Nirvana 's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 30 Apr 2025 15:07:22 -0700 60 Nirvana 's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Year of Magical Thinking 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 Nirvana 2 3.94 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking
author: Joan Didion
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 2
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]]> Kitchen 12507661
When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday.]]> 0 Banana Yoshimoto Nirvana 0 to-read 4.06 1988 Kitchen
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients]]> 21025 288 Irvin D. Yalom 0060938110 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.31 2001 The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients
author: Irvin D. Yalom
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois]]> 26240643 40 Amy Novesky 1419718819 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.20 2016 Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois
author: Amy Novesky
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> Veronica 33225387 272 Mary Gaitskill 178125592X Nirvana 0 to-read 3.56 2005 Veronica
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> Bad Behavior 251356 Emperor of the Air has there been such excitement surrounding a debut short-story collection.

Daisy's valentine --
A romantic weekend --
something nice --
An affair, edited --
Connection --
Trying to be --
Secretary --
Other factors --
Heaven]]> 208 Mary Gaitskill Nirvana 0 to-read 3.90 1988 Bad Behavior
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> The Art of Joy 16059403 The Art of Joy was written over a nine year span, from 1967 to 1976. At the time of her death in 1996, Sapienza had published nothing in a decade, having been unable to find a publisher for what was to become her most celebrated work, due to its perceived immorality. One publisher's rejection letter exclaimed: 'It's a pile of iniquity.' The manuscript lay for decades in a chest finally being proclaimed a "forgotten masterpiece" when it was eventually published in 2005.

This epic Sicilian novel, which begins in the year 1900 and follows its main character, Modesta, through nearly the entire span of the 20th century, is at once a coming-of-age novel, a tale of sexual adventure and discovery, a fictional autobiography, and a sketch of Italy's moral, political and social past. Born in a small Sicilian village and orphaned at age nine, Modesta spends her childhood in a convent raised by nuns.Through sheer cunning, she manages to escape, and eventually becomes a princess. Sensual, proud, and determined, Modesta wants to discover the infinite richness of life and sets about destroying all social barriers that impede her quest for the fulfilment of her desires. She seduces both men and women, and even murder becomes acceptable as a means of removing an obstacle to happiness and self-discovery.

Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) was born in Catania, Sicily in 1924, in an anarchist socialist family. At sixteen, she entered the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome and worked under the direction of Luchino Visconti, Alessandro Blasetti and Francesco Maselli. She is the author of several novels published during her lifetime: Lettera Aperta (1967), Il Filo Di Mezzogiorno (1969), UniversitĂ  di Rebibbia (1983), Le Certezze Del Dubbio (1987). L'Arte Della Gioia is considered her masterpiece.

Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., a former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for nearly twenty years, and is a member of ALTA, ATA, NCTA and PEN. Her translation of Giovanni Arpino's Scent of a Woman (Penguin, 2011) was named the winner of The John Florio Prize for Italian Translation (2013).]]> 704 Goliarda Sapienza 0374106142 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.05 1998 The Art of Joy
author: Goliarda Sapienza
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/19
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]]> Meeting in Positano: A Novel 57455563
«Ecco, quella lunga sfilata di quinte rocciose, che chiudono in un abbraccio vertiginoso la piccola baia e il mio corpo, sono per me una delle infinite forme magnifiche che il diavolo, trasformista per antonomasia, sa prendere». Negli anni Cinquanta il lavoro cinematografico porta Goliarda Sapienza a Positano, rivelandole un angolo di mondo quasi intatto, popolato da un'umanitĂ  con una dolcezza sconosciuta. È la scoperta di una felicitĂ  senza aggettivi. La conca protetta dalle montagne e dai silenzi del mare diventa il suo rifugio e risveglia le emozioni del corpo, a lungo inaridite dagli orrori della guerra e dalla frenesia della cittĂ . E lĂŹ, tra l'oro e l'azzurro del mare, in un'atmosfera fuori dal tempo, una figura di donna si muove a passo di danza sulle scalinate del paese. La gente del posto la chiama principessa, ha una bellezza antica, gli occhi che cambiano colore. Quello tra Erica e Goliarda Ăš un incontro felice, immerso in una pace che si avvicina all'ebbrezza: l'inizio di un rapporto che nel corso degli anni si fa sempre piĂč intenso, tra i fantasmi del passato e le ombre imminenti. Conoscersi, svelarsi, cambiare, sono i pilastri di quella vicinanza. Una storia che la memoria non riesce a scolorire e anzi trasforma in romanzo: la rievocazione di un'amicizia perduta e l'affresco di un luogo che non esiste piĂč, ma che rivive grazie a una scrittura sensoriale, vibrante di suggestioni, appena velata di malinconia, come al risveglio da un sogno d'infanzia che fatica a dissolversi. Un libro capace di raccontare la fugacitĂ  dell'incanto come se l'incanto non dovesse mai finire.]]> 256 Goliarda Sapienza 1635420431 Nirvana 0 to-read, purchase-priority 3.79 2015 Meeting in Positano: A Novel
author: Goliarda Sapienza
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> Under the Eye of the Big Bird 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.77 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> Butter Honey Pig Bread 51168133 Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision.

Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact. She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won't be a good mother. Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women. She eventually discovers a way out of her stifling loneliness through a passion for food and cooking.

But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.

