“Giuseppe Caputo's An Orphan World, translated by Juana Adcock and Sophia Hughes, is one of those novels about losing yourself in sex in order to find yourself in sex, that is also a genuinely strange and loving story of a father and son struggling to survive abject poverty and terrifying homophobia in Columbia.”

 

 

In a poverty-stricken neighbourhood wedged between the city and the sea, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. Rather than being discouraged by their difficulties and hardship, their response is to come up with increasingly bizarre and imaginative plans in order to get by. Even when a horrifying, macabre event rocks the neighborhood and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put. What matters is staying together.

 

 

 

“A Grain of Wheat is Ngugi's novel about the so-called Mau Mau Revolt in Kenya, where the British killed hundreds of thousands of people and put half the population in concentration camps. As a story, A Grain of Wheat is actually an addictive page-turner. While this is a social realist narrative, one where the woman comes to represent the motherland, there is a surprising sense of irony, in particular when Ngugi writes in the register of the British characters. Similarly, the revolutionary hero who is positioned as the savior is also revealed as a psychopath, part of the novel's structural critique that under colonial conditions, there is no way to avoid complicity.”

 

 

Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.

 

 

 

 

Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and her daughter and two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism.

 

 

 

 

 

“You, Very Young in New York” paints the portrait of a great American city, paying close attention to grand designs as well as local details, and coalescing in a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. “Repeat Until Time” shifts the scene to California and combines a poetic essay on the nature of repetition with an enquiry into pattern-making of a personal as well as a philosophical kind. “The Sandpit After Rain” explores the birth of a child and death of a father with exacting clarity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“One of my gnawing anxieties is that 'the power of literature' is too often overstated by those of us who traffic in it. Ulitskaya’s novel provides a useful reminder that, at certain times and in certain places (such as post-Stalin Soviet Union), this would not have been a concern; it was known that literature was deadly serious. The friendship of three young boys across four decades provides the through-line of The Big Green Tent, enlivened by their various intimacies, the joy they find in art and music, and the great risks they take just to traffic in literature.”

 

 

With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya's remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys-—an orphaned poet, a gifted yet fragile pianist, and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets—struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled.

 

 

 

“Earlier this year I asked Twitter (who else) what were the best book-length essays. On this rare occasion, Twitter didn’t disappoint. I’ve made my way through a small fraction of all the books suggested, but my favorite remains Namwali Serpell’s Stranger Faces, which I love down to the syntactical level. Written for Transit Books’ Undelivered Lecture series (all fantastic), Serpell takes us away from “The Ideal Face”—site of truth, relationality, and beauty—to those titular stranger faces. From the Elephant Man to Psycho to the emoji, Serpell offers a theory and reading of their uncanny likeness, their doublings, their meanings. Along the way, Serpell quietly provides a correction to our pervasive cultural emphasis on empathy. For as she argues, via the stranger face, it is precisely in granting humanity to the other that we know how to humiliate them.”

 

 

 

 

“The other day, they were posing a question: does the continent have an epic? It may have a lament: Inventory, the finest of Dionne Brand’s book-length poems.”

 

 

In Dionne Brand’s incantatory, deeply engaged, beautifully crafted long poem, the question is asked, What would an inventory of the tumultuous early years of this new century have to account for? Alert to the upheavals that mark those years, Brand bears powerful witness to the seemingly unending wars, the ascendance of fundamentalisms, the nameless casualties that bloom out from near and distant streets. An inventory in form and substance, Brand’s poem reckons with the revolutionary songs left to fragment, the postmodern cities drowned and blistering, the devastation flickering across TV screens grown rhythmic and predictable. Inventory is an urgent and burning lamentation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr.—New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, "the greatest democratic theorist of his generation"—takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South. Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Through his personal history and political acumen, we see America's apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people. The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and precarity, and the social order that would replace it.

 

 

 

 

 

Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible.

 

 

 

 

 

“This was the book from 2022 that gave me the most singular reading experience—jarring, tender, awful, alien, beautiful. As soon as I finished I texted half a dozen friends (now that I’m thinking about it, I went for the ones who love Three-Body Trilogy and/or Fleur Jaeggy) and told them they needed to get it. The Employees is hard to describe—none of the characters are named, it’s written as a series of transcripts, but ‘Lydia Davis meets 2001: A Space Odyssey’ was my pitch to them, and now to you.”

