Pau's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 01:36:09 -0700 60 Pau's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Hard Times 2859195 Thomas Gradgrind is the guiding luminary of the Coketown school, stern proponent of the Philosophy of Fact, whose ill-conceived idealism blinds him to the essential humanity of those around him, with calamitous results. His daughter Louisa becomes trapped in a loveless marriage and falls prey to an idle seducer, and her brother Tom is ruined thanks to their father's pet theories. Meanwhile Sleary's circus offers a vision of escape and entertainment, a joyful contrast to the dreariness of life in Coketown. The hardship of the workers and the victimization of Stephen Blackpool are set against the exuberance of the circus people in Dickens's much-loved moral tale. Gradgrind is forced to reconsider his cherished system when he realizes that 'Facts alone' are not, after all, enough. (From the back cover)



Hard Times is Dickens's shortest novel, and arguably his greatest triumph. A useful appendix of the author's working notes, together with an enlightening introduction and full explanatory notes, will ensure that this edition becomes the obvious choice for anyone studying the novel. Paul Schlike is Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen.

]]> 299 Charles Dickens 0199536279 Pau 2 2018, fiction, classics 3.30 1854 Hard Times
author: Charles Dickens
name: Pau
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1854
rating: 2
read at: 2018/12/02
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: 2018, fiction, classics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Angels in America, #1-2)]]> 9828349 344 Tony Kushner 1559363843 Pau 5 2020, theatre well that sure was. something]]> 4.40 1995 Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Angels in America, #1-2)
author: Tony Kushner
name: Pau
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/11
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: 2020, theatre
review:
“what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that’s it’s not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.�
well that sure was. something
]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Pau 0 to-read 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Pau
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays]]> 51210 A Streetcar Named Desire fading southern belle Blanche Dubois finds her romantic illusions brutally shattered; The Glass Menagerie portrays an introverted girl trapped in a fantasy world; and Sweet Bird of Youth shows how we are unable to escape ‘the enemy, time�.]]> 313 Tennessee Williams 0141182563 Pau 4 2019, theatre, classics 4.11 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays
author: Tennessee Williams
name: Pau
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1947
rating: 4
read at: 2019/10/12
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: 2019, theatre, classics
review:
what a heartbreaking collection
]]> <![CDATA[Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems]]> 6645634
To this enlarged edition Elaine Feinstein adds five major pieces. 'Girlfriend', a sequence of lyrics, was written for Tsvetaeva's lover Sofia Parnok. In 'New Year's Greetings' she responded to the death of Rainer Maria Rilke. 'On a Red Horse' is a dramatic fairytale of power and cruelty. 'Wires', of which two lyrics were included in the earlier edition, now appears in full; and a previously omitted lyric from 'Poem of the End' has been translated. With a new introduction, notes and bibliography of works in English, Bride of Ice brings Tsvetaeva to a new generation of readers.]]> 166 Marina Tsvetaeva 1847770606 Pau 0 to-read 4.26 1971 Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems
author: Marina Tsvetaeva
name: Pau
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Poupée volée 36475895 Le portrait d’une femme qui oscille entre raison et folie, un subtil jeu de miroirs grossissants servi par une écriture précise qui fouille avec justesse la moindre plaie.]]> 196 Elena Ferrante 2072733804 Pau 2 2018, fiction 3.53 2006 Poupée volée
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Pau
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2018/07/10
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: 2018, fiction
review:

]]> A Little Life 25334922 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER � A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship� (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST � MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST � WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE �

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 1447294823 Pau 5
edit: i reread this, retrospectively hoping i would feel neither as sucked in nor as awed but it backfired and i hate myself for it]]> 4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Pau
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/27
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: 2019, left-their-mark, 2020, fiction
review:
i am aware of the voyeuristic & trauma-porn element and although i myself was forced to pause my reading because it was just too much sometimes, i still want to give this book 5 stars because i’ve been deeply engaged both pre, during & post reading and yanagihara’s prose is just magnificent. however it’s definitely not a book i’m recommending lol

edit: i reread this, retrospectively hoping i would feel neither as sucked in nor as awed but it backfired and i hate myself for it
]]> Au revoir là-haut 203305653
Fresque d'une rare cruauté, remarquable par son architecture et sa puissance d'évocation, Au revoir là-haut est le grand roman de l'après-guerre de 14, de l'illusion de l'armistice, de l'État qui glorifie ses disparus et se débarrasse de vivants trop encombrants, de l'abomination érigée en vertu.

Dans l'atmosphère crépusculaire des lendemains qui déchantent, peuplée de misérables pantins et de lâches reçus en héros, Pierre Lemaitre compose la grande tragédie de cette génération perdue avec un talent et une maîtrise impressionnants.

Adapté au cinéma par Albert Dupontel (César de la meileure adaptation pour P.Lemaitre et A.Dupontel; César du meilleur réalisateur à A.Dupontel)]]> 567 Pierre Lemaitre 2226249672 Pau 0 to-read 4.29 2013 Au revoir là-haut
author: Pierre Lemaitre
name: Pau
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flowers for Algernon 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.

Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence � a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X Pau 0 to-read 4.19 1966 Flowers for Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Pau
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All About Love: New Visions 17607 All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

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

For readers who have found ongoing delight and wisdom in bell hooks's life and work, and for those who are just now discovering her, All About Love is essential reading and a brilliant book that will change how we think about love, our culture-and one another.]]> 240 bell hooks 0688168442 Pau 0 2020, non-fiction 4.06 1999 All About Love: New Visions
author: bell hooks
name: Pau
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at: 2020/05/08
date added: 2023/09/08
shelves: 2020, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[بحثاً عن الزمن المفقود - جانب منازل سوان]]> 201497 623 Marcel Proust Pau 3 4.10 1913 بحثاً عن الزمن المفقود - جانب منازل سوان
author: Marcel Proust
name: Pau
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1913
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/08/06
shelves: fiction, classics, francophone
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf]]> 43961
DeSalvo and Leaska established the chronological order of the letters and placed them in sequence, and they have also included relevant diary entries and letters Vita and Virginia wrote to other friends where they add context and illumination to the narrative. Annotations throughout the text identify peripheral characters, clarify allusions, and provide background. As the New York Times noted, "the result is a volume that reads like a book, not just a gathering of marvelous scraps."

In his introduction Mitchell A. Leaska observes, "Rarely can a collection of correspondence have cast into more dramatic relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an enterprise of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling."]]> 480 Vita Sackville-West 1573441961 Pau 5 2020, non-fiction anyway, this was all so very tender, i really am obsessed with writers' correspondence, and especially vita's and virginia's]]> 4.29 1926 The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf
author: Vita Sackville-West
name: Pau
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1926
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/22
date added: 2023/07/30
shelves: 2020, non-fiction
review:
"Many years later, in a letter to Harold, Vita wrote: '...I still think that I might have saved her if only I had been there and had known the state of mind she was getting into.' Vita was probably right." this afterword broke my heart
anyway, this was all so very tender, i really am obsessed with writers' correspondence, and especially vita's and virginia's
]]> Another Country 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Pau 3 2019, fiction, classics 4.32 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: Pau
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2019/10/17
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: 2019, fiction, classics
review:

]]> The Awful Rowing Toward God 691014 86 Anne Sexton 0395203651 Pau 5 2021, poetry 4.22 1975 The Awful Rowing Toward God
author: Anne Sexton
name: Pau
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1975
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/08
date added: 2023/07/22
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Une théorie féministe de la violence, Pour une politique antiraciste de la protection]]> 55944010 Ces mots désignent une cruelle réalité. Mais n’en dissimulent-ils pas une autre, celle des violences commises avec la complicité de l’État ? Dans cet ouvrage, Françoise Vergès dénonce le tournant sécuritaire de la lutte contre le sexisme. En se focalisant sur des « hommes violents », on omet d’interroger les sources de cette violence. Pour l’autrice, cela ne fait aucun doute : le capitalisme racial, les populismes ultra-conservateurs, l’écrasement du Sud par les guerres et les pillages impérialistes, les millions d’exilé•es, l’escalade carcérale, mettent les masculinités au service d’une politique de mort. Contre l’air du temps, Françoise Vergès nous enjoint de refuser l’obsession punitive de l’État, au profit d’une justice réparatrice.]]> 192 Françoise Vergès 2358722049 Pau 4 4.15 2020 Une théorie féministe de la violence, Pour une politique antiraciste de la protection
author: Françoise Vergès
name: Pau
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/27
date added: 2022/10/19
shelves: 2021, francophone, non-fiction
review:

]]> L'Amour la poésie 44676356 136 Paul Éluard 2070221989 Pau 4 2020, poetry, francophone 3.80 1929 L'Amour la poésie
author: Paul Éluard
name: Pau
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/26
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves: 2020, poetry, francophone
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories]]> 51540889 An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg's first story collection since her acclaimed and prizewinning Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and mind like rotten, fragrant fruit. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg's trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Spain, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the thoughts we reveal to no one but ourselves.

In "Lizards," a man mutes his wife's anxieties by giving her a La Croix-like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and violent consequences, while in "Karolina," a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what's left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too close. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of "Slumberland," "that border between magic and annihilation," and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.]]> 224 Laura van den Berg 0374102090 Pau 0 to-read 3.81 2020 I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
author: Laura van den Berg
name: Pau
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon 45892221
Published twenty-five years after her untimely death, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon presents the essential work of one of America’s most cherished poets―celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace. In their inquisitive explorations and direct language, Jane Kenyon’s poems disclose a quiet certainty in the natural world and a lifelong dialogue with her faith and her questioning of it. As a crucial aspect of these beloved poems of companionship, she confronts her struggle with severe depression on its own stark terms. Selected by Kenyon’s husband, Donald Hall, just before his death in 2018, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon collects work from across a life and career that will be, as she writes in one poem, “simply lasting.”]]> 112 Jane Kenyon 1644450194 Pau 4 2021, poetry very sweet collection 4.50 2020 The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon
author: Jane Kenyon
name: Pau
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/01
date added: 2022/04/20
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:
very sweet collection
]]> <![CDATA[Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.]]> 59713003
Noor Hindi’s poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency.

This collection is ultimately a provocation―on trauma, on art, on what it takes to change the world.]]> 80 Noor Hindi 1642596965 Pau 5 4.52 2022 Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.
author: Noor Hindi
name: Pau
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/03/06
shelves:
review:
hell yes. noor hindi supremacy forever & always
]]> Nouvelles: édition complète 40016529 478 Clarice Lispector 2721006762 Pau 0 currently-reading 4.14 2015 Nouvelles: édition complète
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Pau
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> My Grief, the Sun 58797041 Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. In these often intimate poems, every verse invokes ode and elegy. Love and grief sit side by side. My Grief, the Sun listens carefully to the planet's breathing, addresses the endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.

