With Father's Day approaching next Sunday June 19th, you may still be searching for the perfect gift for Dad. Inspired by a tribute penned by Houston bookseller Keaton Patterson to his father, who introduced him to the mind-altering works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, we decided to ask others at some of our favorite independent bookstores which book they would get for their dads. The responses are wide-ranging, hilarious, and moving—and they just might inspire your own Father's Day picks.

We've also got a special offer: If you buy one of these books directly from Restless, you can get 25% off at checkout when you enter the discount code "DADBOOK." Order by the evening of Wednesday the 15th for guaranteed delivery.

"God is Round is perfect for Father's Day because it examines the culture, connection, and joy surrounding the sport that so many people love. Also: because soccer."

—Justus Joseph, The Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA)

"My dad’s sweet spots: the Syfy channel, Spanglish, and forty-page poop jokes. Yoss has him covered."

—Jonathan Woollen, Politics & Prose (Washington, DC)

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"If I were to pick a book from Restless Books' catalogue to give my dad for Father's Day, I would definitely give him Captivity, by György Spiró, because it basically contains everything he likes to read. As a retired historian, he appreciates well-researched historical fiction, especially those works that ground the reader in a historical worldview, rather than attempting to impose a modern viewpoint on the past. Our whole family reads lots of historical fiction with Jewish themes, and I think my dad would relate to the nearsighted nebbish narrator of Captivity, who just wants to spend his life doing research in the Library of Alexandria."

—Molly Odintz, BookPeople (Austin, TX)

"I was really lucky and grew up in a house filled with books. My dad would pull books off the shelves introducing me to Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Al Capp's comic The Shmoo and many others. This is why I would recommend Oleg Kashin's absurd, science fiction infused look at life in Putin's Russia, Fardwor, Russia!, translated by the magnificent Will Evans. (Here's a picture of my cat Sonic.)"

—Caitlin Luce Baker, University Book Store (Seattle, WA)

"I would pick the Restless edition of Frankenstein. With the creepy gothic illustrations, it's perfect for a bad-ass dad who loves the classics!"

—Lauren Peugh, Changing Hands Bookstore (Tempe, AZ)

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"You don't need to be a sports fan to appreciate the wonderful insight, humor and philosophy of Juan Villoro's writing. Along with Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun & Shadow, God is Round is essential reading for anyone looking to better understand the world's most popular sport."

—Shawn Donley, Powell's Books (Portland, OR)

"I think when I give this to my Dad I'm just going to say, 'So Pops, when was the last time you read a really great Cuban Sci-Fi novel about a space traveling veterinarian who explores the digestive tracts of mountain-sized alien creatures? One other thing I should tell you: laxatives are involved.'"

—Emily Ballaine, Green Apple Books on the Park (San Francisco, CA)

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"I'm giving my father Jodorowsky's Where the Bird Sings Best because there is no one like Jodorowsky - just like dad. And he'll get to relive his "magical realist" days of the early 70's...."

—Brian Cudzillo, Harbor Books (Sag Harbor, NY)

"My dad probably would have liked God Is Round the most because he liked soccer, loved Mexico, and would have appreciated the author's caustic wit."

—Conrad Silverberg, Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI)

"If it’s good enough to earn the author a beating from some of Putin’s thugs, it’s good enough for Dad. Zany political satire with a touch of absurdist science fiction, Fardwor, Russia! is the perfect book if Dad gave you Asimov or Vonnegut when you were a teenager."

—Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)

"Albina and the Dog-Men is the answer to the question: 'What do you get the dad who has everything?' Because I assure you, he doesn't have anything even remotely like this."

—Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books on the Park (San Francisco, CA)

"My dad and I have always shared the language of sports and have traded books our whole lives, so I would love to introduce him to the football-mad sensibility of Juan Villoro. Or maybe I'll give it to my sons before we go see Messi and Di Maria play in Seattle next Tuesday!"

—Tom Nissley, Phinney Books (Seattle, WA)

"This Father’s Day, show your appreciation for all those dad jokes with Super Extra Grande by Yoss. This is Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy taken to a whole new level: raunchy, funny, and full of language play. It might also make him realize that being a veterinarian to enormously large alien creatures has got nothing on changing diapers."

