Katie's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:11:59 -0700 60 Katie's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Candy Story (European Women Writers)]]> 1320704
Ěý

Candy Story is the fourth novel by Marie Redonnet. Translations of the first three� Hôtel Splendid , Forever Valley , and Rose Mellie Rose —are also available from the University of Nebraska Press. In its unadorned prose and passionate focus on the inner life of a young woman, this fourth novel is unmistakably allied to the earlier ones. It will enthrall Redonnet’s admirers and win new ones.

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Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.]]> 99 Marie Redonnet 0803289588 Katie 0 3.63 1992 Candy Story (European Women Writers)
author: Marie Redonnet
name: Katie
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, MieczysĹ‚aw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort inĚýGörbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Katie 0 3.66 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Katie
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> The Other 13414715 An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here

Holland and Niles Perry are identical thirteen-year-old twins. They are close, close enough, almost, to read each other’s thoughts, but they couldn’t be more different. Holland is bold and mischievous, a bad influence, while Niles is kind and eager to please, the sort of boy who makes parents proud. The Perrys live in the bucolic New England town their family settled centuries ago, and as it happens, the extended clan has gathered at its ancestral farm this summer to mourn the death of the twins� father in a most unfortunate accident. Mrs. Perry still hasn’t recovered from the shock of her husband’s gruesome end and stays sequestered in her room, leaving her sons to roam free. As the summer goes on, though, and Holland’s pranks become increasingly sinister, Niles finds he can no longer make excuses for his brother’s actions.
Thomas Tryon’s best-selling novel about a homegrown monster is an eerie examination of the darkness that dwells within everyone. It is a landmark of psychological horror that is a worthy descendent of the books of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shirley Jackson, and Patricia Highsmith.]]> 258 Thomas Tryon 1590175832 Katie 0 to-read 3.83 1971 The Other
author: Thomas Tryon
name: Katie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself]]> 57657686 Join a respected Jungian analyst for a deep dive into the emotional and symbolic journey of motherhood.
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Motherhood is the true hero’s journey—which is to say that it can be as harrowing as it is joyful, and enlightening as it is exhausting. For Jungian psychoanalyst Lisa Marchiano, this journey is not just an adventure of diaper bags and parent-teacher conferences, but one of intense self-discovery.
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In Motherhood, Marchiano draws from a deep well of Jungian analysis and symbolic research to present a collection of fairy tales, myths, and fables that evoke the spiritual arc of raising a child from infancy through adulthood. After all, this kind of storytelling has always been one of the most important conduits of humanity’s collective wisdom—and Marchiano provides each tale alongside keen insights into the timeless archetypes they represent.
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Balanced with real-life case stories from Lisa’s own practice and in-depth questions for personal reflection, Motherhood explores how events like pregnancy, the calamities of childhood, and the empty-nest experience are invitations to an adventure into the wild frontier of your own soul. Here you will
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•� How the challenges of motherhood send you on journeys into your innermost source
•� Seeing the value of conflict with your child even while working to solve it
•� “The dark passage� of confronting and dispelling the energy of childhood wounds
•� “The thirteenth fairy”—how to recognize when we are resisting inconvenient or uncomfortable truths
•� Understanding how anger, rage, and aggression arise in parental relationships
•� Recognizing the ways that you have been taught to ignore your deepest instincts
•� How to navigate the inevitable periods of grief that accompany your child’s many life changes
•� Why much of successful mothering requires surrendering your sense of control
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With Lisa’s gentle but straightforward guidance, you’ll return from this inner journey in possession of the treasured knowledge needed to clarify your values, embrace your disowned parts, and claim the mantle of motherhood in the full bloom of your empowerment.
Ěý]]> 246 Lisa Marchiano 1683646673 Katie 0 4.54 Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself
author: Lisa Marchiano
name: Katie
average rating: 4.54
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rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> Entitlement 209330233 A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.]]> 288 Rumaan Alam 0593718461 Katie 0 3.00 2024 Entitlement
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Katie
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> Happy All the Time 7942600 Happy All the Time follows four sane, intelligent, and good-intentioned people who manage to find love in spite of themselves.]]> 224 Laurie Colwin Katie 4 3.89 1978 Happy All the Time
author: Laurie Colwin
name: Katie
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2011/08/30
date added: 2025/02/20
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This book really was kind of happy. And I still liked it!
]]> Rental House 208584952 From the award-winning author of Chemistry, a sharp-witted, insightful novel about a marriage as seen through the lens of two family vacations

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,� says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign� wife.

Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?

With her “wry, wise, and simply spectacular� style (People) and “hilarious deadpan that recalls Gish Jen and Nora Ephron� (O, The Oprah Magazine), Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.]]> 224 Weike Wang 0593545540 Katie 0 3.31 2024 Rental House
author: Weike Wang
name: Katie
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/13
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]]> The Family Chao 58085230
The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant’s reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James.]]> 303 Lan Samantha Chang 0393868079 Katie 5 3.28 2022 The Family Chao
author: Lan Samantha Chang
name: Katie
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> Hurricane Season 46041168 A New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A Guardian Best Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666Ěýor Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.]]> 224 Fernanda Melchor 0811228037 Katie 0 3.93 2017 Hurricane Season
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Katie
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/16
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]]> Liars 200555235 A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.]]> 272 Sarah Manguso 0593241258 Katie 0 3.67 2024 Liars
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Katie
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/08
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]]> Termush 62678428 Introduced by Jeff VanderMeer, welcome to a luxury hotel at the end of the world in this post-apocalyptic 1967 dystopia ...

The day we came up from the shelters four people were found dead on the steps of the hotel.

Welcome to Termush: a luxury coastal resort like no other. All the wealthy guests are survivors: preppers who reserved rooms long before the Disaster. Inside, they embrace exclusive radiation shelters, ambient music and lavish provisions; outside, radioactive dust falls on the sculpture park, security men step over dead birds, and a reconnaissance party embarks.

Despite weathering a nuclear apocalypse, their problems are only just beginning. Soon, the Management begins censoring news; disruptive guests are sedated; initial generosity towards Strangers ceases as fears of contamination and limited resources grow. But as the numbers - and desperation - of external survivors increase, they must decide what it means to forge a new moral code at the end (or beginning?) of the world ...]]> 119 Sven Holm 057137915X Katie 0 3.27 1967 Termush
author: Sven Holm
name: Katie
average rating: 3.27
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> Consent: A Memoir 200798634 Half a Life. She asks herself whether she told the whole truth back then. What did truth look like to her in the era of love-bead curtains, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility of May-December romance? With new understanding about the imbalance of power between an older man and a minor girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at age ninety-three.]]> 145 Jill Ciment 0593701062 Katie 0 3.83 2024 Consent: A Memoir
author: Jill Ciment
name: Katie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
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]]> Heart Berries 35840657 Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.]]> 143 Terese Marie Mailhot 1619023342 Katie 0 3.83 2018 Heart Berries
author: Terese Marie Mailhot
name: Katie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
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]]> Nonfiction 174070104
But for a while after you’re gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway. Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself.

As the mother―a novelist―attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story?

Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson’s A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.]]> 240 Julie Myerson 1959030310 Katie 0 3.98 2022 Nonfiction
author: Julie Myerson
name: Katie
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/11
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]]> The Little Stranger 7234875 512 Sarah Waters Katie 0 3.59 2009 The Little Stranger
author: Sarah Waters
name: Katie
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Katie 0 3.53 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Katie
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/27
date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> Intermezzo 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 Katie 0 3.88 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Katie
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/15
date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 22015627 The basis for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s cinematic romance starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison.
Ěý
Burdened by debt after her husband's death, Lucy Muir insists on moving into the very cheap Gull Cottage in the quaint seaside village of Whitecliff, despite multiple warnings that the house is haunted. Upon discovering the rumors to be true, the young widow ends up forming a special companionship with the ghost of handsome former sea captain Daniel Gregg. Through the struggles of supporting her children, seeking out romance from the wrong places, and working to publish the captain's story as a book, Blood and Swash, Lucy finds in her secret relationship with Captain Gregg a comfort and blossoming love she never could have predicted.
Ěý
Originally published in 1945, made into a movie in 1947, and later adapted into a television sitcom in 1968, this romantic tale explores how love can develop without boundaries, both in this life and beyond.Ěý

With a new foreword by Adriana Trigiani.

Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.Ěý]]> 194 R.A. Dick 0804173494 Katie 0 4.42 1945 The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
author: R.A. Dick
name: Katie
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1945
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/31
date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> Exit West 30688435
Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.]]> 231 Mohsin Hamid 0735212171 Katie 0 3.74 2017 Exit West
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Katie
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/20
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]]> White Cat, Black Dog: Stories 61391802 Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.]]> 272 Kelly Link 0593449959 Katie 0 3.79 2023 White Cat, Black Dog: Stories
author: Kelly Link
name: Katie
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Tales]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Katie 5 3.92 1911 Death in Venice and Other Tales
author: Thomas Mann
name: Katie
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1911
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> Quartet in Autumn 2066735 Quartet in Autumn.]]> 224 Barbara Pym 0452269342 Katie 4 4.01 1978 Quartet in Autumn
author: Barbara Pym
name: Katie
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2011/08/22
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Katie 4 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Katie
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> The Lost Daughter 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Katie 4 3.70 2006 The Lost Daughter
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Katie
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2015/07/29
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution]]> 305826
"In order for all women to have real choices all along the line," Adrienne Rich writes, "we need fully to understand the power and powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture." Rich's investigation, in this influential and landmark book, concerns both experience and institution. The experience is her own - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed in its many variations on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

One of our most distinguished poets, ADRIENNE RICH was born in Baltimore in 1929. Over the last forty years she has published more than seventeen volumes of poetry and five books of nonfiction prose, including Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Blood, Bread, and Poetry; and What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. She has received numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Lambda Book Award, the National Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in California.]]> 322 Adrienne Rich 0393312844 Katie 4 4.23 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
author: Adrienne Rich
name: Katie
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2012/12/12
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> All Fours 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 Katie 5 3.53 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Katie
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/29
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]]> You Dreamed of Empires 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan � today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma � who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods � the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Ălvaro Enrigue 059354479X Katie 0 3.76 2022 You Dreamed of Empires
author: Ălvaro Enrigue
name: Katie
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/29
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]]> Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2) 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Katie 0 3.68 2024 Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2)
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Katie
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/19
date added: 2024/06/20
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy]]> 42771901 232 Jenny Odell 1612197493 Katie 0 3.68 2019 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
author: Jenny Odell
name: Katie
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/10
date added: 2024/06/20
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]]> Alphabetical Diaries 127282792
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374610789 Katie 0 3.95 2024 Alphabetical Diaries
author: Sheila Heti
name: Katie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/31
date added: 2024/05/31
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]]> The Long Form 80100178
Windham Campbell Prize-winner Kate Briggs’s long-awaited follow up to This Little Art, The Long Form is a novel in the original sense of novelty: a form all its own. The story of two people composing a day together, it is also renews Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be: a province of writing that gathers both fiction and essay, that looks to past traditions while supporting new life.]]> 448 Kate Briggs Katie 0 4.32 2023 The Long Form
author: Kate Briggs
name: Katie
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2024/05/31
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]]> <![CDATA[So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men]]> 126262032 Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with the short story of the same name.


A triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, misogyny, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In “So Late in the Day,� Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently.

In “The Long and Painful Death,� a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions.

And in “Antarctica,â€� a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.Ěý

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160859 Katie 0 3.98 2022 So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
author: Claire Keegan
name: Katie
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/08
date added: 2024/04/09
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]]> Loved and Missed 125079046
Love and Missed is a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love's gains and missteps. British writer Susie Boyt's seventh novel, and the first to be published in theĚýUnited States, is a triumph.]]> 208 Susie Boyt 1681377810 Katie 0 4.37 2023 Loved and Missed
author: Susie Boyt
name: Katie
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/15
date added: 2024/03/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Don't Look at Me Like That (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 57998109 A candid novel of love, betrayal, and friendship about a young woman who breaks with her peers, moves to London, and begins a shocking affair.

In England half a century ago, well-brought-up young women are meant to aspire to the respectable life. Some things are not to be spoken of; some are most certainly not to be done. There are rules, conventions. Meg Bailey obeys them. She progresses from Home Counties school to un-Bohemian art college with few outward signs of passion or frustration. Her personality is submerged in polite routines; even with her best friend, Roxane, what can't be said looms far larger than what can.

But circumstances change. Meg gets a job and moves to London. Roxane gets married to a man picked out by her mother. And then Meg does something shocking - shocking not only by the standards of her time, but by our own.

As sharp and as startling now as when it was written, Don't Look At Me Like That matches Diana Athill's memoirs After a Funeral and Instead of a Letter in its gift for storytelling and its unflinching candour about love and betrayal.
]]> 192 Diana Athill 1681376113 Katie 0 3.99 1967 Don't Look at Me Like That (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Diana Athill
name: Katie
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/07
date added: 2024/03/07
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]]> Death Valley 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 Katie 0 3.46 2023 Death Valley
author: Melissa Broder
name: Katie
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/18
date added: 2024/02/19
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]]> Poor Deer 127823311 A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.]]> 240 Claire Oshetsky 006332766X Katie 0 3.97 2024 Poor Deer
author: Claire Oshetsky
name: Katie
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/13
date added: 2024/02/19
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]]> My Work 88564034
'My work' is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of motherhood: it mixes fiction, essays, poetry, memoir, and letters to explore the thorny, twisted ties between pregnancy, maternity, capitalism, work, art, individuality, and literature.]]> 416 Olga Ravn 0811234711 Katie 5 4.02 2020 My Work
author: Olga Ravn
name: Katie
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2024/02/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times]]> 52623750 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593189481.

An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.]]> 241 Katherine May Katie 0 3.82 2020 Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
author: Katherine May
name: Katie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/02/03
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]]> The Tartar Steppe 83017 198 Dino Buzzati 1567923046 Katie 0 to-read 4.24 1940 The Tartar Steppe
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Katie
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Convenience Store Woman 51031906
Sayaka Murata brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the familiar convenience store that is so much part of life in Japan. With some laugh-out-loud moments prompted by the disconnect between Keiko’s thoughts and those of the people around her, she provides a sharp look at Japanese society and the pressure to conform, as well as penetrating insights into the female mind. Convenience Store Woman is a fresh, charming portrait of an unforgettable heroine that recalls Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, and ´ˇłľĂ©±ôľ±±đ.]]> 176 Sayaka Murata Katie 0 japan 3.74 2016 Convenience Store Woman
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Katie
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/01/03
shelves: japan
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]]> Reproduction 63222190 A lucid, genre-defying novel that explores the surreality of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a country in crisis

A novelist attempts to write a book about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, a mother and artist whose harrowing pregnancies reveal the cost of human reproduction. Soon, however, the novelist’s own painful experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as her increasing awareness of larger threats from climate change to pandemic, force her to give up on the book and turn instead to writing a contemporary Frankenstein, based on the story of an old friend who mysteriously reappears in her life.

In telling a story that ranges from pregnancy to miscarriage to traumatic birth, from motherhood to the frontiers of reproductive science, Louisa Hall draws powerfully from her own experiences, as well as the stories of two other women: Mary Shelley and Anna, a scientist and would-be parent who is contemplating the possibilities, and morality, of genetic modification.

Both devastating and joyful, elegant and exacting, Reproduction is a powerful reminder of the hazards and the rewards involved in creating new life, and a profoundly feminist exploration of motherhood, female friendship, and artistic ambition.]]> 224 Louisa Hall 0063283646 Katie 0 4.04 2023 Reproduction
author: Louisa Hall
name: Katie
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/28
date added: 2023/12/28
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]]> Blackouts 131127539 Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the California Book Award for Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction
Winner of Tournament of Books

A Best Book of the The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Fresh Air, Vanity Fair, NBC News, The BBC, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Granta, The New York Public Library, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Electric Literature, Them, Literary Hub, BookPage, Gay Times, Book Soup, Five Books, Southwest Books

“Like no book I have ever read.� —Ari Shapiro, NPR’s All Things Considered

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book�Sex A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.]]> 290 Justin Torres Katie 0 3.60 2023 Blackouts
author: Justin Torres
name: Katie
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/22
date added: 2023/12/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric]]> 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 Katie 0 4.28 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
author: Claudia Rankine
name: Katie
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
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]]> Vengeance Is Mine 112974898 From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer's childhood

The heroine of Marie NDiaye's new novel is a quiet middle-aged lawyer, living a modest existence in Bordeaux. She has been so effectively consumed by her job she is known to all simply as Maître Susane. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack.

She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but can't quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for the most important trial of his life?

While this mystery preoccupies Maître Susane, at home she is greeted by Sharon, her faithful but peculiar housekeeper. Sharon arrived from Mauritius with her husband and children, and she lacks legal residency in France. And while Maître Susane has generously offered Sharon her professional services, the young maid always finds ways to evade her, claiming the marriage certificate Maître Susane requires is being held hostage. Is Sharon being honest with Maître Susane, or is something more sinister going on?

Told in a slow seethe recalling the short novels of Elena Ferrante and the psychological richness of Patricia Highsmith's work, Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories, tortured uncertainty, and an unreliability that frightens her.]]> 241 Marie NDiaye 0593534255 Katie 5 2.87 2021 Vengeance Is Mine
author: Marie NDiaye
name: Katie
average rating: 2.87
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/05
date added: 2023/12/06
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]]> The Last Language 61415863
Trained with an understanding of spoken language as the essential foundation of thought, Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization utilizing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonspeaking patients with motor impairments. Through the Center, Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-eight-year-old patient who has been confined to his bedroom for most of his life. Sam quickly takes to the technology—and so does Angela. Her once deeply philosophical interest in language comes vividly to life through her interactions with Sam. Angela becomes intensely drawn to him, and their relationship soon turns intimate.

