en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 09:44:29 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 40176913
Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.]]> 249 Rachel Cusk 0571346766 lauren 0 to-read 3.75 2014
author: Rachel Cusk
name: lauren
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 209546137 Like Nolan’s Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin, a radiant novel tracking the lifecycle of a silver screen starlet rising against the backdrop of the mid-20th century.

Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness.

As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.

Joni Murphy’s Barbara is a deep character study of a woman losing hold and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking. Through an intimate first-person perspective, the novel follows Barbara as she navigates decades and genres—from austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics—glimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th Century.]]> 244 Joni Murphy 166260288X lauren 0 to-read 3.79 2025
author: Joni Murphy
name: lauren
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 484028 462 Mike Davis 0679738061 lauren 0 to-read 4.22 1990
author: Mike Davis
name: lauren
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 13082435 88 Clarice Lispector 0811219909 lauren 0 currently-reading 4.33 1973
author: Clarice Lispector
name: lauren
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 38458438 122 Amparo Dávila 0811228215 lauren 3 short-stories, 2025-reads 3.58 2018
author: Amparo Dávila
name: lauren
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: short-stories, 2025-reads
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]]> 214152231 A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez.

In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis’s descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.

Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.]]> 288 Madeleine Watts 1668051621 lauren 0 currently-reading 3.95 2025
author: Madeleine Watts
name: lauren
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 207006355 What do you want, when no one is watching?
What do you want, when the lights are off?
What do you want, when you are anonymous?

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons �� some complicated, some not �� so many of us don't talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here's the key. In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.]]> 372 Gillian Anderson 1419777297 lauren 0 to-read 3.44 2024
author: Gillian Anderson
name: lauren
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 179546805 A moving memoir of a young woman's reckoning with her parents' absence, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyper-connected world

In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. Orphaned by age ten, she was raised by her grandmother in Los Angeles, a fragmented city, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, unmoored by grief, she begins exploring the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss. This leads her to discover that AIDS and the internet developed along parallel timelines, lending truth to the saying "going viral." Chasing this idea through anecdotes, TV shows, scientific papers, Wikipedia entries, and internet history, McCalden forms a synaptic experience of what happened to her family, one that leads to an unexpected discovery about who her parents might have been.]]> 304 Heather McCalden 0593596471 lauren 0 to-read 3.84 2024
author: Heather McCalden
name: lauren
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 228645127 208 Fátima Velez 166260226X lauren 0 to-read 0.0
author: Fátima Velez
name: lauren
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> 196674628
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of “ars poetica�� gives way to “anti poetica�� and “ars america�� to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of American acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem―part map, part annotation, part visual argument―offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after the city decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.]]> 160 Danez Smith 1644452987 lauren 0 to-read 4.44 2024
author: Danez Smith
name: lauren
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> 211031960 125 Zea Asis 6219670620 lauren 0 to-read 3.88
author: Zea Asis
name: lauren
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> 222376983 With the awakening of fire-breathing dragons, Among the Burning Flowers sees the first sparks of danger that threaten to consume the world in The Priory of the Orange Tree.

Take your first steps into the epic.
Yscalin, land of sunshine and lavender, will soon be ablaze.

It has been centuries since the Draconic Army took wing, almost extinguishing humankind.

Marosa Vetalda is a prisoner in her own home, controlled by her cold father, King Sigoso. Over the mountains, her betrothed, Aubrecht Lievelyn, rules Mentendon in all but name. Together, they intend to usher in a better world.

A better world seems impossibly distant to Estina Melaugo, who hunts the Draconic beasts that have slept across the world for centuries.

And now the great wyrm Fýredel is stirring, and Yscalin will be the first to fall . . .

A story of human resilience in the face of dire circumstances, Among the Burning Flowers leads readers through the gripping and tragic circumstances that pave the way for the opening of the million-copy bestseller The Priory of The Orange Tree.

Richly illustrated with magical artwork by Rovina Cai (@rovinacai).]]> 288 Samantha Shannon 1639736018 lauren 0 to-read, most-anticipated 4.36 2025
author: Samantha Shannon
name: lauren
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 202102084 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ava Reid comes a reimagining of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her.

The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men. 

The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.  

The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. 

But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. 

She does not know this yet. But she will.]]> 320 Ava Reid 0593722566 lauren 0 to-read 3.47 2024
author: Ava Reid
name: lauren
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> 212342605 Hungerstone is a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood and Emilia Hart’s Weyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution, Hungerstone is a compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the book that inspired Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.]]> 336 Kat Dunn 1638932166 lauren 0 to-read 4.02 2025
author: Kat Dunn
name: lauren
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> 8217236
In a private journal, the woman records her growing obsession with the “horrid�� wallpaper. Its strange pattern mutates in the moonlight, revealing what appears to be a human figure in the design. With nothing else to occupy her mind, the woman resolves to unlock the mystery of the wallpaper. Her quest, however, leads not to the truth, but into the darkest depths of madness.

A condemnation of the patriarchy, The Yellow Wallpaper explores with terrifying economy the oppression, grave misunderstanding, and willful dismissal of women in late nineteenth-century society.

First published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.

Excerpt:
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.]]> 63 Charlotte Perkins Gilman lauren 0 to-read 4.05 1892
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: lauren
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> 403642 107 Ivan Turgenev 0140443355 lauren 0 to-read 3.76 1860
author: Ivan Turgenev
name: lauren
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1860
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> 220599225 Set in the English countryside, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year as two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

‘It’s a novel about us�� KAVEH AKBAR

‘Hewitt writes with such tenderness and grace�� ANNE ENRIGHT

On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. Beholden to the expectations of home and family, his burgeoning desire �� an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex �� threatens to unravel his shy exterior.

Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own.

As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever. Enthralling and richly immersive, Open, Heaven is a debut novel about the freedom of youth, the sacrifices of friendship, and the possibilities of love in all its forms.

‘A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life��
HELEN MACDONALD

‘Open, Heaven does what the very best coming of age stories do��
MICHAEL MAGEE

‘Gorgeous…thrums with hidden love and concealed truths��
ANDREW McMILLAN

‘Intensely conjured…as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong��
PATRICK GALE]]> 272 Seán Hewitt 1787335194 lauren 0 to-read 4.08
author: Seán Hewitt
name: lauren
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 40971817 160 David Shields 0814255191 lauren 0 to-read 3.46
author: David Shields
name: lauren
average rating: 3.46
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date added: 2025/03/07
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]]> 213816143 A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard—one of the most mythologized serial killers—twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.]]> 312 Natalia Theodoridou 1963108191 lauren 0 to-read 3.78 2025
author: Natalia Theodoridou
name: lauren
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 lauren 0 to-read, most-anticipated 3.69 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: lauren
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> 55347007 A young Australian woman unable to find her footing in the world begins to break down when the emergencies she hears working as a 911 operator and the troubles within her own life gradually blur together, forcing her to grapple with how the past has shaped her present.

Drifting after her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. Callers report car accidents and violent spouses and homes caught up in flame.

The work becomes monotonous: answer, transfer, repeat. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins walking home with keys in hand, ready to fight off men disappointed by what they find in neighboring bars. During her free time, she gets black-out drunk, hooks up with strangers, and navigates an affair with an ex-lover whose girlfriend is in their circle of friends.

Two centuries earlier, her great-great-great-great-grandfather—the British explorer John Oxley—traversed the wilderness of Australia in search of water. Oxley never found the inland sea, but the myth was taken up by other men, and over the years, search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it.

Interweaving a woman's self-destructive unraveling with the gradual worsening of the climate crisis, The Inland Sea is charged with unflinching insight into our age of anxiety. At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, this novel asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency.]]> 272 Madeleine Watts 164622017X lauren 0 to-read 3.44 2021
author: Madeleine Watts
name: lauren
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 220595449
When We Love You, Bunny opens, Sam has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies�� side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers—and the phantasmagoric adventure of conjuring their first creation. With a bound and gagged Sam, we embark on a wickedly intoxicating journey into the heart of dark academia: a fairy tale slasher that explores the wonder and horror of creation itself. Not to mention the transformative powers of love and friendship, Bunny.

Frankenstein by way of Heathers, We Love You, Bunny is both a prequel and a sequel, and an unabashedly wild and totally complete stand-alone novel. Open your hearts, Bunny, to another dazzlingly original and darkly hilarious romp in the Bunny-verse from the queen of the fever-dream, Mona Awad.]]> 496 Mona Awad 166805986X lauren 0 to-read, most-anticipated 4.43 2025
author: Mona Awad
name: lauren
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> 217387701 An addictively entertaining, internationally bestselling family saga by a National Book Award finalist.

Meet the Mikkola Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.

Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.

Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.

Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Sisters is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order and an addictively entertaining tour de force.]]> 656 Jonas Hassen Khemiri 0374618895 lauren 0 to-read 4.15 2023
author: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
name: lauren
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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review:

]]> 215362651 “The story of relationships built and broken, mistakes inherited and repeated, and the beauty of trying again��.already one of the year’s best.”��People

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws�� lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents�� story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.]]> 448 Eric Puchner 0385550669 lauren 0 to-read 3.65 2025
author: Eric Puchner
name: lauren
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> 209070804
She doesn't really need the money. But it lays bare the truth of each loveless transaction. Still living at home, each chance encounter is a route to escape the tedium of her sheltered, suburban existence. One day a man takes her home to meet his beautiful, unhappy wife, Ingrid. She knows she should leave, but instead becomes drawn ever deeper into their games, her suspicions of the terrible secrets they keep mounting with each visit. Caught in a web of fear, intrigue and desire, she will end up in more trouble than she ever bargained for.

Told with perfect restraint and the iciest detachment, Notice is the sickeningly addictive story of a woman on the edge, who does not know how much further yet she could fall. A stark, relentless exploration of power and pursuit, this provocative cult classic will lead you on an unforgettable journey into pitch darkness.]]> 256 Heather Lewis 1800818610 lauren 0 to-read 3.34 2004
author: Heather Lewis
name: lauren
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58772762 In this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose reality? What rules? --Jean Chen Ho, author of The New York Times Book Review

These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores's deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives. --Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

Psychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of the Trufflepig.



No one captures the border--its history and imagination, its danger, contradiction, and redemption--like Fernando A. Flores, whose stories reimagine and reinterpret the region's existence with peerless style. In his immersive, uncanny borderland, things are never what they seem: a world where the sun is both rising and setting, and where conniving possums efficiently take over an entire town and rewrite its history.

The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Fr�d�ric Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Ju�rez in the aftermath of his mother's death, attempting to recover his beloved piano that was seized at the border, while a muralist is taken on a psychedelic journey by an airbrushed Emiliano Zapata T-shirt. A woman is engulfed by a used-clothing warehouse with a life of its own, and a grieving mother breathlessly chronicles the demise of a town decimated by violence. In two separate stories, queso dip and musical rhythms are bottled up and sold for mass consumption. And in the final tale, Flores pieces together the adventures of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as he starts a music career in Texas.

Swinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, Valleyesque is a boundary- and border-pushing collection from a one-of-a-kind stylist and voice. With the visceral imagination that made his debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, a cult classic, Flores brings his vision of the border to life--and beyond.]]> 208 Fernando A. Flores 0374604134 lauren 0 to-read, short-stories 3.82 2022
author: Fernando A. Flores
name: lauren
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read, short-stories
review:

]]> 211934958 Two women fight to save their dystopian border town—and literature—in this gonzo near-future adventure.

The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of the town’s mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick’s pockets.

Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalí—the latter of whom, one of the town’s last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí’s possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick’s forces, Neftalí and Prosperina, with the help of a wounded bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel tías, rise up to reclaim their city—and in the process, unlock Rivas’s connection to Three Rivers itself.

An adventure that only the acclaimed Fernando A. Flores could dream up, Brother Brontë is a mordant, gonzo romp through a ruined world that, in its dysfunction, tyranny, and disparity, nonetheless feels uncannily like our own. With his most ambitious book yet, Flores once again bends what fiction can do, in the process crafting a moving and unforgettable story of perseverance.]]> 352 Fernando A. Flores 0374604169 lauren 0 to-read 3.57 2025
author: Fernando A. Flores
name: lauren
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> 213870131 When a husband asks his reluctant wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible

She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband�� and “wife�� force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. 

Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes. Destined to become a classic novel of marriage, and tackling the big questions being asked about partnership in postpandemic relationships, Crush is a sharp, funny, seductive, and revelatory novel about holding on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.]]> 288 Ada Calhoun 0593832027 lauren 0 to-read 3.01 2025
author: Ada Calhoun
name: lauren
average rating: 3.01
book published: 2025
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]]> 222176563 From the hyper-online author of Dreaming of You comes a spiky and surprising short stories about women and their jealous men, predatory teachers, monsters, fame, inherited trauma, and their own personal BS.