For readers of African diasporic authors such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.]]> 317 Francesca Ekwuyasi 1551528231 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.31 2020 Butter Honey Pig Bread
author: Francesca Ekwuyasi
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder]]> 39899253 Scattered Minds explodes the myth of attention deficit disorder as genetically based � and offers real hope and advice for children and adults who live with the condition.

Gabor Maté is a revered physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry and psychology � and himself has ADD. With wisdom gained through years of medical practice and research, Scattered Minds is a must-read for parents � and for anyone interested how experiences in infancy shape the biology and psychology of the human brain.

Scattered Minds:
- Demonstrates that ADD is not an inherited illness, but a reversible impairment and developmental delay
- Explains that in ADD, circuits in the brain whose job is emotional self-regulation and attention control fail to develop in infancy � and why
- Shows how ‘distractibilityâ€� is the psychological product of life experience
- Allows parents to understand what makes their ADD children tick, and adults with ADD to gain insights into their emotions and behaviours
- Expresses optimism about neurological development even in adulthood
- Presents a programme of how to promote this development in both children and adults]]> 368 Gabor Maté 1785042211 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.28 1999 Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
author: Gabor Maté
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> The Red Book: Liber Novus 6454477 The Red Book, a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principle theories—of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with treatment of the sick into a means for higher development of the personality.

While Jung considered The Red Book to be his most important work, only a handful of people have ever seen it. Now, in a complete facsimile and translation, it is available to scholars and the general public. It is an astonishing example of calligraphy and art on a par with The Book of Kells and the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake. This publication of The Red Book is a watershed that will cast new light on the making of modern psychology.
212 color illustrations.]]> 371 C.G. Jung 0393065677 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.54 2009 The Red Book: Liber Novus
author: C.G. Jung
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Modern Herbal Dispensatory: A Medicine-Making Guide]]> 29429267 The beloved best-selling classic for the modern herbalist—a definitive guide to 250 safe and effective herbal medicines, preparations, and single-herb remedies to make at home.This comprehensive, full-color guide offers detailed and easy-to-follow instructions for making and using approximately 250 all-natural DIY herbal medicines. With practical tips, in-depth preparation techniques, and an inside look at some of the authorsâ€� own favorite formulas, The Modern Herbal Dispensatory walks beginners and advanced herbalists alike â€� The 12 major categories of herbs, from aromatic to sweetâ€� Herbal preparations: the many ways to prepare and use herbs, from capsules and tinctures to standardized extracts and essential oilsâ€� Choosing the best dosage form for each category of herbâ€� How to harvest, dry, and use fresh herbsâ€� Extractions: terms, equipment, solvents, and calculations, plus how to extract herbs in water, alcohol, glycerin, and vinegarâ€� Advanced like percolation extracts, fluid extracts, and soxhlet extractsâ€� Preparations like oil-based extractions, topical applications, concentrates, lozenges, traditional Chinese methods, and moreâ€� Formulas and how to design herbal formulas and use herbs safely and effectivelyâ€� Herbal insights and need-to-know wisdom, like why different preparations of the same herb affect the body differently; which herbs are medicinal when dry, but could be toxic when fresh; and why beginners typically see more potent results with formulations versus single-herb preparationsThe text includes multiple appendices, recommendations for further reading, in-depth full-color photo guides, and a helpful index. With advice on herbal preparations for 100+ illnesses and conditions and a comprehensive materia medica, The Modern Herbal Dispensatory is an enduring classic and beloved plant-medicine reference manual for herbalists, natural medicine practitioners, and anyone seeking safe, holistic, at-home care and inexpensive all-natural remedies.]]> 484 Thomas Easley 162317080X Nirvana 0 to-read 4.52 The Modern Herbal Dispensatory: A Medicine-Making Guide
author: Thomas Easley
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics]]> 544175 118 Andrea Dworkin 0704338866 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.41 1976 Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
author: Andrea Dworkin
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> Right-Wing Women 377163 � From the reverse cover.]]> 255 Andrea Dworkin 0399506713 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.39 1983 Right-Wing Women
author: Andrea Dworkin
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Pornography: Men Possessing Women]]> 163256 336 Andrea Dworkin 0452267935 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.01 1981 Pornography: Men Possessing Women
author: Andrea Dworkin
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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]]> Woman Hating 209333 224 Andrea Dworkin 0452268273 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.89 1974 Woman Hating
author: Andrea Dworkin
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> Intercourse 163265 Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women’s subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to “all sex is rapeâ€� in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin’s already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin’s untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin’s argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?]]> 349 Andrea Dworkin 0465017525 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.00 1987 Intercourse
author: Andrea Dworkin
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions]]> 6377236 336 Kathleen Woodward 0822343770 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.82 2008 Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions
author: Kathleen Woodward
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men]]> 224552
He says he loves you. So...why does he do that?
Ìę
You’ve asked yourself this question again and again. Now you have the chance to see inside the minds of angry and controlling men—and change your life. In Why Does He Do That? you will learn
Ìę
‱ÌęThe early warning signs of abuse
� The nature of abusive thinking
‱ÌęMyths about abusers
‱ÌęTen abusive personality types
‱ÌęThe role of drugs and alcohol
‱ÌęWhat you can fix, and what you can’t
‱ÌęAnd how to get out of an abusive relationship safely

“This is without a doubt the most informative and useful book yet written on the subject of abusive men. Women who are armed with the insights found in these pages will be on the road to recovering control of their lives.”—Jay G. Silverman, Ph.D., Director, Violence Prevention Programs, Harvard School of Public Health]]> 408 Lundy Bancroft 0425191656 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.47 2002 Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
author: Lundy Bancroft
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> Sandalwood Death 16087986
Sandalwood Death is set during the Boxer Rebellion (1898â€�1901)—an anti-imperialist struggle waged by North China’s farmers and craftsmen in opposition to Western influence. Against a broad historical canvas, the novel centers on the interplay between its female protagonist, Sun Meiniang, and the three paternal figures in her life. One of these men is her biological father, Sun Bing, an opera virtuoso and a leader of the Boxer Rebellion. As the bitter events surrounding the revolt unfold, we watch Sun Bing march toward his cruel fate, the gruesome “sandalwood punishment,â€� whose purpose, as in crucifixions, is to keep the condemned individual alive in mind-numbing pain as long as possible.

