Yara's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 20 Feb 2025 21:59:36 -0800 60 Yara's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Collected Works, Vol. 1 15712189
"He might be one of the great southern storytellers of our time." -VOL. 1 BROOKLYN

"When I discovered the stories of Scott McClanahan last year, I was instantly enthralled with his natural storytelling voice and freaky funny tales. There's no pretense to Scott's work. It's like you're just dropped right into the middle of these fantastic and true stories. It's like a sweet blend of my favorite southern writers, Larry Brown and Harry Crews. Reading McClanahan is like listening to a good friend telling you his best real-life stories on your back porch on a humid night. And you both got a nice whiskey buzz going." -KEVIN SAMPSELL, author of "A Common Pornography"

"McClanahan's prose is unfettered and kinetic and his stories seem like a hyper-modern iteration of local color fiction. His delivery is guileless and his morality ambivalent and you get the sense, while reading him, that he is sitting next to you on a barstool, eating peanuts and drinking a beer, and intermittently getting up to pick a song on the jukebox." -THE RUMPUS

"Reads like Bukowski with more surprises." -IMPOSE MAGAZINE]]> 132 Scott McClanahan 1621050335 Yara 0 to-read 4.46 2012 The Collected Works, Vol. 1
author: Scott McClanahan
name: Yara
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> She's Always Hungry 201033505 From Eliza Clark, the author of the brilliant novels Boy Parts and Penance and one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, comes a fierce, visionary and darkly comic story collection.

A woman welcomes a parasite into her body.

A teenager longs for perfect skin.

A scientist tends to fragile alien flora.

A young man takes the night into his own hands.

Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.]]> 240 Eliza Clark 0063393263 Yara 0 to-read 3.81 2024 She's Always Hungry
author: Eliza Clark
name: Yara
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> Heart Songs and Other Stories 28003 The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized.

These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small-town life. The country is blue-collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

]]> 203 Annie Proulx 0020360754 Yara 0 to-read 3.96 1988 Heart Songs and Other Stories
author: Annie Proulx
name: Yara
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> Three Comrades 91203
Written with the same overwhelming simplicity and directness that made All Quiet on the Western Front a classic, Three Comrades portrays the greatness of the human spirit, manifested through characters who must find the inner resources to live in a world they did not make, but must endure.]]> 496 Erich Maria Remarque 0449912426 Yara 0 to-read 4.49 1936 Three Comrades
author: Erich Maria Remarque
name: Yara
average rating: 4.49
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Laugh or Lament: Selected Short Stories]]> 1509470 160 Aziz Nesin 9759038838 Yara 0 currently-reading 4.22 2002 Laugh or Lament: Selected Short Stories
author: Aziz Nesin
name: Yara
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> The Artificial Silk Girl 370756 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's 'Berlin Stories' and Bertolt Brecht's 'Three Penny Opera'. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933, and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was ever published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential "material girl" remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more. Other Press is pleased to announce the republication of The Artificial Silk Girl, elegantly translated by noted Germanist Kathie von Ankum, and featuring a new introduction by Harvard professor Maria Tatar.]]> 216 Irmgard Keun 1892746816 Yara 0 to-read 3.83 1932 The Artificial Silk Girl
author: Irmgard Keun
name: Yara
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1932
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Artificial Silk Girl: A Novel]]> 222176553 224 Irmgard Keun 1635425085 Yara 0 to-read 4.60 The Artificial Silk Girl: A Novel
author: Irmgard Keun
name: Yara
average rating: 4.60
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]]> The Communist Manifesto 30474
Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.

This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 288 Karl Marx 0140447571 Yara 0 to-read 3.67 1848 The Communist Manifesto
author: Karl Marx
name: Yara
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1848
rating: 0
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]]> Kürk Mantolu Madonna 220826 Her gün, daima öğleden sonra oraya gidiyor, koridorlardaki resimlere bakıyormuş gibi ağır ağır, fakat büyük bir sabırsızlıkla asıl hedefine varmak isteyen adımlarımı zorla zapt ederek geziniyor, rastgele gözüme çarpmış gibi önünde durduğum "Kürk Mantolu Madonna"yı seyre dalıyor, ta kapılar kapanıncaya kadar orada bekliyordum.

Kimi tutkular rehberimiz olur yaşam boyunca. Kollarıyla bizi sarar. Sorgulamadan peşlerinden gideriz ve hiç pişman olmayacağımızı biliriz. Yapıtlarında insanların görünmeyen yüzlerini ortaya çıkaran Sabahattin Ali, bu kitabında güçlü bir tutkunun resmini çiziyor. Düzenin sildiği kişiliklere, yaşamın uçuculuğuna ve aşkın olanaksızlığına dair, yanıtlanması zor sorular soruyor.]]> 160 Sabahattin Ali 9753638027 Yara 5 4.50 1943 Kürk Mantolu Madonna
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Yara
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
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That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. Cover to cover in one sitting. Wow.
]]> Klara Milić 60907751 68 Ivan Turgenev Yara 0 to-read 4.00 1883 Klara Milić
author: Ivan Turgenev
name: Yara
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1883
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> Enter Ghost 59725231 A bold, evocative new novel from the Sue Kaufman, Betty Trask and Plimpton Prize Award winner Isabella Hammad that follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet

After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. This is her first trip back since the second intifada and the deaths of their grandparents: while Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia stayed in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.

At Haneen’s, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Sonia is soon rehearsing Gertude’s lines in classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than in Haifa, along with a dedicated group of men from all over historic Palestine who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer it becomes clear just how many violent obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.

A stunning rendering of present-day Palestine, Enter Ghost is a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance. Timely, thoughtful, and passionate, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite feat, an unforgettable story of artistry under occupation.]]> 336 Isabella Hammad 080216238X Yara 0 to-read 4.13 2023 Enter Ghost
author: Isabella Hammad
name: Yara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> Open Throat 62039259 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

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

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

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 160 Henry Hoke 037460987X Yara 0 to-read 4.02 2023 Open Throat
author: Henry Hoke
name: Yara
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> Hit Parade of Tears 62920022 A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.

Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.

A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; idle high school students find adventure in another dimension but aren't all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.]]> 288 Izumi Suzuki 1839768495 Yara 4 3.42 2023 Hit Parade of Tears
author: Izumi Suzuki
name: Yara
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2025/01/21
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I love when women who are irritated by life itself write books!!! I liked this a lot, but it got 3/5 because it started off w strong stories and got progressively less good/more meta vs actual plot lines. I will be reading terminal boredom next tho
]]> <![CDATA[By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept: An unforgettable chronicle of passion and heartbreak]]> 25495637
One day, while browsing in a London bookshop, Elizabeth Smart chanced upon a slim volume of poetry by George Barker � and fell passionately in love with him through the printed word. Eventually they communicated directly and, as a result of Barker’s impecunious circumstances, Elizabeth Smart flew both him and his wife from Japan, where he was teaching, to join her in the United States. Thus began one of the most extraordinary, intense and ultimately tragic love affairs of our time. They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written � ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept�.

Originally published in 1945, this remarkable book is now widely identified as a classic work of poetic prose which, seven decades later, has retained all of its searing poignancy, beauty and power of impact.]]> 161 Elizabeth Smart 0007375883 Yara 0 to-read 3.18 1945 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept: An unforgettable chronicle of passion and heartbreak
author: Elizabeth Smart
name: Yara
average rating: 3.18
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> Terminal Boredom: Stories 55251789
Women and Women: The fissures in a queer matriarchal utopia are exposed when a boy, a creature usually contained in ghettoised isolation - appears beneath young Yūko's window
You May Dream: An extreme government initiative curbing overpopulation prompts a woman to re-evaluate her friendships
Night Picnic: The last family in a desolate city learns to be human through the awkward appropriation of popular culture
That Old Seaside Club: Passive-aggressive furniture provides unwelcome romantic advice
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Tense interplanetary politics distort Emma's love life
Forgotten: Jane's ex-girlfriend reppears, radically altered and insistent on a catch-up
Terminal Boredom: Tokyo's teenagers, disaffected and numb from excessive screentime, find distraction in violence.

Suzuki's singular slant on science fiction remains fresh and essential. Concerns about society, gender and imperialism dovetail irresistibly with flights of speculative wonder. And with a kitchen sink in the corner of even her wildest stories, Suzuki reminds us that while society may be limitless, relationships remain impossible]]> 218 Izumi Suzuki 1788739884 Yara 3
Izumi suzuki is a really good and unique writer. You can tell she was a nihilist and an anhedonic hedonist. Rest in Peace <3]]> 3.59 2021 Terminal Boredom: Stories
author: Izumi Suzuki
name: Yara
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
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review:
I liked hit parade of tears WAYYYYYYYY better but these were still good. Just confusing at times. I loved the first story “women and women� and the last story “terminal boredom�. Also, I liked that Emma and Sol appear in both collections in 2 stories that kind of build off each other. I was still confused either way tho

Izumi suzuki is a really good and unique writer. You can tell she was a nihilist and an anhedonic hedonist. Rest in Peace <3
]]> Your Utopia 173403968 By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. These stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too � often between unexpected subjects.

In ‘The Center for Immortality Research�, a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired � no one can. In ‘One More Kiss, Dear�, a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In ‘Seeds�, we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.

If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.]]> 256 Bora Chung 1643756214 Yara 0 to-read 3.64 2021 Your Utopia
author: Bora Chung
name: Yara
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> ǰǰö 13129925
To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.

A traditional haunted house story in a thoroughly contemporary setting, ǰǰö is designed to retain its luster and natural appearance for a lifetime of use. Pleasingly proportioned with generous French flaps and a softcover binding, ǰǰö delivers the psychological terror you need in the elegant package you deserve.

Designed by Andie Reid, cover photography by Christine Ferrara.]]> 248 Grady Hendrix 1594745269 Yara 0 to-read 3.64 2014 ǰǰö
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Yara
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever�

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Yara 0 to-read 3.78 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Yara
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> Yara 123452547 THE GLOBE AND MAIL : BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN FALL 2023 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BIG INDIE BOOKS OF FALL 2023
From the author of Maidenhead , a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s
Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires. But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent. Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us.
"Tamara Faith Berger is one of our best writers of the body, capturing in sharp, red-hot prose its raw animal urges, its often confused and contradictory desires, and the way our search for pleasure can be both liberatory and self-annihilating. Like Israel, bodies are contested territories, and in Berger's revelatory new novel, Yara seeks to wrest control and meaning from the forces that seek to instrumentalize nationalism, capitalism, pornography, and lovers." � Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners " Yara is a complicated novel about the confusions of consent and kinship, the way love makes victims of us all, told with cool, epigrammatic verve. As raw, destabilizing and searching as its titular protagonist, it's Berger's best book yet." –� Jason McBride, author of Eat Your Mind
"Canada’s finest and boldest writer. Tamara Faith Berger is my favourite ball buster." –� Anakana Schofield, author of A Novel in Warnings]]> 192 Tamara Faith Berger 1552454673 Yara 0 to-read 3.54 Yara
author: Tamara Faith Berger
name: Yara
average rating: 3.54
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date added: 2024/12/23
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]]> <![CDATA[This Is How You Lose the Time War]]> 43352954 Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.]]> 209 Amal El-Mohtar Yara 0 to-read 3.87 2019 This Is How You Lose the Time War
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Yara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> Touching Spirit Bear 41128030
Cole is offered Circle Justice: a system based on Native American traditions that attempts to provide healing for the criminal offender, the victim, and the community. With prison as his only alternative, Cole plays along. He says he wants to repent, but in his heart, Cole blames his alcoholic mom, his abusive dad, wimpy Peter (everyone but himself) for his situation.

Cole receives a one-year banishment to a remote Alaskan island. There, he is mauled by a mysterious white bear of Native American legend. Hideously injured, Cole waits for death. His thoughts shift from anger to humility. To survive, he must stop blaming others and take responsibility for his life. Rescuers arrive to save Cole's body, but it is the attack of the Spirit Bear that may save his soul.

Ben Mikaelsen paints a vivid picture of a juvenile offender, examining the roots of his anger without absolving him of responsibility for his actions, and questioning a society in which angry people make victims of their peers and communities. Touching Spirit Bear is a poignant testimonial to the power of a pain that can destroy, or lead to healing.]]> 266 Ben Mikaelsen Yara 0 to-read 3.87 2001 Touching Spirit Bear
author: Ben Mikaelsen
name: Yara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/18
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]]> <![CDATA[So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men]]> 126262032 Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with the short story of the same name.


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

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

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

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

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160859 Yara 0 to-read 3.98 2022 So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
author: Claire Keegan
name: Yara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> A Dreary Story 16435229 0 Anton Chekhov 5552040481 Yara 0 to-read 4.03 A Dreary Story
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Yara
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> Mariette in Ecstasy 252669
In 1906, a beautiful seventeen year old postulant enters the convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in upstate New York. When she begins to bleed from her hands, feet, and side, the entire community is thrown into turmoil. Is Mariette a cunning sham, or sexually hysterical, or does God stalk her like a pitiless lover?

Mariette in Ecstasy is a stunning immersion into the society of a small convent at the turn of the century, where a mysterious and ultimately harrowing world lies beneath the lovely, placid surface of everyday life. With Mariette In Ecstasy, critically acclaimed author Ron Hansen again powerfully demonstrates his gift for brilliantly recreating time and place. As intriguing as The Name Of The Rose, as sensually hypnotic as Marguerite Duras' The Lover, this is an intimate portrait of a fascinating young woman in the grip of an intractable fate, and it raises provocative questions about the complex nature of passionate faith.

Exquisitely crafted, Mariette in Ecstasy is a spellbinding novel that marks a new level of achievement in one of our most gifted writers.

