Despite a recent loss, I do have some books for you to heed. You can take my word for it—in any event, it’s the only word I am capable of at this moment—that they are worth your attention.

1. The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind
2. William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories edited by Christopher Carduff
3. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Richard Iton
4. The Half-Known World: Writing Fiction by Robert Boswell
5. Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize, and Engage Youth by Ben Rigby
6. Leningrad: State of Siege by Michael Jones
7. The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse
8. A Common Ordinary Murder by Donald Pfarrer
9. The Little Book by Selden Edwards
10. Crude Reflections/Cruda realidad: Oil, Ruin, and Resistance in the Amazon Rainforest by Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak
11. Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst
12. Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner