en-US Wed, 26 Feb 2025 10:44:27 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 15811545
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. 

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.]]> 432 Ruth Ozeki 0670026638 Em 5 4.06 2013
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Em
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> 181346634
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it's basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.]]> 334 Hanif Abdurraqib 0593448790 Em 4 4.32 2024
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Em
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

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

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

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X Em 0 to-read 3.75 2022
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: Em
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 18467802 Inspired by the true story of a woman who changed the way we understand our world.

In 1933 three young, gifted anthropologists are thrown together in the jungle of New Guinea. They are Nell Stone, fascinating, magnetic and famous for her controversial work studying South Pacific tribes, her intelligent and aggressive husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson, who stumbles into the lives of this strange couple and becomes totally enthralled. Within months the trio are producing their best ever work, but soon a firestorm of fierce love and jealousy begins to burn out of control, threatening their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives...]]> 256 Lily King 0802122558 Em 5 3.84 2014
author: Lily King
name: Em
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 41817577 My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is an audacious new form of nonfiction that remakes the boundaries between criticism, biography, and autobiography in search of two identities.

While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson and a woman named Annemarie―letters are that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters�� language―but does not see Carson as history has portrayed her.

And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of Carson's life: She wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at Carson’s childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives Carson’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and Carson, she see the way Carson’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results articulate something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.

In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of America’s most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.]]> 266 Jenn Shapland 1947793284 Em 4 4.10 2020
author: Jenn Shapland
name: Em
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> 579079
A lively exploration of the relationship between modern art, truth, and deception, Looking Askance offers a new paradigm for understanding American visual culture, from the art of Thomas Eakins, William Harnett, and Marcel Duchamp to such fascinating historical episodes as the trial of spirit photographer William Mumler, scientist Helen Abbott's interpretation of Monet's Impressionism, the myriad illusions featured at the Buffalo World's Fair of 1901, and William James's analysis of automatic drawing. Leja traces the roots of skeptical seeing in the culture of modernity and in national values of entrepreneurship, invention, competition, and unregulated marketing.

This brilliantly pluralistic study will resonate with a broad spectrum of multidisciplinary interests. Tracking the way questions about the nature of seeing inform self-constructions of the modern subject, Leja moves flexibly through a wide range of surprisingly diverse materials, linking spirit photography, world fairs, circuses, automatic drawing, realist painting, and Marcel Duchamp. In true skeptical fashion, Leja trains his eye on the ambiguities of his materials, refusing to let them settle into either a celebratory or a cynical narrative. Opposites are revealed as similar (P. T. Barnum’s humbug and George Washington’s truth-telling both play on the motif of deception), while humbugs manifest difference (a radical fear of dishonesty versus a source of delight). The final illuminating shift in this complex study is thus from the modern need to negotiate multiple and layered realities to the manifold optical lenses of Leja’s own kaleidoscopic approach.]]> 337 Michael Leja 0520238079 Em 0 currently-reading 3.75 2004
author: Michael Leja
name: Em
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 59924
In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George's dreams for his own purposes.

The Lathe of Heaven is an eerily prescient novel from award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin that masterfully addresses the dangers of power and humanity's self-destructiveness, questioning the nature of reality itself. It is a classic of the science fiction genre.]]> 176 Ursula K. Le Guin 0060512741 Em 0 4.12 1971
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Em
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
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Said some really Freudian things to coworkers while reading this��
]]> 62802740 In this stunning debut, Javier Fuentes chronicles a tumultuous, passionate love affair between two young men from vastly different worlds during one, extraordinary summer in Spain, in what is ultimately a meditation on identity, class, belonging and desire

It is 2007, in New York where Demetrio, 24, is a celebrated pastry chef at the French restaurant, Le Bourrelet. It will be his seventh year as their patissier and the chef-owner, stern, but paternal feels he should move on. When Demetrio is offered a position as Head of Pastries at a Michelin-starred restaurant, he wants nothing more than to accept it. Undocumented, he is missing one crucial thing: papers. Terrified he will be found out, he makes the difficult decision of voluntary departure to permanently return to his homeland which he has not seen since he was a small child. This will mean leaving the only family he knows, his beloved uncle Chus, who brought him up and who he still lives with. On his flight to Madrid, he sits next to the handsome, playful and sensitive Jacobo, a student at NYU going home to his aristocratic, fascist family and there is an instant, unacknowledged electricity between them.