From concrete to confessional poem, exegesis to erasure, the Missinnihe River in Canada to the Zabarwan Mountains in Kashmir, Wani undoes and complicates genre and gathers the world between the poet’s hands.]]> 112 Sanna Wani 1487010842 Pau 5 4.29 2022 My Grief, the Sun
author: Sanna Wani
name: Pau
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/25
date added: 2022/01/25
shelves:
review:
sanna wani i am in LOVE with you!!!!!!!!!!!
]]> The Hurting Kind: Poems 59571658 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,� writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.� What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols�?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others� stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,� writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”]]> 100 Ada Limon 1639550496 Pau 5 poetry 4.34 2022 The Hurting Kind: Poems
author: Ada Limon
name: Pau
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/14
date added: 2022/01/14
shelves: poetry
review:
received an ARC courtesy of milkweed books and this was SUCH a lovely read, brought me back to the first ever poetry collection i read, which happened to be bright dead things...things coming full circle i love poetry & i love ada limón
]]> Blue Horses 20821239
Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.



At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.]]> 79 Mary Oliver 1594204799 Pau 0 2021, poetry 4.28 2014 Blue Horses
author: Mary Oliver
name: Pau
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/26
date added: 2021/12/26
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Moon Is Always Female: Poems]]> 129636
”The Lunar Cycle forms the second part. I first heard of the lunar calendar in my childhood, when I asked why Passover falls on a different date every year and was answered that it falls on Nisan 14, the fourteenth day of the lunar month of Nisan. The next time I came across the moon-month was in reading Robert Graves in search of the old goddess religions. But the lunar calendar has really only been an intimate part of my life since I moved near the ocean and the bay and had to become conscious of the tides; for one thing, to get the sweet Wellfleet oysters.

For more precise understanding I owe a lot to Nancy F. W.Passmore of the Luna Press, who every year produces The Lunar Calendar with thirteen months, their old Celtic names, associations from around the world, time of moon rise and set and all the phases. It tells me at a glance when my period will come and when I can expect to ovulate, and it is the most beautiful calendar I have ever seen, with the months in the form of spirals rather than grids.
”Not being constrained by commerce to produce a calendar to sell by January first, Roman time, I begin when my year opens, in the spring; with Nisan, the first month of the Jewish religious year � although I have used the Celtic names, as does The Lunar Calendar, in homage to that labor of love. Rediscovering the lunar calendar has been a part of rediscovering women’s past, but it has also meant for me a series of doorways to some of the non-rational aspects of being a living woman: Thus The Lunar Cycle, explorations of my last two years.”]]> 133 Marge Piercy 0394738594 Pau 0 2021, poetry 4.22 1980 The Moon Is Always Female: Poems
author: Marge Piercy
name: Pau
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/25
date added: 2021/12/25
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> Light Years 174622 308 James Salter 0679740732 Pau 0 currently-reading 4.07 1975 Light Years
author: James Salter
name: Pau
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Childhood / Youth / Dependency]]> 50742897 370 Tove Ditlevsen 0241457572 Pau 0 non-fiction, 2021 4.39 1967 Childhood / Youth / Dependency
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Pau
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/24
date added: 2021/12/24
shelves: non-fiction, 2021
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story]]> 1093459 278 Paul Monette 0349105499 Pau 0 2021, non-fiction 4.29 1992 Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
author: Paul Monette
name: Pau
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/20
date added: 2021/12/20
shelves: 2021, non-fiction
review:

]]> Twenty-Ninth Year 37570526
For Hala Alyan, this is a year in which the past—memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith—winds itself around the present. Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies.

A vivid catalog of trauma, heartache, loneliness, and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.
]]> 96 Hala Alyan 1328511944 Pau 0 2021, poetry 3.92 2019 Twenty-Ninth Year
author: Hala Alyan
name: Pau
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/19
date added: 2021/12/18
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Little Middle of the Night (Iowa Poetry Prize)]]> 7202957 This award-winning collection simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself. Tinged with a suffering—“I was the littlest wastebasket. / I was my own church. Except� / scared, scared”—that rises above personal sorrow, her fierce and painterly poems redefine nature and art and what exists “Lately, there is spangled shade in my space / and a cold apple orchard to tend in place of consciousness.� As Reginald Shepherd said about the poems in Brodak’s first collection, the chapbook Instructions for a Painting , her world is “‘small enough / to sing in all directions,� and large enough to take us there.”]]> 82 Molly Brodak 1587298589 Pau 0 2021, poetry 4.14 2010 A Little Middle of the Night (Iowa Poetry Prize)
author: Molly Brodak
name: Pau
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/15
date added: 2021/12/14
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> God's Silence 148158 Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. Wright, whom we know as a poet of exquisite miniatures, opens God’s Silence with “East Boston, 1996,� a powerful long poem that looks back at the darker moments in the formation of his sensibility. He shares his private rules for bus riding (“No eye contact: the eyes of the terrified / terrify�), and recalls, among other experiences, his first encounter with a shotgun, as an eight-year-old boy (“In a clearing in the cornstalks . . . it was suggested / that I fire / on that muttering family of crows�). Throughout this volume, Wright continues his penetrating study of his own and our collective soul. He reaches a new level of acceptance as he intones the paradox “I have heard God’s silence like the sun,� and marvels at our presumptions:

We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished
even this, the holiness of things
precisely as they are, and never will!