 

 

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

 

 

 

 

 

Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.

 

 

 

“Archipelago Books recently sent me a novel with an inauspicious title by a Dutch writer I hadn’t heard of. I decided to politely read five pages. Next thing I knew, I was a hundred pages in. The novel, translated by David Colmer, is set in the first days of Hitler’s invasion of Holland. The main character, speeding in his car to help a Jewish refugee flee the country, hits and kills a little girl and hides her body. The ensuing story is part thriller, part family novel, part metaphysical investigation, and also, unexpectedly, part comedy. I’ve since learned that Hermans is considered one of the great Dutch writers of the 20th century. A Guardian Angel Recalls will give you an idea why.”

 

 

Alberegt, a frenzied and lovelorn public prosecutor, speeds through Hook of Holland in his black Renault on May 9, 1940—the eve of the German invasion of the Netherlands. Guiding his every move is a guardian angel. With unflappable patience, the angel flits from the hood of the Renault to the rim of his windswept hat, determined to quell his every anxiety and doubt. The angel’s momentary distraction, however, sets off a chain of events that spins a nightmarish web.

 

 

 

“I have the impression that The Unclassed doesn’t command a lot of respect in comparison to George Gissing’s later novels, but I found it more memorable and moving than New Grub Street, which is admittedly more polished. I can’t believe this sensitive, feminist, prostitute-loving man died from such a stupid thing (catching a chill on a winter walk).”

 

 

Struggling to make it as a lower-class Londoner, Osmond Waymark finds himself unable to give up his literary ambitions. Desperate and lonely, he strikes up a friendship with Julian Casti, a similarly down-and-out young writer who suffers from both poverty and xenophobia as the son of Italian immigrants. When Julian agrees to an ill-advised marriage to Harriet Smales, a rude young woman, he inadvertently exposes Osmond to her manipulative and vindictive ways. As Osmond falls for Ida Starr, a prostitute’s daughter driven to rise above her circumstances, he unwittingly angers Harriet, whose friend Maud is secretly in love with him. In a shocking turn of events, Harriet conspires to get Ida arrested for theft, then maneuvers to get Osmond into the arms of Maud. The two become engaged, leaving Ida—the novel’s heroine—to rely on her wits and survival instinct to not only prove her innocence, but win back the man she loves.

 

 

“Full disclosure, this recommendation is a concession. What you should really buy is the thirteen-volume Tales of Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett and published by Ecco, that includes all his published novellas and stories. However, that set can really put you back: on eBay it's $200 or more, and the sets are not always complete. More sensibly sized and at a much better price, this Portable Chekhov will tide you over. Everyone should read these stories at least once before they die: ‘The Kiss,’ ‘The Name-Day Party,’ ‘In the Cart,’ ‘Gooseberries,’ ‘About Love,’ ‘The Darling,’ and ‘The Lady With the Pet Dog.’ The novellas ‘An Anonymous Story,’ ‘A Dreary Story,’ and ‘Three Years’ are unfortunately not in here, but you can probably find them online—or maybe by the time you finish this book, you'll be ready to go in on the set.”

 

 

Edited and with an introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov presents twenty-eight of Chekhov’s best stories, chosen as particularly representative of his many-sided portrayal of the human comedy—including “The Kiss,” “The Darling,” and “In the Ravine”—as well as two complete plays; The Boor, an example of Chekhov’s earlier dramatic work, and The Cherry Orchard, his last and finest play. In addition, this volume includes a selection of letters, candidly revealing of Chekhov’s impassioned convictions on life and art, his high aspirations, his marriage, and his omnipresent compassion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I don’t know why I don’t own Negative Space, which I gather is the better collection, but I don’t, so I’m recommending Farber on Film. The book is too heavy, the font is too small, the index is somehow too comprehensive, but every maddening, paradoxical, occasionally self-undermining assessment sees more on the screen (and provokes more reflection from the reader) than almost any other film criticism I’ve read. Here, for example, is Farber on Bullitt: ‘But in a long, near-silent and very good stretch in U.C. Hospital, which is almost excessive in the way it sticks like plaster to the mundaneness of the place, the movie hits into about seventeen verities: faces looking out as though across the great divide of 20th-century lousiness.’ Because of the tiny font you get like a dozen of these mega-genius sentences per page.”

 

 

Farber was an early discoverer of many filmmakers later acclaimed as American masters: Val Lewton, Preston Sturges, Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann. A prodigiously gifted painter himself, he brought to his writing an artist's eye for what was on the screen. Alert to any filmmaker, no matter how marginal or unsung, who was “doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it,” he was uncompromising in his contempt for pretension and trendiness, for, as he put it, directors who “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.”

The excitement of his criticism, however, has less to do with his particular likes and dislikes than with the quality of attention he paid to each film as it unfolds, to the “chains of rapport and intimate knowledge” in its moment-to-moment reality. To transcribe that knowledge he created a prose that, in Robert Polito's words, allows for “oddities, muddles, crises, contradictions, dead ends, multiple alternatives, and divergent vistas.” The result is critical essays that are themselves works of art.

 

 

“Natalia Ginzburg, in addition to writing twelve books and two plays, struggled against anti-Semitic laws, mourned a husband killed by the fascists, and, in her sixties, took up a career in Italian politics. What a life! Her novel Voices in the Evening, set in the aftermath of WWII, is a story of tragedy, comedy, gossip, romance, and life at the small-town scale of a Fellini film. ‘No, she is not a spy. She is merely a stupid woman.’ ‘He related what Purillo was like, how he washed and ate and made love with the servant, and how he did his exercises in the morning in shorts of black webbing.’ ‘In these months, I have driven a great many of my thoughts underground. I have dug out a little grave for them.’ ‘Isn’t your granny fed up with reading all those novels?’”

 

 

After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel's narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town's history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: "Why has everything been ruined?"

 

 

“Alice Sheldon, the psychologist, artist, and former CIA agent who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., was one of the great sci-fi authors of the 20th century: stylish, compelling, uncompromising. Somehow, even though she has an award named after her—for ‘science fiction or fantasy that explores and expands the roles of women and men’—she’s too little read by mainstream readers; she should be as well known outside sci-fi as Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever collects her best stories into a single volume.”

 

 

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever collects eighteen brilliant short stories from a luminary of the science-fiction genre, James Tiptree, Jr. This updated edition is the quintessential Tiptree collection and contains revisions from the author's original notes. Tiptree's fiction reflects the darkly complex world its author inhabited: exploring the alien among us; the unreliability of perception; love, sex, and death; and humanity's place in a vast, cold universe.

 

 

“You would be forgiven for thinking, from its first pages, that Summer Will Show is some novel set on an estate where bad things happen to rich, if not bad, people. And they do: two children die in quick succession, a husband is off with another woman. And suddenly, the reproductive labor that has occupied our protagonist, Sophia Willoughby, no longer quite exists. After all, although she is head of her estate, she employs many, many workers who carry out its actual management. And so what does our protagonist do? She goes to get her husband back, so that she may start reproducing once more. Yet, rather than using the change of scene to have new clothes made and secure her husband once more, or not only, she falls in love with none other than her husband’s mistress Minna. I should now mention that, although the book was written in the interwar period, for Sophia the year is 1848 and her husband has traipsed off to Paris. I think this queer romance is one of the best novels to imagine the not-quite-revolution, centering on a fictional account of the June Days uprising.”

 

 

Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband's sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades.

 

 

“I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki, translated by Anton Hur, by Baek Sehee is a memoir of depression. The title is playful about dark things, perhaps more so in the title than the memoir itself, but I appreciated this memoir about depression from South Korea in part for the way we do rarely hear about depression and mental health from Asians and Asian Americans. ”

 

 

Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her—what to call it?—depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?

Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness.

