#5: The Financial Lives of the Poets
AUTHORS: Jess Walter
THE COMPLEX CO-SIGN: Newspaper reporter loses his job, bets it all on a website that goes belly-up, and has to resort to selling weed. Damn, hit close to home much? We keed, we keed. Heftier than it sounds, but just as entertaining.
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#4: Methland
AUTHOR: Nick Reding
THE COMPLEX CO-SIGN: Speed kills, but meth fucking destroys. It's a fact everyone knows, but one which journalist Reding nonetheless drives home with an exhaustive and immersive account of one rural Iowa town's battle with the drug (aka "the devil's scrotal dandruff"). It's not as cut-and-dry as one would believe—the town has in fact rebounded somewhat after its methedemic—but it's harrowing nonetheless.
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#3: Big Machine
AUTHOR: Victor LaValle
THE COMPLEX CO-SIGN: The dude behind Slapboxing With Jesus and The Ecstatic came through with a tour de crazytown. Race, cults, disaster, and the supernatural, from New England to the Yay Area. Make sense? No? Good. Let the 40-year-old janitor protagonist walk you through it and everything'll be straight.
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#2: Parker: The Hunter
AUTHORS: Darwyn Cooke and Richard Stark
THE COMPLEX CO-SIGN: We already co-signed the original 1962 noir classic in our Best Summer Books list from earlier this year, but now that the graphic novel adaptation has come out, you no longer have the excuse of "things without pictures make me cry."
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#1: Let the Great World Spin
AUTHOR: Colum McCann
THE COMPLEX CO-SIGN: When Times Square is home to the world's biggest Toys R Us, it's easy to forget how jacked up NYC was in the 1970s. McCann takes us back to a time when Vietnam was wrapping up and innocence was all but impossible to come by.
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