In dimly lit bars in Madrid and on pebbled beaches by the sea far outside the city, Demetrio and Jacobo's subtle but intense relationship unfolds. Demetrio is tortured by a fear of true intimacy, and anxiety about their class difference. Both are struggling with their identities and sexuality and they avoid their true feelings and deep passion until a family tragedy sets them on a collision course back into one another's lives. Powerfully sensual, and dramatic, Countries of Origin is a story which immerses you in the intense emotions and conflicts of love and loss.]]> 304 Javier Fuentes 0593317580 Em 0 to-read 3.54 2023
author: Javier Fuentes
name: Em
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203166731 152 Renee Gladman 1948980231 Em 0 to-read 3.96 2023
author: Renee Gladman
name: Em
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Em 0 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Em
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> 25733855 A fascinating account of the friendship between two of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth centuryGermany in the mid 1920s, a place and time of looming turmoil, brought together Walter Benjamin—acclaimed critic and extraordinary literary theorist—and Bertolt Brecht, one of the twentieth century’s most influential playwrights. It was a friendship that would shape their writing for the rest of their lives.In this groundbreaking work, Erdmut Wizisla explores what this relationship meant for them personally and professionally, as well as the effect it had on those around them. From the first meeting between Benjamin and Brecht to their experiences in exile, these eventful lives are illuminated by personal correspondence, journal entries and private miscellany—including previously unpublished materials—detailing the friends�� electric discussions of their collaboration. Wizisla delves into the archives of other luminaries in the distinguished constellation of writers and artists in Weimar Germany, which included Margarete Steffin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Hannah Arendt. Wizisla’s account of this friendship opens a window on nearly two decades of European intellectual life.]]> 270 Erdmut Wizisla 1784781134 Em 0 to-read 4.00 2007
author: Erdmut Wizisla
name: Em
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 149475870 0 Carl Zigrosser Em 0 currently-reading 0.0
author: Carl Zigrosser
name: Em
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 42188604 252 Carmen Maria Machado Em 0 4.56 2019
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Em
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
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]]> 208580597 The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory��, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.]]> 384 Johanna Hedva 163893116X Em 0 to-read 3.87
author: Johanna Hedva
name: Em
average rating: 3.87
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 198137722 Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in a fractured America in this sparkling novel of love, friendship and chosen family, by the award-winning author of The Third Rainbow Girl.

What does it feel like, standing in the moments that will mark your life?


When Bernie replies to Leah's ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two begin an intense and defiantly uncategorizable friendship based on a mutual belief in their art, and one another. Both aspire to capture the world around them: Leah through her writing; Bernie through her photography.

After Bernie's former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.

What ensues is a three-week journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the aritsts into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”—as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to to pursue their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.

Housemates is a warm and insightful coming-of-age story of youth and freedom, a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.]]> 352 Emma Copley Eisenberg 0593242238 Em 3 3.52 2024
author: Emma Copley Eisenberg
name: Em
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves:
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I really liked the descriptions of fatness, the very real ways I’ve thought myself. I wasn’t really charmed by either of the protagonists, but the removed elder lesbian narrator rocked. The complexity of having a mentor relationship with Daniel Dunn was more fascinating than reading about people I know in west philly!
]]> 55835474
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.

Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...

With its clear eyes on contemporary womanhood and sharp take on structures of power, Nightbitch is an outrageously original, joyfully subversive read that will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. Addictive enough to be devoured in one sitting, this is an unforgettable novel from a blazing new talent.]]> 256 Rachel Yoder 0385546815 Em 2 3.46 2021
author: Rachel Yoder
name: Em
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves:
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]]> 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what �� or who �� is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Em 0 to-read 4.03 2023
author: Paul Lynch
name: Em
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 113429 205 Miranda July 0743299396 Em 3 3.83 2007
author: Miranda July
name: Em
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Em 4 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Em
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves:
review:
I’m always going to enjoy the way Sally Rooney writes! How can I not be compelled by these complex grieving brothers? I just think Rooney gets too attached to her protagonists and ties things up with more neatness than feels realistic. I was particularly frustrated with Peter’s triad, and how Peter wants something complicated and incongruous but these two complicated women just want him in the end??
]]> 176443453
It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Māori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants.

Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.

Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings�� misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.]]> 352 Rebecca K. Reilly 1668028042 Em 0 3.89 2021
author: Rebecca K. Reilly
name: Em
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
I was excited about the premise of this book, but am rather disappointed having read it. The writing itself felt really boring. And the second gen Russian stuff felt incredibly hollow. I liked that the older generation was the more sexually and relationally ambiguous one, and 20-somethings asking questions about their parents�� lives for the first time felt pretty real. So many appealing threads that were dropped in favor of a happy ending love plot�� Ultimately a book with a lot of potential and underwhelming execution.
]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Em 5 3.52 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Em
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves:
review:
Finished this book two days ago, and I keep wishing I had more of it. I love the way Miranda July writes! The descriptions of dance, loaded silences, beautiful decorative elements were great. I found the body/mind dichotomy here really compelling, and maybe I’ll reread this book when I’m 45. I love how Miranda July lets the nonbinary kid be, and that loving attentiveness permeates the book.
]]> 36739755 Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura.

Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,�� she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction―many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual―and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal�� person excellently, more or less. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action��

A brilliant depiction of a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures we all feel to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.]]> 163 Sayaka Murata 0802128254 Em 3 3.65 2016
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Em
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
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]]> 17912498
Featuring a cast of characters drawn from history, The Queen of the Night follows Lilliet as she moves ever closer to the truth behind the mysterious opera and the role that could secure her reputation -- or destroy her with the secrets it reveals.  ]]> 561 Alexander Chee 0618663029 Em 3 3.43 2016
author: Alexander Chee
name: Em
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves:
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]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Em 0 3.83 2023
author: James McBride
name: Em
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves:
review:
I loved the many characters of Chicken Hill, the way McBride brings you into their daily worries and their relationship to the things that matter most in life. I didn’t mind that the book was meandering until the mystery from the beginning reared its head as a complete afterthought.
]]> 190576
Originally rendered by C.K. Scott Moncrieff from an early and unreliable French edition, Proust’s masterpiece has now been flawlessly translated by Terence Kilmartin in this acclaimed version.]]> 1056 Marcel Proust 0394711823 Em 0 currently-reading 4.29 1913
author: Marcel Proust
name: Em
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 55788737
About Of the Diaspora:

McSweeney's Of the Diaspora is a series of previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic, the first novel in the series, was originally published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as an editor at Random House. This Of the Diaspora edition features a new introduction written by Brown for the series. Tragic Magic will be followed by Paule Marshall's novel of a Harlem widow claiming new life. Praisesong for the Widow was originally published in 1983 and was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in literature at the College of Southern Nevada. Published in collectible hardcover editions with original cover art by Sunra Thompson, the first three works hail from Black American voices defined by what Amiri Baraka described as strong feeling "getting into new blues, from the old ones." Of the Diaspora-North America will be followed by series from the diasporic communities of Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil.]]> 304 Lester Sloan 1952119154 Em 0 to-read 4.48 2021
author: Lester Sloan
name: Em
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Em 4 4.17 2001
author: Percival Everett
name: Em
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/27
date added: 2024/06/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 62888191 A literary horror debut about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.]]> 336 Gerardo Sámano Córdova 1638930368 Em 4 4.11 2023
author: Gerardo Sámano Córdova
name: Em
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/27
date added: 2024/06/27
shelves:
review:
I was so weary when I saw the changing pov structure, but it absolutely worked. I loved the descriptions of living in grief so differently. M’s narration really worked. His relationship to hunger and morality felt really refreshingly jointed. I see why the ending is where it is but I wanted something bigger.
]]> 22522805
The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.

Included on TIME Magazine's "THE 100 BEST FANTASY BOOKS OF ALL TIME"]]> 317 Kazuo Ishiguro 030727103X Em 3 3.56 2015
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Em
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 608287 Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.

Contains:
Car Crash While Hitchhiking
Two Men
Out on Bail
Dundun
Work
Emergency
Dirty Wedding
The Other Man
Happy Hour
Steady Hands at Seattle General
Beverly Home']]> 160 Denis Johnson 0060975776 Em 0 to-read 4.16 1992
author: Denis Johnson
name: Em
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57408095 Eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation -- a powerful, emotionally rich novel about love, friendship, and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson, by a novelist The New York Times calls "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers".

It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaulate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.

In a remarkable literary feat, Gary Shteyngart has documented through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller, Super Sad True Love Story.]]> 317 Gary Shteyngart 1984855123 Em 3 3.15 2021
author: Gary Shteyngart
name: Em
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves:
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]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Em 5 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Em
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/27
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves:
review:
Really loved this one! The meeting of the stories from past to present was gorgeous. As covid art goes, Patchett really captured the mixture of constant dread and rare delight of those unusual circumstances perfectly.
]]> 58395049 TRUE BIZ (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they'll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who's never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school's golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the headmistress, who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another's—and changed forever.

This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.]]> 386 Sara Nović 0593241509 Em 4 4.06 2022
author: Sara Nović
name: Em
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/22
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves:
review:
A really cool read. The perspectival shifts worked, the “textbook�� sections almost fully worked? I loved the teens and I loved the foolish 19 year old anarchists. Ending was a little underwhelming
]]> 54785558 From the author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships.

A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. His provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally in the intersecting spaces of our internal and external worlds.

With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Rachel Cusk's Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons.]]> 186 Rachel Cusk 0374279225 Em 5 3.69 2021
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Em
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/28
date added: 2024/04/28
shelves:
review:
So much to chew on. The novel itself is marshy and incongruous, and its evil moves in and out of focus. The underpainting that is the story of Mabel Dodge Luhan is so cleverly used, Cusk takes the essentials and maybe some embellishing details, and then let’s herself run free.
]]> 45289222 Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

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

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.]]> 320 Lily King Em 4 3.98 2020
author: Lily King
name: Em
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/19
date added: 2024/04/19
shelves:
review:
I read this book because it’s a favorite of a dear friend, and anytime you can better understand a loved one through the books they love—that’s worth it! I love the optimistic turn of this book. I thought it would be corny for everything to go well, but the build up was perfect and I wanted the protagonist to experience unbelievable joy. More than anything, this book made me want to read more.
]]> 1055996 256 Rabih Alameddine 0312186932 Em 0 to-read 4.06 1998
author: Rabih Alameddine
name: Em
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51777605 The award-winning author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and x-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters' lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.

In "Boys Go to Jupiter," a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend's unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.]]> 269 Danielle Evans 1594487332 Em 0 4.15 2020
author: Danielle Evans
name: Em
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/09
date added: 2024/04/09
shelves:
review:
I really loved the Alcatraz short story and the novella. Evans is great at drawing you in to the implications of multigenerational stories. Not a big fan of the others. Politically the cut-off in a lot of these stories happens before the profound moment (I blame the Iowa writers workshop for this).
]]> 91290204 An artist of color becomes obsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamor of Clarice Lispector and the viscerality of Han Kang.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the specter of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.]]> 320 Johanna Hedva 1913505669 Em 0 to-read 3.54 2023
author: Johanna Hedva
name: Em
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60784651 Named one of the Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2023 (So Far) by Vogue �� Named a Best Book of 2023 (So Far) by Cosmopolitan �� Named a Best Book of Spring 2023 by Esquire �� Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2023 by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Them

An addictive, absurd, and darkly hilarious debut novel about a young woman who embarks on a ten-day getaway with her partner and two other queer couples

Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians—prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda—invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they’re quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple—Jesse’s best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy—whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants.