Though Wright often seeks forgiveness in these poems, his black wit and self-deprecation are reliably present, and he delights in reminding us that “literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.�
But in this book, literature wins as well. God’s Silence is a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silences) can do for us.]]> 160 Franz Wright 1400043514 Pau 4 2021, poetry 4.13 2006 God's Silence
author: Franz Wright
name: Pau
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/10
date added: 2021/12/13
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog]]> 374817 65 Paul Monette 0312026021 Pau 5 2021, poetry 4.34 1988 Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog
author: Paul Monette
name: Pau
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/13
date added: 2021/12/13
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> Together and By Ourselves 31945168 There are new jobs and people
and someone dies before noon every day.
I am swimming and swimming…in May or an ocean,
I don’t see the reason. “But that’s unimportant,� you said.
“Just keep doing it over again until one day you can’t.�
Spring excites us and we know what it is every time.
The minutes in meetings are life’s most undistinguished;
that’s obvious. And what’s obvious makes us all fools
then fast friends.

Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.]]> 96 Alex Dimitrov 1556595107 Pau 0 2021, poetry 3.88 2017 Together and By Ourselves
author: Alex Dimitrov
name: Pau
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2021/12/09
date added: 2021/12/09
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> Le quatrième mur 18375774 329 Sorj Chalandon 2246808715 Pau 5 4.29 2013 Le quatrième mur
author: Sorj Chalandon
name: Pau
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/12/06
shelves: left-their-mark, fiction, francophone
review:

]]> Journal of a Solitude 845386
In this book, we are closer to the marrow than ever before in May Sarton's writing.]]> 208 May Sarton 0393309282 Pau 0 currently-reading 4.15 1973 Journal of a Solitude
author: May Sarton
name: Pau
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> &Dz;ééԱ𳾱Գ 819954 130 Annie Ernaux 2070419231 Pau 0 to-read 4.36 2000 L'événement
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Pau
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Breath of Life 13082431 A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness.

A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published.

At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured� by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.]]> 167 Clarice Lispector 0811219623 Pau 4 2021, classics 4.34 1978 A Breath of Life
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Pau
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/08
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: 2021, classics
review:

]]> Rêves (French Edition) 8951800 72 Wajdi Mouawad 274273709X Pau 3 2020, theatre, francophone 3.90 2002 Rêves (French Edition)
author: Wajdi Mouawad
name: Pau
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2020/07/13
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: 2020, theatre, francophone
review:

]]> Fish in Exile 29633645 The loss of a child takes mythological, magical casts—distortions that allow us to see the contours of grief more clearly.

How do you grieve the death of a child? With fishtanks and jellyfish burials, Persephone’s pomegranate seeds, and affairs with the neighbors. Fish in Exile spins unimaginable loss through classical and magical tumblers, distorting our view so that we can see the contours of a parent’s grief all the more clearly.]]> 192 Vi Khi Nao 1566894492 Pau 0 to-read 4.06 2016 Fish in Exile
author: Vi Khi Nao
name: Pau
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Between the World and Me 25489625 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.�

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]> 152 Ta-Nehisi Coates Pau 3 2021, non-fiction 4.40 2015 Between the World and Me
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Pau
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/20
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: 2021, non-fiction
review:

]]> Second Empire 25330127 This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others--other times, other places--in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.
Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker , Poetry , the Kenyon Review , and Ploughshares . He received his MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a doctoral student in English at Emory University.]]> 69 Richie Hofmann 1938584163 Pau 4 2021, poetry 4.27 2015 Second Empire
author: Richie Hofmann
name: Pau
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/05
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> Sur les ossements des morts 28685837 Il y a un vieux remède contre les cauchemars qui hantent les nuits, c’est de les raconter à haute voix au-dessus de la cuvette des W.-C., puis de tirer la chasse.

Après le grand succès des ééԲ, Olga Tokarczuk nous offre un roman superbe et engagé, où le règne animal laisse libre cours à sa colère. Voici l’histoire de Janina Doucheyko, une ingénieure en retraite qui enseigne l’anglais dans une petite école et s’occupe, hors saison, des résidences secondaires de son hameau. Elle se passionne pour l’astrologie et pour l’œuvre de William Blake, dont elle essaie d’appliquer les idées à la réalité contemporaine. Aussi, lorsqu’une série de meurtres étranges frappe son village et les environs, au cœur des Sudètes, y voit-elle le juste châtiment d’une population méchante et insatiable.