A short story collection from the author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria. These stories explore the pain and uncertainty of girlhood and young adulthood. Stylish, subversive, and suspenseful, Lozada-Oliva uses elements of body horror and fabulism to great effect, investigating themes of class, race, gender and sexuality, and late stage capitalism.]]> 256 Melissa Lozada-Oliva 1662601824 lauren 0 to-read, short-stories 0.0
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name: lauren
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]]> 211934920 By the acclaimed author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, a startling and darkly funny volume of selected poetry, the first to be translated into English.

It was a meaningless day
like what you call
love

It was a Thursday
In parentheses. The brackets around it
Have already faded
Life tastes of ash
And is bearable.

From one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy, comes There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, a major volume of selected poetry written throughout Tove Ditlevsen’s life. Infused with the same wry nihilism, quiet intensity, dark humor, and crystalline genius that readers savor in her prose, these are heartbreak poems, childhood poems, self-portraits, death poems, wounded poems, confessional poems, and love poems—poems that stare into the surfaces that seduce and deceive us. They describe childhood, longing, loss, and memory, obsessively tracing their imprints and intrusions upon everyday life. With morbid curiosity, Ditlevsen’s poems turn toward the uncanny and the abject, approaching gingerly. They stitch the gray scale of daily disappointment with vivid, unsparing detail, a degree of precision that renders loneliness psychedelic.

Speaking across generations to both the passions of youth and the agonies of adulthood, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die reveals everyday life stripped of its excesses, exposing its bones and bare the normal and the strange, the meaningful and the meaningless. These startling, resonant poems are both canonical and contemporary, and demand to be shared with friends, loved ones, nemeses, and strangers alike.]]> 192 Tove Ditlevsen 037461346X lauren 0 to-read 4.34 2017
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: lauren
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 199634757 208 Rachel Cusk 1443471674 lauren 0 to-read 3.38 2024
author: Rachel Cusk
name: lauren
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> 214151927 From Lambda Literary Award–winning author Alejandro Heredia comes a spellbinding debut about intersectionality, enduring friendship, and found family set at the turn of the millennium in 1999, following two Afro-Caribbean friends as they journey beyond the confined expectations of their home country in the Dominican Republic and begin new lives in New York City.

Sal and Charo, two best friends from Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, arrive in New York City and dream of making the United States their new home—but for very different reasons. Charo left Santa Domingo to escape the life of domesticity that was all but guaranteed for women like her, but soon finds herself in the exact situation she tried to partnered to a controlling man, mother of a young child, and working long hours as a cashier. Sal on the other hand, fled Santa Domingo after an unspeakable tragedy, hoping that the distance would allow him a fresh start. But trauma keeps him in its grips, and he’s unable to move on.

With both friends feeling the same pressures in New York that forced them from their homes, a chance outing at a gay bar introduces Sal to Vance, an African American gay man whose romantic relationship with Sal challenges him to confront the trauma of his past. Through Vance, Charo befriends Ella, an African American trans woman, and Ella’s refusal to be who or what society dictates she should be inspires Charo to reckon with the role she’s grown comfortable in. Sal and Charo soon find themselves part of a queer intersectional community who disrupt the status quo of gender politics and conformity, allowing both to create the family and identities they’ve always longed for.]]> 352 Alejandro Heredia 1668050463 lauren 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Alejandro Heredia
name: lauren
average rating: 3.95
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]]> 212806636 A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this epic saga of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.]]> 368 Allegra Goodman 0593730089 lauren 0 to-read 4.01 2025
author: Allegra Goodman
name: lauren
average rating: 4.01
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]]> 211935105 Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless�� (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.

Of death the muse is death the muse of Hell
Is death the muse of Heaven I don’t know
O muse of where howcan I hope to go
To where I pray I’ll go sing at least tell

Shane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.�� Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and
this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.]]> 112 Shane McCrae 0374615497 lauren 0 to-read 3.80 2025
author: Shane McCrae
name: lauren
average rating: 3.80
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]]> 215537039 The Bella Vista, is inspired by the piano works of Harold Budd on the album La Bella Vista, and childhood memories of her father’s own improvised piano reveries in their LA apartment. 


For twenty years, Emma has pursued music as her primary medium, evoking dreamy abstraction, exploring textural maximalism, and embracing her own vulnerability with a guitar, a piano, and the sound of her voice. With The Bella Vista, she turns to language as the best and perhaps only tool suitable to express, in her words, “the tenderness and brutality of romantic love.�� Written on the road and in the air between tour locations, the chronological, self-referential poems of The Bella Vista follows a relationship from its enthralling genesis through its twisted convulsions and the devastation of its dissolution then, eventually, to a sort of peace. The collection is a concept album, an addiction memoir, a family tree, and a love letter all at once—to music, to mistakes, to womanhood; to cross-country drives and other artists and the long road to finding oneself.]]> 110 Emma Ruth Rundle 1961884321 lauren 0 to-read 3.79
author: Emma Ruth Rundle
name: lauren
average rating: 3.79
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]]> 174156085 Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

It is the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women—and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.]]> 256 Marina Yuszczuk 0593472063 lauren 0 to-read 3.43 2020
author: Marina Yuszczuk
name: lauren
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 213618273 “Enigmatic, opalescent, so precise.�� —Jia Tolentino

An intimate and candid account of one of the most romantic and revolutionary of relationships: divorce

Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.�� As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.

Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a deeply felt and radiant account of 21st century divorce—the remarkably common and seemingly singular experience, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage towards an unknown future.

Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.]]> 304 Haley Mlotek 1984879081 lauren 0 to-read 3.29 2025
author: Haley Mlotek
name: lauren
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2025
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]]> 58311245 New Animal is a poignant, darkly comedic look at human connection from a biting and original new voice in Ella Baxter.

Amelia Aurelia is approaching thirty and her closest relationships �� other than her mother �� are through her dating apps. She works at the family mortuary business as a cosmetic mortician with her eccentric step-father and older brother, whose throuple’s current preoccupation is with what type of snake to adopt. When Amelia’s affectionate mother passes away without warning, she is left without anchor. Fleeing the funeral, she seeks solace with her birth-father in Tasmania and stumbles into the local BDSM community, where her riotous attempts to belong are met with confusion, shock, and empathy.

Hilarious and heartfelt, New Animal reveals hard-won truths as Amelia struggles to find her place in the world without her mother, with the help of her two well-intentioned fathers and adventures at the kink club.]]> 212 Ella Baxter 1953387128 lauren 0 to-read 3.65 2021
author: Ella Baxter
name: lauren
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 218173295 A debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico.

Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.]]> 192 Dahlia de la Cerda 1761380419 lauren 0 to-read 4.03 2019
author: Dahlia de la Cerda
name: lauren
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> 216563981 Hunger devours.
Takeaway food and human flesh. Sexual humiliation or humanity's survival. Smooth, unblemished skin.

It cannot be sated.
But people try. They push eager hands into their own gaping injuries. They suck the blood of rabbits and other people. They buy from a restaurant that only serves food they didn't order. They do everything the song from the ocean demands.

This outstanding first collection cements Eliza Clark's place as one of the UK's most extraordinary voices. Its ten dark, visceral stories range from urban teenage fantasies to dystopian, each bursting with unexpected and insatiable intruders into bodies, communities and ecosystems - both deeply desired and violently resisted.]]> 225 Eliza Clark 0571371817 lauren 0 to-read 3.84 2024
author: Eliza Clark
name: lauren
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> 221560862
Baby is a dancer at a strip club and at the age of 27, she’s feeling lost. It seems that only Dino, her sweet, cross-dressing, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend can keep her afloat. So, when Dino disappears without so much as a kiss goodbye, she plunges headfirst into San Francisco’s shady erotic underground to find him.

Baby searches through dive bars and old haunts, at the club and at the sex dungeon where she has a part-time dominatrix gig. She encounters clients like Simon, a recluse paying her for increasingly bizarre “favours�� and a philosophizing suicide fetishist named ‘Nobody��, as well as coworkers like Emeline, the balletic new hire who seems to want to steal Baby’s whole identity, starting with her underwear.

It’s not long before she starts to find cryptic notes hidden in her belongings and realises her search is attracting the wrong kind of attention. With her grip on reality loosening and the clock ticking, will Baby manage to put together the pieces and find the only man she’s ever loved? Or might her past catch up with her first?

Manically smart, brutally funny and deeply sexy, Soft Core is a book about desire, fantasy, and true love �� like no other.]]> 352 Brittany Newell 0008670382 lauren 0 to-read 3.44 2025
author: Brittany Newell
name: lauren
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2025
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]]> 217388147 The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides in this haunting debut about five sisters in a small village in eighteenth century England whose neighbors are convinced they’re turning into dogs.

Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbed to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before.

The truth is that though the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls—a little odd, think some; a little high on themselves, perhaps—they’ve always had plenty to say about them. As the rotating perspectives of five villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it.

As relevant today as any time before, The Hounding celebrates the wild breaks from convention we’re all sometimes pulled toward, and wonders if, in a world like this one, it isn’t safer to be a dog than an unusual young girl.]]> 240 Xenobe Purvis 1250366380 lauren 0 to-read, most-anticipated 4.18 2025
author: Xenobe Purvis
name: lauren
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> 171089697
'Sly, profound �� Electrifying' Observer

‘Wonderfully strange and alive�� Jon McGregor
A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised �� the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.

As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves �� until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

‘Beguiling �� A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation�� Daily Mail

‘Haunting and strange �� Li has made her style her own�� Tessa Hadley, Guardian

‘A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout�� Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist]]> 368 Yiyun Li 0008531854 lauren 0 to-read 3.84 2022
author: Yiyun Li
name: lauren
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> 205015171 The Summer Book and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.

In The Summer Book and The True Deceiver, as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart but as full-blooded people with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. It’s no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American institution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds.

In Sun City, Jansson depicts these worlds in a group portrait of residents and employees at the Berkeley Arms in St. Petersburg, Florida. As the narrative moves from character to character, so the characters move through an America riven by cultural divides, facing the death of its dream. The Berkeley Arms’s newest resident finds a place among the rocking chairs and endless chatter on the veranda, while other residents long for past glories, mourning their losses and killing time. Meanwhile one of their attendants, Bounty Joe, is eagerly awaiting a letter, or even just a postcard, alerting him to the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “Nobody’s normal anymore,�� as the bartender says, “not the old geezers and not the newborn kids.”]]> 224 Tove Jansson 1681378655 lauren 0 to-read 3.72 1974
author: Tove Jansson
name: lauren
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> 207294097 For readers of Luster, All Fours, and Vladimir: a brazenly sexy and scathingly candid novel about a white-hot relationship and the two intractable characters who emerge from it transformed.

Noa Simon is a thirty-six-year-old filmmaker who knows what she wants when she sees it, and when she meets Teddy Rosenfeld, an antagonistic, older CEO, she goes for the jugular. An electrifying encounter in a bathroom stall after their first meeting only serves to whet Noa’s appetite, and despite Teddy’s subsequent rejections, she is exhilarated by the challenge—and by her own insatiability. In her first power play, she takes a job at his office, setting up a battle of the wills that Teddy proves unable to resist. Their ravenous, volatile romance will ultimately unearth difficult secrets from both of their pasts, and finally force Noa to reckon with her deepest desires and most destructive impulses.

Written with visceral intensity and voyeuristic precision, Rosenfeld is a propulsive tale of sexual abandon that titillates and interrogates in equal measure.]]> 400 Maya Kessler 1668053454 lauren 0 currently-reading 3.27 2024
author: Maya Kessler
name: lauren
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 101673225 The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.]]> 240 C Pam Zhang 0593538242 lauren 0 to-read 3.50 2023
author: C Pam Zhang
name: lauren
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 23221694 ghost writer che deve riscrivere un libro inquietante, pericoloso come una profezia. Persi sotto un cielo ostile in cui brillano due lune, entrambi si giocano la vita in una storia che sembra destinata a farli incontrare.
Mai come in 1Q84 Murakami ha esplorato i nostri incubi per dare vita a un mondo così personale, onirico e malinconico, in cui nessuna realtà parallela ripaga per la nostalgia di un'amicizia d'infanzia, per un amore mancato.]]> 1170 Haruki Murakami 8806222902 lauren 0 to-read 4.18 2009
author: Haruki Murakami
name: lauren
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> 57693262 For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage.

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

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

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.]]> 384 Coco Mellors 1635576814 lauren 0 to-read 3.70 2022
author: Coco Mellors
name: lauren
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 209311051
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair and possibility—a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 442 Sally Rooney 0571365469 lauren 0 to-read 4.03 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: lauren
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
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]]> 206318561 178 Eve Babitz 0394409841 lauren 0 to-read 4.07 1977
author: Eve Babitz
name: lauren
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> 23365262
From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.]]> 650 Clarice Lispector 0811219631 lauren 0 to-read 4.41 2015
author: Clarice Lispector
name: lauren
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> 205307210 Horse Girl Fever is a hilariously weird collection, part autofiction, part outlandish daydream, that celebrates the horse girl within all of us.