 

 

“The most exciting new book I’ve read in the past year is Jo Ann Beard’s Festival Days. The book is a knockout—a collection of nonfiction narratives that read like short stories, plus one short story that makes you wonder if it too is nonfiction. Masterly sentence by sentence, entirely original in method, the pieces are full of death and the threat of it, but their effect is the opposite of funereal. Beard’s wry voice and her clear-eyed compassion make her the best sort of company.”

 

 

In these nine pieces, Jo Ann Beard captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instants when life and death hang in the balance, ranging from the death of a beloved dog to a relentlessly readable account of a New York artist trapped inside a burning building, as well as two triumphant, celebrated pieces of short fiction. Here is an unforgettable collection destined to be embraced and debated by readers and writers, teachers and students. Anchored by the title piece—a searing journey through India that brings into focus questions of mortality and love—Festival Days presents Beard at the height of her powers, using her flawless prose to reveal all that is tender and timeless beneath the way we live now.

 

 

 

 

This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend Sam, the Phi Beta Kappa and former coat salesman; and Charles' mother, who spends a lot of time in the bathtub feeling depressed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Margaret Drabble’s affecting novel is set in London during the 1960s. Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Bea meets Erica at the home of a mutual friend, this chance encounter sets the stage for the story of two women torn between desire and taboo in the years leading up to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Erica, a reckless young journalist, pursues passionate but abusive affairs with different women. Bea, a reserved secretary, grows increasingly obsessed with Erica, yet denial and shame keep her from recognizing her attraction. Only Bea's discovery that Erica is half-Jewish and a member of the Dutch resistance—and thus in danger—brings her closer to accepting her own feelings.

 

 

 

“The book-length interview is an underrated literary genre, and this is the best example of the form I’ve encountered. In 1977 and 1978, Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett, and Francis Mulhern spent hours and days interrogating, prodding, examining, and second-guessing Raymond Williams about his life and work. That sounds confrontational, and I suppose it is at times, but the conversations are suffused with deep reverence: this is a sustained encounter with a legend, and Williams himself is characteristically generous in response. The NLR editors put it best in their foreword: ‘Interviews—perhaps especially in intellectual matters—are often . . . uncritical, since real critical inquiries presuppose the ability and willingness to argue alternatives. Where possible, New Left Review has tried to develop another model of interview allowing for statement and argument on both sides. This volume follows that practice. Its scale, however, is unusual. That is due at once to our judgment of the quality and importance of Williams’s work—fully the equal and in some crucial respects the superior of its counterparts elsewhere in Europe—and to the unreserved willingness of Williams himself, which can have few precedents, to respond to the questions, criticisms, and counter-arguments that were put to him.’”

 

 

Raymond Williams has made a central contribution to the culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. Politics and Letters is a volume of interviews with Williams, conducted by members of the New Left Review editorial committee, that is designed to bring into clear focus the major theoretical and political issues posed by his work. Ranging across his biographical development, the evolution of his cultural theory and literary criticism, his work on dramatic forms and his fiction, the volume concludes with an exploration of Williams's positions on British and international politics.

 

 

 

 

Close to Home is the classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women's liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether “bourgeois” and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women's movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Challenging the traditional developmental sequence as well as the idea that issues of attachment, dependency, and trust are confined to infancy, Stern integrates clinical and experimental science to support his revolutionizing vision of the social and emotional life of the youngest children, which has had spiraling implications for theory, research, and practice. A new introduction by the author celebrates this first paperback edition.

 

 

 

“The Haitian Revolution was a world historical event. Despite the fact that, say, the Louisiana Purchase and therefore the US's continental borders would not have happened without it, this moment of liberation has also been relegated to amnesia in this country. Joan Dayan began writing her remarkable study, Haiti, History, and the Gods partly to understand what it meant for some of the historical figures from the Revolution to discover a second life as gods. What emerges is a careful study of voudoun as a syncretist ideology whose seemingly mystical figures actually symbolize the underlying politics of the slave trade: the idea of the zombie, for example, as a figure who dies and comes back to life as another person's servant, makes more sense when thinking of the Middle Passage. This delicately written but gothic and actually somewhat experimental book, which combines personal narrative, history, and literary criticism, is one of the best written literary studies I've read. ”

 

 

In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.