As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests�� secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.

Unfolding over ten heady days, Dykette is an unforgettable love story at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity. With propulsive plotting and sexy, wickedly entertaining prose, Jenny Fran Davis captures the vagaries of desire and the many devastating places in which we seek recognition.]]> 320 Jenny Fran Davis 1250843138 Em 2 2.92 2023
author: Jenny Fran Davis
name: Em
average rating: 2.92
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/26
date added: 2024/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 58837536 A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip.

Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She's in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn't inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she's trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James's savior—or his downfall.

One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie's Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist—and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author��Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.]]> 290 Imogen Binnie 0374606617 Em 4 3.93 2013
author: Imogen Binnie
name: Em
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/15
date added: 2024/03/15
shelves:
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]]> 26635370
The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the e xperience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform.

Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.]]> 296 Jen Manion 0812247574 Em 5 4.05 2015
author: Jen Manion
name: Em
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/09
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 53733106
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats—from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness—begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?"

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.]]> 210 Patricia Lockwood 0593189582 Em 4 3.56 2021
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Em
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/09
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves:
review:
First half felt like the logical continuation of how Jameson talks about postmodernism. Moments of which are very squishy and cringey, and then it all clicks into place in the second half and is so beautiful and profound! Cried a lot thinking about being human and feeling love
]]> 59742663 From the author of Oval, a collection of “fan nonfiction�� that proposes new possibilities and genealogies for weird fiction in the age of extinction.

This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris Lessing, Jenny Hval, Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Mark Fisher, Donna Haraway, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer; it explores the erotics of compost, vampire-themed live-action roleplaying, intoxicated birds, medieval nuns, invasive spores, and solarpunk. The book asks: what kind of stories are being written that help us rethink our human-centric perspective of Earth? What kinds of narratives will make sense of the age of extinction? Death by Landscape creates a syllabus for feminist sci-fi and speculative fiction for our time.]]> 308 Elvia Wilk 1593767153 Em 0 currently-reading 4.19 2022
author: Elvia Wilk
name: Em
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 66086834 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525558965.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith Em 3 As a reading experience... kind of a slog (Smith went a little too stylistically Victorian for me). And I'm not sure that the ending worked, although I loved the last chapter as an emotional beat. ]]> 3.25 2023
author: Zadie Smith
name: Em
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/09
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:
Really fascinating world building. I loved how much the main character hated Dickens, people often forget to hate on Dickens when it's very deserved. Loved lots of little Victorian details (stereoscope viewing, singing Lord Bateman, descriptions of publications). The life story of Andrew Bogle was by far the most interesting part of the book, Smith clearly did an incredible amount of research to critically fabulate the narrative of this real man who was so deeply in the public eye for one limited function.
As a reading experience... kind of a slog (Smith went a little too stylistically Victorian for me). And I'm not sure that the ending worked, although I loved the last chapter as an emotional beat.
]]> 58349243
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the California Book Awards
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Novel

Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace.

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.

Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.

With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.]]> 304 Ruth Madievsky Em 4 Some diaspora corniness (I say with love as a postsoviet person). Also the narrator/protagonist being unnamed felt too on the nose. We get it! She doesn’t know who she is!!! ]]> 3.48 2023
author: Ruth Madievsky
name: Em
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/28
date added: 2023/09/28
shelves:
review:
Really fun rabbit hole of a book. I really felt the atmosphere of sleepless LA nights. The protagonists relationships with her sister and her psychic amulet/gf were fantastically written.
Some diaspora corniness (I say with love as a postsoviet person). Also the narrator/protagonist being unnamed felt too on the nose. We get it! She doesn’t know who she is!!!
]]> 168675458
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,�� says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”]]> 608 Mariana Enríquez 0451495152 Em 0 to-read 4.09 2019
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Em
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/01
shelves: to-read
review:

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

In his introduction Mitchell A. Leaska observes, "Rarely can a collection of correspondence have cast into more dramatic relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an enterprise of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling."]]> 480 Vita Sackville-West 1573441961 Em 0 to-read 4.29 1926
author: Vita Sackville-West
name: Em
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1926
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62052300
The success of Irby's career has taken her to new heights. She fields calls with job offers from Hollywood and walks the red carpet with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City. Finally, she has made it. But, behind all that new-found glam, Irby is just trying to keep her life together as she always had.

Her teeth are poisoning her from inside her mouth, and her diarrhea is back. She gets turned away from a restaurant for wearing ugly clothes, she goes to therapy and tries out Lexapro, gets healed with Reiki, explores the power of crystals, and becomes addicted to QVC. Making light of herself as she takes us on an outrageously funny tour of all the details that make up a true portrait of her life, Irby is once again the relatable, uproarious tonic we all need.]]> 290 Samantha Irby 0593315693 Em 3 3.66 2023
author: Samantha Irby
name: Em
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/13
date added: 2023/07/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 56899010 Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and NPR

In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton’s unique creative genius in the context of his time.

Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman.

Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton’s life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett.