From cult author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim, Kevin Maloney delivers a vision of the world that is hysterical, terrifying, and true. A cuckolded husband finds a new identity as a ghost. A homeowner has a nervous breakdown while building a pergola. An angst-ridden teenager finds his spiritual equal in the mosh pit of an Alice in Chains concert. 

In fourteen brutally funny stories, Horse Girl Fever plunges the reader into a world of misfits—inept drug smugglers, tattooed office workers, and philosophical strip club bouncers—who fumble toward the light but often end up flailing. Maloney’s writing conjures a dazzling spectrum of pain, joy, and humanity, peeking into the darkest corners of reality while high on Whippets.]]> 146 Kevin Maloney 1960988360 lauren 0 to-read, short-stories 4.01 2025
author: Kevin Maloney
name: lauren
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 lauren 0 to-read 3.94 1970
author: Joan Didion
name: lauren
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
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review:

]]> 36470362 Black Swans is a collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s—decades of dreams, drink, and stoned youth turning Republican. Babitz prowls California, telling tales of a changing world. She writes about the Rodeo Gardens, about AIDS, about learning to tango, about the Hollywood Cemetery, about the self-enchanted city, and, most important, about the envy and jealousy underneath it all.

Babitz’s inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their way: 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.]]> 225 Eve Babitz 1640090509 lauren 0 to-read, in-process 3.90 1993
author: Eve Babitz
name: lauren
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read, in-process
review:

]]> 30199417
The first thing Leif notices about Oola is the sharp curve of her delicate shoulders, tensed as if for flight. Even from that first encounter at a party in a flat outside of London, there’s something electric about the way Oola, a music school dropout, connects with the cossetted, listless narrator we find in twenty-five-year-old Leif. Infatuated, the two hit the road across Europe, housesitting for Leif’s parents�� wealthy friends, and finally settling for the summer in Big Sur.

Leif makes Oola his he will attempt an infinitesimal cartography of her every thought and gesture, her every dimple, every snag, every swell of memory and hollow. And yet in this atmosphere of stifling and paranoid isolation, the world around Leif and Oola begins to warp--the tap water turns salty, plants die, and Oola falls dangerously ill. Finally, it becomes clear that the currents surging just below the surface of Leif’s story are infinitely stranger than they first appear.

Oola is a mind-bendingly original novel about the way that--particularly in the changeable, unsteady just-post-college years--sex, privilege, desire, and creativity can bend, blur, and break. Brittany Newell bursts into the literary world with a narrative as twisted and fresh as it is addicting.]]> 272 Brittany Newell 1250114144 lauren 0 to-read 3.36 2017
author: Brittany Newell
name: lauren
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57335967 This darkly hilarious and “delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food�� (The Boston Globe) from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today is a “precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache�� (BuzzFeed).

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

“A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture�� (Glamour) Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is “riotously funny and perfectly profane�� (Refinery 29) from “a wild, wicked mind�� (Los Angeles Times).]]> 320 Melissa Broder 1982142502 lauren 0 to-read 3.63 2021
author: Melissa Broder
name: lauren
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211003842
In this peerless memoir, the 85-year-old “paterfamilias of queer literature�� (New York Times) recounts the sixty-plus years of sexual escapades that have inspired his many masterpieces. He explores the sex he had with other closeted boys in 50s Midwest, with women as a young man trying to be straight, the sex he's paid for and been paid for, sex during the Stonewall and HIV eras, and in the age of the apps. Through stories of transactional sex, mutual admiration, open relationships, domination, submission, love, and loss, he paints an indelible portrait of queer history in America and abroad in a way only someone who has lived through it can.

Written with White's signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of this legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.]]> 256 Edmund White 1639733728 lauren 0 to-read 3.68 2025
author: Edmund White
name: lauren
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208451373 1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artefact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her ambition, her desire, and her troubling history.

Disorientated by jet lag, debilitating migraines and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth finds herself enthralled by her new surroundings �� and, equally, by her translator’s inscrutable wife, a young artist named Theo.

As the nude’s acquisition proves to be riskier than she could have ever imagined, the fates of Elizabeth and the sculpture are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with the role she’s played in the global art trade and the ethical fallouts her personal and professional decisions could leave behind.

The Nude is an evocative and intense exploration of art and cultural theft, combining the moody atmosphere of Katie Kitamura’s A Separation and the complex gender dynamics of Lisa Taddeo’s Animal with the sensual exploration of female desire of Deborah Levy's Hot Milk. Your next summer obsession!]]> 320 C. Michelle Lindley 085730884X lauren 0 3.33 2024
author: C. Michelle Lindley
name: lauren
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read, to-be-read, most-anticipated
review:

]]> 65599686
When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrust back to the summer she spent as a waitress at his high-end Dublin restaurant. Drawn in by the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the elegance of the food, the wild parties after service, Hannah also remembers the sizzling tension of the kitchens. And how the attention from Daniel morphed from kindness into something darker��

His restaurant shuttered, his lawyers breathing down his neck, Daniel is in a state of disbelief. Decades of hard graft, of fighting to earn recognition for his talent �� is it all to fall apart because of something he can barely remember?

Hiding behind the bedroom curtains from the paparazzi lenses, Julie is raking through more than two decades spent acting the supportive wife, the good mother, and asking herself what it’s all been for.

Their three different voices reveal a story of power and abuse, victimhood and complicity. This is a novel about the facades that we maintain, the lies that we tell and the courage it takes to face the truth.]]> 256 Sarah Gilmartin 1911590804 lauren 0 to-read 4.22 2023
author: Sarah Gilmartin
name: lauren
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205307250 An Authentic Life is an exacting and fearless interrogation of the education one receives from the institutions of academia and family.


Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang’s anticipated third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the “fathers�� who stand at the center of history. Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation. Here, the patriarchal violence of history becomes intimate, brought down to a domestic scale. A woman sweeping the floor cannot escape thoughts of war, or her dying mother, while another scene shows friends questioning the “despite-ness�� of love. In poems where the lyric is reimagined as porous, discursive, and bursting open, Chang fearlessly confronts the forms of knowledge that hold power. Meticulous and masterful, An Authentic Life creates a world where we can begin “to unlearn everything.”]]> 112 Jennifer Chang 1556596995 lauren 0 to-read 4.57
author: Jennifer Chang
name: lauren
average rating: 4.57
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211953309 A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility—and looming danger.