 

 

 

 

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. But at nineteen, she became ill. Through years of misdiagnosis, she suffered patronizing psychiatric treatment and destructive surgery that left her without hope of children. Beset by pain and sadness, she decided to “write herself into being”—one novel after another.

 

 

 

“It’s hard to succinctly describe the humane and low-key charm of The End of Vandalism, but here’s the moment where the novel really took flight for me: ‘When Albert was five or six years old, he got mad at Claude and Marietta and decided to move out to the woods behind the Robeshaw farm. He took a can of beans, a can opener, a fork, and [a book] . . . He read the whole thing and then he was hungry, and he managed to open the can and begin eating the beans. But when he came upon the little cube of pork in the beans, he didn't know what it was, and it scared him, and he ran crying for home.’”

 

 

Welcome to Grouse County—a fictional Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric—where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse, and a sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars. At the heart of The End of Vandalism is an unforgettable love triangle set off by a crime: Sheriff Dan Norman arrests Tiny Darling for vandalizing an anti-vandalism dance and then marries the culprit's ex-wife Louise. So Tiny loses Louise, Louise loses her sense of self, and the three find themselves on an epic journey.

At turns hilarious and heart-breaking, The End of Vandalism is a radiant novel about the beauty and ache of modern life.

 

 

 

 

 

Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann’s romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to “make justice” in a world where “there are no innocent white people.” But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work.

 

 

 

 

 

In this highly original work, Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih present a dialogic account of the lingering effects of the terroristic attacks that occurred in Paris in November 2015. Situating the events within broader histories of state violence in metropolitan France and its colonial geographies, the authors interweave narrative accounts and photographs to explore a range of related phenomena: governmental and journalistic discourses on terrorism, the political work of archives, police and military apparatuses of control and anti-terror deterrence, the histories of wounds, and the haunting reverberations of violence in a plurality of lives and deaths. Traces of Violence is a moving work that aids our understanding of the afterlife of violence and offers an innovative example of collaborative writing across anthropology and sociology.

 

 

 

 

 

In a land devastated by war, a nameless narrator pursues an elusive white-haired woman in the clutches of a government official known only as “The Warden.” Neither will giver her up, but a freak ecological apocalypse is indifferent to their rival claims. As a terrifying wall of ice continues its incursion, freezing everything in its path, it seems that only the white-haired woman is truly resigned to the fate of the world. Ice is hailed as classic of science fiction and a definitive work of the slipstream genre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Nobody writes about the relationships between parents and children like Gwendoline Riley. She has an uncanny ability to suffuse the family home with the atmosphere of a killing jar. My Phantoms, her sixth novel, is about a fraught relationship between mother and daughter but it’s also a mystery: why is Hen unbearably self-defeating? Why does Bridget despise her mother as much as she does? Why are humans so strange? Best read with a Gordon’s and tonic in a plastic cup.”

 

 

Helen Grant is a mystery to her daughter. An extrovert with few friends who has sought intimacy in the wrong places, a twice-divorced mother of two now living alone surrounded by her memories, Helen (known to her acquaintances as “Hen”) has always haunted Bridget. Now, Bridget is an academic in her forties. She sees Helen once a year, and considers the problem to be contained. As she looks back on their tumultuous relationship—the performances and small deceptions—she tries to reckon with the cruelties inflicted on both sides. But when Helen makes it clear that she wants more, it seems an old struggle will have to be replayed.

 

 

 

“Witches. Family secrets. A hot 26-year-old virgin who makes hard cider in the 17th century. Maria McCann is a genius whose books, tragically, tend to come packaged in insultingly bad covers. You can turn to The Wilding after your annual reread of her masterpiece As Meat Loves Salt, when you're craving more of her male narrators.”

 

 

A generation after the Civil War, Jonathan Dymond, a cider maker, has so far enjoyed a quiet life. But when he discovers a letter from his dying uncle, hinting an inheritance and revenge, he is determined to unravel the mystery in his family. Under the pretence of his cider business, Jonathan visits his newly widowed aunt and there meets her unruly servant girl, Tamar, who soon reveals that she has secrets of her own . . .

