The staff of Greenlight Bookstore (and our sister store Yours Truly, Brooklyn) read widely and passionately, and love to recommend books they've especially enjoyed! You can peruse and purchase current staff picks from the list below.
A perennial favorite and one of the sources of our name, Fitzgerald's masterpiece is always a staff pick at Greenlight Bookstore.
-Sam Park
Dante: A nice nostalgic reminder of my Film Studies course days, A.S. Hamrah film essay collection The Earth Dies Streaming 2002 - 2018 is wonderful mixture of film antidotes, societal contemplation, and sharp ego buster to Hollywood mainstream. Notable film reviews: The Nice Guys, Loving, Certain Women, and Sorry to Bother You. If you have a film fan or movie buff in your life, this is a really great book to dive into and rediscover films you potentially forgot about and rediscover new ones that reshape your outlook on humanity.
Ikwo: The mission is simple: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen. Two colleagues from a technologically advanced future travel back in time to obtain a rumored unpublished novel from the illustrious author, all the while adhering to the directive of leaving the past intact. Short of hurling this book at you, what else can I say to make you pick it up? Moving, beautiful, and quite stunning!
Casey: “Bark, George” is the perfect read aloud for toddlers, who will love the surprise answer to why George cannot bark! Jules Feiffer’s pen-and-ink illustrations are always stunning, and people of all ages will laugh when they see what happens when George visits the vet.
Danni: I hate—not dislike, but actively hate—95% of book covers. But look at this book's cover? A BEAUT.
This is a cultural defense of being a Black goth. Through flowing prose, Taylor's deft mind links America's legacy of slavery, the artistic movement of the Gothic, and goth culture. This is your great next read. Especially if you usually read fiction.
Maritza: Harris writes food and memoir beautifully. Here, she focuses on the parties, meals, and moments in which she came-of-age among Black literary intellectual circles of 1970s New York and Paris. My Soul Looks Back is dreamy-- comforting but grounded in the realities of the era, full of warmth and awe, and one of my favorite balms for burnout.
Karl: Janet Mock is one of our most formidable trans activists of our time. Her second memoir chronicles her life in her hometown of Hawaii working as a sex worker to pay her way through school and falling in love for the first time. She shares living a stealth life working at a magazine, attending graduate school in New York, and coming out publicly as trans in 2011. This book inspired me to make the move to New York and her story of perseverance is such an inspiration to me.
K: Everyone thinks they know all about sex because, for the most part, we all generally have it. A DIY education, right? Nope nope nope. This historian gives us the origins of all kinds of goodies that have informed where stigma, stereotype, gendered associations, & more come from. I personally have a new relationship to the word 'cunt,' which I never would have seen coming (hey-o), so. You never know what history has to offer.
Jul: Sometimes the cover is as cute as the inside!
Brought to you by the author of the Henna Wars, this YA Rom-Com features a fake-dating trope with a sunshine-grumpy dynamic! I loved reading and learning more about Bengali culture, and Jaigirdar shows its diversity through the two main characters.
This book had great bisexual representation and I am so glad I read it, I just wish I had a time machine to give it to my teenaged self so I could love it sooner! :)
Sammi: Assata Shakur's autobiography is charming, brimming with life, and a stark reminder of the liberation struggle raging everyday among incarcerated people. It is both a case study of the judicial system's treatment of a political prisoner and a coming-of-age story about a woman's path to rebellion. She is a fixture on the top of the FBI's most wanted list, but her book shows us that she is motivated by a deep and abiding love of her people and the struggle that continues today
-Jean
Josie: "This is a female text" - a book about the ways women are (mis)remembered and forgotten, a book about all of the unnoticed ways women sacrifice their bodies every day. A personal and literary mystery full of obsessive passion, it is so completely engrossing that I read it on my phone in one sitting.
Emily: Want to read a good story? A good poem? Something funny? Something terrifying? Something joyful? Something gross? Mythological? Biological? This title is all these, and on top of all that a game changer for fiction, Asian-American or not. I am DUMMYSTOKED for her short story collection coming out later this year.
Shanni (Yours Truly, Brooklyn): A bitterly hilarious glimpse into (Ashkenazi) Jewish neurosis. A neurosis that any recovering-from-traditional-restriction (looking @ u Catholics) could maybe identify with. Auslander recounts his orthodox upbringing, secret rebellious childhood, and break from religion -- all while remaining paralyzingly terrified of the omniscient G-d, who could take away anything that brings him joy at any moment. So he avoids joy altogether. Reading him talk to God made me feel delightfully blasphemous myself: "Fuck you. But please don't kill my son because I said that." If you heard a hyena cackling on the C train in April of 2021, I'm sorry, that was me, reading this book.