It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents�� medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, whom every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,�� but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.]]> 368 Cynthia Weiner 0593798848 lauren 0 to-read 3.72
author: Cynthia Weiner
name: lauren
average rating: 3.72
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208499319 264 Emmalea Russo 1648210643 lauren 0 to-read 3.65 2024
author: Emmalea Russo
name: lauren
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209457798 A thrilling and eccentric novel about what it means to make art as a woman, and about the powerful forces of voyeurism, power, obsession, and online performanceWoo Woo follows Sabine, a conceptual artist on the verge of a photo exhibition she hopes will be pivotal, as she plunges deeper into her neuroses and seeks validation in relationships—with her frustratingly rational chef husband, her horde of devoted Gen Z TikTok followers, and even a mysterious, potentially violent stalker. Accompanying her throughout are Sabine’s strange alter egos, from hyperrealistic puppets of her as a baby to the ghost of conceptual artist Carolee Schneemann, who shows up with inscrutable yet sage life advice. Ella Baxter approaches the desire to see and be seen that defines both the creative and romantic act with humor, empathy, and a good dose of wildness, driving Sabine to an surreal and compelling climax that forces her—and us—to reconsider what it means to be an artist and a partner.]]> 272 Ella Baxter 1646222555 lauren 0 to-read 3.15 2024
author: Ella Baxter
name: lauren
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199797823
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.]]> 240 Fernanda Trías 1668049775 lauren 0 to-read 3.37 2020
author: Fernanda Trías
name: lauren
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195790626
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.]]> 240 Elisa Gabbert 0374605890 lauren 0 to-read 3.76 2024
author: Elisa Gabbert
name: lauren
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59571658 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.

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

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

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,�� writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”]]> 100 Ada Limon 1639550496 lauren 5 4.34 2022
author: Ada Limon
name: lauren
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: all-time-faves, fave-poetry, 2025-reads
review:

]]> 59616446
As the college year progresses, their relationship becomes increasingly unstable, as do the girls themselves, threatening to unravel due to the intense feelings and complicated circumstances that underlie their bond. Yet, the biggest threat is posed by a secret one girl is keeping...

The lines between love, envy and obsession blur in Laurie Petrou's utterly enthralling, unceasingly tense second novel. A darkly compelling coming-of-age thriller, perfect for fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, or Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies.]]> 272 Laurie Petrou 0857308238 lauren 0 to-read 3.70 2022
author: Laurie Petrou
name: lauren
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207003516 A true-crime obsessed young artist is drawn into the lives of an obscenely wealthy family in this fantastically entertaining thriller from Calla Henkel, author of Other People’s Clothes

Recently dumped and stuck with a mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. The scrapbooks, a secret birthday gift for Naomi’s husband, Bryce, trace the Duncan’s 25-year marriage. The Esther must include every piece of paper she’s been sent, must sign an NDA, and must only contact Naomi using the burner phone provided. Otherwise she’ll spoil the surprise. As Esther binges true-crime podcasts and works through the near-200 boxes of Duncan detritus, she finds herself infatuated with the gilded family—until, mid-project, Naomi dies suspiciously. When Esther becomes convinced the husband killed her, she uses the scrapbooks�� trove of information to insert herself into the Duncans�� lives to prove it. But the more Esther investigates, the further she is dragged back to the scorched earth of her past and the famous artist who paid her to disappear. Laced with pitch-black humor and conspiratorial unease, Scrap is a razor-sharp examination of wealth and power, art and truth, of the line between justice and revenge—and who gets to cross it.]]> 320 Calla Henkel 1419775227 lauren 0 to-read 3.65 2024
author: Calla Henkel
name: lauren
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 46041465
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else�� realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones�� Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.]]> 368 Dolly Alderton 0062968785 lauren 0 to-read 3.98 2018
author: Dolly Alderton
name: lauren
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 lauren 0 to-read 4.38 2023
author: Julia Fox
name: lauren
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59768070 Helen Hajnoczky lauren 0 to-read 4.10
author: Helen Hajnoczky
name: lauren
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52717097 My Brilliant Friend is also the story of a nation. Through the lives of Elena and Lila, Ferrante gives her readers the story of a city and a country undergoing momentous change.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante lauren 0 to-read 4.11 2011
author: Elena Ferrante
name: lauren
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220160134 In this heartrending spin on the zombie mythos, a brilliant scientist desperately searches for a cure after a devastating epidemic while also hiding a monumental secret—her undead husband.

Having always preferred the company of microbes, British scientist Kesta Shelley has spent her life peering through a microscope rather than cultivating personal relationships. That changed when Kesta met Tim—her cheerleader, her best friend, her absolute everything. So when he was one of the last people in London to be infected with a perplexing virus that left the city ravaged, Kesta went into triage mode.

Although the government rounded up and disposed of all the infected, Kesta is able to keep her husband (un)alive—and hidden—with resources from the hospital where she works. She spends her days reviewing biopsy slides and her evenings caring for him, but he’s clearly declining. The sedatives aren’t working like they used to, and his violent outbursts are becoming more frequent. As Kesta races against the clock, her colleagues start noticing changes in her behavior and appearance. Her care for Tim has spiraled into absolute obsession. Whispers circulate that a top-secret lab is working on a cure, and Kesta clings to the possibility of being recruited, but can she save her husband before he is discovered?]]> 352 Leigh Radford 1668081210 lauren 0 to-read 3.77 2025
author: Leigh Radford
name: lauren
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 lauren 0 to-read, most-anticipated 3.95 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: lauren
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, most-anticipated
review:

]]> 122769136 203 Sheena Patel 1783789816 lauren 0 to-read 3.31 2022
author: Sheena Patel
name: lauren
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57155092 A darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse--one woman's furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.

Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. Deep in the Mojave Desert where she grew up, she meets her ghosts at every turn: the first love whose self-destruction still haunts her; her father, a member of the most famous cult in American history; her mother, whose native spark gutters with every passing year. She can't go back in time to make any of it right, but what exactly is her way forward? Alone in the wilderness, at last she begins to make herself at home in the world.

Bold, tender, and often hilarious, I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness reaffirms Watkins as one of the signal writers of our time.]]> 304 Claire Vaye Watkins 0593330218 lauren 0 to-read 3.13 2021
author: Claire Vaye Watkins
name: lauren
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60334013 High Fidelity meets Where'd You Go Bernadette in this Swedish runaway bestseller, a work of pure literary nostalgia for times just past.