When Sam’s family discovers their relationship, they intervene and bring charges. As Angela tells her story from prison in the form of an unrepentant plea, we are plunged into the inner workings of her mind as she rejects all else in pursuit of a more profound understanding of language and humanity. As the sole narrator and perspective giver, Angela’s understanding pushes and pulls us into ambiguity, and a Nabokovian hall of mirrors emerges as she tumbles deeper and deeper into obsession.

Provocative and profound in its exploration of the basis of humanity, this is an extraordinary novel from one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers.]]> 240 Jennifer duBois 1639551085 Katie 5 3.83 2023 The Last Language
author: Jennifer duBois
name: Katie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/19
date added: 2023/11/19
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]]> The Nursery 61358644 208 Szilvia Molnar 0593316843 Katie 0 3.75 2023 The Nursery
author: Szilvia Molnar
name: Katie
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/09
date added: 2023/11/09
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]]> Carmilla 39937171 Before Dracula, there was Carmilla—the first seductive vampire to haunt readers� imaginations This classic of Gothic horror follows Laura, a woman haunted by a girlhood dream of a beautiful visitor to her bedroom. Now, a decade later, Laura finds Carmilla, who appears to be her own age, on the side of the road after a carriage accident. The two recognize each other from the same childhood dream and become fast friends. Soon after, Laura begins to experience mysterious feelings and is once again haunted by nightmares. She finds Carmilla strangely irresistible and longs to be with her. But as the two friends grow closer, Laura’s health begins to fail. It becomes apparent that her enchanting companion is harboring a sinister secret. To free herself from Carmilla’s grasp, Laura and her family must fight for their lives. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.]]> 108 J. Sheridan Le Fanu Katie 0 3.74 1872 Carmilla
author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
name: Katie
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1872
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/29
date added: 2023/10/29
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]]> The Dangers of Smoking in Bed 53215250 Following the "propulsive and mesmerizing" ( New York Times Book Review ) Things We Lost in the Fire comes a new collection of singularly unsettling stories, by an Argentine author who has earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges.

Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre: populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her next collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken -- fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history -- with unsettling urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death by a question of morality they fail to answer correctly.

Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with resounding tenderness towards those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, this new collection from one of Argentina's most exciting writers finds Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.]]> 208 Mariana EnrĂ­quez 0593134079 Katie 0 3.78 2009 The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
author: Mariana EnrĂ­quez
name: Katie
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2023/10/15
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]]> Still Born 95696897
When complications arise in Alina’s pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, in Nettel’s sensitive and surgically precise exploration of maternal ambivalence.

Still Born was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023, announced on April 18, 2023.

In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.]]> 224 Guadalupe Nettel 1639730044 Katie 0 4.08 2020 Still Born
author: Guadalupe Nettel
name: Katie
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/21
date added: 2023/09/21
shelves:
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]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band � and meeting the man who would become her husband � her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 Katie 0 4.25 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Katie
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/11
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]]> Thunderstruck & Other Stories 18339643 The Giant’s House�finalist for the National Book Award—comes a beautiful new story collection, her first in twenty years. Laced through with the humor, the empathy, and the rare and magical descriptive powers that have led Elizabeth McCracken’s fiction to be hailed as “exquisite� (The New York Times Book Review), “funny and heartbreaking� (The Boston Globe), and “a true marvel� (San Francisco Chronicle), these nine vibrant stories navigate the fragile space between love and loneliness. In “Property,� selected by Geraldine Brooks for The Best American Short Stories, a young scholar, grieving the sudden death of his wife, decides to refurbish the Maine rental house they were to share together by removing his landlord’s possessions. In “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey,� the household of a successful filmmaker is visited years later by his famous first subject, whose trust he betrayed. In “The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston,� the manager of a grocery store becomes fixated on the famous case of a missing local woman, and on the fate of the teenage son she left behind. And in the unforgettable title story, a family makes a quixotic decision to flee to Paris for a summer, only to find their lives altered in an unimaginable way by their teenage daughter’s risky behavior.
Ěý
In Elizabeth McCracken’s universe, heartache is always interwoven with strange, charmed moments of joy—an unexpected conversation with small children, the gift of a parrot with a bad French accent—that remind us of the wonder and mystery of being alive. Thunderstruck & Other Stories shows this inimitable writer working at the full height of her powers.]]> 240 Elizabeth McCracken 0385335776 Katie 4 short-stories 3.91 2014 Thunderstruck & Other Stories
author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: Katie
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/17
date added: 2023/09/11
shelves: short-stories
review:

]]> The Halt During the Chase 88564035
Both a sincere bildungsroman of Sophie’s attempt to seize a life for herself and a comic masterpiece with cutting observations and asides, The Halt During the Chase is flutteringly alive as it discusses different forms of love, adulthood (“Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?�), marriage, insecurity, and stifling British snobbery and classism. Sophie’s voice, fueled by Tonks’s acidic narration, evolves from thrashing about in various traps into a triumphant, croaky-throated liberation song.]]> 160 Rosemary Tonks 0811237451 Katie 0 to-read 4.20 1972 The Halt During the Chase
author: Rosemary Tonks
name: Katie
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> In the Act 62972500 64 Rachel Ingalls 0811232042 Katie 0 3.68 2023 In the Act
author: Rachel Ingalls
name: Katie
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/22
date added: 2023/08/29
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa]]> 37979760
But the situation is more complex than it seems. In Night in the American Village, journalist Akemi Johnson takes readers deep into the “border towns� surrounding the bases—a world where cultural and political fault lines compel individuals, both Japanese and American, to continually renegotiate their own identities. Focusing on the women there, she follows the complex fallout of the murder of an Okinawan woman by an ex–U.S. serviceman in 2016 and speaks to protesters, to women who date and marry American men and groups that help them when problems arise, and to Okinawans whose family members survived World War II.

Thought-provoking and timely, Night in the American Village is a vivid look at the enduring wounds of U.S.-Japanese history and the cultural and sexual politics of the American military empire.]]> 224 Akemi Johnson Katie 5 4.41 Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa
author: Akemi Johnson
name: Katie
average rating: 4.41
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/15
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: potential-conflict-of-interest, japan
review:

]]> Ghost Wall 38922230
For two weeks, the length of her father's vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie's father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind.