Filled with the sensual imagery and lacerating expressions for which Mo Yan is so celebrated, Sandalwood Death brilliantly exhibits a range of artistic styles, from stylized arias and poetry to the antiquated idiom of late Imperial China to contemporary prose. Its starkly beautiful language is here masterfully rendered into English by renowned translator Howard Goldblatt.]]> 419 Mo Yan 0806143398 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.26 2001 Sandalwood Death
author: Mo Yan
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Little Reunions (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 36954609 A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China.

Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.]]> 392 Eileen Chang 1681371286 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.32 2009 Little Reunions (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Eileen Chang
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> Red Rose, White Rose 10453145 There were two women in Zhenbao's life: one he called his white rose, the other his red rose. One was a spotless wife, the other a passionate mistress. Isn't that just how the average man describe a chaste widow's devotion to her husband's memory - as spotless, and passionate too? Maybe every man has had two such women - at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is "moonlight in front of my bed." Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.

In Eileen Chang's eloquent and evocative novella, Zhenbao is a devoted son, a diligent worker, and guarded in love. But when he meets a friend's spoilt, spirited, desirable wife, he cannot resist her charms, or keep their relationship under his control. As he succumbs to passions and resentments, Red Rose, White Rose is both sensual and restrained.

]]> 85 Eileen Chang 0141196149 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.72 1993 Red Rose, White Rose
author: Eileen Chang
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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]]> Love in a Fallen City 2153367 352 Eileen Chang Nirvana 0 to-read 3.81 1943 Love in a Fallen City
author: Eileen Chang
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei: Vol. One: The Gathering]]> 486177
This is the first volume in David Roy's celebrated translation of one of the most famous and important novels in Chinese literature. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei is an anonymous sixteenth-century work that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ch’ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. The novel, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of the narrative art form―not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context.

With the possible exception of The Tale of Genji (1010) and Don Quixote (1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. Although its importance in the history of Chinese narrative has long been recognized, the technical virtuosity of the author, which is more reminiscent of the Dickens of Bleak House , the Joyce of Ulysses , or the Nabokov of Lolita than anything in the earlier Chinese fiction tradition, has not yet received adequate recognition. This is partly because all of the existing European translations are either abridged or based on an inferior recension of the text. This translation and its annotation aim to faithfully represent and elucidate all the rhetorical features of the original in its most authentic form and thereby enable the Western reader to appreciate this Chinese masterpiece at its true worth.]]> 714 Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng 0691016143 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.03 1596 The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei: Vol. One: The Gathering
author: Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1596
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Captive (Remembrance of Things Past)]]> 770678 289 Marcel Proust 039470598X Nirvana 0 to-read 4.28 1923 The Captive (Remembrance of Things Past)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1923
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> Surfacing 46755 Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec.ÌęSetting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose.ÌęHere is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented... and becoming whole.

]]> 199 Margaret Atwood 0385491050 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.47 1972 Surfacing
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/13
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]]> The Word for World Is Forest 118014 The award-winning masterpiece by one of today's most honored writers!

Ìę

The Word for World is Forest

When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.

Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But in defending their lives, they have endangered the very foundations of their society. For every blow against the invaders is a blow to the humanity of the Athsheans. And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.

]]> 137 Ursula K. Le Guin 0425032795 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.95 1972 The Word for World Is Forest
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> The Atrocity Exhibition 862742 The Atrocity Exhibition (1966)
The University of Death (1968)
The Assassination Weapon (1966)
You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe (1966)
Notes towards a Mental Breakdown (1967)
The Great American Nude (1968)
The Summer Cannibals (1969)
Tolerances of the Human Face (1969)
You and Me and the Continuum (1966)
Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy (1966)
Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. (1968)
Crash! (1969)
The Generations of America (1968)
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (1968)
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (1966)]]> 139 J.G. Ballard Nirvana 0 to-read 3.33 1969 The Atrocity Exhibition
author: J.G. Ballard
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex]]> 924208 188 John Stevens 087773416X Nirvana 0 to-read 3.53 1990 Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex
author: John Stevens
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> The Parasites 7994491 318 Daphne du Maurier Nirvana 0 to-read 3.50 1949 The Parasites
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry]]> 18112192 On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.

Gass writes:
Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of the exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright think quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.]]> 91 William H. Gass 1590177185 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.66 1975 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
author: William H. Gass
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants]]> 52379389 As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

]]> 390 Robin Wall Kimmerer 014199195X Nirvana 0 to-read 4.47 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> Summer Will Show 52692583 'She is my husband's mistress - and here am I, taking her out to dinner'

Sophia Willoughby of Blandamer House, upstanding Victorian matriarch, has packed her errant husband off to Paris with his mistress Minna. But when tragedy throws her life off balance Sophia goes to seek him out, and instead finds herself intensely attracted to the charismatic, bohemian Minna, who leads her on a wild, chaotic adventure through a city in the throes of revolution.]]> 320 Sylvia Townsend Warner 0241454840 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.68 1936 Summer Will Show
author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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]]> My Face for the World to See 36987625 A brilliant, bruising depiction of the dark side of 1950s Hollywood, from the author of In Love.

