Sky F
Books By The Foot
Sky Friedlander is from the middle of Pennsylvania, specifically the perplexingly-named State College, PA. She went to school for art in Baltimore and English at Penn State. In her non-bookstore moments, she likes to draw, mostly dogs and people with dogs. She just recently moved to New York, and still gets a thrill to see the Empire State Building lit up at night (although sometimes confuses it for the Chrysler Building, does anyone else do that?)
Would you like other recommendations? Email me at staff+sky-f@strandbooks.com.
Sky F's Reviews
The Queen of the Night
by: Alexander Chee
Ethereal, fantastically researched and surprising! The way Alexander Chee describes gowns from 1800's France...swoon!!
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Through the Woods
by: Emily Carroll
Spooky and gorgeous. Like Angela Carter or Neil Gaiman, plus incredible digital illustrations. Don't read this right before bedtime.
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A Time of Gifts
by: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris
A fascinating and moving portrait of 1930’s Europe. Fermor walked from Holland to Istanbul at 19 and recalls his trip many years later, losing none of his youthful verve and curiosity. Will make you yearn to travel!.
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Vivian Maier: Street Photographer
by: Vivian Maier
Maier is immensely popular right now, in the mythical artist way: after her death. There is a fascinating story to the creation of this book, and the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, which is out now; John Maloof found stacks and stacks of her photographs at a yard sale, and proceeded to champion the work and direct the documentary. It turns out, no one close to Maier knew she was a photographer, and we get an idea of her as a silent observer with an incredibly compassionate eye for human emotion. One photograph has stuck in my brain for several months; a little girl, wedged next to her mother's hip, sobbing.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by: Michael Chabon
This is the kind of book you can sort of fall into, or rather can sink into like a cartoon cloud or a pile of soft blankets. From the first sentence the characters rise, fully and complexly carved, from a sprawling, spellbinding world. To sketch the basic plot: Jewish artist/ magician Josef Kavalier escapes Prague shortly before WWII and finds his way to his cousin, the writer and scheming dreamer Sammy Klayman's Brooklyn apartment. They are kindred souls and strike up a fortuitous and profitable partnership as comic book creators. But this hardly does justice to the scope of this novel, which roves from the bottom of the Moldau river to an Antarctic army base, from the beginnings of American suburbia to the lonely underground office of the Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes in the imaginary Empire City Public Library. If you have an interest in Golden Age comics, World War Two, the American Jewish experience, pulpy pop culture from the '40's and '50's, Harry Houdini, dramatic radio programming, really horrible cooking, or heartbreakingly realistic human relationships that will make you feel less alone, read this book immediately.
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