The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?

A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the "primitive minds" of our ancestors.]]> 152 Sarah Moss 1783784458 Katie 5 perfect-short-novels, ireland 3.72 2018 Ghost Wall
author: Sarah Moss
name: Katie
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/05/01
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: perfect-short-novels, ireland
review:
This book is just so up my alley.
]]> Normal People 37539457
A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.]]> 266 Sally Rooney 0571334644 Katie 4 ireland 3.93 2018 Normal People
author: Sally Rooney
name: Katie
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/05/29
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> The Memory Police 37004370
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]> 274 YĹŤko Ogawa 1101870605 Katie 0 japan 3.72 1994 The Memory Police
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: Katie
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at: 2020/03/28
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: japan
review:

]]> Conversations with Friends 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 Katie 4 ireland 3.74 2017 Conversations with Friends
author: Sally Rooney
name: Katie
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/03/04
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> Follow Me to Ground 52220595 A haunted, surreal debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal - one that upends our understanding of power, predation, and agency.

Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or “Cures”—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson. When they strike up an affair, to the displeasure of her father and Samson’s widowed, pregnant sister, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover—and eventually comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.

Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Slim but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after its final page, pulling the reader into a dream between fairytale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.]]> 208 Sue Rainsford 1982133635 Katie 0 ireland 3.52 2018 Follow Me to Ground
author: Sue Rainsford
name: Katie
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2020/04/29
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> The Hole 51283868 ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý
One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole—a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.]]> 92 Hiroko Oyamada 0811228878 Katie 0 japan 3.47 2013 The Hole
author: Hiroko Oyamada
name: Katie
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2021/01/02
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: japan
review:

]]> Breasts and Eggs 50736031
Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.

It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Her silence proves a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and frustrations.

On another hot summer’s day ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless.]]> 430 Mieko Kawakami 1609455878 Katie 0 japan 3.87 2019 Breasts and Eggs
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Katie
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2021/01/18
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: japan
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 56597885 356 Sally Rooney 0374602603 Katie 0 ireland 3.53 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: Katie
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2021/10/16
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> Diary of a Void 59629744 A prizewinning, thrillingly subversive debut novel about a woman in Japan who avoids harassment at work by perpetuating, for nine months and beyond, the lie that she's pregnant

When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace--a company that manufactures cardboard tubes--she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups--because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms. Shibata is not pregnant.

Pregnant Ms. Shibata doesn't have to serve coffee to anyone. Pregnant Ms. Shibata isn't forced to work overtime. Pregnant Ms. Shibata rests, watches TV, takes long baths, and even joins an aerobics class for expectant mothers. But pregnant Ms. Shibata also has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Helped along by towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app on which she can log every stage of her "pregnancy," she feels prepared to play the game for the long haul. Before long, though, the hoax becomes all-absorbing, and the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.

A surreal and wryly humorous cultural critique, Diary of a Void is bound to become a landmark in feminist world literature.]]> 213 Emi Yagi 0143136879 Katie 0 japan 3.51 2020 Diary of a Void
author: Emi Yagi
name: Katie
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/29
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: japan
review:

]]> Foster 61206869 An international bestseller and one of The Times' "Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century," Claire Keegan's piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household--where everything is so well tended to--and this summer must soon come to an end.

Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan's great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160158 Katie 0 ireland 4.40 2010 Foster
author: Claire Keegan
name: Katie
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/07
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> Weasels in the Attic 62824954 From the acclaimed author of The Hole and The Factory, a thrilling and mysterious novel that explores fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan.

In three interconnected scenes, Hiroko Oyamada revisits the same set of characters at different junctures in their lives. In the back room of a pet store full of rare and exotic fish, old friends discuss dried shrimp and a strange new relationship. A couple who recently moved into a rustic home in the mountains discovers an unsettling solution to their weasel infestation. And a dinner party during a blizzard leads to a night in a room filled with aquariums and unpleasant dreams. Like Oyamada’s previous novels, Weasels in the Attic sets its sights on the overlooked aspects of contemporary Japanese society, and does so with a surreal sensibility that is entirely her own.]]> 82 Hiroko Oyamada 0811231194 Katie 0 japan 3.46 2022 Weasels in the Attic
author: Hiroko Oyamada
name: Katie
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/31
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: japan
review:

]]> A Ghost in the Throat 51498568 326 Doireann NĂ­ GhrĂ­ofa 1916434266 Katie 0 ireland 4.04 2020 A Ghost in the Throat
author: Doireann NĂ­ GhrĂ­ofa
name: Katie
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/12
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 59016923 "A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." --Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers

Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 70 Claire Keegan 0802158757 Katie 0 ireland 4.23 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Katie
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/03/30
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> The Factory 43862305 The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan.

In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality seem to be dissolving: all forms of life capriciously evolve, strange creatures begin to appear� After a while—it could be weeks or years—the workers don’t even have the ability to ask themselves: where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin?

Told in three alternating first-person narratives, The Factory casts a vivid—if sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of modern life. With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, Hiroko Oyamada is one of the boldest writers of her generation.]]> 116 Hiroko Oyamada 0811228851 Katie 0 japan 3.36 2010 The Factory
author: Hiroko Oyamada
name: Katie
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/03
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: japan
review:

]]> Seven Steeples 58311997 A stunning, powerful new novel about a couple that pushes against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society.

It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another--one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they've drifted.

They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, "as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards." They make a promise to climb the mountain, but--over the course of the next seven years--it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes.

Seven Steeples is a beautiful and profound meditation on the nature of love and the resilience of nature. Through Bell and Sigh, and the life they create for themselves, Sara Baume explores what it means to escape the traditional paths laid out before us--and what it means to evolve in devotion to another person, and to the landscape.]]> 181 Sara Baume 0358629233 Katie 0 ireland 3.50 2022 Seven Steeples
author: Sara Baume
name: Katie
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/07
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: ireland
review:

]]> The Light Room 62952133
From “one of our most formally ambitious writers� ( Esquire ), a moving account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and loss

In The Light Room , Zambreno offers her most profound and affecting work a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, YĹ«ko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.

How will our memories, and our children’s, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room , Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.]]> 256 Kate Zambreno 059342106X Katie 0 3.56 2023 The Light Room
author: Kate Zambreno
name: Katie
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/23
date added: 2023/07/23
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]]> Open Throat 62039259 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,� our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.�

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.� As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 160 Henry Hoke 037460987X Katie 0 4.02 2023 Open Throat
author: Henry Hoke
name: Katie
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/20
date added: 2023/07/23
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]]> Territory of Light 33871745 Territory of Light is the luminous story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her three-year-old daughter. Its twelve, stand-alone fragments follow the first year of her separation from her husband. The novel is full of light, sometimes comforting and sometimes dangerous: sunlight streaming through windows, dappled light in the park, distant fireworks, dazzling floodwater, desaturated streetlamps and earth-shaking explosions. The seemingly artless prose is beautifully patterned: the cumulative effect is disarmingly powerful and images remain seared into your retina for a long time afterwards.]]> 122 YĹ«ko Tsushima 0241312191 Katie 0 to-read 3.61 1978 Territory of Light
author: YĹ«ko Tsushima
name: Katie
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem]]> 58085206
An insightful, provocative, and witty exploration of the relationship between motherhood and art―for anyone who is a mother, wants to be, or has ever had one. What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? What does it mean to create, not in “a room of one’s own,� but in a domestic space? In The Baby on the Fire Escape , award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy, Phillips evokes the intimate and varied struggles of brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Ursula K. Le Guin found productive stability in family life, and Audre Lorde’s queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms. Susan Sontag became a mother at nineteen, Angela Carter at forty-three. These mothers had one child, or five, or seven. They worked in a studio, in the kitchen, in the car, on the bed, at a desk, with a baby carrier beside them. They faced judgement for pursuing their creative work―Doris Lessing was said to have abandoned her children, and Alice Neel’s in-laws falsely claimed that she once, to finish a painting, left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. As she threads together vivid portraits of these pathbreaking women, Phillips argues that creative motherhood is a question of keeping the baby on that apocryphal fire escape: work and care held in a constantly renegotiated, provisional, productive tension. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary life.]]> 320 Julie Phillips 0393088596 Katie 0 4.25 2022 The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem
author: Julie Phillips
name: Katie
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/13
date added: 2023/07/13
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]]> Second Class Citizen 865365 174 Buchi Emecheta 0807610666 Katie 0 to-read 4.02 1974 Second Class Citizen
author: Buchi Emecheta
name: Katie
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Memoirs of a Survivor 371316
This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.]]> 192 Doris Lessing Katie 0 to-read 3.67 1974 The Memoirs of a Survivor
author: Doris Lessing
name: Katie
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Summer Before the Dark 286801 236 Doris Lessing 0586088997 Katie 0 to-read 3.64 1973 The Summer Before the Dark
author: Doris Lessing
name: Katie
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The School for Good Mothers 57846320 An alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781982156121 can be found here.

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance.

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents� sacrifices. What’s worse is she can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with their angelic daughter Harriet does Frida finally feel she’s attained the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she’s just enough.

Until Frida has a horrible day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida � ones who check their phones while their kids are on the playground; who let their children walk home alone; in other words, mothers who only have one lapse of judgement. Now, a host of government officials will determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that she can live up to the standards set for mothers � that she can learn to be good.

This propulsive, witty page-turner explores the perils of “perfect� upper-middle-class parenting, the violence enacted upon women by the state and each other, and the boundless love a mother has for her daughter.]]> 336 Jessamine Chan Katie 0 3.51 2022 The School for Good Mothers
author: Jessamine Chan
name: Katie
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/26
date added: 2023/06/27
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]]> Mouthful of Birds 39872813 A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star.

Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection.

Schweblin's stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing, and the line between the real and the strange blur.]]> 240 Samanta Schweblin 0399184627 Katie 0 3.61 2009 Mouthful of Birds
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Katie
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/07
date added: 2023/06/08
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]]> Joan Is Okay 57677144
Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations.

Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, her parents moved back to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland. But when Joan’s father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone just as her hospital, her city, and the world are forced to reckon with a health crisis more devastating than anyone could have imagined.

Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful, laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese-American right now; working in medicine at a high-stakes time; finding one’s voice within a dominant culture; being a woman in a male-dominated workplace; and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it’s a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can’t get her out of your head.]]> 240 Weike Wang 0525654844 Katie 0 3.86 2022 Joan Is Okay
author: Weike Wang
name: Katie
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/01
date added: 2023/06/01
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]]> Seven Empty Houses 60636626 A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the 3 time International Booker Prize finalist, "lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.� –O, the Oprah magazine

The seven houses in these seven stories are empty. Some are devoid of love or life or furniture, of people or the truth or of memories. But in Samanta Schweblin’s tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back in: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child’s first encounter with a dark choice or the fallibility of parents.

This was the collection that established Samanta Schweblin at the forefront of a new generation of Latin American writers. And now in English it will push her cult status to new heights. Seven Empty Houses is an entrypoint into a fiercely original mind, and a slingshot into Schweblin's destablizing, exhilarating literary world.

In each story, the twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin and reveals uncomfortable truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant writers.]]> 205 Samanta Schweblin 0525541411 Katie 0 3.60 2015 Seven Empty Houses
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Katie
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/26
date added: 2023/05/26
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]]> Unseen City 49771536 272 Amy Shearn 159709367X Katie 0 3.88 2020 Unseen City
author: Amy Shearn
name: Katie
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
shelves:
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]]> The Remains of the Day 274186 here.

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.� But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness� and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.]]> 245 Kazuo Ishiguro 0679731725 Katie 4 4.17 1989 The Remains of the Day
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Katie
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2009/10/29
date added: 2023/05/16
shelves:
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I felt like I was the only person who hadn't read this; now I've amended the transgression. Having just read 'An Artist of the Floating World' I couldn't help but notice how similarly they're written, from repressed voice to form. I thought for a while this was just very good. But then, as promised, it does become *heartbreaking*. Now I'm going to watch Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson reenact. Oh, bantering, the key to life!
]]> White Tears 30780283
Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is glamorous and the heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation.

White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.]]> 271 Hari Kunzru 0451493699 Katie 0 3.67 2017 White Tears
author: Hari Kunzru
name: Katie
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/13
date added: 2023/05/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales]]> 61327451 A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South--based on her acclaimed Paris Review column "Happily"

"One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I've read in decades."--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls "this strange American weather."

Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. She grapples with a loss of innocence in "Sorry, Peter Pan, We're Over You," when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween. In "The Evil Stepmother," Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation. And in "Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand," the hunt for a wigmaker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister's cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by.

Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, Happily is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Mark's voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family.]]> 224 Sabrina Orah Mark 0593242475 Katie 0 3.87 2023 Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales
author: Sabrina Orah Mark
name: Katie
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/27
date added: 2023/04/30
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]]> The Nature Book 60679091 The Nature Book collages descriptions of the natural world into a singular symphonic paean to the planet.

What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a “literary supercut� that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction’s traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns—honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us.]]> 272 Tom Comitta 1566896630 Katie 0 to-read 3.79 2023 The Nature Book
author: Tom Comitta
name: Katie
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/21
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]]> The Dark Dark 31702762 The acclaimed novelist Samantha Hunt’s first collection of stories blends the literary and the fantastic and brings us characters on the verge—girls turning into women, women turning into deer, people doubling or becoming ghosts, and more

Strange things happen all around us all the time, but is it best to acknowledge or to turn away from moments when the weird pokes its way into our ordinary lives?

In these marvelously inventive stories, Samantha Hunt imagines numerous ways in which lives might be altered by the otherworldly. An FBI agent falls in love with a robot built for a suicide mission. A young woman unintentionally cheats on her husband when she is transformed, nightly, into a deer. Two strangers become lovers and find themselves somehow responsible for the resurrection of a dog. A woman tries to start her life anew after the loss of a child but cannot help riddling that new life with lies. Thirteen pregnant teenagers develop a strange relationship with the Founding Fathers of American history. A lonely woman’s fertility treatments become the stuff of science fiction.

Magic intrudes. Technology betrays and disappoints. Infidelities lead us beyond the usual conflict. Our bodies change, reproduce, decay, and surprise. With her characteristic unguarded gaze and offbeat humor, Hunt has conjured stories that urge an understanding of youth and mortality, magnification and loss, and hold out the hope that we can know one another more deeply or at least stand side by side to observe the mystery of the world.]]> 241 Samantha Hunt 0374282137 Katie 0 3.65 2017 The Dark Dark
author: Samantha Hunt
name: Katie
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/14
date added: 2023/04/17
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind]]> 62819115 From a bold new voice in nonfiction, an exhilarating account of the lives and works of influential 17th and 18th century feminist philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and her predecessors who have been written out of history, and a searing look at the author’s experience of patriarchy and sexism in academia

As a young woman growing up in small-town Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academician, the first step, she believed, to becoming a self-determined person living a life of the mind. What Penaluna didn’t realize was that the Western philosophical canon taught in American universities, as well as the culture surrounding it, would slowly grind her down through its misogyny, its harassment, its devaluation of women and their intellect. Where were the women philosophers?

One day, in an obscure monograph, Penaluna came across Damaris Cudworth Masham’s name. The daughter of philosopher Ralph Cudworth and a contemporary of John Locke, Masham wrote about knowledge and God, and the condition of women. Masham’s work led Penaluna to other remarkable women philosophers of the era: Mary Astell, who moved to London at age twenty-one and made a living writing philosophy; Catharine Cockburn, a philosopher, novelist, and playwright; and the better-known Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote extensively in defense of women’s minds. Together, these women rekindled Penaluna’s love of philosophy and awakened her feminist consciousness.

In How to Think Like a Woman, Regan Penaluna blends memoir, biography, and criticism to tell the stories of these four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for love and truth. Funny, honest, and wickedly intelligent, this is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.]]> 320 Regan Penaluna 0802158803 Katie 0 to-read 3.97 2023 How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind
author: Regan Penaluna
name: Katie
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir]]> 48613168
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation� in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.]]> 213 Natasha Trethewey 006224857X Katie 0 4.24 2020 Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
author: Natasha Trethewey
name: Katie
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/05
date added: 2023/04/05
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]]> Outline 21400742
Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.]]> 249 Rachel Cusk 0571233627 Katie 0 re-read 3.68 2014 Outline
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Katie
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/31
date added: 2023/03/07
shelves: re-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative]]> 58393129 Memoir meets craft masterclass in this “daring, honest, psychologically insightful� exploration of how we think and write about intimate experiences—“a must read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past" (Mary Karr).

In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller’s life and the questions which run through it.

How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author’s way of writing, or living, to be dismissed as “navel-gazing”—or else hailed as “so brave, so raw�? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong?

Drawing on her own path from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor—via addiction and recovery, sex work and Harvard night school—Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas—and occasional notes of caution—to anyone who has ever hoped to see themselves in a story.]]> 171 Melissa Febos 1646220854 Katie 0 4.23 2022 Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
author: Melissa Febos
name: Katie
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/28
date added: 2023/02/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster]]> 61855777
"Caroline Hagood's Weird Girls is part manifesto, part homage, and part long-form essay—a tribute and a call to arms for women artists and particularly mothers to embrace what Jenny Offill calls "the art monster" in her novel, The Department of Speculation. Drawing on the monsters of her own childhood and an impressive archive of women writers, comedians, and essay theory, Hagood encourages us to embrace our inner monsters so that we can create the monstrous, specific, grotesque, witchy, and embodied work that the world so desperately needs. Her interludes on her own mothering and monstrosity are especially moving and thrilling. In this time of forced birth, right-wing religious grabs for the autonomy of marginalized people, and late capitalism, this book is a much-needed balm and call-to-arms for all of us to be our full selves."