La police enquête. Règlement de comptes entre demi-mafieux�? Les victimes avaient toutes pour la chasse une passion dévorante. Quand Janina Doucheyko s’efforce d’exposer sa théorie � dans laquelle entrent la course des astres, les vieilles légendes et son amour inconditionnel de la nature �, tout le monde la prend pour une folle. Mais bientôt, les traces retrouvées sur les lieux des crimes laisseront penser que les meurtriers pourraient être� des animaux�!]]> 304 Olga Tokarczuk 2882502605 Pau 0 to-read 3.80 2009 Sur les ossements des morts
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Pau
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Le Maître et Marguerite 1101128 Le Maître et Marguerite a mis vingt-cinq ans pour s'imposer comme l'un des chefs-d'œuvre de la
littérature russe et devenir un livre culte dont la construction diabolique n'a pas fini d'enchanter les lecteurs. Comment définir un mythe ? Les personnages de ce roman fantastique sont le diable, un écrivain suicidaire, un chat géant, Jésus et Ponce Pilate, la plus belle femme du monde... On y trouve des meurtres atroces et des crucifixions. C'est une satire acerbe, une comédie burlesque, une parodie politique, un poème philosophique dévastateur avec des fantômes et des transformations magiques. Mais cette fantasmagorie baroque, ce film noir, cette vision d'apocalypse est aussi l'une des plus belles histoires d'amour jamais écrites.]]> 577 Mikhaïl Boulgakov 226613437X Pau 0 to-read 4.16 1967 Le Maître et Marguerite
author: Mikhaïl Boulgakov
name: Pau
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> La Comtesse sanglante 8081797 238 Valentine Penrose 2070701212 Pau 0 to-read 3.22 1962 La Comtesse sanglante
author: Valentine Penrose
name: Pau
average rating: 3.22
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Year of Blue Water (Volume 113) (Yale Series of Younger Poets)]]> 41155003
“Weaves together descriptions of experiences of immigration as a Chinese-American and of racism, mental wellness, and gender from a queer and trans perspective.”� Publishers Weekly

2020 Lambda Literary Awards finalisttransgender poetry category

How can a search for self‑knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi’s arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life.

These poems constitute an artifact of a groundbreaking and original author whose work reflects a long journey self‑guided through tarot, therapy, and the arts. Foregrounding the power of friendship, Yanyi’s poems converse with friends as much as with artists both living and dead, from Agnes Martin to Maggie Nelson to Robin Coste Lewis. This instructive collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.]]> 96 Yanyi . 0300242646 Pau 3 2021, poetry 4.25 2019 The Year of Blue Water (Volume 113) (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
author: Yanyi .
name: Pau
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/04
date added: 2021/12/03
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Kingdom Animalia (American Poets Continuum)]]> 11778691
Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.]]> 120 Aracelis Girmay 193441462X Pau 5 2021, poetry 4.30 2011 Kingdom Animalia (American Poets Continuum)
author: Aracelis Girmay
name: Pau
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/01
date added: 2021/12/01
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> The Sea 3656 The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy� of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.� What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer]]> 195 John Banville 1400097029 Pau 0 currently-reading 3.54 2005 The Sea
author: John Banville
name: Pau
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Swimming Home 11700333 Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-adjusted people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera comes loose at the seams. Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.]]> 165 Deborah Levy 1908276029 Pau 5 2021, fiction 3.44 2011 Swimming Home
author: Deborah Levy
name: Pau
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/30
date added: 2021/11/30
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:

]]> Dept. of Speculation 17402288
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.]]> 179 Jenny Offill 0385350813 Pau 4 2021, fiction 3.76 2014 Dept. of Speculation
author: Jenny Offill
name: Pau
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/29
date added: 2021/11/29
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:

]]> Crudo 36638609 The Lonely City.

"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn’t have a clue."

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.

From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, compassionate account of learning to love when the end of the world seems near.]]> 143 Olivia Laing 1509892834 Pau 3 2021, fiction 3.34 2018 Crudo
author: Olivia Laing
name: Pau
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/26
date added: 2021/11/26
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:
very similar to autumn by ali smith in that: some exquisite quotes but the book itself is so unbalanced
]]> The Sea, the Sea 9843479 495 Iris Murdoch 1101495650 Pau 3 2021, fiction 4.09 1978 The Sea, the Sea
author: Iris Murdoch
name: Pau
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1978
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/25
date added: 2021/11/25
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:
long-winded and such but when iris murdoch wrote “somehow, let us not waste love, it is rare enough”…yeah
]]> Finna 48984964 Dynamic poems that celebrate the Black vernacular and engage with the world through the lens of Hip Hop as well as America's vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets--from an award-winning author and poet.

fin-na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to. rooted in African American Vernacular English. (2) eye dialect spelling of "fixing to." (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow.

A lyrical and sharp celebration, these poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy. In three key parts, Finna explores the mythos and erasure of names in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, through the celebration and examination of the Black vernacular, expands the notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.]]> 128 Nate Marshall 0593132459 Pau 2 2021, poetry 4.48 2020 Finna
author: Nate Marshall
name: Pau
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/11/21
date added: 2021/11/24
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us]]> 33947154
In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car.

In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.]]> 291 Hanif Abdurraqib Pau 5 non-fiction, 2021 4.57 2017 They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Pau
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/08
date added: 2021/11/24
shelves: non-fiction, 2021
review:
everything hanif abdurraqib touches turns into poetry
]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 11996 "As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes.

The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.

Then everything changes... and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.]]> 208 Jacqueline Harpman 0380731819 Pau 0 to-read 4.22 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Pau
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Felon: Poems 43726561 Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.

The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.

Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."]]> 95 Reginald Dwayne Betts 0393652149 Pau 5 2021, poetry 4.34 2019 Felon: Poems
author: Reginald Dwayne Betts
name: Pau
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/21
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:
“it is the policy of the city to jail people it is the policy of the city to jail people it is the policy of the city to hold prisoners until extinguished� OOF
]]> Magical Negro 40611194 Magical Negro is an archive of Black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless Black melancholies and triumphs.]]> 112 Morgan Parker 1947793187 Pau 2 2021, poetry 4.33 2019 Magical Negro
author: Morgan Parker
name: Pau
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2021/11/21
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> The New Testament 20702577 73 Jericho Brown Pau 2 2021, poetry 4.26 2014 The New Testament
author: Jericho Brown
name: Pau
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2021/11/21
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> The Tradition 41746324 The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex―a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues―testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.]]> 77 Jericho Brown 1556594860 Pau 4 2021, poetry 4.25 2019 The Tradition
author: Jericho Brown
name: Pau
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/21
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> Citizen: An American Lyric 20613761 Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.]]> 169 Claudia Rankine 1555976905 Pau 0 non-fiction, 2021 4.27 2014 Citizen: An American Lyric
author: Claudia Rankine
name: Pau
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2021/11/11
date added: 2021/11/20
shelves: non-fiction, 2021
review:

]]> The Overstory 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X Pau 0 to-read 4.10 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Pau
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Devil's Valley 18242469 With Devil's Valley, South African writer André Brink, author of A Dry White Season, takes the reader on a wild ride into all the dark places of human nature that people most like to avoid. He makes a landscape and social history of these dark places as he brings his protagonist face to face with an agrarian community sternly committed to keeping outsiders out and inner secrets in. It's a place where dream worlds, death worlds, and this world blur and blend, where God and the Devil daily wrestle for the souls of the inhabitants, where simple human dignity is all but out of reach. What is history in such a place? What is truth? "The problem is that I have no bloody way of making sure what I have to show for my efforts," Lochner muses on his experience. "Statements, testimonies, accounts, or just a damn handful of ravings?"

Devil's Valley asks the reader to wonder about his or her own history, especially those parts we all like to leave out yet mutter silently to ourselves, the parts that skitter through our own moonlit night lives accompanied by owls and baboons. --Schuyler Ingle

]]> 372 André Brink 0436275031 Pau 0 2021, fiction 3.17 1998 Devil's Valley
author: André Brink
name: Pau
average rating: 3.17
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2021/11/19
date added: 2021/11/19
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:

]]> A Ghost in the Throat 51498568 326 Doireann Ní Ghríofa 1916434266 Pau 0 to-read 4.04 2020 A Ghost in the Throat
author: Doireann Ní Ghríofa
name: Pau
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Branches 45274800 Rhiannon McGavin Pau 4 2021, poetry 4.58 2017 Branches
author: Rhiannon McGavin
name: Pau
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/18
date added: 2021/11/18
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> Milkman 36059839
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.]]> 348 Anna Burns 0571342736 Pau 5 2021, fiction 3.68 2018 Milkman
author: Anna Burns
name: Pau
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/16
date added: 2021/11/16
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)]]> 44421460 What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?]]> 213 Toshikazu Kawaguchi 1529029589 Pau 0 to-read 3.67 2015 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: Pau
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> There There 36692478 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525520375.

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.]]> 294 Tommy Orange Pau 0 to-read 3.98 2018 There There
author: Tommy Orange
name: Pau
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Writer's Diary 14948
Included are entries that refer to her own writing, and those that are relevant to the raw material of her work, and, finally, comments on the books she was reading. The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world—the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision—of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

� A Writer’s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.”� New York Times Book Review

Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.]]> 355 Virginia Woolf 0156027917 Pau 4 2021, non-fiction 4.16 1953 A Writer's Diary
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Pau
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/13
date added: 2021/11/13
shelves: 2021, non-fiction
review:

]]> Vanessa and Virginia 5505825
Vanessa and Virginia are sisters, best friends, bitter rivals, and artistic collaborators. As children, they fight for attention from their overextended mother, their brilliant but difficult father, and their adored brother, Thoby. As young women, they support each other through a series of devastating deaths, then emerge in bohemian Bloomsbury, bent on creating new lives and groundbreaking works of art. Through everything—marriage, lovers, loss, madness, children, success and failure—the sisters remain the closest of co-conspirators. But they also betray each other.

In this lyrical, impressionistic account, written as a love letter and elegy from Vanessa to Virginia, Sellers imagines her way into the heart of the lifelong relationship between writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell. With sensitivity, imagination, and fidelity to what is known of both lives, Sellers has created a powerful portrait of sibling rivalry.]]> 213 Susan Sellers 0151014744 Pau 0 2021, fiction 3.37 2008 Vanessa and Virginia
author: Susan Sellers
name: Pau
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2021/02/03
date added: 2021/11/13
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:
beautifully written and interesting perspective and does what it sets out to do but i guess biofiction is not really for me
]]> Blood and Guts in High School 321950
In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny--her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"--until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise.

Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.]]> 165 Kathy Acker 080213193X Pau 0 to-read 3.50 1984 Blood and Guts in High School
author: Kathy Acker
name: Pau
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Freshwater 35412372 Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities.

Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. A traumatic assault leads to a crystallization of her alternate selves: Asụghara and Saint Vincent. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these selves--now protective, now hedonistic--move into control, Ada's life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction.