Several years after the disappearance of his wife Cecilia, Martin Berg is tumbling into a life crisis. The owner of an ailing Swedish publishing house, he's left wondering what could have been.


Meanwhile, Martin's old and much more remarkable friend, the artist Gustav Becker, is visiting Gothenburg, plastering billboards across the city that feature the eyes of his greatest muse, Cecilia Berg.

Feeling out of place and restless in the city, Martin's daughter Rakel finds a possible clue to her mother's fate and her world begins to unravel.

A family saga of several generations, Collected Works is a story about enduring love, absence, friendship, and art in the intersection of truth and fiction.
]]> 610 Lydia Sandgren 1662601514 lauren 0 to-read 4.04 2020
author: Lydia Sandgren
name: lauren
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214537790 From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples�� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X lauren 0 to-read, most-anticipated 4.01 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: lauren
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read, most-anticipated
review:

]]> 199427752 256 Marosia Castaldi 1913505871 lauren 0 to-read 3.92
author: Marosia Castaldi
name: lauren
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210482472 “It’s a rare thing, more rare than most of us would like to admit, to find such unflinching human nakedness in the artistry of storytelling today. Not of the bodily kind, but the sheer genuine baring of every scar and infirmity and near every shade of harm worn on the invisible flesh of the heart. Rarer still for a collection to so simply state, Here I am. I am as my choices and time and circumstances have made me. And I do not apologize for my position on men.��
-C.S. Humble, Foreword from I Do Not Apologize for My Position on Men

A woman forms an electric bond with the cosmic terror behind a gloryhole. Another falls in love with a hurricane. A nihilist and her obsessive paramour find a child after a catastrophic fire. An interactive survival horror based on the tragedy of the whaling ship Essex. People seduce monsters, monsters seduce people, and the line between person and monster loses meaning.

I Do Not Apologize for My Position on Men will appeal to lovers of Eric LaRocca’s “disaster queers��, Wrath James White’s brutal eroticism, and Paula D. Ashe’s combination of lush prose and devastating violence.]]> Rae Wilde lauren 0 to-read 4.00
author: Rae Wilde
name: lauren
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199454353 An influencer attempts to derail a viral TV marketing campaign with her violent cult following. A marriage between two ghost hunters is threatened when one of them loses her ability to see spirits. The lives of a famous painter in the twilight of her career and a teenage UFO enthusiast converge when a mysterious glowing orb appears in their small desert town. And a slasher-flick screenwriter looking for inspiration escapes a pack of wild dogs only to find herself locked in an SUV with a strange man beside her. Set primarily in deserts throughout the American Southwest, Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights is a debut collection of stories about women and girls at the crossroads of mundane daily life and existential dread.

From the all-too-real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister transformed by cave-dwelling creatures, Mystery Lights grapples with terrors both familiar and fantastic, introducing an electrifying new voice in contemporary fiction while bringing to light the many faces of the forces that haunt us.]]> 256 Lena Valencia 1959030620 lauren 0 to-read, short-stories 3.59 2024
author: Lena Valencia
name: lauren
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, short-stories
review:

]]> 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 lauren 0 to-read, short-stories 3.89 2024
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: lauren
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, short-stories
review:

]]> 185127040 “Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do," writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for the Lovers , her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.]]> 96 Dawn Lundy Martin 1643622315 lauren 0 to-read 4.18
author: Dawn Lundy Martin
name: lauren
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 125077431
In “The Boundary,�� one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,�� a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line. And in “The Steps,�� on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.]]> 224 Jhumpa Lahiri lauren 0 to-read 3.77 2023
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: lauren
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 128713517 A bold and haunting debut story collection that follows various characters as they navigate the day-to-day perils of Jim Crow racism from Diane Oliver, a missing figure in the canon of twentieth-century African American literature, with an introduction by Tayari Jones

A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.

There’s the nightmarish “The Closet on the Top Floor�� in which Winifred, the first Black student at her newly integrated college, starts to physically disappear; “Mint Juleps not Served Here�� where a couple living deep in a forest with their son go to bloody lengths to protect him; “Spiders Cry without Tears,�� in which a couple, Meg and Walt, are confronted by prejudices and strains of interracial and extramarital love; and the high tension titular story that follows a nervous older sister the night before her little brother is set to desegregate his school.

These are incisive and intimate portraits of African American families in everyday moments of anxiety and crisis that look at how they use agency to navigate their predicaments. As much a social and historical document as it is a taut, engrossing collection,  Neighbors  is an exceptional literary feat from a crucial once-lost figure of letters.]]> 320 Diane Oliver lauren 0 to-read 4.01 2024
author: Diane Oliver
name: lauren
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> 203591569
Inseparable friends Val-and-Tal are used to making their decisions together. But what happens when their choices become their own? CHOOSE THIS NOW, a novel-in-stories, illuminates the small moments that shape their lives across nearly twenty years.

On Val’s 21st birthday—which falls on Halloween—a sudden act of violence interrupts a longed-for kiss. This unfinished moment haunts Val year after year until she materializes in a new town to confront her past. Tal, an aspiring painter, vacillates between dedicating herself to art and literally burning it all down. As they fall in and out of love, start and restart careers, and become mothers, Valerie and Taline struggle to define themselves, with and without each other.

CHOOSE THIS NOW takes on art, labor, romantic love, pregnancy, and parenthood—and the role of friendship in forging a life.]]> 254 Nicole Haroutunian 1955992037 lauren 0 to-read 4.51
author: Nicole Haroutunian
name: lauren
average rating: 4.51
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199463705
Parents awaken in a home in the woods, again and again, to find themselves aging as their infant remains unchanged. An employee is menaced by a conspiracy-minded security guard and accused of sending a sinister viral email. An aging tour guide leads a troublesome group to the site of a UFO, witnessing the slow social deterioration as the rules of decorum go out the window.

In each of Williams�� ten stories, time is as fallible as the characters, and reality is witnessed through the gauzy folds of a dream—or a nightmare. Bucolic scenes devolve into harrowing exercises in abandonment; the quotidian nature of office life raises serious questions of existential fortitude. Williams is keenly aware of the insidiousness lurking in the shadows of the everyday, ably spiking it with humor. He depicts the divided self of the parent, the distances necessary to protect our children, and the fallout of our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to recognize the impact—and beauty—of time’s relentless movement.

With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.]]> 240 Zach Williams 0385550146 lauren 0 to-read 3.46 2024
author: Zach Williams
name: lauren
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 177185879
Equal parts fantastical—a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy, a fox demon contemplates avenging her sister's death—and true to life—a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death—the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.