~ from 1991 hardcover dustjacket]]> 180 Ron Hansen 0060981180 Yara 0 to-read 3.75 1991 Mariette in Ecstasy
author: Ron Hansen
name: Yara
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 42983724 WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk 0525541330 Yara 0 to-read 3.92 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Yara
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Down the Drain 123183412
This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain . With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural her parents� volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist�; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience—it’s all here, in raw, remarkable and riveting detail.

More than a year before the book’s publication, Fox’s description of it as “a masterpiece� in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.]]> 318 Julia Fox 1668011506 Yara 0 currently-reading 4.38 2023 Down the Drain
author: Julia Fox
name: Yara
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Set My Heart on Fire 208433116 The first novel from Izumi Suzuki to be published in English: a candid, intimate exploration of passion, music and transgression.

Hope I'm in for a good time, I thought. Even if it's just for tonight.

Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties. Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun.

Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance. Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist's love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.]]> 192 Izumi Suzuki 180429330X Yara 0 to-read 3.36 1983 Set My Heart on Fire
author: Izumi Suzuki
name: Yara
average rating: 3.36
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Sarah Book 23282136 150 Scott McClanahan 098851835X Yara 2 4.30 2015 The Sarah Book
author: Scott McClanahan
name: Yara
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves:
review:
Supes depressing! Esp re: the stage of XYs. The prose was fine I guess (ppl seem to like it a lot about this book/author). hella angsty which isn’t bad, adults can be angsty too. Idk like I liked it but something was missing for me. And I need to know exactly how autobiographical this is because wtf.
]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Yara 4 3.89 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Yara
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016]]> 28114392
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 includes N. R. KLEINFIELD, ANNA KOVATCHEVA, DAN HOY, ANTHONY MARRA, MICHAEL POLLAN, MARILYNNE ROBINSON, DANA SPIOTTA, ADRIAN TOMINE, INARA VERZEMNIEKS and others

Rachel Kushner, guest editor, is the author of The Flamethrowers, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and one of the New York Times ’s top five novels of 2013. Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, a winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book.
ձ> 432 Rachel Kushner 0544812115 Yara 0 to-read 3.81 2016 The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Yara
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Master and Margarita 117833 The first complete, annotated English Translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's comic masterpiece.

An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.

One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.]]> 372 Mikhail Bulgakov 0679760806 Yara 0 to-read 4.31 1967 The Master and Margarita
author: Mikhail Bulgakov
name: Yara
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mean Girls (Paramount) (Little Golden Book)]]> 207994369 You can't sit with the Plastics, but you can sit with this fetch Little Golden Book and read all about Regina, Cady, Janis, and their friends! Relive the grool story of Mean Girls over and over again (the limit does not exist!) in this book, which is perfect for kids ages 2 to 5, cool moms, and collectors of all ages--out just in time to celebrate the film's 20th anniversary.

Little Golden Books enjoy nearly 100% consumer recognition. They feature beloved classics, hot licenses, and new original stories . . . the classics of tomorrow.

TM & (c) 2024 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.]]> 24 Cara Stevens 0593709594 Yara 0 Why does this exist 4.32 Mean Girls (Paramount) (Little Golden Book)
author: Cara Stevens
name: Yara
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves:
review:
Why does this exist
]]> <![CDATA[A Woman is a School (Books for Collective Liberation)]]> 215354084 260 Céline Semaan Yara 0 to-read 4.46 A Woman is a School (Books for Collective Liberation)
author: Céline Semaan
name: Yara
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Meet Cute: Some People Are Destined to Meet]]> 33503607
Readers will experience Nina LaCour's beautifully written piece about two Bay Area girls meeting via a cranky customer service Tweet, Sara Shepard's glossy tale about a magazine intern and a young rock star, Nicola Yoon's imaginative take on break-ups and make-ups, Katie Cotugno's story of two teens hiding out from the police at a house party, and Huntley Fitzpatrick's charming love story that begins over iced teas at a diner. There’s futuristic flirting from Kass Morgan and Katharine McGee, a riveting transgender heroine from Meredith Russo, a subway missed connection moment from Jocelyn Davies, and a girl determined to get out of her small town from Ibi Zoboi. Jennifer Armentrout writes a sweet story about finding love from a missing library book, Emery Lord has a heartwarming and funny tale of two girls stuck in an airport, Dhonielle Clayton takes a thoughtful, speculate approach to pre-destined love, and Julie Murphy dreams up a fun twist on reality dating show contestants.

This incredibly talented group of authors brings us a collection of stories that are at turns romantic and witty, epic and everyday, heartbreaking and real.]]> 314 Jennifer L. Armentrout 1328759873 Yara 0 to-read, gave-up 3.58 2018 Meet Cute: Some People Are Destined to Meet
author: Jennifer L. Armentrout
name: Yara
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read, gave-up
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness]]> 43306206
The Courage to Be Disliked shows you how to unlock the power within yourself to become your best and truest self, change your future and find lasting happiness. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 19th-century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, the authors explain how we are all free to determine our own future free of the shackles of past experiences, doubts and the expectations of others. It’s a philosophy that’s profoundly liberating, allowing us to develop the courage to change, and to ignore the limitations that we and those around us can place on ourselves.

The result is a book that is both highly accessible and profound in its importance. Millions have already read and benefited from its wisdom. Now that The Courage to Be Disliked has been published for the first time in English, so can you.]]> 288 Ichiro Kishimi Yara 0 to-read 3.90 2013 The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness
author: Ichiro Kishimi
name: Yara
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Four Truths and a Lie (mix) 2295713 272 Lauren Barnholdt 1416935045 Yara 0 to-read 4.12 2008 Four Truths and a Lie (mix)
author: Lauren Barnholdt
name: Yara
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Love]]> 11438 Alternate-cover edition can be found here

In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.]]> 159 Raymond Carver 0679723056 Yara 0 4.11 1981 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
author: Raymond Carver
name: Yara
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: short-story-compilations, currently-reading
review:

]]> My Dark Vanessa 44890081
2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.

2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed?

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.]]> 373 Kate Elizabeth Russell 006294150X Yara 5 4.09 2020 My Dark Vanessa
author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
name: Yara
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
review:
I loved this and could not put it down, and I don’t typically read novels like that. The way Vanessa talks about herself and first love and whatever are so real but I don’t wanna say relatable bc at the end of the day she was literally groomed into thinking these things. It sucks when the best part of someone’s life is someone else’s presence bc the subsequent absence drives them literally insane cuz it feels like there’s nothing else to focus on. So good I hope Mary Elizabeth Russell writes more. Still never reading Lolita though this book is like a more mature and modern progression
]]> Loose Woman 32956
“Not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.� � The New York Times Book Review

“All poets would do well to follow the example of Sandra Cisneros, who takes no prisoners and has not made a single compromise in her language.� � Barbara Kingsolver, Los Angeles Times]]> 115 Sandra Cisneros 0679755276 Yara 0 to-read 4.22 1994 Loose Woman
author: Sandra Cisneros
name: Yara
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Orientalism 355190
In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.]]> 424 Edward W. Said Yara 0 to-read 4.13 1978 Orientalism
author: Edward W. Said
name: Yara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Imaginary Museums: Stories 45991174
Miniature catastrophes --
The rope barrier --
Coed picnic --
Winners --
Grocery story --
Garden party --
Arranged marriage --
American interiors --
A house for living --
The dance --
The nearby place --
Invitation --
Doorstop --
Imaginary museums --
Your shining trapdoor --
Slovak sceneries --
Sabbatical --
Flowers for Angelika --
Thursdays at Waterhouse --
The seamstress --
How to eat well --
Owls fall in Nitra --
Library of lost things --
Girls I no longer know --
Guest books --
Field notes --
Rest in pieces --
Pets I no longer have --
The squinter's watch --
Love language]]> 128 Nicolette Polek 159376586X Yara 2 3.64 2020 Imaginary Museums: Stories
author: Nicolette Polek
name: Yara
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/29
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:
Many unsatisfingly short stories. I did really love The Dance and Field Notes though as well as the red panther one even though it was confusing. These are cool concepts but should have been slightly more fleshed out.
]]> Woman at Point Zero 159604 108 Nawal El Saadawi Yara 0 to-read 4.21 1975 Woman at Point Zero
author: Nawal El Saadawi
name: Yara
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bitter Water Opera 127282246
In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.

In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.

Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta―the example of her single-minded, solitary life―enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.

In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?]]> 128 Nicolette Polek 1644452839 Yara 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Bitter Water Opera
author: Nicolette Polek
name: Yara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Oblivion 6749
Mister squishy --
The soul is not a smithy --
Incarnations of burned children --
Another pioneer --
Good old neon --
Philosophy and the mirror of nature --
Oblivion --
The suffering channel]]> 329 David Foster Wallace 0316010766 Yara 0 4.09 2004 Oblivion
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Yara
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Burned (Burned, #1) 270807 I do know things really began to spin out of control after my first sex dream.

It all started with a dream. Nothing exceptional, just a typical fantasy about a boy, the kind of dream that most teen girls experience. But Pattyn Von Stratten is not like most teen girls. Raised in a religious—yet abusive—family, a simple dream may not be exactly a sin, but it could be the first step toward hell and eternal damnation.

This dream is a first step for Pattyn. But is it to hell or to a better life? For the first time Pattyn starts asking questions. Questions seemingly without answers—about God, a woman's role, sex, love—mostly love. What is it? Where is it? Will she ever experience it? Is she deserving of it?

It's with a real boy that Pattyn gets into real trouble. After Pattyn's father catches her in a compromising position, events spiral out of control until Pattyn ends up suspended from school and sent to live with an aunt she doesn't know.

Pattyn is supposed to find salvation and redemption during her exile to the wilds of rural Nevada. Yet what she finds instead is love and acceptance. And for the first time she feels worthy of both—until she realizes her old demons will not let her go. Pattyn begins down a path that will lead her to a hell—a hell that may not be the one she learned about in sacrament meetings, but it is hell all the same.

In this riveting and masterful novel told in verse, Ellen Hopkins takes readers on an emotional roller-coaster ride. From the highs of true love to the lows of abuse, Pattyn's story will have readers engrossed until the very last word.]]> 544 Ellen Hopkins 1416903542 Yara 0 to-read 4.25 2006 Burned (Burned, #1)
author: Ellen Hopkins
name: Yara
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Identical 2241059 Or in a better place?

Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin.

For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a mother whose presence on the campaign trail means absence at home. All that Raeanne sees is Daddy playing a game of favorites—and she is losing. If she has to lose, she will do it on her own terms, so she chooses drugs, alcohol, and sex.

Secrets like the ones the twins are harboring are not meant to be kept—from each other or anyone else. Pretty soon it's obvious that neither sister can handle it alone, and one sister must step up to save the other, but the question is—who?]]> 565 Ellen Hopkins 1416950052 Yara 0 to-read 4.30 2008 Identical
author: Ellen Hopkins
name: Yara
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rebecca 17899948 Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives--presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.

First published in 1938, this classic gothic novel is such a compelling read that it won the Anthony Award for Best Novel of the Century.]]> 449 Daphne du Maurier 0316323705 Yara 0 to-read 4.28 1938 Rebecca
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Yara
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> My First Book 186872309
Walking the wire between imagination and confession, My First Book captures both our cultural moment and the feeling of growing up in the internet generation. Debut author Honor Levy’s uniquely riveting voice emerges from the chaos of coming of age in the 21st century, only having lived in a post-internet world. Never far from a digital interface, Levy’s characters grapple with formative political, existential, and romantic experiences in a web-drenched world simultaneously hyper-real, hyper-performative, and on the brink of collapse. Amid the sense of imminent catastrophe, a fragile self struggles to form.

Wildly inventive, always ambitious, and frequently surreal, the stories of My First Book are a mirrorball onto the world as it is. Levy’s prose illuminates what it is to be at once adorable, special, heavily medicated, consistently panicked, and completely sincere. “I’d rather do Xanax than cut myself. No, I’d rather do Xanax then cut myself,� one protagonist muses, while another discovers the infinite nature of love, another reminisces about sunsets that were “pinker, like way pinker,� and another encounters God in a downtown video game arcade. To find and keep faith is the order of the day—but how?

For readers of Patricia Lockwood, Bret Easton Ellis, and the depths of the internet, and for anyone who would like to see Generation Z from the inside out, My First Book holds the key. And in capturing the experience of an entire generation, it marks the arrival of an electric new talent.]]> 224 Honor Levy 0593656539 Yara 2 Forgot to review
Nothing notable to add. Just a lot of questionable politics that come more from a desire for attention than from conviction.
Thank you Peter thiel for an entertaining enough read]]> 3.12 2024 My First Book
author: Honor Levy
name: Yara
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:
Finished weeks ago
Forgot to review
Nothing notable to add. Just a lot of questionable politics that come more from a desire for attention than from conviction.
Thank you Peter thiel for an entertaining enough read
]]> Gag Reflex 59712924
2005. Lucy shambles through the last weeks of her senior year of high school, jonesing for a thinner body, desperate to connect with another human. Who is reflected back at her when she is sleeping with someone, when she is puking into the toilet bowl? Who is reflected back when she’s alone? Only the internet knows, where she muses on the concept of her “self� through her Livejournal, with a cadre of online friends who are definitely NOT pro-anorexic.

Everyone's sick here, but at least they understand.]]> 180 Elle Nash 1955904022 Yara 0 to-read 3.83 2022 Gag Reflex
author: Elle Nash
name: Yara
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Nudes 56609421 Elle Nash Yara 0 4.09 2021 Nudes
author: Elle Nash
name: Yara
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Grey Dog 198385737
The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd � spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist � accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past � riddled with grief and shame � has never seemed so far away.

But then, Ada begins to witness strange and grisly a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. She soon believes that something ancient and beastly � which she calls the grey dog � is behind these visceral offerings, which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory begins to fail. Ada takes on the wildness of the woods, and begins to wonder which is more dangerous: the grey dog, or herself.]]> 400 Elliott Gish 177041732X Yara 0 to-read 3.86 2024 Grey Dog
author: Elliott Gish
name: Yara
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Good Happy Girl 185767237 A poignant, surprising, and immersive read about a young professional woman pursuing an emotionally intense relationship with a married lesbian couple.

Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed. Historically happy to compartmentalize� distracting herself by hooking up with lesbian couples, doting on her grandmother, and flirting with a young administrative assistant—Helen finally meets her match with Catherine and Katrina, a married couple who startle and intrigue her with their ever-increasing sexual and emotional intensity.

Perceptive and attentive, Catherine and Katrina prod at Helen’s life, revealing a childhood tragedy she’s been repressing. When her father begs her yet again for help getting parole, she realizes that she has a bargaining chip to get answers to her past.

In her exploration of queer domesticity, effects of incarceration on family, and intergenerational poverty, Marissa Higgins offers empathy to characters who don’t often receive it, with unsettling results.]]> 256 Marissa Higgins 1646221974 Yara 0 to-read 2.92 2024 A Good Happy Girl
author: Marissa Higgins
name: Yara
average rating: 2.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Deliver Me 193438781 At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.

The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish.

With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.]]> 275 Elle Nash Yara 0 to-read 3.81 2023 Deliver Me
author: Elle Nash
name: Yara
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sitt Marie Rose 200835 Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege, Sitt Marie Rose, is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the Civil War in Lebanon. It reveals the tribal mentality which makes the Middle East a dangerous powerhouse. It constitutes a new narrative form and is already a classic of war literature. It won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into ten languages.

]]> 106 Etel Adnan 094299633X Yara 0 to-read 4.09 1977 Sitt Marie Rose
author: Etel Adnan
name: Yara
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/06
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]]> <![CDATA[A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4)]]> 248665 166 Anaïs Nin 0671871390 Yara 0 to-read 3.75 1954 A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4)
author: Anaïs Nin
name: Yara
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1954
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/05
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]]> My Immortal 11099295
The story follows Ebony Way as she forms a romantic attachment to Draco Malfoy (an elegant Goth in this story), in spite of her concern that he has had a relationship with Harry "Vampire" Potter and may still be interested in him. Voldemort, claiming to know of Ebony's relationship with Draco through "telekinesis", commands her to kill Harry. Various people including Hagrid and someone called "Snaketail" confess that they love Ebony, while Snape and Remus are "pedofiles" who take pictures of her. Ebony begins to have precognitive visions, which are later verified. Prof. Sinister tells Ebony that if Voldemort had ever had people who loved him he would not have become evil, so Ebony's task is to go back in time and seduce him.

Was originally posted on fanfiction.net
Cover by ]]> 76 Tara Gilesbie Yara 0 3.96 2006 My Immortal
author: Tara Gilesbie
name: Yara
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/22
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]]> In Case of Emergency 58036809 In this prize-winning Iranian novel, a spoiled and foul-mouthed young woman looks to get high while her family and city fall to pieces.

What do you do when the world is falling apart and you’re in withdrawal?

Disillusioned, wealthy, and addicted to opium, Shadi wakes up one day to apocalyptic earthquakes and a dangerously low stash. Outside, Tehran is crumbling: yuppies flee in bumper-to-bumper traffic as skaters and pretty boys rise up to claim the city as theirs. Cross-dressed to evade hijab laws, Shadi flits between her dysfunctional family and depressed friends—all in search of her next fix.

Mahsa Mohebali's groundbreaking novel about Iranian counterculture is a satirical portrait of the disaster that is contemporary life. Weaving together gritty vernacular and cinematic prose, In Case of Emergency takes a darkly humorous, scathing look at the authoritarian state, global capitalism, and the gender binary.]]> 168 Mahsa Mohebali 1952177863 Yara 0 to-read 3.26 2008 In Case of Emergency
author: Mahsa Mohebali
name: Yara
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/18
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]]> Boule & Bill 79252644 0 Jean Roba 2803614537 Yara 0 to-read 0.0 Boule & Bill
author: Jean Roba
name: Yara
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> The Prophet 2547 The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.

The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.]]> 127 Kahlil Gibran 000100039X Yara 0 to-read 4.27 1923 The Prophet
author: Kahlil Gibran
name: Yara
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1923
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/15
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]]> Dune (Dune, #1) 44767458
When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.]]> 658 Frank Herbert 059309932X Yara 0 to-read 4.33 1965 Dune (Dune, #1)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Yara
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Yara 5 4.22 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Yara
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/14
date added: 2024/05/14
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review:
Such a wild concept, but so beautifully written. None of the questions I had while reading this book were answered but when finishing I realized that answers aren’t as important as I’ve been lead to believe
]]> <![CDATA[I Am Zuko (Avatar: The Last Airbender) (Little Golden Book)]]> 156740481
Prince Zuko thinks the only way to restore his honor is to capture the Avatar and help his father conquer the four nations� but is that truly the best thing for the world, or for himself? Based on Nickelodeon’s animated series The Last Airbender , this Little Golden Book follows Zuko’s emotional journey from exiled Fire Nation Prince to firebending master. Illustrated in the signature Little Golden Books style, it’s perfect for children ages 2 to 5 and Avatar superfans of all ages!

Check out the other book in the I Am Aang !

Little Golden Books enjoy nearly 100% consumer recognition. They feature beloved classics, hot licenses, and new original stories . . . the classics of tomorrow.]]> 24 Mei Nakamura 0593707699 Yara 5 4.42 I Am Zuko (Avatar: The Last Airbender) (Little Golden Book)
author: Mei Nakamura
name: Yara
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves:
review:
Kate read this to us and did an amazing job. You could just read this instead of watching ATLA
]]> <![CDATA[Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention� and How to Think Deeply Again]]> 57933306 Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity.

Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.]]> 357 Johann Hari 0593138511 Yara 0 gave-up, to-read 4.22 2022 Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again
author: Johann Hari
name: Yara
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/07
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]]> Writers & Lovers 45289222 Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.]]> 320 Lily King Yara 0 to-read 3.98 2020 Writers & Lovers
author: Lily King
name: Yara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/21
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]]> <![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 Yara 4 4.57 2017 They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Yara
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/04/14
shelves:
review:
Audiobook is wayyyyy better because aburraqib is a poet so he has a nice prose cadence to his voice. Sounds a little slam poetry at some parts. I appreciate the diff music he incorporated into these essays, esp the emo parts bc it’s such a white dominated space and I liked hearing his take on it. I also enjoyed the parts in which he talked about islam/growing up Muslim because the whole time up until he did I was like “I wonder if hes gonna talk about it I really hope so�. I will say, he sounds pretentious as fuck sometimes but again he’s a poet/writer so I feel like they’re just like that.
]]> Rememberings 55609892 THE LANDMARK MEMOIR OF A GLOBAL MUSIC ICON

Sinéad O'Connor's voice and trademark shaved head made her famous by the age of twenty-one. Her recording of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U made her a global icon. She outraged millions when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television.

O'Connor was unapologetic and impossible to ignore, calling out hypocrisy wherever she saw it.
She has remained that way for three decades.

Now, in Rememberings, O'Connor tells her story - the heartache of growing up in a family falling apart; her early forays into the Dublin music scene; her adventures and misadventures in the world of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll; the fulfilment of being a mother; her ongoing spiritual quest - and through it all, her abiding passion for music.

Rememberings is intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and full of hard-won insights. It is a unique and remarkable chronicle by a unique and remarkable artist.]]> 288 Sinéad O'Connor 1844885410 Yara 0 to-read 4.09 2021 Rememberings
author: Sinéad O'Connor
name: Yara
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/26
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]]> Belle Teal 19196767 176 Ann M. Martin 0545532337 Yara 0 to-read 3.98 2001 Belle Teal
author: Ann M. Martin
name: Yara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told]]> 62919409 From Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, How to Stay Married tells the hilarious, shocking, and spiritually profound story of one man’s journey through hell and back when infidelity threatens his marriage.

One gorgeous autumn day, Harrison discovers that his wife—the sweet, funny, loving mother of their three daughters, a woman “who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church”—is having an affair with a family friend. This revelation propels the hysterical, heartbreaking action of How to Stay Married , casting our narrator onto “the factory floor of hell,� where his wife was now in love with a man who “wears cargo shorts, on purpose.� What will he do? Kick her out? Set fire to all her panties in the yard? Beat this man to death with a gardening implement? Ask God for help in winning her back?

Armed with little but a sense of humor and a hunger for the truth, Harrison embarks on a hellish journey into his past, seeking answers to the riddles of faith and forgiveness. Through an absurd series of escalating confessions and betrayals, Harrison reckons with his failure to love his wife in the ways she needed most, resolves to fight for his family, and in a climax almost too ridiculous to be believed, finally learns that love is no joke. How to Stay Married is a comic romp unlike any in contemporary literature, a wild Pilgrim’s Progress through the hellscape of marriage and the mysteries of mercy.]]> 320 Harrison Scott Key 1668015501 Yara 0 to-read 4.04 2023 How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told
author: Harrison Scott Key
name: Yara
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/22
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]]> The Lottery and Other Stories 89723 The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.]]> 302 Shirley Jackson 0374529531 Yara 0 4.05 1949 The Lottery and Other Stories
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Yara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/08
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Interpreter of Maladies 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Yara 0 4.18 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Yara
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/08
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Horror Stories: A Memoir 44525549 From the two-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter behind the groundbreaking album Exile in Guyville comes a haunting memoir in stories in the tradition of Patti Smith's M Train

When Liz Phair was just starting out in the Wicker Park, Chicago, music scene in the early 1990s, she mostly encountered a**holes—mostly men, who didn't respect her and were determined not to see her fail, exactly, because they didn't care enough about her to wish failure on her—they just wanted her to get out of their space, to disappear. "Girly Sound" was the name of the cassettes she used to pass around in those days, and in 1993 those songs became the landmark album Exile in Guyville, which turned Phair, at twenty-five, into a foul-mouthed feminist icon.

Now, like a Gen X Patti Smith, Liz Phair tells the story of her life and career in a memoir about the moments that have haunted her most. Horror is in the eye of the beholder. For Phair, horror is what stays with you—the often unrecognized, universal experiences of daily pain, shame, and fear that make up our common humanity. In Phair's case it means the dangers of falling for "the perfect guy," and the disaster that awaits her; the memory of a stranger passed out on a bathroom floor amid a crowd of girls, forcing her to consider our responsibilities to one another, and the gnawing regret of being a bystander; and the profound sense of emptiness she experienced on the set of her first celebrity photoshoot.

Horror Stories reads like the confessions of a friend, a book that gathers up all of our isolated shames, bringing us together in our shared imperfection, our uncertainty and our cowardice, smashing the stigma of not being in control. But most importantly, Horror Stories is a memoir that asks questions of how we feel about the things that have happened to us, how we cope with regret and culpability, and how we break the spell of those things, leeching them of their power over us. This memoir is an immersive experience, taking readers inside the most intimate moments of Phair's life. Her fearless prose, wit, and uncompromising honesty transform those deeply personal moments into tales about each and every one of us—that will appeal to both the serious fan and the serious reader.]]> 261 Liz Phair 0525511989 Yara 0 to-read 3.68 2019 Horror Stories: A Memoir
author: Liz Phair
name: Yara
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Homesick for Another World 30079724 An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time

Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel.
And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition.

But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.

Bettering myself --
Mr. Wu --
Malibu --
The weirdos --
A dark and winding road --
No place for good people --
Slumming --
An honest woman --
The beach boy --
Nothing ever happens here --
Dancing in the moonlight --
The surrogate --
The locked room --
A better place]]> 294 Ottessa Moshfegh 0399562885 Yara 4 3.63 2017 Homesick for Another World
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Yara
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/04
date added: 2024/03/07
shelves:
review:
I reread this story lying on a blanket in the sun (see pfp). “A Better Place�;
]]> Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Yara 0 to-read 3.90 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: Yara
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics]]> 53496557 A bold call for the American Left to extend their politics to the issues of Israel-Palestine, from a New York Times bestselling author and an expert on U.S. policy in the region

In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how holding fast to one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies reflects the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine deftly argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so, the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which U.S. policy has made peace harder to attain. They also unravel the conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.

Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, including Israel's growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.]]> 227 Marc Lamont Hill 1620975920 Yara 4 Bitch we out here mobbin on some Palestine shit]]> 4.21 2021 Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
author: Marc Lamont Hill
name: Yara
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/28
date added: 2024/02/28
shelves:
review:
Fuck israel, Israel a bitch
Bitch we out here mobbin on some Palestine shit
]]> Intimations: Stories 28257667
Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. It was praised by the New York Times as “a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.�

In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of “living� where we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best.

The title is taken from one of the stories (“Intimation�), but is also a play on Wordsworth's “Intimations of Immortality”—only in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, “Living� section of the book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the characters.

At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood.

Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.]]> 256 Alexandra Kleeman 006238872X Yara 0 3.55 2016 Intimations: Stories
author: Alexandra Kleeman
name: Yara
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Milk Blood Heat 43893870
A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter—whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family’s church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father’s ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth.]]> 208 Dantiel W. Moniz 0802158153 Yara 0 4.04 2021 Milk Blood Heat
author: Dantiel W. Moniz
name: Yara
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> You Are Having a Good Time 25664490 You Are Having a Good Time, Amie Barrodale’s collection of highly compressed and charged tales, the veneer of normality is stripped from her characters� lives to reveal the seething and contradictory desires that fuel them. In “Animals,� an up-and-coming starlet harbors a complicated attraction toward her abusive director. In “Frank Advice for Fat Women,� an ethically compromised psychiatrist is drawn into the middle of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. And in “The Imp,� a supernatural possession ruins a man’s relationship with his pregnant wife.

Barrodale’s protagonists drink too much, say the wrong things, want the wrong people. They’re hounded by longings (and sometimes ghosts) to the point where they are forced to confront the illusions they cling to. They’re brought to life in stories that don’t behave as you expect stories to behave. Barrodale’s startlingly funny and original fictions get under your skin and make you reconsider the fragile compromises that underpin our daily lives.]]> 208 Amie Barrodale 0374293864 Yara 0 3.38 2016 You Are Having a Good Time
author: Amie Barrodale
name: Yara
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Her Body and Other Parties: Stories]]> 33375622 Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

The husband stitch --
Inventory --
Mothers --
Especially heinous --
Real women have bodies --
Eight bites --
The resident --
Difficult at parties]]> 248 Carmen Maria Machado 155597788X Yara 0 3.85 2017 Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Yara
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Girlhood 53138199 A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.

In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.

When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others� expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.

Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.

Written with Febos� characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.]]> 320 Melissa Febos 1635572525 Yara 0 4.23 2021 Girlhood
author: Melissa Febos
name: Yara
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How Long 'til Black Future Month?]]> 40855636 400 N.K. Jemisin 0316491349 Yara 0 4.27 2018 How Long 'til Black Future Month?
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Yara
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Difficult Women 28818921 An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection.

The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls� fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.

I will follow you --
Water, all its weight --
The mark of Cain --
Difficult women --
FLORIDA --
La negra blanca --
Baby arm --
North country --
How --
Requiem for a glass heart --
In the event of my father's death --
Break all the way down --
Bad priest --
Open marriage --
A pat --
Best features --
Bone density --
I am a knife --
The sacrifice of darkness --
Noble things --
Strange gods]]> 260 Roxane Gay 0802125395 Yara 0 3.96 2017 Difficult Women
author: Roxane Gay
name: Yara
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stories of Your Life and Others]]> 223380 ]]> 281 Ted Chiang 0330426648 Yara 0 4.28 2002 Stories of Your Life and Others
author: Ted Chiang
name: Yara
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Houseguest and Other Stories]]> 38458438 122 Amparo Dávila 0811228215 Yara 0 3.58 2018 The Houseguest and Other Stories
author: Amparo Dávila
name: Yara
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> So Sad Today: Personal Essays 25904473 So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter, grappling with sex, death, love, low self-esteem, addiction, and the drama of waiting for the universe to text you back. With insights as sharp as her humor, Broder explores—in prose that is both gutsy and beautiful, aggressively colloquial and achingly poetic—questions most of us are afraid to even acknowledge, let alone answer, in order to discover what it really means to be a person in this modern world.]]> 206 Melissa Broder 1455562726 Yara 0 3.81 2016 So Sad Today: Personal Essays
author: Melissa Broder
name: Yara
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Girls of a Certain Age 53915328 This darkly playful and subversive debut story collection explores the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness.

What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness? Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls andwomen in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition.

Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.
ձ> 240 Maria Adelmann 0316450812 Yara 0 3.43 2021 Girls of a Certain Age
author: Maria Adelmann
name: Yara
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Black Swans 475853
Babitz’s inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their sex, rage, the Château Marmont, youth, beauty, Jim Morrison, men, women, and black swans. This exciting reissue further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.]]> 256 Eve Babitz 051714445X Yara 0 3.86 1993 Black Swans
author: Eve Babitz
name: Yara
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror]]> 26831729
In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin’s doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect “found dolls� from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they? In “Gun Accident,� a teenage girl is thrilled when her favorite teacher asks her to house-sit, even on short notice. But when an intruder forces his way into the house while the girl is there, the fate of more than one life is changed forever. In “Equatorial,� set in the exotic Galapagos, an affluent American wife experiences disorienting assaults upon her sense of who her charismatic husband really is, and what his plans may be for her.

In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the “fascination of the abomination� that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.]]> 317 Joyce Carol Oates 0802124887 Yara 0 3.42 2016 The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Yara
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You: Stories]]> 56020849 We Cast a Shadow.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin has an uncanny ability to reveal the hidden corners of a place we thought we knew. These perspectival, character-driven stories center on the margins and are deeply rooted in New Orleanian culture.

In "Beg Borrow Steal," a boy relishes time spent helping his father find work after just coming home from prison; in "Ghetto University," a couple struggling financially turns to crime after hitting rock bottom; in "Before I Let You Go," a woman who's been in NOLA for generations fights to keep her home; in "Fast Hands, Fast Feet," an Army vet and a runaway teen find companionship while sleeping under a bridge; in "Mercury Forges," a flash fiction piece among several in the collection, a group of men hurriedly make their way to a home where an elderly gentleman lives, trying to reach him before the water from Hurricane Katrina does; and in the title story, a young man works the street corners of the French Quarter, trying to achieve a freedom not meant for him.

These stories are intimate invitations to hear, witness, and imagine lives at once regional but largely universal, and undeniably New Orleanian.]]> 240 Maurice Carlos Ruffin 0593133404 Yara 0 4.01 2021 The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You: Stories
author: Maurice Carlos Ruffin
name: Yara
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Suspicious Holdout: Stories]]> 58341750 The critically acclaimed author of The Rib King returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships in a Black neighborhood over the course from the late 1980s to the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration.

The twelve stories in The Last Suspicious Holdout and Other Stories capture powerful and poignant moments in the everyday lives of African American families, friends, and neighbors. Taking place in an unnamed "sliver of Southern suburbia" in the years spanning from the beginning of the Clinton presidency to the eve of Barack Obama's election, each of these exceptional works of short fiction explore how the inequities of our society--in the criminal justice system, education, and healthcare--as well as issues like the "war on drugs"--shape and scar ordinary lives in deeply personal ways.

In "False Cognates," a formerly incarcerated attorney struggles with paying raising tuition costs to keep his troubled son in an elite private school. In "There He Go," a young girl whose mother moves them constantly yearns for stability and clings to a picture of the grandfather she doesn't know, inventing stories of his greatness that contrast with the actual man.

In this fearless and at times funny collection, Ladee Hubbard transcends stereotypes to provide a fuller portrait of Black American life and its undercurrents. The characters inhabiting her world present diverse configurations of family--grandmothers and granddaughters who live together as roommates; cousins and uncles who form tight bonds; and fathers who are mainly present. Each is part of a community where daycares and babysitters are never taken for granted; where books and words are revered.

