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From our bookshelves, iPods and laptops to your Thursday morning breakfast table, here are our recommendations for the best of current culture. Click on, check out and press play on these favorites - because there is a world outside "the bubble."

By Brakhage
Stan Brakhage (2003)

This anthology of innovative and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage highlights the non-narrative artist's career from the mid-50s up until the late-90s. From techniques like painting over to baking celluloid, By Brakhage stuns, awes, surprises and envelops in its powerful communication that relies on the visual, not the vocal.

- Melissa Marshall



Except in Struggle
Casey Ruble

This exciting young artist cuts out pieces of paper to create her cartoon-like depictions of Asian battles - but she's really good at it. Her works seem to feature tropically colored warriors, usually on horseback, making poetic gestures. Mxake a trip to New York City's Foley Gallery, 547 W. 27th St., to see the exhibit.

- Andrew Throdahl



Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marisha Pessl (2006)

Pessl's debut novel follows Blue Van Meer, an out-there adolescent, and her father Gareth, an eccentric professor, as they jump around to different college towns before stopping in North Carolina for Blue's last year of high school. The reference-heavy work (Pessl has an obsession with Nabokov) moves beyond satire and intellectual gymnastics to include a murder mystery when Blue's film teacher turns up dead.

- Grace Duggan