—Anton Bogomazov, Politics & Prose (Washington, DC)

"Replete with amazingly detailed illustrations, Albina and the Dog-Men by Alejandro Jodorowsky is by turns obscene, profane, hilarious, incredibly violent, reverent, and profound. It’s a timeless myth engaged in the power of sexuality and what lurks in the darkest recesses of the mind. But most of all, it’s a tremendous amount of fun."

—Keaton Patterson, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)

Out today from Restless is the new novel from notorious Russian journalist Oleg Kashin: Fardwor, Russia! A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin. A journalist at one of Russia’s top daily newspapers, Oleg Kashin gained notoriety in November 2010 when he was beaten nearly to death in an attack provoked by his political reporting. It came two months after he’d delivered the manuscript of his fierce political satire, Fardwor, Russia!, which takes on the absurdity and corruption at the heart of Russian political life in the Putin era.

Now translated into English by Will Evans, Fardwor, Russia! remains as timely today as it was prescient then. Following and subverting the tradition of Soviet science fiction, the book dresses Russian society in the costume of genre: A genetic engineering experiment (a growth serum for midgets) goes absurdly awry. The book is an incisive and witty blend of political satire and science fiction that tackles head-on the perilous state of contemporary Russia—and the hilarious and frightening follies of power. Read an excerpt below.

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These Books Kill Fascists Bundle

$35.00 $49.97

Fardwor, Russia! + Heartland + Checkpoint

Wildly funny and deadly serious: these novels serve you lesbian pulp noir in pre-apocalyptic America and razor-sharp critiques of war and Putin’s Russia.

An Excerpt from Fardwor, Russia! A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

Karpov kept disappearing into his shack from morning to night, and Marina had already gotten used to having no entertainment except for television and the Internet (yes, she herself had called the cable guy, who had come from a local provider and set up cable Internet in their apartment), since it didn’t look like any more options were about to become available. But one day Karpov came in from the shack around 5:00 p.m. in an excessively good mood and bearing a bottle of champagne. Marina immediately knew that something important and good had happened and, hopefully, since this important and good thing had happened, they could finally return to Moscow and Karpov would become rich and famous, and she would be the wife of “the one and only Karpov,” which suited her just fine; for as had been written, “The great man stared through the window, but her entire world ended with the border of his broad Greek tunic.”

But it turned out that all the fuss just about some small victory that didn’t affect Marina’s life at all—Karpov had finally managed to regulate his serum so that once his test rats reached adult size they would stop growing before they turned into enormous monsters.

“What now?” Marina asked.

“Now...” her husband paused in thought. “Now I need a midget.”

Of course, experiments on people in Russia are forbidden by law, as in any civilized country, but Karpov didn’t see this as an obstacle to performing a miracle, and turning a midget into a normal-sized person, of course, can be considered a real miracle, and as long as Marina didn’t rat out Karpov to the cops, then she needn’t be afraid of anything—no one would find out how the test midget grew, and the midget himself would be happy. They got online and started scouring the Internet for midgets, and within a minute, on some local message-board for young parents, they found a fascinating discussion about a new show at the city circus—all those young parents without exception advised one another not to bring their children to this new show under any circumstances, because there was no spectacle more sad and boring. The clowns weren’t funny, the trained cows and cats were boring, and most shameful of all was the midget Vasya, who did impersonations of popular Norwegian singer Alexander Rybak, but the way he performed them made you wish he’d never done them in the first place.

Karpov immediately called the circus and found out that the next show would take place the next day.

“Shall we go meet Vasya?” he asked Marina. Marina kissed her husband—she had wanted to go to the city with Karpov for some fun for some time now.

They made a point of coming to the city early to have dinner in a restaurant and stroll along the boulevard before the show. Karpov brought his wife to the tin Red Army soldier again, but this time its shape didn’t impress Marina at all; it was just a statue like any other. She had been in a bad mood pretty much all day, and she knew why: when Karpov spoke, what he said seemed logical and proper to her, but when he was silent, and she allowed herself to think about it, then all her husband’s ingenious ideas started to seem if not dubious, then at least peculiar. An experiment on a living person—what if it goes wrong; what if the midget grows into a twenty-meter giant and destroys the city; and what if Karpov gets thrown in jail? Or even without the giant, what if the midget is insulted by Karpov’s dangerous proposal, and he calls the cops and Karpov gets into some kind of mess?