The Last Suspicious Holdout and Other Stories mirrors and celebrates Black resilience. Though their finances, jobs, and businesses may be vulnerable to forces they cannot control, the neighbors in these stories bravely confront the realities of their lives, and firmly believe that hope is not a promise but a choice.]]> 207 Ladee Hubbard 0062979094 Yara 0 3.66 2022 The Last Suspicious Holdout: Stories
author: Ladee Hubbard
name: Yara
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> The Lonely Stories 59564386
If you’re feeling lonely or if you’ve ever felt unseen, if you’re emboldened by solitude or secretly longing for it: Welcome to The Lonely Stories. This cathartic collection of personal essays illuminates what the experience of being alone is like for all of us. Some of these stories are heartbreaking, such as Jesmyn Ward’s reckoning with the loss of her husband, Imani Perry’s confrontation with chronic illness, and Dina Nayeri’s reflection on immigrating to a foreign country. Others are witty, such as Lev Grossman’s rueful tale of heading to the woods alone or Anthony Doerr’s struggles with internet addiction. Still others celebrate solitude and the kind of clarity it can bring about, such as Claire Dederer’s journey toward sobriety and Lidia Yuknavitch’s sensual look at women and desire. Thoughtful and ultimately affirming, The Lonely Stories explores emotions that so often go undiscussed, and lets us all know that we’re not alone.]]> 252 Natalie Eve Garrett 194822660X Yara 0 3.66 2022 The Lonely Stories
author: Natalie Eve Garrett
name: Yara
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women]]> 104625853
A middle-aged Black woman exacts revenge on the aggressively average men she meets on dating sites. A girl buries pieces of herself in a hole beneath an apple tree, hoping to escape her mother’s life of struggle and servitude. A group of teenage girls compete for the title of "Worst Girl in America.� A young woman in Taiwan becomes infatuated with a female scam caller, a fleeting ghost of a love that blossoms from strangeness. And a wealthy woman goes to unconventional, and perhaps not entirely ethical, lengths to find her dream man.

In these sixteen stories, we see women at their most monstrous—as con artists and murderers, cutthroats and scalpers, ruled by ambition and grief and spite. Characters for those tired of being told to play nice. Dressed to the nines in morally gray, the stories in this anthology comprise an envelope full of teeth: each one distinct, unsettling, and sharp enough to rip out a throat.]]> 256 Molly Llewellyn 1950539873 Yara 0 3.57 2023 Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women
author: Molly Llewellyn
name: Yara
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Emperor of the Air: Stories 88295 192 Ethan Canin 0618004149 Yara 0 4.06 1988 Emperor of the Air: Stories
author: Ethan Canin
name: Yara
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-story-compilations
review:

]]> Homegoing 27071490 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.]]> 305 Yaa Gyasi Yara 0 to-read 4.48 2016 Homegoing
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: Yara
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Picture of Dorian Gray 5297
In this celebrated work Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England. Combining elements of the Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world. For over a century, this mesmerizing tale of horror and suspense has enjoyed wide popularity. It ranks as one of Wilde's most important creations and among the classic achievements of its kind.]]> 272 Oscar Wilde Yara 0 to-read 4.13 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Yara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1890
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Earth Angel 75719826 In her electric debut, Madeline Cash synthesizes the godlessness of a digital age into a glimmering, sublime, life-affirming collage of stories.

Earth Angel is a book like no other, the paperback that swallowed the smartphone. An Isis recruit, an adolescent beauty queen, and a childless millennial walk into a bar. A Biblical plague rains down head lice, aerial drone strikes, gender non-conforming frogs. An app throws a slumber party for a friendless office worker. Texans in the winter, the Taliban in Springtime, Teslas with ℮☥ bumper stickers, Frozen 5 in Arabic, architectural consistency laws in Laurel Canyon, the longest recorded nosebleed in history.

An unhinged jet stream that is ultramodern and poignantly timeless, capturing the angst of the post-millennial generation.]]> 130 Madeline Cash 1955904693 Yara 3 3.98 2023 Earth Angel
author: Madeline Cash
name: Yara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves:
review:
Man. I liked the stories enough. Creative and a def product of living around rich ppl on both coasts, which do make interesting subjects. But Madeline cash seems to have a weird vaguely xenophobic fascination when it comes to side characters/little plot details. Especially regarding the Middle East and Islam. Very very cringe. And when you do some digging, you realize that she’s part of that yuppie Dimes Square social periphery and suddenly this all makes sense. Sucks that I spent $17 on this fuckin paperback. I requested this on z-library March 2023 and 11 months later no luck so I bought this on Amazon. The return window passed February 15th. Sad.
]]> <![CDATA[I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both]]> 185767233 Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise meets Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in a Black woman’s coming-of-age story, chronicling a life-changing friendship, the interplay between music fandom and identity, and the slipperiness of sanity

Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration.

Khaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.

One song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?]]> 336 Mariah Stovall 1593767609 Yara 0 to-read 3.17 2024 I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both
author: Mariah Stovall
name: Yara
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life]]> 15810109 With candor and humor, a manic-depressive Iranian-American Muslim woman chronicles her experiences with both clinical and cultural bipolarity.

Melody Moezzi was born to Persian parents at the height of the Islamic Revolution and raised amid a vibrant, loving, and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland. When at eighteen, she began battling a severe physical illness, her community stepped up, filling her hospital rooms with roses, lilies, and hyacinths.

But when she attempted suicide and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, there were no flowers. Despite several stays in psychiatric hospitals, bombarded with tranquilizers, mood-stabilizers, and antipsychotics, she was encouraged to keep her illness a secret—by both her family and an increasingly callous and indifferent medical establishment. Refusing to be ashamed, Moezzi became an outspoken advocate, determined to fight the stigma surrounding mental illness and reclaim her life along the way.

Both an irreverent memoir and a rousing call to action, Haldol and Hyacinths is the moving story of a woman who refused to become torn across cultural and social lines.Moezzi reports from the front lines of the no-man’s land between sickness and sanity, and the Midwest and the Middle East. A powerful, funny, and poignant narrative told through a unique and fascinating cultural lens, Haldol and Hyacinths is a tribute to the healing power of hope, humor, and acceptance.]]> 304 Melody Moezzi 1583334688 Yara 0 to-read 3.90 2013 Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life
author: Melody Moezzi
name: Yara
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![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 Yara 0 to-read 3.67 2015 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: Yara
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me]]> 62365898 "Aisha Harris is one of our smartest, most entertaining modern cultural critics. The nine pieces offer insight on Stevie Wonder, the Spice Girls, Pen15, and New Girl--among many other pop artifacts, of course--which might as well be parlance for, 'Read me immediately.'"

--ELLE

Aisha Harris has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for a razor-sharp take on whatever show or movie everyone is talking about. Now, she turns her talents inward, mining the benchmarks of her nineties childhood and beyond to analyze the tropes that are shaping all of us, and our ability to shape them right back.

In the opening essay, an interaction with Chance the Rapper prompts an investigation into the origin myth of her name. Elsewhere, Aisha traces the evolution of the "Black Friend" trope from its Twainian origins through to the heyday of the Spice Girls, teen comedies like Clueless, and sitcoms of the New Girl variety. And she examines the overlap of taste and identity in this era, rejecting the patriarchal ethos that you are what you like. Whatever the subject, sitting down with her book feels like hanging out with your smart, hilarious, pop culture-obsessed friend--and it's a delight.]]> 288 Aisha Harris 0063249944 Yara 0 to-read 3.81 2023 Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me
author: Aisha Harris
name: Yara
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Boogie Down (Phineas and Ferb)]]> 15818585 World of Reading: Phineas and Ferb Level 3 early reader is perfect for fans who are ready to read on their own.
]]> 48 Walt Disney Company 1423148134 Yara 5 3.87 2013 Boogie Down (Phineas and Ferb)
author: Walt Disney Company
name: Yara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/15
shelves:
review:

]]>