Jessica: Maybe you know a kid who tends to be anxious a lot these days, about big things and small things. (Okay who am I kidding we are all that kid.) Wemberly is your mouse. What I like about Henkes' story is that its point isn't to face your fears or embrace positive thinking -- it's just that finding a friend to share your worries with might make them sit a little lighter. She may never be as carefree as her family wishes she could be, but Wemberly is going to be okay.
Matt: My introduction to Jesse McCarthy was his brilliant essay "Notes On Trap," published in n+1, an essay I've already read multiple times. This collection lives up to the hype of that essay, and it's a terrific gateway to so many other great thinkers and works of art. It's an underrated gem.
-Bria
—Claire
Morgan: Why can't the leader of a slave rebellion be depicted as a hero? In this gory graphic novel, Kyle Baker uses the account of slave rebellion leader Nate Turner to challenge that idea and make you question who's really the villian; plot twist the slave owners and enablers are the villains.
-John
Ash
Rich: A beautifully written, Pulitzer prize winning novel set in 1930s New York. If you are a fan of coming of age stories and the golden age of comic books, you will love this book.
![Frog and Toad are Doing Their Best [A Parody]: Bedtime Stories for Trying Times Cover Image](https://images.booksense.com/images/books/460/478/FC9780762478460.JPG)
shurmi: Once upon a time I was doing a dramatic read-aloud of this book in the store, and the UPS worker who was delivering our daily loot was so taken that he stopped what he was doing and purchased himself a copy to keep in his little pinchers. "Wow!" he said. "I need a copy of that in my little pinchers!" He really said that! (He didn't. But he did buy the book!) Needless to say, if you're on the fence about buying this book, just summon me and I'll dramatic read you into an alternate demention. For real. You will not leave here without this book. Even if I'm not working, just whisper "frog and toad" to yourself three times with as much humidity in your breath as you can and a vision of me will appear before your eyes to deliver those literary goods. Come along with me, friends. And let's discover the beautiful adventures of these quaint little homos. Hop to it!
Zakiya: If you call yourself a feminist, read this book.
Ikwo: You know when a book ends but you want to keeping flipping the pages, not quite ready to get off the ride? That's In at the Deep End for you. Kate Davies will take you on nothing short of an exhilarating ride and she'll makes no apologizes for it. Poor Julia stumbling through her self-proclaimed and newly minted "lesbian life" is the perfect remedy for readers who wanted The Pisces to be an extra 200 pages. At its core this book is an examination of the wetland between self-discovery and self-assurance, teeming with risqué sex parties, love and things that look like it, and wit! It's everything you need from a rom-com, in book form.
Megan: Ever wanted to burn down a corrupt government? Then this is absolutely the book for you! Reading this book was a catharsis I didn't know I needed. Zetian is a furious, dark main character who isn't always likeable and I loved her even more for it. Plus, why have a boring old love triangle when you can have a canon polyamorous throuple? Love triangles are so 2008 anyway.
Nicole: The perfect read for when you want to abandon your own thoughts and jump into someone else’s. A dreamy, slow burn set in the heat and chaos of Sri Lanka over two days. After hearing the news that his grandmother’s caretaker has suddenly died, Krishan takes a train ride to her funeral, while grappling with survival, care, and country. Pick up if you want to read something that defies western storytelling tropes or if you want to share an evening with a quiet, complicated character that feels like an old friend.
-Kiara
-David
Anna: when my father first recommended me this book i was suspicious... a book about a horse? what insight could it possibly offer? horse go so fast and in a circle? so color me surprised when i not only ADORED this book but found myself in a late onset horse girl era.
Seabiscuit himself was not available for interview, on account of his distaste of the press and the fact that he is both dead and a horse. but Hillenbrand persisted (nevertheless). yes, horse go fast but also... it took a whole cast of wacky characters and a nation in crisis to turn this humble horse into an unlikely champion and equine icon.
also there's a scene where two jockeys literally come to blows in the middle of a horse race... high drama!"
Casima: This graphic novel contains wonderful artwork with beautiful colors and a story that centers around what author imagines the lives of magical girls are like; as they defend their city at night from powerful creatures that lurk in the dark.
Claire: BOOK OF MUTTER was my first encounter with Kate Zambreno's body of work, and immediately I knew she would be one of my literary touchstones. She reconstitutes the shreds of memory that have been rendered incoherent by the death of her mother: how, after someone died, is it possible that they ever existed? Yes, their belongings remain in the room, their hairs in the carpet and their perfumes tipped in the bathroom cabinet, but the objects are speechless without the people that animate them. Zambreno writes into this silence and transforms personal loss into an archive that moves past the boundary of her life and into a broader cultural memory. In between these disjointed frames of family history and conflict, Zambreno splices critical reflections on the work of Henry Darger, Louise Bourgeois, Roland Barthes, and others, and the images that emerge form an unsettling collage of grief. This book changed the way I think, write, and remember.
-Ienna
-Ash
-Rose
Zakiya: Never let anyone stop you from raising the dead. Not even your mom.
David: