en-US Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:27:20 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 40603783 not the new twenty. In this enlightening book, Dr. Meg Jay reveals how many twentysomethings have been caught in a swirl of hype and misinformation that has trivialized what are actually the most defining years of adulthood. Drawing from more than ten years of work with hundreds of twentysomething clients and students, Dr. Jay weaves the science of the twentysomething years with compelling, behind-closed-doors stories from twentysomethings themselves. She shares what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, reproductive specialists, human resources executives, and economists know about the unique power of our twenties and how they change our lives. The result is a provocative and sometimes poignant read that shows us why our twenties do matter. Our twenties are a time when the things we do--and the things we don't do--will have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.]]> 273 Meg Jay An 4 4.09 2012
author: Meg Jay
name: An
average rating: 4.09
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rating: 4
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]]> 217006044 In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.

]]> 296 Abdulrazak Gurnah 0593852605 An 0 to-read 3.96 2025
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: An
average rating: 3.96
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]]> 34536488 Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.

In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.� It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success.

In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth� and “radical transparency,� include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards� for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve.

Here is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.]]> 16 Ray Dalio 1508243247 An 0 to-read 4.09 2017
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name: An
average rating: 4.09
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]]> 25314952
Few books have been as quietly powerful as Edward L. Bernays’sĚý Crystallizing Public Opinion . First published in 1923, it is a groundbreaking and, as history has shown, influential guide to the most crucial principles of mass persuasion. Aimed at governments and corporations in the wake of World War I, this classic work combines crowd psychology with the pillars of psychoanalysis to argue the importance of public relations in democratic society. Citing far-reaching case studies from the resuscitation of a beleaguered magazine in New York to Lithuania’s campaign for global recognition, Bernays illustrates the burgeoning significance of his field in shaping public opinion while also laying out the crucial techniques for mobilizing broad-based support in an increasingly fragmented world.

Celebrated by PBS in itsĚý Books That Shook the World Ěýfeature,Ěý Crystallizing Public Opinion Ěýoccupies a fascinating place in history, defining both a concept and a system that were taken up by progressive social movements, corporate barons, and national governments alike.]]> 216 Edward L. Bernays 1497698804 An 0 to-read 4.02 1923
author: Edward L. Bernays
name: An
average rating: 4.02
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]]> 126274 Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.]]> 389 Marshall McLuhan 0262631598 An 0 to-read 4.12 1964
author: Marshall McLuhan
name: An
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1964
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]]> 52372 224 Susan Sontag 0141187166 An 0 currently-reading 3.87 1973
author: Susan Sontag
name: An
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> 38255329
“No single book is as relevant to the present moment.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS� CHOICE � With a new preface � A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history.

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States long before Donald Trump.

Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us� and a “them.� He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include

� exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past
� propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves
� anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts
� law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals
� fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare

These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership.

By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.]]> 240 Jason F. Stanley 0525511830 An 0 to-read 4.20 2018
author: Jason F. Stanley
name: An
average rating: 4.20
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]]> 214175076 A provocative exploration about the architecture of power, the forces that stifle us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in democratically elected government—“the best book to date on the biggest political issue that nobody is talking about� (Matthew Yglesias)

America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?

America is today the victim of a vetocracy that allows nearly anyone to stifle progress. While conservatives deserve some blame, progressives have overlooked an unlikely culprit: their own fears of “The Establishment.� A half-century ago, progressivism’s designs on getting stuff done were eclipsed by a desire to box in government. Reformers put speaking truth to power ahead of exercising that power for good. The ensuing gridlock has pummeled faith in public institutions of all sorts, stifled the movement’s ability to deliver on its promises, and, most perversely, opened the door for MAGA-style populism.

A century ago, Americans were similarly frustrated—and progressivism pointed the way out. The same can happen again. Marc J. Dunkelman vividly illustrates what progressives must do if they are going to break through today’s paralysis and restore, once again, confidence in democratically elected government. To get there, reformers will need to acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong. Progressivism’s success moving forward hinges on the movement’s willingness to rediscover its roots.]]> 416 Marc J. Dunkelman 154170021X An 0 to-read 4.05
author: Marc J. Dunkelman
name: An
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]]> 40338442
In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.]]> 157 Han Kang 0525573062 An 0 to-read 3.85 2016
author: Han Kang
name: An
average rating: 3.85
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]]> 30091914 A riveting, poetic, and fearless portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice by the acclaimed author of The Vegetarian.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, both suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother, their collective heartbreak and acts of hope tell the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 218 Han Kang 1101906723 An 0 to-read 4.26 2014
author: Han Kang
name: An
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
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]]> 51152420 The new comprehensive bible of interior design, from a home styling guru who has coached an entire Scandinavian generation in the art of creating a harmonious home.

Frida Ramstedt believes in thinking about how we decorate, rather than focusing on what we decorate with. We know more today than ever before about design trends, furniture, and knickknacks, and now Frida familiarizes readers with the basic principles behind interior and styling--what looks good and, most of all, why it looks good.