 

 

 

 

 

In this, the first biography of Tolstoy in more than twenty years, Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including much fascinating material made available since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived. Above all, Bartett gives us an eloquent portrait of the brilliant, maddening, and contrary man who has once again been discovered by a new generation of readers.

 

 

 

 

 

Avey Johnson—a Black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls—has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel—and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Best known for Black Marxism, this new collection of Robinson’s writing from H.L.T. Quan is an excellent introduction to his work. From a critique of race in Aristotle’s thought, to neocolonialism in the Philippines, to Eugene O’Neil, to blaxploitation, to ’90s California current events, On Racial Capitalism . . . reveals a staggeringly nimble mind. Also check out Joshua Myers’s new biography of Robinson, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition.”

 

 

Cedric J. Robinson is considered one of the doyens of Black Studies and a pioneer in study of the Black Radical Tradition. His works have been essential texts, deconstructing racial capitalism and inspiring insurgent movements from Ferguson to the West Bank. For the first time, Robinson's essays come together, spanning over four decades and reflective of his diverse interests in the interconnections between culture and politics, radical social theory and classic and modern political philosophy. Themes explored include Africa and Black internationalism, World politics, race and US Foreign Policy, representations of blackness in popular culture, and reflections on popular resistance to racial capitalism, white supremacy and more.

 

 

 

 

Reasons for Moving was Mark Strand's first book, and on its publication in 1968 Donald Justice called him “maybe the very best of the new poets.” Darker followed, and Robert Penn Warren said, “the moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration.” And Harold Bloom wrote, “these poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no confessional poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must he supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America.”

 

 

 

 

Any hall she has ever read her poetry in is invariably filled to the gills. Women like her, girls like her, and men like her, too. In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wistawa Szymborska is in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she'd be designated a national treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written the most intensely ‘ethical’ poetry in Italian literature of the twentieth century. One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, My Poems Won't Change the World is her first substantial American anthology.

 

 

 

 

“In the early nineties, the writer and artist Etel Adnan was asked by a fellow left-wing journalist if she wanted to go to an international women's summit and send back a report. While she did go to the conference, she replied that she would rather travel to different international cities and write back what she observed of women there. Of Cities and Women collects the resulting letters. While Adnan reflects on gender and politics, Western philosophy and the ‘Orient,’ the epistolary nature of the book means that the discourse is always relational. The effect is a nurturing, boundary-crossing sense of philosophical intimacy. This book should be a transnational feminist classic!”

 

 

Written against the background of war at the turn of this century, this millennium—the Gulf War, the Lebanese civil war and the military occupations of that country, the author's country of origin—these letters, Of Cities & Women, are in their turn now letters to cities and women—that we, that is, women and men alike, might eventually, before it is too late, “find the right geography for our revelations.”—Barbara Harlow

 

 

 

 

 

In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; and of her own passage to the West.

 

 

 

 

 

“If you’ve really been in it, social movement organizing of almost any kind is near-impossible to narrate. First of all, the relationships are too complex and burdened to faithfully portray without betraying a person or cause you care about. Relatedly, the process is too ambiguous: it typically combines some of the purest acts of principle and even self-sacrifice with the most base instrumentalities. At some level, you’d be doing it wrong if you didn’t have both of these sides. Most importantly, there's a protagonist problem. It’s very difficult to understand the intricacies of organizing relationships from the outside, but any participant is necessarily an unreliable narrator, most of all because organizing is a process of self-transformation. When you sit down to write about it, you're not the same person you were when you were in it. Daisy Pitkin somehow takes these narrative obstructions and turns them into the heart of her memoir of organizing with industrial laundry workers, On the Line. I’ve never read anything else about union organizing that comes close.”

 

 

On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona. Workers here wash hospital, hotel, and restaurant linens and face harsh conditions: routine exposure to biohazardous waste, injuries from surgical tools left in hospital sheets, and burns from overheated machinery. Broken US labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back. The drive to unionize is led by two women: author Daisy Pitkin, a young labor organizer, who addresses this exhilarating narrative to Alma Gomez García, a second-shift immigrant worker, who risks her livelihood to join the struggle and convinces her fellow workers to take a stand.