At a Hollywood party, a screenwriter rescues an aspiring actress from a drunken suicide attempt. He is married, disillusioned; she is young, seemingly wise to the world and its slights. They slide into a casual relationship together, but as they become ever more entangled, he realises that his actions may have more serious consequences than he could ever have suspected. Hayes' exquisite novella, written in his cool, inimitable style, holds a revealing light to the hollowness of the Hollywood dream and exposes the untruths we tell ourselves, even when we think we have left illusions behind.

'A masterpiece ... an insider's manual for all those who would aspire to fame, the ghostly glamour of the movies' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

'Hayes is the poet of the things we think about while lying in bed, when sleep refuses to carry us off' David Thomson]]> 119 Alfred Hayes 0241342309 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.67 1958 My Face for the World to See
author: Alfred Hayes
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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]]> Little Birds 11036 148 AnaĂŻs Nin 0156029049 Nirvana 0 currently-reading 3.74 1979 Little Birds
author: AnaĂŻs Nin
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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]]> All Passion Spent 606805 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 0860683583

In 1860, as a young girl of 17, Lady Slane nurtures a secret, burning ambition—to become an artist.ÌęShe becomes, instead,Ìęthe wife of a great statesman and the mother of six children. Seventy years later, released by widowhood, and to the dismay of her pompous children, she abandons the family home for a tiny house in Hampstead. Here she recollects the dreams of youth, and revels inÌęher newfound freedomÌęwith her odd assortment of companions: Genoux, her French maid; Mr. Bucktrout, her house agent; and a coffin maker who pictures people dead in order to reveal their true characters.ÌęAnd then there'sÌęMr. FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire who met and loved her in India when she was young and very lovely. It is here in this world of her own that she finds a passion that comes only with the freedom to choose, and it is this, her greatest gift, that she passes on to the only one who can understand its value.

First published in 1931, Vita Sackville-West's masterpiece is the fictional companion to her great friend Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.]]> 297 Vita Sackville-West Nirvana 0 to-read 3.98 1931 All Passion Spent
author: Vita Sackville-West
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1931
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Selected Works of Audre Lorde]]> 50489367 A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s "intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Among the essays included here are:
� "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"
â€� "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
� "I Am Your Sister"
â€� Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of Light

The poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:
� "Martha"
� "A Litany for Survival"
� "Sister Outsider"
� "Making Love to Concrete"]]> 367 Audre Lorde 1324004614 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.63 2020 The Selected Works of Audre Lorde
author: Audre Lorde
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2020
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]]> The Passion 879426 192 Jeanette Winterson 0676973493 Nirvana 3
Much to take in about love as a lens, a worldview and a means of self-discovery. That being said, i can’t help but wonder what would a Venetian have to say..]]> 4.11 1987 The Passion
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/06
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“When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer. Then, when I had regarded myself for the first time, I regarded the world and saw it to be more various and beautiful than I thought.â€�

Much to take in about love as a lens, a worldview and a means of self-discovery. That being said, i can’t help but wonder what would a Venetian have to say..
]]> Killing Stella 219299650 other, about her son’s gloomy demeanor and her daughter’s obliviousness to everything, and, most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has just met a sudden and disastrous end.

A domestic horror story that builds to an apocalyptic ending, Killing Stella distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel The Wall into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella.]]> 80 Marlen Haushofer 0811238652 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.20 1958 Killing Stella
author: Marlen Haushofer
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1958
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]]> Sophie’s Choice 228560 562 William Styron 0679736379 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.18 1979 Sophie’s Choice
author: William Styron
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Studies in the History of Sexuality)]]> 503672 men" (Jews and homosexuals) in defining and maintaining the male stereotype, and considers the possible erosion of that stereotype in our own time.]]> 240 George L. Mosse 0195126602 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.01 1996 The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Studies in the History of Sexuality)
author: George L. Mosse
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1996
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]]> <![CDATA[The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism]]> 32709697 Audre Lorde Nirvana 0 to-read 4.75 1981 The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism
author: Audre Lorde
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.75
book published: 1981
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]]> Rethinking Sex: A Provocation 58037743 Part searing examination, part call to arms—a bold case against modern sexual ethics, from young Washington Post columnist Christine Emba.

For years now, modern-day sexual ethics has held that “anything goesâ€� when it comes to sex—as long as everyone says yes, and does so enthusiastically. So why, even when consent has been ascertained, are so many of our sexual experiences filled with frustration, and disappointment, even shame?

The truth is that the rules that make up today’s consent-only sexual code may actually be the cause of our sexual malaise—not the solution. In Rethinking Sex, reporter Christine Emba shows how consent is a good ethical floor but a terrible ceiling. She spells out the cultural, historical, and psychological forces that have warped our idea of sex, what is permitted, and what is considered “safe.â€� In visiting critical points in recent years—from #MeToo and the Aziz Ansari scandal, to the phenomenal response to “Cat Person”—she reveals how a consent-only view of sex has hijacked our ability to form authentic and long-lasting connections, exposing us further to chronic isolation and resentment.