The Interior Design Handbook teaches you general rules of thumb--like what the golden ratio and the golden spiral are, the proper size for a coffee table in relation to your sofa, the optimal height to hang lighting fixtures, and the best ways to use a mood board--complete with helpful illustrations. Use The Interior Design Handbook to achieve a balanced, beautiful home no matter where you live or what your style is.]]> 240 Frida Ramstedt 0593139313 An 0 to-read 4.19 2019
author: Frida Ramstedt
name: An
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
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]]> 17607 All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame.

For readers who have found ongoing delight and wisdom in bell hooks's life and work, and for those who are just now discovering her, All About Love is essential reading and a brilliant book that will change how we think about love, our culture-and one another.]]> 240 bell hooks 0688168442 An 5 4.06 1999
author: bell hooks
name: An
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1999
rating: 5
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]]> 58578770
How do you place a bed in an awkward room? How can your space help you be more focused and more productive? How do you set up your room to make you ready for romantic love? It's simple!

In Feng Shui for Modern Living, TikTok influencer Cliff Tan answers these questions and more, explaining the ancient practice of feng shui and how it can be translated to modern homes. Cliff has become an internet sensation with his videos demonstrating the principles of feng shui, and in this practical guide he shows how to apply these principles room-by-room in your own home. He takes you behind the mysticism to reveal the logic behind feng shui. This is the key to unlocking the power of this ancient practice: once you understand the logic, your application of feng shui will work every time. There is no room too challenging, no problem that feng shui can't unravel. That's why people have been using it for thousands of years.

In the tradition of Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch, this guide will revolutionise how you think about your space. It's feng shui made simple, and anyone can learn.]]> 192 Cliff Tan 1526639998 An 0 to-read 4.12
author: Cliff Tan
name: An
average rating: 4.12
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]]> 195217 344 Adrienne Rich 0393312461 An 0 to-read 4.39 1993
author: Adrienne Rich
name: An
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/17
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]]> 628724 168 Thich Nhat Hanh 157075344X An 0 to-read 4.26 1975
author: Thich Nhat Hanh
name: An
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1975
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]]> 58089773 A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking translations by an American poet of Persian descent.

Rumi’s poems were meant to induce a sense of ecstatic illumination and liberation in his audience, bringing its members to a condition of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the divine. They remain masterpieces of world literature to which readers in many languages continually return for inspiration and succor, as wellas aesthetic delight. This new translation by Haleh Liza Gafori preserves the intelligence and the drama of the poems, which are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.]]> 87 Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi 1681375338 An 0 to-read 4.39 2022
author: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
name: An
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2022
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]]> 50420209
Planners, privatisation, and police surveillance are laying siege to urban public spaces. The streets are becoming ever more regimented as life and character are sapped from our cities. What is to be done? Is it possible to maintain the public realm as a flexible space that adapts over time? Can disorder be designed?

Fifty years ago, Richard Sennett wrote his groundbreaking work The Uses of Disorder , arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed, likely to produce a fragile, restrictive urban environment. The need for the Open City, the alternative, is now more urgent that ever. In this provocative essay, Pablo Sendra and Richard Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the life of our cities. What the authors call 'infrastructures for disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide, remain open to change rather than rapidly stagnate.

Designing Disorder is a radical and transformative manifesto for the future of twenty-first-century cities.]]> 169 Richard Sennett An 0 to-read 3.49 2020
author: Richard Sennett
name: An
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2020
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]]> 60069456
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried.

In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can't look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance.rtance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.]]> 335 Percival Everett 1914391179 An 0 to-read 4.08 2021
author: Percival Everett
name: An
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett An 0 to-read 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: An
average rating: 4.47
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]]> 121141883 Embrace your inner child.

Empower your inner parent.

Befriend your inner critic.

Are you ready to heal all parts of yourself?

Meet your inner child � the part of your subconscious still holding the child within � and learn how to honour and heal them. Through quick, constructive exercises, inspirational quotes, journaling activities and reflective practices, this ten-step programme is the perfect tool for embracing your past, accepting your present and improving your future.]]> 192 Tiffany Trieu 1802796002 An 0 to-read 4.17
author: Tiffany Trieu
name: An
average rating: 4.17
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 375920 Deprivation and Delinquency is an invaluable compilation of his papers, talks, letters and lectures between 1930 and 1970, centred on the theme of the relationship between antisocial behaviour, or more chronically delinquency, and childhood experiences of deprivation. Linking passages by the editors set the historical context for four sections focusing on children under stress, the nature and origin of antisocial tendency, the practical management of difficult children, and individual therapy with the antisocial personality.]]> 304 D.W. Winnicott 0415059038 An 0 to-read 4.06 1984
author: D.W. Winnicott
name: An
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1984
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date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> 270903
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.

The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.]]> 168 Claudia Rankine 1555974074 An 0 to-read 4.28 2004
author: Claudia Rankine
name: An
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> 385795 416 David Ritz 030681191X An 0 to-read 4.11 1985
author: David Ritz
name: An
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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]]> 28216954 Peter Hujar (1934�87) was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising and fashion industries. He documented the vibrant cultural scene of downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 he published Portraits in Life and Death , with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987.]]> 56 Vince Aletti 3958291066 An 5 4.50
author: Vince Aletti
name: An
average rating: 4.50
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rating: 5
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]]> 59950 Librarian's note: An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.

From the Nobel Prize-winning writer and acclaimed author of Snow Country comes a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age—about an elderly Tokyo businessman who must face the failures of his memory and the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate the end of a life.