In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton’s life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.]]> 447 Dana Stevens 1501134213 Em 3 4.20 2022
author: Dana Stevens
name: Em
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/10
date added: 2023/07/10
shelves:
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I liked the idea of writing Keaton’s biography in relation to 20th century history more so than the execution. Parts of it felt quite disjointed. Stevens is meticulous, and you can definitely tell this came out of a dissertation project. I absolutely loved the Roscoe Arbuckle chapter, and really appreciated the larger history of early Hollywood stuff. The Chaplin chapter was quite fun!
]]> 8374826 256 Barbara Young Welke 0521152259 Em 0 to-read 3.88 2010
author: Barbara Young Welke
name: Em
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 485894 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 0553213695 / 9780553213690

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes."

With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."]]> 201 Franz Kafka 0553213695 Em 5 3.90 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: Em
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1915
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/20
date added: 2023/06/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 46114 The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.]]> 297 Virginia Woolf 0156949601 Em 0 currently-reading 4.17 1931
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Em
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 44436221 A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration��Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.]]> 288 Charles Yu Em 0
The form of this book is really incredible craft. The collapsing of real life and the screen, the Goffman chapter set-ups—these are things I like! You can’t ask a novel to interrogate racial capitalism in America in a thorough way, but it did feel politically obtuse at certain moments…]]> 3.95 2020
author: Charles Yu
name: Em
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/20
date added: 2023/05/20
shelves:
review:
Read this as part of the One Book One Philadelphia program of the Free Library.

The form of this book is really incredible craft. The collapsing of real life and the screen, the Goffman chapter set-ups—these are things I like! You can’t ask a novel to interrogate racial capitalism in America in a thorough way, but it did feel politically obtuse at certain moments��
]]> 48758708 672 Mariana Enríquez 8433998854 Em 0 to-read 4.44 2019
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Em
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59793324 Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.

In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In “A First-Rate Material��, Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can’t stand the conventional use of deceased people’s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. “Lovers on the Breeze�� is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child’s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. “Eating the City�� explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while “Hatchling�� closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.

In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.]]> 256 Sayaka Murata 0802159583 Em 4 3.76 2019
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Em
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/10
date added: 2023/04/10
shelves:
review:
Sayaka Murata is so gross in a fantastic way! You can see the mechanics of how she thinks about social order and strangeness of minutia through visceral, bodily writing. The titular story and “Eating the City�� were my personal favorite.
]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk Em 4 3.93 2009
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Em
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/20
date added: 2023/03/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 18144588 128 Liana Finck 0062291610 Em 0 to-read 3.87 2014
author: Liana Finck
name: Em
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 8913370
One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum.

With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.]]> 592 Sarah Waters 1101057025 Em 3 4.05 2002
author: Sarah Waters
name: Em
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/05
date added: 2023/03/05
shelves:
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]]> 58890783 From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood

Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel--a life worthy of becoming a novel--without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?

Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice--no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.

Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.]]> 368 Elif Batuman 0525557598 Em 3 4.00 2022
author: Elif Batuman
name: Em
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/13
date added: 2023/02/13
shelves:
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]]> 61111034
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,�� says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”]]> 588 Mariana Enríquez 0451495144 Em 0 to-read 4.07 2019
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Em
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59577177 A staggering memoir from New York Times bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier.

As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own.

The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it.

In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.]]> 272 Ada Calhoun 0802159788 Em 0 to-read 3.97 2022
author: Ada Calhoun
name: Em
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13544002 240 Lidia Yuknavitch 0983477574 Em 0 to-read 3.62 2012
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Em
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55685332 A debut story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that marks the arrival of an indisputable new talent in American fiction

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space�� app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.

With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humor, and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.

Three women of Chuck's donuts --
Superking Son scores again --
Maly, Maly, Maly --
The shop --
The monks --
We would've been princes! --
Human development --
Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly --
Generational differences]]> 262 Anthony Veasna So 0063049902 Em 5 Favorite stories: Superking Son Scores Again and We Would’ve Been Princes!]]> 3.91 2021
author: Anthony Veasna So
name: Em
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/04
date added: 2022/12/04
shelves:
review:
Really loved this! So created such a connected, vivid world and emotionally poignant daily conflicts. The interweaving of different relationships to intergenerational trauma was so real, felt incredibly meaningful.
Favorite stories: Superking Son Scores Again and We Would’ve Been Princes!
]]> 58200662
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on .]]> 160 Eugene M. Avrutin 1350097284 Em 0 to-read 4.17
author: Eugene M. Avrutin
name: Em
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58951004 This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur—were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher.

Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition—and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women’s House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.]]> 357 Hugh Ryan 1645036669 Em 0 to-read 4.46 2022
author: Hugh Ryan
name: Em
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18799436 729 Oksana Zabuzhko 1611090199 Em 0 to-read 3.74 2009
author: Oksana Zabuzhko
name: Em
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 108428
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.]]> 128 Angela Y. Davis 1583225811 Em 5 4.53 2003
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Em
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/02
date added: 2022/09/02
shelves:
review:
Perfect intro. Also the Quakers should read this to grapple with their history.
]]> 55354618
In its place, Scott Levi identifies multiple causal factors that underpinned the Bukharan crisis. Some of these were interrelated and some independent, some unfolded over long periods while others shocked the region more abruptly, but they all converged in the early eighteenth century to the detriment of the Bukharan Khanate and those dependent upon it. Levi applies an integrative framework of analysis that repositions Central Asia in recent scholarship on multiple themes in early modern Eurasian and world history.]]> 224 Scott C. Levi 0822987333 Em 0 to-read 4.25
author: Scott C. Levi
name: Em
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ��80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]> 389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 Em 2 4.39 2017
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Em
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2022/07/29
date added: 2022/07/29
shelves:
review:
The language was clunky. Monique was not a compelling character for most of the book. I will say it was extremely readable! There were a few beautiful gay moments.
]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 Em 0 3.62 2018
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Em
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2022/07/18
date added: 2022/07/18
shelves:
review:
Ok so it lives up to the hype! The ending was so beautifully formulated. The whole book feels so lived in and the writing about self-medicating was really interesting to me, a fascinating small world.
]]> 6334 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Em 5 3.85 2005
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Em
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/13
date added: 2022/07/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 2716235
As the hilarious tale unfolds, both Rainbow and her dybbuk discover that History still holds a few tricks up her sleeve.]]> 248 Ellen Galford 1878067516 Em 0 to-read 3.94 1993
author: Ellen Galford
name: Em
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 46263943
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.]]> 329 Brandon Taylor 0525538887 Em 0 3.79 2020
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Em
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2022/06/11
date added: 2022/06/11
shelves:
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]]> 13531832 Swamplandia! �� a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize �� comes a magical and uniquely daring collection of stories that showcases the author’s gifts at their inimitable best.

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

Vampires in the lemon grove --
Reeling for the Empire --
Seagull army descends on Strong Beach, 1979 --
Proving up --
Barn at the end of our term --
Dougbert Shackleton's rules for Antarctic tailgating --
New veterans --
Graveless doll of Eric Mutis]]> 243 Karen Russell 0307957233 Em 4 3.68 2013
author: Karen Russell
name: Em
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/11
date added: 2022/06/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 60400779 209 Baek Se-hee 152665086X Em 0 to-read 3.25 2018
author: Baek Se-hee
name: Em
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/06/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57693639 Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374603944 Em 4 3.46 2022
author: Sheila Heti
name: Em
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/01
date added: 2022/06/01
shelves:
review:
Really loved the way Heti writes about relationships, intimacy, sense-memories. This book is so internal and strange and manages to make that feel so poignant in an isolating world. I did think some parts got too drawn out and didactic! Can’t wait to share this book with loved ones.
]]> 58582927 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.

The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.
]]> 114 Ocean Vuong 0593300238 Em 0 to-read 3.94 2022
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Em
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58470895

After suffering horrific abuse from his cousin Vovka who has returned broken from war, Mitya embarks on a journey across underground Moscow to find something better, a place to belong. His experiences are interlaced with a retelling of a foundational Russian fairytale, Koschei the Deathless, offering an element of fantasy to the brutal realities of Mitya’s everyday life.


Told with deep empathy, humor, and a bit of surreality, Little Foxes Took Up Matches is a revelation about the life of one community in a country of turmoil and upheaval, glimpsed through the eyes of a precocious and empathetic child, whose heart and mind understand that there are often more than two choices. An arresting coming of age, an exploration of gender, a modern folktale, a comedy about family, Katya Kazbek breaks out as a new voice to watch.]]> 350 Katya Kazbek 1953534023 Em 4 3.84 2022
author: Katya Kazbek
name: Em
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/29
date added: 2022/05/29
shelves:
review:
Really cool book! I loved the character’s world, the political atmosphere of my own city in the late 90s. The intergenerational relationships were really special here. Kazbek’s use of Russian in the text with and without translations was a really cool artistic decision, and made me feel at home in the text. I thought the contemporary folklore interlude story didn’t quite work. I also thought the explicitness of the child abuse was somewhat cruel, it was more than necessary for the story. Overall�� Would definitely recommend this book!
]]> 51476901
Амадока �� найбільше в Европі озеро, розташоване на території сучасної України, вперше згадане Геродотом і впродовж кількох століть відтворюване на мапах середньовічними картографами, аж до свого раптового і цілковитого зникнення. Яким чином безслідно випаровуються великі озера, як зникають цілі світи, цілі культури �� і що залишається натомість? Чи може існувати зв’язо�� між єврейською Катастрофою Східної Европи і знищенням української інтеліґенції в часи сталінських репресій? Чи може забуття однієї людини сягати на кілька поколінь під землю? Чи пов’язуют�� нас знаки і шрами понівеченої пам’ят��? Чи здатні любов і терпіння дати змогу торкнутися свідомости іншої людини?]]> 832 Sofia Andrukhovych 6176796296 Em 0 to-read 4.36 2020
author: Sofia Andrukhovych
name: Em
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 48727813 Two-time British Fantasy Award Winner
Astounding Award Winner
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Hugo Award Finalist
Locus Award Finalist
Otherwise Award Finalist

"Magnificent in every way."—Samantha Shannon, author of The Priory of the Orange Tree

"A dazzling new world of fate, war, love and betrayal."—Zen Cho, author of Black Water Sister

She Who Became the Sun reimagines the rise to power of the Ming Dynasty’s founding emperor.

To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything

“I refuse to be nothing…��

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness��

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate.