Going to the circus itself, however, was one big mess—quality obviously did not appear to be a priority for the circus, and Marina even asked Karpov to let her go somewhere and wait for him on neutral territory. Karpov didn’t mind, and Marina probably would have even gone, but she suddenly felt sorry for her husband. She stayed and watched as a hung-over clown in the ring hit a cow on the horns with a balloon hammer, while the cow, advertised on the circus poster as an erudite animal in the sense that it could count, mournfully mooed as many times as the hammer hit her horns. Then some Krasnolozhkin performed—on the posters he was advertised as a student of the great cat-trainer Yuri Kuklachev and, probably, he really was, because this Krasnolozhkin’s skinny cats so desperately tried to act like trained ones, and they were so pitiful that Marina probably would have again asked to go to some café if Karpov hadn’t looked so pleadingly—he himself, of course, shared his wife’s feelings for the circus, but unlike her, he was prepared to do anything just to make it to the moment the midget Vasya would come out.

Vasya, when he appeared, did not deviate from the show’s general format—he was a bit cuter than the cats and a bit more pathetic than the cow. In contrast to the animals, however, he was his own trainer and master of ceremonies—he galloped on a pony, shot a miniature gun at plates thrown into the air by an assistant (twice, of course, he missed), but then jumped with surprising grace from his little pony, pulled out of somewhere a tiny, probably plastic, violin, and, accompanying himself, began to sing in a horrid child’s voice: “Years ago, when I was younger, I kinda liked a girl I knew, she was mine and we were sweethearts, that was then but then it’s true.” If Marina found out that the lyrics had been written by Vasya himself she wouldn’t have been surprised—the midget himself and his violin, along with his voice and the song, came together remarkably well as a cohesive composition—and it was simply impossible to determine which of those distinct parts was the most offensive.

Marina glanced over at her husband—Karpov looked like the happiest man on Earth. Obviously if he could, he would have been happy to gobble this little Vasya up whole, but since Karpov’s range of morally acceptable activities didn’t include cannibalism, he limited himself to passing a note to the midget through a manager. It read something like, “Blah blah blah, I’m Karpov from Moscow, I would like to talk to you about a very important matter, I’m waiting for you in such and such coffee shop across the street from the circus.”

While they sat and waited for Vasya in the coffee shop, Marina told Karpov several times that Vasya, of course, would not come, because being a midget in the circus not only entailed riding a pony around the arena, but also drinking oneself silly after the show, and if Karpov couldn’t understand that, then that was just proof of his ignorance. Karpov disagreed halfheartedly, but Marina saw that her husband was starting to get nervous again—the chances of not seeing Vasya were very high. And perhaps that’s why, when the midget did actually appear, Karpov’s face lit up with a degree of joy only possible for a twenty-nine-year-old married man without children and a proper job.

For his part, Vasya, as quickly became apparent, was for some reason certain that Karpov was not only from Moscow, but from the Nikulin Circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard; and so, when it became apparent that no one was going to try to lure him to Moscow, the midget became bored and started to display a willingness to leave, especially since Karpov nearly ruined everything—without any preliminaries, he told the midget that he wanted to “make him a bit taller.” It’s well known that midgets are very sensitive to even the slightest joke about their anthropometrical statistics, and the fact that Vasya didn’t start a brawl with Karpov right away, if it meant anything, meant only that Vasya had some self-esteem issues. In any case, the conversation began to take on a hostile tone, and Marina realized that she needed to get involved. She took Vasya by the hand and very calmly began to explain to him that her husband didn’t mean any harm, and that though Marina herself didn’t understand how, he really was going to try to make Vasya taller.

They talked for a long time. Then they were silent. Karpov tore a piece of paper from his notebook and wrote down a list of foods that Vasya needed to eat after the injection. Then Vasya and Karpov went into the bathroom together, and though Marina couldn’t see Karpov massage the rubbing alcohol onto Vasya’s arm and jab a syringe half-full of yellowish liquid into his vein, he really did, honest.

When Karpov and the midget came out of the bathroom, the barmaid gave them a judgmental look. After all, the south has always been the most conservative part of the country.

From Fardwor, Russia! by Oleg Kashin

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