Chung is a master at capturing emotion, and her characters—human and otherwise—will claw their way into your heart and make themselves at home.]]> 240 Gina Chung 0593469364 lauren 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Gina Chung
name: lauren
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 177148883 224 Uché Okonkwo 1959030388 lauren 0 to-read 4.02 2024
author: Uché Okonkwo
name: lauren
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63221207 New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity.

When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?

In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Cahalan tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen.]]> 300 Susannah Cahalan 1451621396 lauren 0 to-read 4.20 2012
author: Susannah Cahalan
name: lauren
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 202165946 A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning Akwaeke Emezi, about five friends trying to outrun and outmatch a powerful, underground world

One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A breakup that starts a spiral. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. Little Rot is a whirling journey through the city’s dark side, told through the eyes of five people, each determined to run from the twisted powers out to destroy them.

Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from his loss, visits a sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, intersect with the three old friends as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt underworld, they’re all looking for a way out of the trouble they’ve instigated, driven by loss and fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them. They careen madly in the face of the poison of power, sexual violence, murder, betrayals. Little Rot tests how far these five will go to save each other—or themselves—when confronted by evil, culminating in a shattering denouement.

With each novel, with each creation, Akwaeke Emezi shows their genius as a storyteller, as a visionary force who has created a thrilling tale of sex, power, and deviance in Little Rot. You won’t be able to look away.]]> 276 Akwaeke Emezi 0525541632 lauren 0 to-read 3.59 2024
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: lauren
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60896180
The fiercely-anticipated sequel to the #1 New York Times bestseller Once Upon a Broken Heart, starring Evangeline Fox and the Prince of Hearts on a new journey of magic, mystery, and heartbreak

Not every love is meant to be.

After Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, betrays her, Evangeline Fox swears she'll never trust him again. Now that she’s discovered her own magic, Evangeline believes she can use it to restore the chance at happily ever after that Jacks stole away.

But when a new terrifying curse is revealed, Evangeline finds herself entering into a tenuous partnership with the Prince of Hearts again. Only this time, the rules have changed. Jacks isn’t the only force Evangeline needs to be wary of. In fact, he might be the only one she can trust, despite her desire to despise him.

Instead of a love spell wreaking havoc on Evangeline’s life, a murderous spell has been cast. To break it, Evangeline and Jacks will have to do battle with old friends, new foes, and a magic that plays with heads and hearts. Evangeline has always trusted her heart, but this time she’s not sure she can��
.]]> 416 Stephanie Garber 1250874742 lauren 3 4.65 2022
author: Stephanie Garber
name: lauren
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/16
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: 2022-reads, books-i-own, fave-ya
review:
i finished reading OUABH tonight and i NEED more of Jacks and Evangeline & Apollo and all of the magic and romance IMMEDIATELY. also, can we talk about that one graveyard scene?!?! iykyk
]]> 197063361
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms �� what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency.

Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how �� no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope �� we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.]]> 496 Martin MacInnes 0802163467 lauren 0 to-read 3.70 2023
author: Martin MacInnes
name: lauren
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 lauren 0 to-read 4.08 2024
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: lauren
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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review:

]]> 199248447 A captivating debut exploring power imbalances, bodily autonomy, love, and the generational legacy of resilience.

The Blueprint is a harrowing novel set in an alternate United States—a world of injustice and bondage. Solenne Bonet, a young Black woman in Texas, lives in a society where an algorithm dictates her occupation, spouse, and residence. Seeking solace, she pens the biography of Henriette, her ancestor and an enslaved concubine. When Solenne becomes entangled with Bastien Martin, a high-ranking government official, she must decide, with Henriette's story as her guide, whether to escape the psychological bond that imprisons her.]]> 304 Rae Giana Rashad 0063330091 lauren 0 to-read 3.82 2024
author: Rae Giana Rashad
name: lauren
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> 203313299 A passionate and groundbreaking bestseller from one of Norway’s most highly-regarded and award-winning novelists, for readers of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion and Coco Mellors' Cleopatra and Frankenstein

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.]]> 291 Vigdis Hjorth 1839768908 lauren 0 to-read 3.22 2001
author: Vigdis Hjorth
name: lauren
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54784249 Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance.

Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón’s award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.]]> 88 Ada Limon 1938769805 lauren 0 to-read 4.02 2006
author: Ada Limon
name: lauren
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2006
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date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7846664
The speaker in Sharks in the Rivers finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family’s roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion—both toward and away from us—and it is also full of risk: from sharks unexpectedly lurking beneath estuarial rivers to the dangers of New York City, where, as Limón reminds us, even rats can find themselves trapped by the garbage cans they’ve crawled into. In such a world, how should one proceed?

Throughout these poems, Limón suggests that we must cleave to the world as it “keep[s] opening before us,�� for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each person’s mouth “is the same / mouth as everyone’s, all trying to say the same thing.�� For Limón, it’s the saying—individual and collective—that transforms each of us into “a wound overcome by wonder,�� that allows “the wind itself�� to be our “own wild whisper.”]]> 96 Ada Limon 1571314385 lauren 0 to-read 3.95 2010
author: Ada Limon
name: lauren
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198648576 256 Yiyun Li 0008531870 lauren 0 3.55 2023
author: Yiyun Li
name: lauren
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: to-read, short-stories, to-be-read
review:

]]> 217005303 A searing novel of love and betrayal as a young boy comes of age in the heart of England, from an exquisite new voice.

In a small village in England, in the shadow of an ancient abbey nestled between rivers, a young boy is growing up. Daniel is highly intelligent but little understood by his family, and so a secret passion burns inside him—for love, for certainty, and for recognition. His father is a man of grand gestures but few practical skills, and his beautiful mother is attentive but compromised by her own unhappiness and fading ideals.  

When Daniel’s father loses his job as the headmaster of the local school, the family is pulled beneath the undertow of his whims, stumbling into a rural life for which they are ill-prepared. The arrival of Philip, a new boy at school, whom Daniel worships with a confused intensity, is his sole solace. Before long, both boys fall under the spell of a charismatic art teacher, setting Daniel on a perilous course that could lead to the betrayal of all he loves.  

Tender, brutal, and enthralling, The Boyhood of Cain is a remarkable portrait of a young boy caught between mother and father, between self and desire, and between obedience and freedom. It evokes the passions and private wounds of youth and plumbs the turning points in our lives that make us who we are.]]> 208 Michael Amherst 0593718526 lauren 0 to-read 3.41 2025
author: Michael Amherst
name: lauren
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>