“A rich, complicated novel�. Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata’s is the closest to poetry.� �The New York Times Book Review

By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo’s life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the stirrings of desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments, Kawabata has crafted a novel that is a powerful, serenely observed meditation on the relentless march of time.

Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker]]> 276 Yasunari Kawabata 0679762647 An 0 to-read 3.92 1954
author: Yasunari Kawabata
name: An
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1954
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]]> 497499 262 Magda SzabĂł 1843431939 An 0 to-read 4.09 1987
author: Magda SzabĂł
name: An
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 43452825 Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.

There is something of Jane Austen in this story of the deceptiveness of appearances; fans of J.K. Rowling are sure to enjoy Szabó’s picture of irreverent students, eccentric teachers, and boarding-school life. Above all, however, Abigail is a thrilling tale of suspense.]]> 333 Magda Szabó 168137403X An 0 to-read 4.27 1970
author: Magda SzabĂł
name: An
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 An 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Miranda July
name: An
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/11
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]]> 20256572 352 David J. Morris 0544086619 An 0 to-read 4.16 2015
author: David J. Morris
name: An
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> 168759 606 Robert Jay Lifton 080784344X An 0 to-read 4.11 1967
author: Robert Jay Lifton
name: An
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1967
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]]> 22329506 Love and War, which describes the making and manipulation of gender in militaristic societies and the sweeping consequences for men and women in their personal, romantic, sexual, and professional lives.

Drawing on cross-cultural comparisons and examples from popular media, including sports culture, the rise of "gonzo" and "bangbus" pornography, and "internet trolls," Digby describes how the hatred of women and the suppression of empathy are used to define masculinity, thereby undermining relations between women and men--sometimes even to the extent of violence. Employing diverse philosophical methodologies, he identifies the cultural elements that contribute to heterosexual antagonism, such as an enduring faith in male force to solve problems, the glorification of violent men who suppress caring emotions, the devaluation of men's physical and emotional lives, an imaginary gender binary, male privilege premised on the subordination of women, and the use of misogyny to encourage masculine behavior. Digby tracks the "collateral damage" of this disabling misogyny in the lives of both men and women, but ends on a hopeful note. He ultimately finds the link between war and gender to be dissolving in many societies: war is becoming slowly de-gendered, and gender is becoming slowly de-militarized.]]> 240 Tom Digby 0231168411 An 0 to-read 4.24 2014
author: Tom Digby
name: An
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2014
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]]> 194746 No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world � suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, � but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston]]> 176 Osamu Dazai An 0 to-read 3.99 1948
author: Osamu Dazai
name: An
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1948
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]]> 58678518
If sex is a truth-teller, Eve--a young, queer woman in Brooklyn--is looking for answers. On an evening when she is feeling particularly impulsive, she posts some nude photos of herself online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia, the charismatic Nathan--and soon the three begin a relationship that disturbs Eve as much as it delights her. As each act of the affair unfolds, Eve is left to ask: to whom is she responsible? And to what extent do our desires determine who we are?

In the way that only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find--or lose--ourselves in intimacy. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, it might be the most thought-provoking book you read all year.]]> 240 Lillian Fishman 0593243765 An 0 to-read 3.08 2022
author: Lillian Fishman
name: An
average rating: 3.08
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]]> 127282281 A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent.

In her debut essay collection, “brilliant and stylish� (The Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation.

Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld argues: while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance.

Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.]]> 304 Becca Rothfeld 1250849918 An 0 to-read 3.60 2024
author: Becca Rothfeld
name: An
average rating: 3.60
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]]> 205804222 From one of the sharpest up-and-coming voices in American poetry, a stunning collection that explores our most fundamental instincts, capacity for affection, and the ways we resemble the wild.Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book full of tenderness and violence, longing and love. Ranging from inherited family tales, to meditations on the body, to the ways animals display love and grief alike, Emily Jungmin Yoon holds a mirror up to humanity to show that we are animal, too. In poems full of wonder and want, she showcases our tendencies to fight or fly, act with affection and cruelty, and ultimately, overflow with life itself.“And when I say we are beasts, / is that a metaphor?� Yoon asks, exploring the ways we—like language, like any creature—stem from our surroundings. Braiding together reflections about the natural world, family heritage, and adoration, Yoon shows that what passes between us—body-to-body, generation-to-generation—is what defines a life. Deeply felt and beautifully crafted, Find Me as the Creature I Am is a rapturous collection by a rising star in the poetry landscape.]]> 80 Emily Jungmin Yoon 0593801180 An 0 to-read 4.35
author: Emily Jungmin Yoon
name: An
average rating: 4.35
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]]> 209050367 A debut collection that draws on the poet’s Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.

Ěý

Darius Atefat-Peckham’s debut poetry collection follows a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.

Ěý

Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory “like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.�

Ěý

Book of Kin won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize.

Ěý]]> 96 Darius Atefat-Peckham 1637680961 An 0 to-read 4.82
author: Darius Atefat-Peckham
name: An
average rating: 4.82
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]]> 14394 384 Robert Coles 0395599237 An 0 to-read 3.89 1990
author: Robert Coles
name: An
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 An 5 3.88 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: An
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 57693262 For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage.

Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank's life is full of all the excesses Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could've predicted.

Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it's Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo's marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last.

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.]]> 384 Coco Mellors 1635576814 An 0 to-read 3.70 2022
author: Coco Mellors
name: An
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
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date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> 59463840
“Identity politics� is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, Olúfẹ�mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.

Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class� vs. “race.� By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.]]> 157 Olúfẹ�mi O. Táíwò 1642596884 An 0 to-read 3.99 2022
author: Olúfẹ�mi O. Táíwò
name: An
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/20
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]]> 123087951
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, care work has been thrust into the national spotlight. The notion of care seems simple enough. Care is about nurturing, feeding, nursing, assisting, and loving human beings. It is “the work that makes all other work possible.â€� But as historian Premilla Nadasen argues, we have only begun to understand the massive role it plays in our lives and our economy.Ěý

Nadasen traces the rise of the care economy, from its roots in slavery, where there was no clear division between production and social reproduction, to the present care crisis, experienced acutely by more and more Americans. Today’s care economy, Nadasen shows, is an institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit.

Yet this is also a story of resistance. Low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of color in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for Black Lives have continued to fight for and practice collective care. These groups help us envision how, given the challenges before us, we can create a caring world as part of a radical future.]]> 288 Premilla Nadasen 1642599662 An 0 to-read 4.10
author: Premilla Nadasen
name: An
average rating: 4.10
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]]> 13330670
In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,� “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.� Olds’s propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music—sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.]]> 112 Sharon Olds 0375712259 An 0 to-read 4.15 2012
author: Sharon Olds
name: An
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2012
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]]> 211934945 A luminous new translation of the greatest woman poet in Chinese history, highlighting Li Qingzhao's iconoclastic verse and showcasing her visionary portrait of the inner workings of the artist’s mind.

The Magpie at Night is a lyrical and searching portrait of the inner life of Li Qingzhao, one of the greatest poets in Chinese literary history. These spare and arresting poems evoke with rare immediacy the quiet and haunting beauty of country life during the Song dynasty; the unseen, restive labor of the poet; and Li Qingzhao’s bracing and complex take on what it means to create art as a woman in the shadow of exile, war, imprisonment, and an
unwelcoming literary establishment.

In Wendy Chen’s splendid new translation, each of Li Qingzhao’s ci—lyrics that were originally set to music—is as sharp and fresh as the edge of a new spring leaf. These richly textured bolts of melody tell a story that will resonate with scholars eager to restore this iconic figure to the canon of classical Chinese poetry, as well as with contemporary readers who will relate to the strikingly modern mode in which she delivers her wry, unsentimental, and bracing thoughts on art and posterity.]]> 144 Li Qingzhao 0374612757 An 0 to-read 4.52
author: Li Qingzhao
name: An
average rating: 4.52
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]]> 118007 Alternative Cover Edition of ISBN 006051275X/ISBN-13 9780060512750

Centuries ago, the moon Anarres was settled by utopian anarchists who left the Earthlike planet Urras in search of a better world, a new beginning. Now a brilliant physicist, Shevek, determines to reunite the two civilizations that have been separated by hatred since long before he was born.

The Dispossessed is a penetrating examination of society and humanity -- and one man's brave undertaking to question the unquestionable and ignite the fires of change.]]> 387 Ursula K. Le Guin An 0 to-read 4.18 1974
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: An
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> 26535513 Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how
Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data � Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it.]]> 288 Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic 1119002257 An 0 to-read 4.39 2015
author: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
name: An
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 123610886 144 Etel Adnan 1643622110 An 4 4.25 2022
author: Etel Adnan
name: An
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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]]> 29599109
Etel Adnan’s evocative new book places night at its center to unearth memories held in the body, the spirit and the landscape. This striking new book continues Adnan’s meditative observation and inquiry into the experiences of her remarkable life.]]> 64 Etel Adnan 1937658538 An 4 4.12 2016
author: Etel Adnan
name: An
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2016
rating: 4
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]]> 57693625
Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.]]> 86 Solmaz Sharif 1644450798 An 0 to-read 4.21 2022
author: Solmaz Sharif
name: An
average rating: 4.21
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]]> 26114310 Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable losses of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,� she writes. “Let me look at you.”]]> 98 Solmaz Sharif 1555977448 An 0 to-read 4.32 2016
author: Solmaz Sharif
name: An
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2016
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]]> 18767223 392 Etel Adnan 193765821X An 0 to-read 4.75 2014
author: Etel Adnan
name: An
average rating: 4.75
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> 25082429
“Here Anne Boyer accounts for a form of life—form of life of a woman in this century living in Kansas City apartment complexes or duplexes with names like The Kingman or Colonial Gardens, form of life of a low-rent, cake-baking intellectual parenting a Socratic daughter, form of life of a person whose body refuses to become information or pornography, which are the same. These are the confessions of Anne Boyer, a political thinker who takes notes and invents movements, social and prosodic. Ta gueule, Rousseau.� —Lisa Robertson

Anne Boyer Artist Statement:

I read a lot, old works and new ones, but there were so many books that I couldn’t find. These were the books that should have contained an answer to the problem—how do we survive our survival? If a work of literature approached an answer, the answer was bent, asemic, obscured, distorted into sentimental accounts, melodrama, or pornography by literary convention established to make knowing what we needed to impossible.

