One of the best parts about being a bookseller at Lemuria is all the unusual and fun books I get to come across. Dave Eggers, and his publishing house McSweeney’s, are well known for their unique handling of the book. (McSweeney’s quarterly literary journal has arrived in a box shaped like a head, a collection of eight mini-books that are all illustrated, etc.) Dave Eggers new book, A Hologram for the King came out last week. A cross between the King James Bible that has been in your family for generations and the book Harrison Ford found on his last Indiana Jones adventure, A Hologram for the King is not only a good book (I’m almost finished–so far, so good) but also can double as the “treasure” for any games you play this summer.
Dave Egger’s fur-covered book, The Wild Things, is also a fun book to cuddle up with this summer. Loosely based on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and the screen-play (co-written with Spike Jonze) for the film with the same 
title, The Wild Things follows Max as he runs away from home, wearing his favorite wolf-suite, and becomes king of the Wild Things.
Tomas Transtromer, the 2011 Nobel Prize winner in poetry, wrote his memoir the year after he lost his ability to speak due to a stroke, and the paperback English translation is published in a small, pocket-size edition. (I tried it in all my pockets, and it fits in all except the coin-pocket on the left side of my jeans. So don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t fit in all of your pockets either.) New Directions Press also published two other mini paperbacks: a collection of Love Poems by Pablo Neruda (“You too were a little leaf/that trembled on my chest”) and a selection of poems from Rainer Rilke’s The Book of Hours (“God, who can hold you? To yourself alone/belonging, by no owner’s hand disturbed,/you are like unripened wine that unperturbed/grows ever sweeter and all its own”).
A couple weeks ago, Whitney found a poetry book that wasn’t even a book. David Hinton’s Fossil Sky is an epic poem in the form of a lyrical map. Yes, it unfolds.
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