Hello, friends.

I hope you have had a wonderful summer and also that you have missed our little gatherings immensely. Perhaps it is time for a resumption of Monday Night Book Club. Are you ready? I was told to pick a book. As you may recall, I am very partial to collections of short stories and a sucker for authors with a tendency towards preciousness. I included a couple of novels, though. Here are some suggestions. What do you think?

Yours sincerely,
Sexretary

The Elephant Vanishes (stories), Haruki Murakami
This collection of 15 stories from a popular Japanese writer, perhaps best known in this country for A Wild Sheep Chase, gives a nice idea of his breadth of style. The work maintains the matter-of-fact tone reminiscent of American detective fiction, balancing itself somewhere between the spare realism of Raymond Carver and the surrealism of Kobo Abe. These are not the sort of stories that one thinks of as "Japanese"; the intentionally Westernized style and well-placed reference to pop culture gives them a contemporary and universal feel. Engaging, thought-provoking, humorous, and slyly profound, these skillful stories will easily appeal to American readers but must present something of a challenge to the Japanese cultural establishment. At their best, however, they serve to dispel cultural stereotypes and reveal a common humanity.

Labyrinths (stories), Jorge Luis Borges
If Jorge Luis Borges had been a computer scientist, he probably would have invented hypertext and the World Wide Web.

Instead, being a librarian and one of the world's most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer (although Umberto Eco sometimes comes close, especially in Name of the Rose).

Borges's stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library.

t zero (stories), Italo Calvino
A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination. “Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty” (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin
The second part of this 1974 novel's title is: "An Ambiguous Utopia." It's the story of two civilizations. A wealthy but authoritarian culture thrives planetside, and on its arid moon is a feminist-anarchist colony created by dissidents who left the planet over a century before. A brilliant physicist is the first member of the moon colony to travel back planetside since the separation. What he learns there, using advanced scientific equipment, is nothing compared to what he learns about political conflict.

Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler
Butler brings us a story of completely alien creatures who want to merge with humanity. This series of three interconnected stories focuses on the Oankali, aliens who use biotechnology to reinvent themselves every few generations by merging with other intelligent forms of life. Their new chosen mates are human, and Butler takes us through three generations of the Oankali's hybridization project, introducing us to the Oankali's three-gender family structure as well as their biotech spaceships, created by lifeforms that devour entire planets to build themselves into vast habitats that roam the galaxy.

Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross
A recent novel by award-winning author Stross, Saturn's Children is a deceptively light-hearted story of a sexbot trying to figure out what her life really means now that the humans she was programmed to service are extinct.