.

Sometimes the answer was deformed by the failure of survival itself—there were texts severed by their author’s severed lives, by madness, by social isolation, by early death or a long life passed always wanting it. Literature, like garments, had so often been against so many of us, enforcing and sustaining the hostilities of a world with the unequal distribution of resources and the corresponding unequal distribution of suffering.

.

The libraries I needed were full of works written by ghosts of the dead so common their graves lacked stones, the literature of those humans whose names were never their own, whose names were mostly said aloud so that someone might make a command of them, whose names were never used as the mark of their own property—what was it they had known? How did the great human majority—women and girls, those without property, the poor and the workers and enslaved people—resist? In what forms, what languages, what codes were their poems? What possibilities inhabited their thinking, their philosophies, their politics? What names would they be called if they could choose their own?



During much of the time Garments Against Women was being written, I wanted to stop writing. I wanted to stop wanting and needing to write. This was so that my daughter and I could better survive; this was also because of my disappointment with literature.

.

But Garments Against Women exists because I failed. I failed to find the literature I needed, so I had to try to write it down. I failed, also, at refusal, failed at failing, failed at self-negating, failed at being ruined despite all that would ruin us, failed at keeping survival bare, failed at obeying history’s prohibitions, failed at being intimidated by the centuries of hostile traditions. What I failed at was not writing despite all the conditions that had been relentlessly calibrated to keep not writing sustained.

.

Some of us write because there are problems to be solved. My life is different than it was when I wrote Garments Against Women, but there’s still a problem: the world as we know it remains the world.]]> 90 Anne Boyer 1934103594 An 0 to-read 4.22 2015
author: Anne Boyer
name: An
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> 34272476
“No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem.� —The Washington Post

“It’s as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most worthy of deep consideration.� —Chicago Tribune

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.

Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.]]> 456 Mary Oliver 0399563245 An 0 to-read 4.58 2017
author: Mary Oliver
name: An
average rating: 4.58
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]]> 65215471
Removal Acts takes its speaker’s fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of “removal� in its many forms―as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit―Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.]]> 136 Erin Marie Lynch 1644452537 An 0 to-read 4.32 2023
author: Erin Marie Lynch
name: An
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/04
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]]> 96441 The End of Education restores meaning and common sense to the arena in which they are most urgently needed.

"Informal and clear...Postman's ideas about education are appealingly fresh."--New York Times Book Review]]> 209 Neil Postman 0679750312 An 0 to-read 3.96 1995
author: Neil Postman
name: An
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> 23152489 128 Belinda Cannone 2070453294 An 0 to-read 3.30 2013
author: Belinda Cannone
name: An
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> 106200557 190 Francesco Tonucci 1622737636 An 0 to-read 0.0
author: Francesco Tonucci
name: An
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/25
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]]> 1568297 James Q. Wilson 039472917X An 0 to-read 3.61 1977
author: James Q. Wilson
name: An
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> 6363568 Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution--largely unnoticed by the press--in controlling crime by means other than brute-force substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible--and essential--to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken.
Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.]]> 256 Mark A.R. Kleiman 0691142084 An 0 to-read 4.11 2005
author: Mark A.R. Kleiman
name: An
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2005
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date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> 47849
The Middle Passage presents us with an opportunity to reexamine our lives and to ask: "Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?" It is an occasion for redefining and reorienting the personality, a necessary rite of passage between the extended adolescence of the first adulthood and our inevitable appointment with old age and mortality.

The Middle Passage addresses the following issues:
How did we acquire our original sense of self? What are the changes that herald the Middle Passage? How does one revision the sense of self? What is the relationship between Jung's concept of individuation and our commitment to others? What attitudes and behavior support individuation and help us move from misery to meaning?

This book shows how we may travel the Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer.

--back cover]]> 127 James Hollis 0919123600 An 0 to-read 4.45 1993
author: James Hollis
name: An
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/21
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]]> 41580312 116 Ram Dass An 0 to-read 4.40 1971
author: Ram Dass
name: An
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 48019 208 Peter F. Drucker 0060833459 An 0 to-read 4.07 1966
author: Peter F. Drucker
name: An
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38488
There are more older people in America today than ever before. They are our parents and grandparents, our aunts and uncles and in-laws. They are living longer, but in a culture that has come to worship youth--a culture in which families have dispersed, communities have broken down, and older people are isolated. Meanwhile, adults in two-career families are struggling to divide their time among their kids, their jobs, and their aging parents--searching for the right words to talk about loneliness, forgetfulness, or selling the house. Another Country is a field guide to this rough terrain for a generation of baby boomers who are finding themselves unprepared to care for those who have always cared for them. Psychologist and bestselling writer Mary Pipher maps out strategies that help bridge the gaps that separate us from our elders. And with her inimitable combination of respect and realism, she offers us new ways of supporting each other--new ways of sharing our time, our energy, and our love.]]> 352 Mary Pipher 1573227846 An 0 to-read 3.96 1999
author: Mary Pipher
name: An
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/18
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]]> 745452 ]]> 396 Kenneth T. Jackson 0195049837 An 0 to-read 4.03 1985
author: Kenneth T. Jackson
name: An
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 35574989 A spellbinding debut novel about the trailblazing poet Forugh Farrokhzhad, who defied Iranian society to find her voice and her destiny

“Remember the flight, for the bird is mortal.”—Forugh Farrokhzad

All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh is told that Iranian daughters should be quiet and modest. She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel—gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother’s walled garden, venturing to the forbidden rooftop to roughhouse with her three brothers, writing poems to impress her strict, disapproving father, and sneaking out to flirt with a teenage paramour over café glacé. It’s during the summer of 1950 that Forugh’s passion for poetry really takes flight—and that tradition seeks to clip her wings.