—Carley Moore, author of The Not Wives and Panpoclaypse

"Caroline Hagood's decision to embrace her 'inner monster' and lead a writer's life spurs her epic literary journey exploring the figure of the so-called "weird" woman: the witch, the mother, the feminist. Hagood's text spills gloriously from topic to topic, weaving together a hybrid narrative that rejects both genre and the idea that the mother and art monster cannot co-exist. Bold, smart, and wildly endearing, Weird Girls is a must-read for women who feel like the world can't contain them—and for those who love them."

—Patricia Grisafi, author of Breaking Down Plath

"In Weird Girls, Caroline Hagood assembles the ultimate dream dinner party: a pantheon of brilliant, iconic, genre-defying, and game-changing women artists through time and across discipline. In sharp and spirited prose, Hagood discusses the lives and work of these artists as a means to interrogate gendered ideas of creative genius. Using elements of memoir, manifesto, and attentive close reading, Weird Girls is rich with insights that, in their jewel-like shimmering, light the path for discoveries of our own."

—Mary-Kim Arnold, author of Litany for the Long Moment and The Fish & the Dove]]> 160 Caroline Hagood 1956005773 Katie 0 4.40 2022 Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster
author: Caroline Hagood
name: Katie
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/16
date added: 2023/02/16
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]]> The Upstairs House 53487130 A provocative meditation on new motherhood—Shirley Jackson meets The Awakening—in which a postpartum woman’s psychological unraveling becomes intertwined with the ghostly appearance of children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown.

There’s a madwoman upstairs, and only Megan Weiler can see her.

Ravaged and sore from giving birth to her first child, Megan is mostly raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she’s also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation—a thesis on mid-century children’s literature.

Enter a new upstairs neighbor: the ghost of quixotic children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown—author of the beloved classic Goodnight Moon—whose existence no one else will acknowledge. It seems Margaret has unfinished business with her former lover, the once-famous socialite and actress Michael Strange, and is determined to draw Megan into the fray. As Michael joins the haunting, Megan finds herself caught in the wake of a supernatural power struggle—and until she can find a way to quiet these spirits, she and her newborn daughter are in terrible danger.

Using Megan’s postpartum haunting as a powerful metaphor for a woman’s fraught relationship with her body and mind, Julia Fine once again delivers an imaginative and “barely restrained, careful musing on female desire, loneliness, and hereditary inheritances� (Washington Post).]]> 304 Julia Fine 006297582X Katie 0 3.31 2021 The Upstairs House
author: Julia Fine
name: Katie
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/11
date added: 2023/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass]]> 20380578
Alice and all her many friends will never beĚýĚýforgotten so long as books for children are published.ĚýĚýThe fascinating adventures of this timeless littleĚýĚýgirl as she plunges down the rabbit-hole, shrinksĚýĚýand grows, meets the pack of cards and the chessĚýĚýpieces -- should be read regularly by all ages forĚýĚýtheir totally original fantasy, their humor, andĚýĚýtheir charm.]]> 52 Lewis Carroll 0307823415 Katie 0 3.93 1871 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
author: Lewis Carroll
name: Katie
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1871
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/30
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]]> The Home-Maker 1786432 320 Dorothy Canfield Fisher 0897330692 Katie 0 4.15 1924 The Home-Maker
author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
name: Katie
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1924
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/19
date added: 2023/01/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times]]> 61355265 #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER - ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2022 - In an inspiring follow-up to her critically acclaimed, #1 bestselling memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today's highly uncertain world.

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life's big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?

Michelle Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt to change and overcome various obstacles--the earned wisdom that helps her continue to "become." She details her most valuable practices, like "starting kind," "going high," and assembling a "kitchen table" of trusted friends and mentors. With trademark humor, candor, and compassion, she also explores issues connected to race, gender, and visibility, encouraging readers to work through fear, find strength in community, and live with boldness.

"When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it," writes Michelle Obama. A rewarding blend of powerful stories and profound advice that will ignite conversation, The Light We Carry inspires readers to examine their own lives, identify their sources of gladness, and connect meaningfully in a turbulent world.]]> 319 Michelle Obama 0593237463 Katie 0 4.26 2022 The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
author: Michelle Obama
name: Katie
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/13
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]]> Marigold and Rose: A Fiction 61094689 Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel laureate Louise GlĂĽck.

“Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.� So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.

Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. “Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow.� The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. “It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know.�

Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything GlĂĽck has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.]]> 66 Louise GlĂĽck 0374607591 Katie 0 3.80 2022 Marigold and Rose: A Fiction
author: Louise GlĂĽck
name: Katie
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/09
date added: 2023/01/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands]]> 59069071 Celebrated cartoonist Kate Beaton vividly presents the untold story of Canada.

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.

Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.]]> 430 Kate Beaton 1770462899 Katie 0 4.41 2022 Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
author: Kate Beaton
name: Katie
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/05
date added: 2023/01/05
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]]> Kudos 37590270 Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public enactment of the creative persona, and she begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation that causes her to consider questions of acclaim, justice, and the ultimate value of suffering. The third in the trilogy that began with Outline, Rachel Cusk’s Kudos takes as its theme the relationship between pain and honor, and investigates the moral nature of success as a precept of both art and living.

]]> 236 Rachel Cusk 0374714584 Katie 0 4.01 2018 Kudos
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Katie
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/24
date added: 2022/12/25
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]]> Transit 29939363 The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015.

In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life.

Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed Outline, and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this precise, short, and yet epic cycle of novels, Cusk manages to describe the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life, through a narrative near-silence that draws language toward it. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one's life and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.]]> 260 Rachel Cusk 0374278628 Katie 0 3.98 2016 Transit
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Katie
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/18
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> The Crying Book 43880777
Told in short, poetic snippets, The Crying Book delights and surprises, as well as rigorously examines how mental illness can affect a family across generations and how crying can express women’s agency―or lack of agency―in everyday life. Christle’s gift is the freshness of her voice and honesty of her approach, both of which create an intimacy with readers as she explores a human behavior broadly experienced but rarely questioned. A beautiful tribute to the power of crying, and to working through despair to tears of joy.]]> 160 Heather Christle 1948226456 Katie 0 3.73 2019 The Crying Book
author: Heather Christle
name: Katie
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/11
date added: 2022/12/11
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]]>