Reaching back to the wisdom of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Andrea Dworkin, and drawing from sociological studies, interviews with college students, and poignant examples from her own life, Emba calls for a more humane philosophy, one that starts with consent but accounts for the very real emotional, mental, social, and political implications of sex—even, she argues, if it means saying no to certain sexual practices or challenging societal expectations altogether.

More than a bold reassessment of modern norms, Rethinking Sex invites us to imagine what it means to will the good of others, and in turn, attain greater affirmation, fulfillment, and satisfaction for ourselves.]]> 256 Christine Emba 0593087569 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.60 2022 Rethinking Sex: A Provocation
author: Christine Emba
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2022
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]]> <![CDATA[The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century]]> 56347680 The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity�its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power�we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.]]> 241 Amia Srinivasan 0374721033 Nirvana 0 to-read, purchase-priority 4.27 2021 The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
author: Amia Srinivasan
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
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]]> چ۱ۧŰș‌هŰ� ۱ۧ من ŰźŰ§Ù…ÙˆŰŽ می‌کنÙ� 58275 293 Zoya Pirzad 9643056562 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.60 2002 چ۱ۧŰșâ€ŒÙ‡Ű§ ۱ۧ من ŰźŰ§Ù…ÙˆŰŽ می‌کنم
author: Zoya Pirzad
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/17
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]]> Things I've Been Silent About 2910034 I started making a list in my diary entitled Things I Have Been Silent About. Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran. I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined.--From Things I Have Been Silent About

Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets; a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval–these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first placeâ€� (Newsday).

Nafisi’s intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerizing fictions about herself, her family, and her past. But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi’s father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with the classic tales like the Shahnamah, the Persian Book of Kings. When her father started seeing other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi’s complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal, as well as political, cultural, and social, injustices.

Reaching back in time to reflect on other generations in the Nafisi family, Things I’ve Been Silent About is also a powerful historical portrait of a family that spans many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which turned Azar Nafisi’s beloved Iran into a religious dictatorship. Writing of her mother’s historic term in Parliament, even while her father, once mayor of Tehran, was in jail, Nafisi explores the remarkable “coffee hoursâ€� her mother presided over, where at first women came together to gossip, to tell fortunes, and to give silent acknowledgment of things never spoken about, and which then evolved into gatherings where men and women would meet to openly discuss the unfolding revolution.

Things I’ve Been Silent About is, finally, a deeply personal reflection on women’s choices, and on how Azar Nafisi found the inspiration for a different kind of life. This unforgettable portrait of a woman, a family, and a troubled homeland is a stunning book that readers will embrace, a new triumph from an author who is a modern master of the memoir.]]> 336 Azar Nafisi 1400063612 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.68 2008 Things I've Been Silent About
author: Azar Nafisi
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2008
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]]> Carmilla 212808273 Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in the sexual tension between two young women and gothic romance.

In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, teenaged Laura leads a solitary life with only her father, attendant and tutor for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest—the beautiful Carmilla.

So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her entrancing new companion, one defined by mysterious happenings and infused with an implicit but undeniable eroticism. As Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day...]]> 160 J. Sheridan Le Fanu 1805332120 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.90 1872 Carmilla
author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1872
rating: 0
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]]> Malina 42185902 Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, “deathstyles,â€� the roots of fascism, and passion.

"Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I attempted to say that here in this society there is always war. There isn’t war and peace, there’s only war."—Ingeborg Bachmann]]> 283 Ingeborg Bachmann 081122872X Nirvana 0 to-read, purchase-priority 4.16 1971 Malina
author: Ingeborg Bachmann
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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]]> No One Knows 214387887 No one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we’re adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that.

Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed—in an addictive, easy style—the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In “Lantern,â€� a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him—and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In “Chiyojo,â€� a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: Is this what I really want? Or am I a proxy for their own frustrated ambitions? In “Shame,â€� a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he’s a bourgeois sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): “Novelists are human trash. No, they’re worse than that; they’re demons â€� They write nothing but lies.â€�

This collection of 14 tales—a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English—is based on a Japanese collection of “soliloquies by female narrators,â€� as Dazai described them. No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story “Schoolgirlâ€� and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.]]> 256 Osamu Dazai 0811239330 Nirvana 0 to-read, purchase-priority 4.11 2025 No One Knows
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
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]]> Adam and Eve in Paradise 214387884 Adam, the father of all mankind, was created on October 28 at two in the afternoon. When these words first appeared in Lisbon in 1897 in the Encyclopedic Almanac, more than a few readers were scandalized. This irreverent, clever tale, among Eça de Queirós’s lesser known works, but no less representative for that, combines popular science with myth and a base naturalism with fantasy, all within a Biblical framework. The author puts his considerable wit to the task of creating a vision of Paradise as vivid as the real world, presenting prehistoric animals with real names but exaggerated appearances for effect, describing metaphorical landscapes with a moving prose, and introducing an Eve capable of interpreting everything Adam sees as mysterious and terrifying as logical and soothing. Fans of the classic Portuguese author as well as the uninitiated will find themselves drawn into the imaginative world presented in this wonderful story.]]> 64 Eça de Queirós 0811239144 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.92 1897 Adam and Eve in Paradise
author: Eça de Queirós
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1897
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, #2)]]> 32886 272 bell hooks 0060938293 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.36 2002 Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, #2)
author: bell hooks
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> Cold Enough For Snow 59525175
Jessica Au’s novel will be published by Giramondo, Fitzcarraldo and New Directions in February 2022, and translated into fourteen languages around the world.