Forced into a suffocating marriage, Forugh runs away and falls into an affair that fuels her desire to write and to achieve freedom and independence. Forugh’s poems are considered both scandalous and brilliant; she is heralded by some as a national treasure, vilified by others as a demon influenced by the West. She perseveres, finding love with a notorious filmmaker and living by her own rules—at enormous cost. But the power of her writing grows only stronger amid the upheaval of the Iranian revolution.

Inspired by Forugh Farrokhzad’s verse, letters, films, and interviews—and including original translations of her poems—Jasmin Darznik has written a haunting novel, using the lens of fiction to capture the tenacity, spirit, and conflicting desires of a brave woman who represents the birth of feminism in Iran—and who continues to inspire generations of women around the world.]]> 401 Jasmin Darznik 0399182314 An 0 to-read 4.18 2018
author: Jasmin Darznik
name: An
average rating: 4.18
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]]> 996780 160 Forugh Farrokhzad 1557288615 An 0 to-read 4.41
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name: An
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]]> 127282302 *Kingsley Tufts Book Award Finalist
*NPR Best Books of the Year
*Guardian Best Poetry Books of 2024
*LitHub Favorite Poetry Collections of the Year
*Electric Lit Best Poetry Collections of 2024
*A Today Show Pick
*Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club Selection
*Publisher's Weekly Starred Review and Top Ten Spring 2024 List
*Booklist Starred Review
*BookPage Starred Review

A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit.

Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.

With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang’s new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.]]> 112 Victoria Chang 0374611130 An 0 to-read 4.05
author: Victoria Chang
name: An
average rating: 4.05
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]]> 41716694
Amanda Montell, feminist linguist and staff features editor at online beauty and health magazine Byrdie.com, deconstructs language—from insults and cursing to grammar and pronunciation patterns—to reveal the ways it has been used for centuries to keep women form gaining equality. Ever wonder why so many people are annoyed when women use the word “like� as a filler? Or why certain gender neutral terms stick and others don’t? Or even how linguists have historically discussed women’s speech patterns? Wordslut is no stuffy academic study; Montell’s irresistible humor shines through, making linguistics not only approachable but both downright hilarious and profound.]]> 304 Amanda Montell 006286887X An 0 to-read 4.26 2019
author: Amanda Montell
name: An
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2019
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]]> 199804517
The dominance of US multinational businesses today can seem at first like an inevitable byproduct of the nation’s superpower status. In Dollars and Dominion , Mary Bridges tells a different origin story. She explores the ramshackle beginnings of US financial power overseas, showing that US bankers in the early twentieth century depended on the US government, European know-how, and last-minute improvisation to sustain their work abroad. Bridges focuses on an underappreciated piece of the nation’s financial infrastructure—the overseas branch bank—as brick-and-mortar foundations for expanding US commercial influence.

Bridges explores how bankers sorted their new communities into “us”—potential clients—and “them”—local populations, who often existed on the periphery of the banking world. She argues that US bankers mapped their new communities by creating foreign credit information—and by using a financial asset newly enabled by the Federal Reserve System, the bankers� acceptance, in the process. Doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on longstanding inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus racialized, class-based, and gendered ideas became baked into the financial infrastructure.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism. Bridges shows that US foreign banking was a bootstrapped project that began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons that sustained itself by relying on the power of the US state, copying the example of British foreign bankers, and building alliances with local elites. In this way, US bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure to support the nation’s growing global power.]]> 280 Mary Bridges 0691248133 An 0 to-read 3.25
author: Mary Bridges
name: An
average rating: 3.25
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]]> 13227454
Harold pens a quick reply and, leaving Maureen to her chores, heads to the corner mailbox. But then, as happens in the very best works of fiction, Harold has a chance encounter, one that convinces him that he absolutely must deliver his message to Queenie in person. And thus begins the unlikely pilgrimage. Harold Fry is determined to walk six hundred miles from Kingsbridge to the hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed because, he believes, as long as he walks, Queenie Hennessey will live.

Still in his yachting shoes and light coat, Harold embarks on his urgent quest across the countryside. Along the way he meets one character after another, each of whom unlocks his long-dormant spirit and sense of promise. Memories of his first dance with Maureen, his wedding day, his joy in fatherhood, come rushing back to him - allowing him to also reconcile the losses and the regrets. As for Maureen, she finds herself missing Harold for the first time in years.