Narrated by the various selves within Ada and based in the author's realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.]]> 229 Akwaeke Emezi 0802127355 Pau 0 to-read 4.03 2018 Freshwater
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Pau
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 26135825
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.]]> 232 Alison Bechdel 0618871713 Pau 0 to-read 4.07 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
author: Alison Bechdel
name: Pau
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance]]> 49247757 A stirring meditation on Black performance in America from the New York Times bestselling author of Go Ahead in the Rain

At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,� she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter� in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,� a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.

Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.]]> 301 Hanif Abdurraqib 1984801198 Pau 4 2021, non-fiction ]]> 4.60 2021 A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Pau
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/11
date added: 2021/11/11
shelves: 2021, non-fiction
review:
i say it once again: everything hanif abdurraqib touches turns into poetry

]]> Half a Lifelong Romance 25937741 379 Eileen Chang 0307387542 Pau 0 to-read 3.98 1948 Half a Lifelong Romance
author: Eileen Chang
name: Pau
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Red Tenda of Bologna 36436069
A dreamlike meditation on memory, food, paintings, a fond uncle and the improbable beauty of Bologna, from the visionary thinker and art critic.

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.]]> 64 John Berger 0241339014 Pau 0 to-read 4.08 2007 The Red Tenda of Bologna
author: John Berger
name: Pau
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Peter Pan 219182 200 J.M. Barrie Pau 0 fiction, classics 4.01 1911 Peter Pan
author: J.M. Barrie
name: Pau
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1911
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/08
shelves: fiction, classics
review:

]]> Let the Great World Spin 5941033
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.� A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent� (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.]]> 351 Colum McCann 1400063736 Pau 0 to-read 3.95 2009 Let the Great World Spin
author: Colum McCann
name: Pau
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Under Milk Wood 763508 Under Milk Wood is "lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality" (The New Statesman and Nation).]]> 107 Dylan Thomas 0811202097 Pau 0 to-read 4.01 1954 Under Milk Wood
author: Dylan Thomas
name: Pau
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Grand Union 43608928 A dazzling collection of short fiction, more than half of which have never been published before, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and Swing Time

Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically-respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. With ten extraordinary new stories complemented by a selection of her most lauded pieces for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, GRAND UNION explores a wide range of subjects, from first loves to cultural despair, as well as the desire to be the subject of your own experience. In captivating prose, she contends with race, class, relationships, and gender roles in a world that feels increasingly divided.

Nothing is off limits, and everything--when captured by Smith's brilliant gaze--feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced, and utterly original, GRAND UNION highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.]]> 246 Zadie Smith 0525558993 Pau 0 to-read 3.26 2019 Grand Union
author: Zadie Smith
name: Pau
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Weather 37506228
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.]]> 208 Jenny Offill 0385351100 Pau 0 to-read 3.57 2020 Weather
author: Jenny Offill
name: Pau
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems]]> 45892256 A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically acclaimed poets.

Carl Phillips's new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self's multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips's most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.]]> 58 Carl Phillips 0374229058 Pau 0 to-read 3.97 2020 Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems
author: Carl Phillips
name: Pau
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency]]> 50755102 “One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction� (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in the tumultuous twenty-first century.

In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.]]> 272 Olivia Laing 132400570X Pau 0 to-read 4.02 2020 Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency
author: Olivia Laing
name: Pau
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> Faithful and Virtuous Night 20613826 Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry

A luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception.
You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.]]> 71 Louise Glück 0374152012 Pau 0 to-read 3.96 2014 Faithful and Virtuous Night
author: Louise Glück
name: Pau
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Eye Level: Poems 36479171 Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here―colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes―bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.� Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception―both to the tangible world and to “all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.”]]> 82 Jenny Xie 1555978029 Pau 0 to-read 4.15 2018 Eye Level: Poems
author: Jenny Xie
name: Pau
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Poetry Handbook 71652 Poetry Handbook was written with writers of poetry most vividly in my mind; their needs and problems and increase have most directly been my concerns. But I am hopeful that readers of poetry will feel welcome here, too, and will gain from these chapters an insight into the thoughtful machinery of the poem, as well as some possibly useful ideas about its history, and, if you please, some ideas also of the long work and intense effort that goes into the making of a poem. The final three chapters are especially directed towards issues important to the writer of poems, but here too the reader of poems is heartily welcome. (...)"

[Text taken from the final part of the Introduction written by Mary Oliver]]]> 130 Mary Oliver 0156724006 Pau 0 to-read 4.23 1994 A Poetry Handbook
author: Mary Oliver
name: Pau
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ledger: Poems 50746359 A book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named "among the modern masters" (The Washington Post).

Ledger's pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion, has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate.]]> 128 Jane Hirshfield 0525657800 Pau 0 to-read 4.02 2020 Ledger: Poems
author: Jane Hirshfield
name: Pau
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Pilgrim Bell: Poems 54785508 Calling a Wolf a Wolf. With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, �what now shall I repair?� Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance—the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation—teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.

Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives—resonant, revelatory, and holy.]]> 80 Kaveh Akbar 1644450593 Pau 0 to-read 4.24 2021 Pilgrim Bell: Poems
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Pau
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems]]> 24392810
Eileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which Myles not only lets her readers peer into existent places, like the East Village in her iconic Chelsea Girls, but also lifts them into dreams, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.

