women Are Ditching the Cult of Positivity and Choosing Radical Joy
Happiness is big business. Books, consultants, psychologists, organizations, and even governments tout happiness…
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Most of us probably think of disasters as times when social order breaks down, when neighbors turn on each other, when…
Americanah
This novel is everything. At its most simplistic, it's a love story set in Nigeria, the US, and the UK. It's so much…
Sherwood Nation: A Novel
In a drought-stricken Portland, Oregon, a Robin Hood-esque water thief is caught on camera redistributing an illegal…
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
This extraordinary story of courage and faith is based on the actual experiences of three girls who fled from the…
The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory
This is a novel that reads as a page-turning, barely-fictionalized memoir about squatting in New York City in the 90s. A…
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Our world has become dependent on our constant attention and data production, whether it is in our professions,…
Decoded by Jay-Z
Decoded is billed as rapper Jay-Z's annotated lyrics. In reality, it's a whip-smart, beautifully written memoir that…
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of…
Just Kids
As a rocker, poet, photographer, and now memoirist, Patti Smith follows her heart and her amazing mind to places that…
H Is for Hawk
This book is so many things: a grief memoir, a story of a lifelong obsession (and skill) with birds of prey, and the…
Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
Imagine knowing what the brain craves and what keeps readers transfixed. The vast majority of writing advice focuses on…
The Dispossessed: A Novel
A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother…
Scam: The First Four Issues
The classic zine Scam was equal parts an introductory guide on how to get things for free and punk memoir. Youths…
Unfuck Your Anger: Using Science to Understand Frustration, Rage, and Forgiveness
If you've ever been so pissed off that you did things that you regretted, or ruined your own day and some other people's…
Living My Life
Born in Russia in 1869 and immigrating to America at 16, Emma Goldman played a significant role in the anarchist and…
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
From the bestselling author of 1491, this is a deeply engaging new history of how European settlements in the…
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold Ii of Belgium seized for himself the vast and…
Women in Clothes
If you tried to explain this book to someone, you'd probably find yourself go on for a while about conversations between…
How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature
Learn what made a mole-catcher turn his back on trapping and killing animals through poetry, nature writing, wisdom, and…
Convenience Store Woman: A Novel
This short, sweet novel manages to be both funny and profoundly respectful of its oddball characters. Keiko, a woman…
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
This novella is a brilliant feminist retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. The title…
All the Birds in the Sky
A perfectly-plotted book that follows two unlikely friends from besieged childhood to dystopian adulthood, along with…
The Subtweet: A Novel
This is the best novel I've read in years. Vivek Shraya weaves a page-turning web of friendship, food, music, and…
Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel
Once you've read enough standard mainstream fantasy novels, you start to see some pretty funny patterns—like, why…
Quaran(Tiny) Guide: A Comestible Cookbook for Community and Self-Care
By the creators of Comestible Journal, this gorgeous book compiles 60 recipes the authors used to soothe themselves and…
The Courage Party: Helping Our Resilient Children Understand and Survive Sexual Assault
The Courage Party is a "gently explicit" book about sexual abuse, written for kids to read alone or (better) with a…
Cometbus #59: Post-Mortem
What are the successes and failures of punk and its institutions? What happened to a once-thriving punk underground…
The Closing of a Corner Store
A touching tribute to an oft-overlooked neighborhood institution. Amelia chronicles the sudden closure of the…
Bicycle Culture Rising #4: How Kittie Knox Made Bicycling for Everyone
In the 1890s, bicycling was a cultural activity for the wealthy elite, with a bicycle costing about twenty weeks of a…
The Werewolf Expert
Imagine it's your first day at work at a major chain bookstore and a customer comes in, asking: "What do you know about…
Furcoats and Backpacks greeting card (Beau—skull shirt)
The purr side of the punk scene. Beau with his skull shirt—a traveling cat.
Sticker #314If I Had Biked Today, This Parking Spot Would Be Yours
Got a car? Put it to work doing bicycle advocacy when it would otherwise just be sitting there! Let other drivers know…