Neil's Picks

Books of collected work are not uncommon in the publishing world. What are uncommon are balanced collections that provide the reader with the full spectrum of a particular author's voice. The Stories of Ray Bradbury thankfully falls into the latter. Tales of childhood wonder sit alongside visionary Martian stories and short haunting thrillers. A must own for anyone ever moved by Bradbury's extraordinary legacy.

As Kublai Khan's empire is about to fall, Marco Polo eases his pain with tales of travel. He recounts tales of far-off cities that often border on poetry or impressionist paintings. Calvino's masterwork is at once hopeful and helpless, exact and vague. it is a quiet perfection.

This collection is a debut that reads like mature, seasoned poetry. It is a collection of day-to-day vignettes that cuts deeper into the "human condition" than any other collection in recent memory. Greenwald reveals here, a layer of the everyday that most of us miss.

Many memoirs are plagued by over-romanticizing situations and people. When this is stripped away, we are left with an emotionally honest tale. Big Sid's is one of these rare tales. It is a moving, real story of two very different men brought together for a single purpose, to build an impossible-to-build motorcycle. Learning how to be a father and son is the purpose's gift.

The literary world celebrates a disparate collection of international writers, but rarely are the translators of their works ever mentioned. Edith Grossman does these unsung heroes a great justice in 'Why Translation Matters.' In this concise and indispensable book, Grossman explores the cultural role translation participates within. The act of translation is ultimately shown to be one of interpretation rather than simple verbatim, providing new readers with fresh perspectives and engaging interplay with the text. You will never read Marquez, Saramago, Dostoevsky, or Flaubert in the same way again.