I Must Be Living Twice brings selections from the poet's previous work together with a set of bold new poems, through which Myles continues to refine her sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles's stomping grounds and the home of her most well-known work, she provides a wide-open lens into a radical life.]]> 368 Eileen Myles 0062389106 Pau 0 to-read 4.14 2015 I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems
author: Eileen Myles
name: Pau
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Song of Solomon 11334 338 Toni Morrison 140003342X Pau 3 2020, fiction, classics 4.15 1977 Song of Solomon
author: Toni Morrison
name: Pau
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2020/12/12
date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: 2020, fiction, classics
review:

]]> The Friend 40164365
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.]]> 212 Sigrid Nunez 0735219451 Pau 5 2021, fiction 3.73 2018 The Friend
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Pau
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/31
date added: 2021/10/31
shelves: 2021, fiction
review:
man this book was SO self-indulgent to read, truly perfect sunday read
]]> <![CDATA[Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)]]> 16071015 653 Hilary Mantel Pau 5 4.07 2009 Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Pau
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/13
date added: 2021/10/31
shelves: 2021, fiction, left-their-mark
review:
I had no idea that I would love this so MUCH. 653 pages of such pleasure I read this giant in less than 5 days and would do it again in a heartbeat
]]> Walking to Martha's Vineyard 1380785 96 Franz Wright 0375415181 Pau 5 2021, poetry, left-their-mark 4.11 2003 Walking to Martha's Vineyard
author: Franz Wright
name: Pau
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/24
date added: 2021/10/31
shelves: 2021, poetry, left-their-mark
review:
what a beautiful collection..!
]]> Deluge 52070766 Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.]]> 74 Leila Chatti 1556595891 Pau 5 2021, poetry 4.57 2020 Deluge
author: Leila Chatti
name: Pau
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/17
date added: 2021/10/31
shelves: 2021, poetry
review:

]]> Piranesi 52702097
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 246 Susanna Clarke Pau 0 to-read 4.25 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Pau
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016]]> 26114357 The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices

Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.

Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,� still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.�

Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s collected works are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.]]> 736 Frank Bidart 0374125953 Pau 0 to-read 4.15 2017 Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
author: Frank Bidart
name: Pau
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Winter Recipes from the Collective]]> 56269266 The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient.

Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister's death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts.

"Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, "all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last." This magnificent book couldn't have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life.]]> 46 Louise Glück 037460410X Pau 0 to-read 4.01 2021 Winter Recipes from the Collective
author: Louise Glück
name: Pau
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath]]> 11623
A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.

Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.]]> 732 Sylvia Plath 0385720254 Pau 0 to-read 4.27 2000 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Pau
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne]]> 6680069 I have two luxuries to brood over...your Loveliness and the hour of my death

Though John Keats (1795-1821) died when he was just twenty-five years old, he left behind some of the most exquisite and moving poetry ever written.

He also left an incredibly beautiful and tender collection of love letters, inspired by his great love for Fanny Brawne. Although they knew each other for just a few short years and spent a great deal of that time due to Keats' worsening illness, which forced him to live abroad, Keats wrote again and again about Fanny--his very last poem is called simply "To Fanny"--and wrote love letters to her constantly. She, in turn, would wear the ring he had given her until her death.

This remarkable volume contains the love poems and correspondence composed by Keats in the heat of his passion, and is a dazzling display of a talent cruelly cut short.]]> 144 John Keats 0143117742 Pau 4 2021, non-fiction, poetry 4.27 2009 Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
author: John Keats
name: Pau
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/27
date added: 2021/10/27
shelves: 2021, non-fiction, poetry
review:
those love letters have my whole Heart
]]> <![CDATA[Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories]]> 13531832 Swamplandia! � a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize � comes a magical and uniquely daring collection of stories that showcases the author’s gifts at their inimitable best.

Within these pages, a community of girls held captive in a Japanese silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms and plot revolution; a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow that bears an uncanny resemblance to a missing classmate that they used to torment; a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West has grave consequences; and in the marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try to slake their thirst for blood and come to terms with their immortal relationship.

Vampires in the lemon grove --
Reeling for the Empire --
Seagull army descends on Strong Beach, 1979 --
Proving up --
Barn at the end of our term --
Dougbert Shackleton's rules for Antarctic tailgating --
New veterans --
Graveless doll of Eric Mutis]]> 243 Karen Russell 0307957233 Pau 0 to-read 3.68 2013 Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories
author: Karen Russell
name: Pau
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Orange World and Other Stories]]> 42063901
Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl�, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,� two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.]]> 288 Karen Russell 1984892215 Pau 0 to-read 3.98 2019 Orange World and Other Stories
author: Karen Russell
name: Pau
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/27
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]]> Death of a Salesman 1383701 Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.

In the spring of 1948 Arthur Miller retreated to a log cabin in Connecticut with the first two lines of a new play already fixed in his mind. He emerged six weeks later with the final script of Death of a Salesman - a painful examination of American life and consumerism. Opening on Broadway the following year, Miller's extraordinary masterpiece changed the course of modern theatre. In creating Willy Loman, his destructively insecure anti-hero, Miller himself defined his aim as being 'to set forth what happens when a man does not have a grip on the forces of life'.]]> 112 Arthur Miller 0141182741 Pau 2 2021, theatre 3.69 1949 Death of a Salesman
author: Arthur Miller
name: Pau
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1949
rating: 2
read at: 2021/10/20
date added: 2021/10/26
shelves: 2021, theatre
review:

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