And then there is the unfinished business with Queenie Hennessy.]]> 320 Rachel Joyce 0812993292 An 0 to-read 3.91 2012
author: Rachel Joyce
name: An
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2012
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]]> 999131 370 William H. Thomas 1889242209 An 0 to-read 3.90 2004
author: William H. Thomas
name: An
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2004
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]]> 62888191 A literary horror debut about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.]]> 336 Gerardo Sámano Córdova 1638930368 An 0 to-read 4.12 2023
author: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
name: An
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
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]]> 150251
Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.]]> 260 Anne Carson 0375708421 An 0 to-read 4.27 1995
author: Anne Carson
name: An
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> 11480960 60 Heather Christle An 0 to-read 4.16 2011
author: Heather Christle
name: An
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2011
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 An 0 to-read 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: An
average rating: 4.22
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]]> 134119018 A history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself.

From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal.

This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called “Filterworld.� Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question.

In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?

To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.]]> 290 Kyle Chayka An 0 to-read 3.66 2024
author: Kyle Chayka
name: An
average rating: 3.66
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]]> 146559 If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and now published in the authoritative Library of America text—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman.ĚýFrom these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed wiht fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.]]> 304 William Faulkner 0679741933 An 0 to-read 3.89 1939
author: William Faulkner
name: An
average rating: 3.89
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]]> 109713 City of Night, was first published in 1963, it became a national bestseller and ushered in a new era of gay fiction. Bold and inventive in his account of the urban underworld of male prostitution, Rechy is equally unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling "Youngman" and his restless search for self-knowledge. As the narrator careens from El Paso to Times Square, from Pershing Square to the French Quarter, we get an unforgettable look at a neon-lit life on the edge. Said James Baldwin of the author, "Rechy is the most arresting young writer I've read in a very long time. His tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own; and he has the kind of discipline which allows him a rare and beautiful reckless."]]> 400 John Rechy 0802130836 An 0 to-read 3.94 1963
author: John Rechy
name: An
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1963
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]]> 75603 Ěý
We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street—indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as “living off the land or sailing around the world� while exercizing his libido with a protegee of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on “the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis.� Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.]]> 160 Anatole Broyard 0679781269 An 0 to-read 3.74 1993
author: Anatole Broyard
name: An
average rating: 3.74
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]]> 11194704 Ruthlessly ambitious, Joe Lampton rises swiftly from the petty bureaucracy of local government into the unfamiliar world of inherited wealth, fast cars and glamorous women. But the price of his success is high. Betrayal and tragedy strike as the original "angry young man" of the 1950s pursues his goals.

]]> 235 John Braine An 0 to-read 3.60 1957
author: John Braine
name: An
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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]]> 20057219 208 David Sylvester An 0 to-read 3.97 1975
author: David Sylvester
name: An
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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]]> 297673
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.]]> 335 Junot DĂ­az 1594489580 An 0 to-read 3.89 2007
author: Junot DĂ­az
name: An
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
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]]> 130546 208 Mahmoud Darwish 0520237544 An 0 to-read 4.38 2002
author: Mahmoud Darwish
name: An
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2002
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]]> 130550
Mahmoud Darwish is the leading poet in the Arab world, an artist and activist who attracts thousands to his public readings.

The Butterfly's Burden combines the complete text of Darwish's two most recent full-length volumes, linked by the stunning memoir-witness poem “A State of Siege.� Love poems, sonnets, journal-like distillations, and interlaced lyrics balance old literary traditions with new forms, highlighting loving reflections alongside bitter longing.

From Sonnet [V]

I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place.
Patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle.
And, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches
so I carry faraway’s land and it carries me on the road.

Mahmoud Darwish is the author of 30 books of poetry and prose, as well as the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. He has worked as a journalist, was director of the Palestinian Research Center, and lived in exile until his return to Palestine in 1996. He has received many international awards for his poetry.

Translator Fady Joudah is a physician based in Houston, Texas. His first book of poems received the Yale Younger Poets prize.


]]> 348 Mahmoud Darwish 1556592418 An 0 to-read 4.45 2006
author: Mahmoud Darwish
name: An
average rating: 4.45
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]]> 60147181 From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds--past, present, and future. Choi's third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples and calls us to imagine what will persist in the aftermaths.

With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time. They look into the collective psyche of our years in the pandemic and in the throes of anti-racist uprisings, while imagining other vectors, directions, and futures. Stories of survival collide across space and time--from Korean comfort women during World War II to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Throughout, Choi grapples with where the individual fits within the strange landscapes of this apocalyptic world, with its violent and many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope.]]> 144 Franny Choi 0063240084 An 0 to-read 3.98 2022
author: Franny Choi
name: An
average rating: 3.98
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date added: 2024/09/03
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]]> 50997643 A stunning and honest debut poetry collection about the beauty and hardships in being a mother, a wife, and a woman.Ěý

“When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands/Little by little, mountains are climbed.� So ends Kate Baer’s remarkable poem “Things My Girlfriends Teach Me.� In “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels� she challenges her reader to consider their grandmother’s cake, the taste of the sea, the cool swill of freedom. In her poem “Deliverance� about her daughter’s birth she writes “What is the word for when the light leaves the body?/What is the word for when it/at last, returns?�

Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. As easy to post on Instagram as they are to print out and frame, Kate’s words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends.]]> 94 Kate Baer 0063008424 An 0 to-read 4.06 2020
author: Kate Baer
name: An
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
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]]> 86524
The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered.

We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible� goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be.

We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam� Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . .

Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection� in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines.

We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness� of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.

Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.]]> 882 Robert A. Caro 0679729453 An 0 currently-reading 4.39 1982
author: Robert A. Caro
name: An
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
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]]> 399136
Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.

This revised edition includes two new chapters, one of which discusses the complex role of the colonialist state's mindset in the develpment of Third World nationalism, while the other analyses the processes by which, all over the world, nations came to imagine themselves as old.]]> 224 Benedict Anderson 0860915468 An 0 to-read 4.13 1983
author: Benedict Anderson
name: An
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/25
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]]> 46231 610 Dorothy Parker 0140150749 An 0 to-read 4.34 1944
author: Dorothy Parker
name: An
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1944
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/23
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]]> 192793643 352 Hanif Kureishi 0872869075 An 0 currently-reading 4.03
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: An
average rating: 4.03
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date added: 2024/08/23
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]]> 59418414 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living one’s entire life in Gaza, making a life for one’s family and raising a family in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack.

In this poetry debut, conceived during the Israeli bombing campaign of May 2021, Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profoundly universal humanity.

In direct, vivid language, Abu Toha tells of being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16 and, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by IDF warplanes in a bombing campaign that killed two of his closest friends. These poems are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.]]> 144 Mosab Abu Toha 0872868605 An 0 currently-reading 4.74 2022
author: Mosab Abu Toha
name: An
average rating: 4.74
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]]> 59770989 From a brilliant, absolutely essential voice whose poems feel like whole worlds (Naomi Shihab Nye), a poetry collection considering the body physical, the body politic, and the body sacred

Zeina Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane, where she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying--from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and Zeina's own duets, in which English and Arabic echo and contradict each other--O explores the limits of language, notions of home and exile, and stirring visions of motherhood, memory, and faith.]]> 112 Zeina Hashem Beck 0525508376 An 0 to-read 4.01 2022
author: Zeina Hashem Beck
name: An
average rating: 4.01
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]]> 61758673 240 Hala Alyan 089255567X An 0 to-read 4.60
author: Hala Alyan
name: An
average rating: 4.60
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]]> 61223608 142 Nguyá»…n Thanh HiĂŞn 9815017888 An 0 to-read 4.20
author: Nguyá»…n Thanh HiĂŞn
name: An
average rating: 4.20
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]]> 211674834 36 Diana Cao An 0 to-read 5.00
author: Diana Cao
name: An
average rating: 5.00
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date added: 2024/08/19
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]]> 209194343 'The best book on football I have ever read' Daniel Finkelstein

'Deserves a place among the great modern books on football' Sam Wallace, chief football writer, Telegraph

The insider account of the data revolution that has swept through the modern football world written by one of its key architects, Ian Graham.

Between 2012 and 2023, Ian Graham worked as Liverpool FC's Director of Research. His tenure coincided with the club’s greatest period of success since the 1980s, including winning the Premier League in 2020 � Liverpool’s first league title after an agonising 30 years.

Here for the first time, Graham reveals the fascinating data that informed some of the club’s most pivotal moments of the past decade, from the appointment of Jurgen Klopp as manager in 2015 to the signing of Mohamed Salah in 2017. Along the way, he shares groundbreaking insight into the modern game, including how a season largely played behind closed doors transformed our understanding of a home-side advantage, or why the GOAT (greatest of all time) might not be who you think. And, in a game that is increasingly dominated by an elite few, Graham charts a path for the future where a data-savvy competitor will always find the edge.]]> 296 Ian Graham 1804950319 An 0 to-read 4.23
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]]> 202102049 From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, here is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novel’s end. Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her German grandmother’s experience of the second world war, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.]]> 282 Yōko Ogawa 0593316088 An 0 to-read 3.75 2006
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: An
average rating: 3.75
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]]> 199780022
The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute.

Exhibitions are spread out over thirty venues. There are endless artworks about mid-century architecture and design. How are we expected to engage with today's diverse practise? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has it given way to browsing, skimming, and sampling?

Across four essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice, research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture, and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.]]> 272 Claire Bishop 1804292885 An 0 to-read 3.93
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]]> 68811 304 Michael Ende An 0 to-read 4.35 1973
author: Michael Ende
name: An
average rating: 4.35
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]]> 2026701
On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin.
Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?�

Praise for PERSONAL DAYS
"Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now." � The New York Times Book Review

"Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated." �"Three First Novels that Just Might Last," � Time

A "comic and creepy début...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?" � The New Yorker

"The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 —a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence." —Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times

"In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and lovely language." � Newsweek

"A warm and winning fiction debut." � Publishers Weekly

"I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope." � Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan

"The funniest book I've read about the way we work now." –William Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula

"Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular." —Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai]]> 241 Ed Park 0812978579 An 0 to-read 3.26 2008
author: Ed Park
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average rating: 3.26
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]]> 18953449 iván del Tamarit y Sonetos del amor oscuro. Una y otra se complementan para dar lo mejor de Lorca: su dimensión popular y la valiente indagación en los claroscuros del deseo, con una claridad y crudeza que nunca antes se había permitido. Tras estar muchos años fuera de circulación, recuperamos en un solo volumen dos obras fundamentales de la poesía española del siglo XX.]]> 40 Federico García Lorca 8426418953 An 0 to-read 4.41 1983
author: Federico GarcĂ­a Lorca
name: An
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1983
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