41. The Gulag Archipelago, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Harper Perennial, $19.95) Perhaps it’s too facile to call this mandatory reading for the human race, and too reductionist to appeal to its screamingly apt analogy to th

42. The Exquisite, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

by Laird Hunt (Coffee House Press, $14.95) I hate ensembles of zany characters. I hate untrustworthy first-person narration. I hate novels with an enlarged sense of their own eccentricity. This book

43. 1491, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Nonfiction)

by Charles Mann (Vintage, $14.95) This bestseller has been persistently, infuriatingly insinuating itself into every conversation I’ve had since reading it. My friends are growing afraid to me

44. A Lover’s Discourse, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Nonfiction)

By Roland Barthes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14.00) Haven’t you ever wished somebody loved you enough to write a series of strange, beautiful and terse exegeses on the nature of love itself?

45. Trouble on Triton, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

by Samuel Delany (Wesleyan University Press, $15.95) Sex, war, avant-garde theater! This is home-town hero Delany at the height of his powers holding court on semiotics and space travel in a charact

46. The Dream Songs, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Poetry)

by John Berryman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $18.00) Despair young poets. Any voice you’ve learned, every thought you’ve wanted to set to paper, Berryman has already explored it with more

47. The Stray Dog Cabaret, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Poetry)

Translated by Paul Schmidt (New York Review of Books, $14.95) Is it more telling of my tastes, or of the lasting worth of the poetry contained, that I prefer this new collection from pre-revolution