After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future her brother's abandoned greatness.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 416 Shelley Parker-Chan 1250621798 Em 4 3.87 2021
author: Shelley Parker-Chan
name: Em
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/22
date added: 2022/05/22
shelves:
review:
Really cool read! Parker-Chan writes really beautifully, and obviously put an incredible amount of research in. From the descriptions of 14th century southern Chinese peasant food to the musings on the shaping of destiny, I was pretty hooked. I’m always happy when someone presents a cool historical narrative of what we might read as queerness, but it doesn’t base itself in contemporary queer narratives/20th century creation of homosexuality as we know it.
]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Em 4 4.38 2013
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Em
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/12
date added: 2022/05/12
shelves:
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]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante Em 5 4.47 2012
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Em
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/15
date added: 2022/04/15
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]]> 10434424
But why did this body of Russian scholarship of the early twentieth century turn out to be so innovative? Should we agree with a popular claim of the Russian elites about their country's particular affinity with the 'Orient'? There is no single answer to this question. The early twentieth century was a period when all over Europe a fascination with things 'Oriental' engendered the questioning of many nineteenth-century assumptions and prejudices. In that sense, the revisionism of Russian Orientologists was part of a pan-European trend. And yet, Tolz also argues that a set of political, social, and cultural factors, which were specific to Russia, allowed its imperial scholars to engage in an unusual dialogue with representatives of the empire's non-European minorities. It is together that they were able to articulate a powerful long-lasting critique of modern imperialism and colonialism, and to shape ethnic politics in Russia across the divide of the 1917 revolutions.]]> 216 Vera Tolz 0199594449 Em 0 to-read 4.14 2011
author: Vera Tolz
name: Em
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/04/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56269273 From award-winning author Asali Solomon, The Days of Afrekete is a tender, surprising novel of two women at midlife who rediscover themselves--and perhaps each other, inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, Sula, and Audre Lorde's Zami

Liselle Belmont is having a dinner party.

It seems a strange occasion--her husband, Winn, has lost his bid for the state legislature--but what better way to thank key supporters than a feast? Liselle was never sure about her husband becoming a politician, never sure about the limelight, never sure about the life of fundraising and stump speeches. Then an FBI agent calls to warn her that Winn might be facing corruption charges. An avalanche of questions tumbles around her: Is it possible he's guilty? Who are they to each other; who have they become? How much of herself has she lost--and was it worth it? And just this minute, how will she make it through this dinner party?

Across town, Selena Octave is making her way through the same day, the same way she always does--one foot in front of the other, keeping quiet and focused, trying not to see the terrors all around her. Homelessness, starving children, the very living horrors of history that made America possible: these and other thoughts have made it difficult for her to live an easy life. The only time she was ever really happy was with Liselle, back in college. But they've lost touch, so much so that when they ran into each other at a drugstore just after Obama was elected president, they barely spoke. But as the day wears on, memories of Liselle begin to shift Selena's path.

Inspired by Mrs. Dalloway and Sula, as well as Audre Lorde's Zami, Asali Solomon's The Days of Afrekete is a deft, expertly layered, naturally funny, and deeply human examination of two women coming back to themselves at midlife. It is a watchful celebration of our choices and where they take us, the people who change us, and how we can reimagine ourselves even when our lives seem set.]]> 208 Asali Solomon 0374140057 Em 4 3.46 2021
author: Asali Solomon
name: Em
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/02
date added: 2022/04/02
shelves:
review:
Really great world building, and the nuance of the relationships was beautiful. I just wanted more, was a little disappointed by the ending.
]]> 42815544
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.]]> 307 Mona Awad 0525559736 Em 0 to-read 3.53 2019
author: Mona Awad
name: Em
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Em 5 4.08 2011
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Em
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/27
date added: 2022/03/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Em 0 4.13 2021
author: Claire Keegan
name: Em
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/24
date added: 2022/03/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 43923951 Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone family, and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.]]> 310 Kiley Reid 052554190X Em 4 3.76 2019
author: Kiley Reid
name: Em
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/08
date added: 2022/03/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 53329296
Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned other people aren't safe.

After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics―all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.]]> 296 Gretchen Felker-Martin 1250794641 Em 0 to-read 3.52 2022
author: Gretchen Felker-Martin
name: Em
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Em 5 4.21 1993
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Em
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/02/27
shelves:
review:
2027 sure feels soon and real here��
]]> 56915343 512 Олег Стрижак 5044910910 Em 0 to-read 4.14
author: Олег Стрижак
name: Em
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 297673
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.]]> 335 Junot Díaz 1594489580 Em 0 3.89 2007
author: Junot Díaz
name: Em
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2022/01/28
date added: 2022/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 55878529
With empathy and humor, debut author Jackie Ess crafts a kaleidoscopic meditation on marriage, manhood, dreams, basketball, sobriety, and the secret lives of Oregonians.]]> 182 Jackie Ess 1944866841 Em 4 4.05 2021
author: Jackie Ess
name: Em
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/28
date added: 2022/01/28
shelves:
review:
Bleak, but compelling! Really squirmy and complex for how short it is.
]]> 49130720 At once a time-travelling horror story and a fugue-like feminist manifesto, this is a singular, genre-warping new novel from the author of the acclaimed Paradise Rot.