A young woman accompanies her mother on a holiday in Japan. The daughter has arranged their itinerary. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafĂ©s and restaurants and walk along the canals at night, on guard against the autumn rain and the prospect of snow. All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother’s family in Hong Kong, and the daughter’s allegiances in Australia. But uncertainties abound. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken? Cold Enough for Snow is a reckoning and an elegy: with extraordinary skill, Au creates an enveloping atmosphere that expresses both the tenderness between mother and daughter, and the distance between them.]]> 112 Jessica Au 1925818926 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.88 2022 Cold Enough For Snow
author: Jessica Au
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
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]]> A Leopard-Skin Hat 203119329 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a ‘masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance,â€� it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders

A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre’s signature style.]]> 112 Anne Serre 1915267242 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.53 A Leopard-Skin Hat
author: Anne Serre
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.53
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]]> Patriotism 7420324 60 Yukio Mishima 0811218546 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.10 1961 Patriotism
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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]]> Confessions of a Mask 787423 Confessions of a Mask is one of the classics of modern Japanese fiction. It is the story of an adolescent who must learn to live with the painful fact that he is unlike other young men. Mishima's protagonist discovers that he is becoming a homosexual in a polite, post-war Japan. To survive, he must live behind a mask of propriety.]]> 254 Yukio Mishima Nirvana 0 to-read, purchase-priority 3.88 1949 Confessions of a Mask
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Confessions by Rabee Jaber (2016-03-21)]]> 139867457 0 Ű±ŰšÙŠŰč ۏۧۚ۱ Rabee Jaber Nirvana 0 to-read 3.00 2008 Confessions by Rabee Jaber (2016-03-21)
author: Ű±ŰšÙŠŰč ۏۧۚ۱ Rabee Jaber
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> The Honditsch Cross 214387874 80 Ingeborg Bachmann 0811238563 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.50 1983 The Honditsch Cross
author: Ingeborg Bachmann
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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]]> Stealth 18470101 224 Sonallah Ibrahim 0811223051 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.38 2007 Stealth
author: Sonallah Ibrahim
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> Phantom Pain Wings 62972499 208 Kim Hyesoon 0811231712 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.95 Phantom Pain Wings
author: Kim Hyesoon
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> Autobiography of Death 38458431 Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.â€� Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “youâ€� speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with “Face of Rhythm,â€� a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.]]> 110 Kim Hyesoon 0811227340 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.09 2016 Autobiography of Death
author: Kim Hyesoon
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House]]> 38598541
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]> 51 Audre Lorde 0241339723 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.56 2018 The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
author: Audre Lorde
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Sweat - A Short Story: Including the Introductory Essay 'A Brief History of the Harlem Renaissance']]> 63915407 'Sweat' is an early feminist short story by Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston. This pocket-sized tale presents the contrasting lives of a married couple: the sweat and toil of Delia and the leisure and privilege of her husband, Sykes.

Delia works incredibly long hours as a washerwoman, making sure that she earns enough to pay rent for her and her husband's home, while also ensuring the house is clean and there is food on the table. Her husband, Sykes, is unemployed, abusive, and having an affair. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that both Delia and Sykes want their relationship to end, but Sykes is willing to go to horrific measures to ensure she is out of his life for good.

Zora Neale Hurston presents the lack of job opportunities for Black men in the South following the American civil war, and she investigates the psychological impact of a man at that time having to financially depend on his wife. Sykes resorts to abusing Delia because it is the only way he can assert his dominance. Hurston explores early feminist ideals and ensures her work features characters who are strong Black women.

First published in 1926, 'Sweat' is now in a brand new pocket-sized edition featuring an introductory essay on the Harlem Renaissance, and is a brilliant read for those interested in early feminist writings.]]> 26 Zora Neale Hurston 1528798287 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.00 Sweat - A Short Story: Including the Introductory Essay 'A Brief History of the Harlem Renaissance'
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.00
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]]> <![CDATA[How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women]]> 402075 "What happened to the passion we started with?
Why aren't we as close as we used to be?"

PROBLEM: If you are a woman who is unfulfilled in your marriage...if you feel unheard or overburdened...if you quietly live in a state of slow-burn resentment...
PROBLEM: If you are a man unhappy that your partner seems so unhappy with you...if you feel bewildered, unappreciated, or betrayed...

This book offers a solution

Bestselling author and nationally renowned therapist Terrence Real unearths the causes of communication blocks between men and women in this groundbreaking work. Relationships are in trouble; the demand for intimacy today must be met with new skills, and Real -- drawing on his pioneering work on male depression -- gives both men and women those skills, empowering women and connecting men, radically reversing the attitudes and emotional stumbling blocks of the patriarchal culture in which we were raised. Filled with powerful stories of the couples Real treats, no other relationship book is as straight talking or compelling in its innovative approach to healing wounds and reconnecting partners with a new strength and understanding.]]> 304 Terrence Real 0684868784 Nirvana 0 to-read, purchase-priority 4.26 2001 How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women
author: Terrence Real
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture, Media and Identities Series)]]> 219848 400 Stuart Hall 0761954325 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.06 1997 Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture, Media and Identities Series)
author: Stuart Hall
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over]]> 177148776 128 Anne de Marcken 0811237850 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.70 2024 It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
author: Anne de Marcken
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> Near to the Wild Heart 13082437
The book was an unprecedented sensation â€� the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”]]> 220 Clarice Lispector 0811220028 Nirvana 5 all-time-favourites 4.01 1943 Near to the Wild Heart
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: all-time-favourites
review:
Kitchen table argument on who’s Woolf-esque
]]> Gone with the Wind 819699 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Scarlett O'Hara, the beautiful, spoiled daughter of a well-to-do Georgia plantation owner, must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman's March to the Sea.]]> 1037 Margaret Mitchell 068483068X Nirvana 4 all-time-favourites 4.44 1936 Gone with the Wind
author: Margaret Mitchell
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1936
rating: 4
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]]> All About Love: New Visions 218042 “The word “loveâ€� is most often defined as a noun, yetâ€� we would all love better if we used it as a verb,â€� writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question “What is love?â€�, her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the â€�100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.â€� All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how profoundly she can.

Librarian note: There is an alternate cover edition of this book here.]]> 238 bell hooks 0060959479 Nirvana 4 3.89 1999 All About Love: New Visions
author: bell hooks
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back]]> 58950971 320 Julia Serano 1541674804 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.25 2022 Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back
author: Julia Serano
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence]]> 329751 272 Esther Perel 0060753641 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.20 2006 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
author: Esther Perel
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> Crave 414737 Crave charts the disintegration of a human mind under the pressures of love, loss and desire.

Produced by Paines Plough and Bright Ltd (Guy Chapman and Paul Spyker), Crave premiered at the Traverse Theatre for the 1998 Edinburgh Festival. It received its English premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London in September 1998.]]> 64 Sarah Kane 0413728803 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.12 1998 Crave
author: Sarah Kane
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> Metropolitan Life 927916 177 Fran Lebowitz 0525155627 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.81 1978 Metropolitan Life
author: Fran Lebowitz
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/08
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]]> Ruin of Kasch 36200530 A sparkling new translation of the classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art

The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien régime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the centre stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes.]]> 432 Roberto Calasso 0141397012 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.74 1983 Ruin of Kasch
author: Roberto Calasso
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India]]> 163014
What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible.]]> 464 Roberto Calasso 0679775471 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.17 1996 Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India
author: Roberto Calasso
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony]]> 753252
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterful retelling of the ancient myths and fables we may only think we know. From the tale of Europa and the bull to the fall of Troy, Roberto Calasso weaves his way through the entire world of Greek mythology with a captivating sense of curiosity and intrigue that casts these classical stories in a whole new light for a modern reader.]]> 416 Roberto Calasso 0679733485 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.32 1988 The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
author: Roberto Calasso
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems]]> 411247 128 Kim Addonizio 0393327094 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.12 2004 What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems
author: Kim Addonizio
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> Naked Lunch 24832260 Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined literature. A startling tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and virtuoso style have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Will Self, as well as on music, film, and the media generally. This restored edition incorporates Burroughs’s notes on the text, several essays he wrote about the book, and an appendix of new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a definitive and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.]]> 289 William S. Burroughs Nirvana 0 to-read 3.28 1959 Naked Lunch
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)]]> 6490587 Things Fall Apart tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a “strong manâ€� of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society.

The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. Things Fall Apart is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within.]]> 209 Chinua Achebe 0385667833 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.63 1958 Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Eugenia: A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs]]> 25198030 A little-known gem of utopian/dystopian fiction published in 1919 tells the story of a eugenically engineered society of the future.
It is the year 2218. In “Villautopia,â€� the capital of a Central American nation, the state selects young, biologically desirable citizens to act as breeders. Embryos are implanted in males to increase a flagging population rate, and the offspring are raised in state facilities until old enough to choose their own, non-nuclear families. Sterilization of children with mental or physical abnormalities further ensures the purity of the gene pool.
Written two years before Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and twelve years before Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Eugenia recounts the story of Ernesto, who at age twenty-three is selected as a breeder. Celiana, his thirty-eight-year-old lover and an accomplished scholar, is deemed unfit for reproduction. To cope with her feelings of guilt and hopelessness, she increasingly turns to marijuana, and her scholarly productivity declines. Meanwhile Ernesto falls in love with a fellow breeder, a young woman named Eugenia—but the life they ultimately choose is not quite what the state had envisioned.
Taking up important challenges of modern society—population growth, reproductive behavior and technologies, experimentation with gender roles, and changes in family dynamicsâ€�Eugenia is published here in English for the first time. Sarah A. Buck Kachaluba and Aaron Dziubinskyj provide a critical apparatus helping readers to understand the novel’s literary genesis and genealogy as well as its historical context. Arising from its twentieth-century origins, yet remarkably contemporary, Eugenia is a treasure of speculative fiction.

Winner,ÌęJose Toribio Medina Award, Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials]]> 284 Eduardo Urzaiz Rodríguez 0299306844 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.00 1919 Eugenia: A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs
author: Eduardo Urzaiz Rodríguez
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1919
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays]]> 40121993 224 Esmé Weijun Wang 1555978274 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.14 2019 The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
author: Esmé Weijun Wang
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> Cal 41827048
Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story that unfolds in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark.

See Lies of Silence by Brian Moore]]> 176 Bernard MacLaverty 1784875503 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.70 1983 Cal
author: Bernard MacLaverty
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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]]> The Witch of Edmonton 58631189 162 Thomas Dekker 1554814162 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.57 1658 The Witch of Edmonton
author: Thomas Dekker
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1658
rating: 0
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]]> Amongst Women 304209 184 John McGahern 0571195261 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.96 1990 Amongst Women
author: John McGahern
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> Good Behaviour 54318983
A wickedly funny satire of Irish society after WWI, featuring “delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of themâ€� ( Vulture ).