“It’s 1992 and I’m the Gloomiest Child Queen.��

Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo, a coven of witches begins cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a black metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. Awful things happen in aspic.

Jenny Hval’s latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, gender and art.]]> 240 Jenny Hval Em 2 3.01 2018
author: Jenny Hval
name: Em
average rating: 3.01
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/01/01
shelves:
review:
Could not finish this. Some interesting images, but that’s all I can say for it.
]]> 41809056
But when Louis returns home from his mother's funeral in America, Anja is convinced he has changed. He seems to be in denial of his grief and newly idealistic, consumed by a secret project at the NGO where he works as an artist-consultant. Anja is horrified when she discovers what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. Louis is convinced that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable.

Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.]]> 320 Elvia Wilk 1593764057 Em 3 3.38 2019
author: Elvia Wilk
name: Em
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/29
date added: 2021/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 55711622 From popular LGBTQ advice columnist and writer John Paul Brammer comes a hilarious, heartwarming memoir-in-essays chronicling his journey growing up as a queer, mixed-race kid in America’s heartland to becoming the “Chicano Carrie Bradshaw�� of his generation.

The first time someone called John Paul (JP) Brammer “Papi�� was on the popular gay hookup app Grindr. At first, it was flattering; JP took this as white-guy speak for “hey, handsome.�� Who doesn’t want to be called handsome? But then it happened again and again…and again, leaving JP wondering: Who the hell is Papi?

What started as a racialized moniker given to him on a hookup app soon became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column “¡Hola Papi!,�� launching his career as the Cheryl Strayed for young queer people everywhere—and some straight people too. JP had his doubts at first—what advice could he really offer while he himself stumbled through his early 20s? Sometimes the best advice to dole outcomes from looking within, which is what JP has done in his column and book—and readers have flocked to him for honest, heartfelt wisdom, and of course, a few laughs.

In ¡Hola Papi!, JP shares his story of growing up biracial and in the closet in America’s heartland, while attempting to answer some of life’s toughest questions: How do I let go of the past? How do I become the person I want to be? Is there such a thing as being too gay? Should I hook up with my grade school bully now that he’s out of the closet? Questions we’ve all asked ourselves, surely.

¡Hola Papi! is for anyone—gay, straight, and everything in between—who has ever taken stock of their unique place in the world.]]> 214 John Paul Brammer 1982141492 Em 3 4.06 2021
author: John Paul Brammer
name: Em
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/12
date added: 2021/12/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 48635850 A singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America.

Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity.

As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community. She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man, and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved.

Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni's Room. Her evocative reflections will shift our own perceptions of love, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.]]> 310 Meredith Talusan 0525561307 Em 4 3.75 2020
author: Meredith Talusan
name: Em
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/06
date added: 2021/12/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 10876733
I'm Your Man is the definitive account of that extraordinary life. Starting in Montreal, Cohen's birthplace, acclaimed music journalist Sylvie Simmons follows his trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra, to New York in the sixties, where Cohen launched his career in music. From there she traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to his remarkable retreat in the mid-nineties and his reemergence for a sold-out world tour almost fifteen years later. Whether navigating Cohen's journeys through the backstreets of Mumbai or his countless hotel rooms along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen's life and presents a deeply insightful portrait of the vision, spirit, depth, and talent of an artist and a man who continues to move people like no one else.]]> 576 Sylvie Simmons 0061994987 Em 0 to-read 4.17 2011
author: Sylvie Simmons
name: Em
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54776198 A stunning reinvention of the myth of Narcissus as a modern novel of manners, about two young, well-heeled couples whose parallel lives intertwine over the course of a summer, by a sharp new voice in fiction.

Wes and Diana are the kind of privileged, well-educated, self-involved New Yorkers you may not want to like but can't help wanting to like you. With his boyish good looks, blue-blood pedigree, and the recent tidy valuation of his tech startup, Wes would have made any woman weak in the knees—any woman, that is, except perhaps his wife. Brilliant to the point of cunning, Diana possesses her own arsenal of charms, handily deployed against Wes in their constant wars of will and rhetorical sparring.

Vivien and Dale live in Philadelphia, but with ties to the same prep schools and management consulting firms as Wes and Diana, they’re of the same ilk. With a wedding date on the horizon and carefully curated life of coupledom, Vivien and Dale make a picture-perfect pair on Instagram. But when Vivien becomes a visiting curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art just as Diana is starting a new consulting project in Philadelphia, the two couples�� lives cross and tangle. It’s the summer of 2015 and they’re all enraptured by one another and too engulfed in desire to know what they want—despite knowing just how to act.

In this wickedly fun debut, A. Natasha Joukovsky crafts an absorbing portrait of modern romance, rousing real sympathy for these flawed characters even as she skewers them. Shrewdly observed, whip-smart, and shot through with wit and good humor, The Portrait of a Mirror is a piercing exploration of narcissism, desire, self-delusion, and the great mythology of love.]]> 320 A. Natasha Joukovsky 1419752162 Em 0 to-read 3.60 2021
author: A. Natasha Joukovsky
name: Em
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6969 The newest edition is here. Another alternate cover can be found here.

Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.]]> 474 Jane Austen 0141439580 Em 0 4.05 1815
author: Jane Austen
name: Em
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1815
rating: 0
read at: 2021/11/09
date added: 2021/11/09
shelves:
review:

]]>