“Hilarious and sinister.â€� â€� The New York Times

Is it possible to kill with kindness? As Molly Keane’s Booker Prize–short-listed dark comedy suggests, not only can kindness be deadly, it just may be the best form of revenge. The novel opens as Aroon St. Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon—the silver gleams, the linens glow—of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. In fact, a single whiff of the stuff is enough to knock the old lady dead. “All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,â€� says Aroon soon after. In the pages that follow she will make her case, reminiscing about her youth among the hunting-and-fishing classes of Ireland, a faded aristocracy dedicated to distraction even as their fortunes dwindle.

Keane’s brilliant sleight of hand is toÌęallow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own developmentÌęfrom neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all.]]> 320 Molly Keane 168137529X Nirvana 0 to-read 4.06 1981 Good Behaviour
author: Molly Keane
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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]]> Salvage the Bones 10846336 Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt, while brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that comprise the novel's framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel's heart—motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to struggle for another day. A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, "Salvage the Bones" is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.]]> 261 Jesmyn Ward 1608195228 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.95 2011 Salvage the Bones
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas]]> 1154376 288 Su Tong 0671713280 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.83 1990 Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas
author: Su Tong
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> The Vet's Daughter 1073750 The Vet’s Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife’s death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.
Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O’Connor and Stephen King, The Vet’s Daughter is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.]]> 152 Barbara Comyns 1590170296 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.94 1959 The Vet's Daughter
author: Barbara Comyns
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1959
rating: 0
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]]> Ghosts 58089771 Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937.

In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,â€� the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,â€� the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter.

In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul.

These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,â€� not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-upâ€� by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,â€� which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight.

Contents:
All Souls�
The Eyes
Afterward
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Kerfol
The Triumph of Night
Miss Mary Pask
Bewitched
Mr. Jones
Pomegranate Seed
A Bottle of Perrier]]> 288 Edith Wharton 1681375729 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.92 1937 Ghosts
author: Edith Wharton
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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]]> Lost Cat 55273096 ‘Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don’t know for certain.â€�

So begins Mary Gaitskill’s stunning book-length essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir. Lost Cat begins with the story of how Gaitskill rescued a stray cat in Italy and brought him to live with her in the US, where he went missing.

As she explores the unexpected trauma of her loss, Gaitskill describes how she came to foster two siblings, Caesar and Natalia, a pair of inner-city children who spent summers and holidays with Gaitskill and her husband. The joys and ultimate difficulties of this relationship leads to a searing examination of loss, love, safety and fear. Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.]]> 120 Mary Gaitskill 1911547801 Nirvana 0 to-read 4.08 2014 Lost Cat
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Pornography for the End of the World]]> 61877043
From Brendan Vidito, the Wonderland-Award-winning author of Nightmares in Ecstasy, comes nine tales of apocalyptic body horror.

A young man is initiated into a cult that worships sickness and disease.

Survivors of a nuclear holocaust make a pilgrimage to the last movie theater in existence.

Premonitions of disaster haunt a loving couple doomed to watch each other die.

Each story pulsates with Vidito's characteristic dark humor, atmospheric tension, and visceral prose. This is pornography for the devotee of horror, the morbidly curious—pornography for the end of the world.]]> 148 Brendan Vidito 195165823X Nirvana 0 to-read 3.45 2022 Pornography for the End of the World
author: Brendan Vidito
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> Marigold and Rose 59808598 Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from Nobel Prize laureate Louise GlĂŒck.

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

Here are the elements you'd expect to find in a story of infant twins--Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and nap time--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.

Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book follows thirteen books of poetry and two collections.]]> 55 Louise GlĂŒck 0374607583 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.66 2022 Marigold and Rose
author: Louise GlĂŒck
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> The Leopard 1320341 230 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 0099512157 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.93 1958 The Leopard
author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch]]> 58724936
Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.

So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.

Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.]]> 288 Rivka Galchen 1250849314 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.47 2021 Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
author: Rivka Galchen
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.47
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]]> Out 60093249 Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino's award-winning literary mystery Out. Featuring an introduction by James Ellroy.

This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot's ringleader but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society.

At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.]]> 416 Natsuo Kirino 0593311957 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.92 1997 Out
author: Natsuo Kirino
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1997
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]]> <![CDATA[Perfume: The Story of a Murderer]]> 343 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.]]> 263 Patrick SĂŒskind Nirvana 0 currently-reading 4.05 1985 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
author: Patrick SĂŒskind
name: Nirvana
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1985
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]]> Summer Rain 20459 144 Marguerite Duras 0684194031 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.79 1990 Summer Rain
author: Marguerite Duras
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1990
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]]> Destroy, She Said 281 133 Marguerite Duras 080215154X Nirvana 0 to-read 3.62 1969 Destroy, She Said
author: Marguerite Duras
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1969
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]]> The Easy Life 59808374 For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.

The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence.

An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.]]> 208 Marguerite Duras 1635578515 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.83 1947 The Easy Life
author: Marguerite Duras
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1947
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]]> Blue Eyes, Black Hair 69960 117 Marguerite Duras 0394563204 Nirvana 0 to-read 3.64 1986 Blue Eyes, Black Hair
author: Marguerite Duras
name: Nirvana
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1986
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