 

 

 

“Before David Milch wrote television shows like Deadwood and NYPD Blue that blasted open the scope of that medium forever, he was a student of the New Critics at Yale, a teacher who got so loaded he had to crawl through the window to get to his office (lost his keys), a law school dropout, a guy who lived in Mexico making acid, and a kid who ran bets for his dad at the racetrack as soon as he was five years old. This is quite a life. Written in the midst of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis with the help of his wife and kids, Life’s Work is less a showbiz biography than the complex self-reckoning of a complicated mind. The book is more attentive to its subject’s faults than most memoirs of its kind, and the result is as soaring and eloquent and crazy and hypocritical and marvelous and vulgar as the shows Milch wrote. I loved it, especially the audiobook version.”

 

 

Like Milch’s best screenwriting, Life’s Work explores how chance encounters, self-deception, and luck shape the people we become, and wrestles with what it means to have felt and caused pain, even and especially with those we love, and how you keep living. It is both a master class on Milch’s unique creative process, and a distinctive, revelatory memoir from one of the great American writers, in what may be his final dispatch to us all.

 

 

“A soulful alcoholic starts drinking and keeps on drinking on a train ride from Moscow to the town of Petushki. Reveries, musings, and encounters occur. This is a reductive plot description, but not wildly so. Moscow to the End of the Line isn’t a bad title for the English-language edition, but the original title—Moscow–Petushki—is better because it captures this book’s simple but ingenious structure: short chapters with names like “Moscow. The Kursk Station Restaurant” and “Chukhlinka–Kuskovo.” Russians call this book a prose poem, which I think has more to do with various psychological hang-ups about generic categories than anything else. This is a novel, and a great one—a funny and sui generis samizdat masterpiece that deserves more respect than it gets.”

 

 

In this classic of Russian humor and social commentary, a fired cable fitter goes on a binge and hopes a train to Petushki (where his most beloved of trollops awaits). On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.

 

 

 

 

Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an "anti-state state" that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.

 

 

“Reading Sabrina feels like being enveloped by the darkest parts of the internet: conspiracy, atomization, true crime, American right-wing politics. Nick Drnaso’s extraordinarily beautiful graphic novel swallows you and refuses to let you go—months after reading it, I’m still thinking about the book on a weekly basis. ”

 

 

When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the US Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and the boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina’s grieving sister, Sandra, struggles to fill her days as she waits in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.

 

 

 

 

The setting is an idyllic Alpine village where a woman's underwear factory nestles in the woods. Two factory workers, Brigitte and Paula, dream and talk about finding happiness, a comfortable home and a good man. They realize that their quest will be as hard as work at the factory.

 

 

 

“I can't believe Talk was published nearly fifty years ago: the recorded conversations are almost shockingly contemporary, still funny and raunchy a half century later. Read it if you're obsessed with your friends, or if you have no friends (Linda Rosenkrantz will lend you hers for 240 pages).”

 

 

Talk is a hilariously irreverent and racy testament to dialogue: the gossip, questioning, analysis, arguments, and revelations that make up our closest friendships. It’s the summer of 1965 and Emily, Vincent, and Marsha are at the beach. All three are ambitious and artistic; all are hovering around thirty; and all are deeply and mercilessly invested in analyzing themselves and everyone around them. The friends discuss sex, shrinks, psychedelics, sculpture, and S&M in an ongoing dialogue where anything goes and no topic is off limits. Talk is the result of these conversations, recorded by Linda Rosenkrantz and transformed into a novel whose form and content put it well ahead of its time. Controversial upon its first publication in 1968, Talk remains fresh, lascivious, and laugh-out-loud funny nearly fifty years later.

 

 

 

“Iris Murdoch was interested in the question of what it means to be good in a world shaped by amoral desire, and A Severed Head—a very funny and also deadly serious philosophy joke barely disguised as a comedy of manners—is a deeply provocative, and truly bonkers, attempt at an answer.”

 

 

Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, "this is nothing to do with happiness."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today.

 

 

 

“A slight, dread-laced volume that truly defies description, The Water Statues is inscrutable yet particular, highly formal yet entirely unconventional. Read it to renew your faith in the untapped possibilities of fiction. ”

 

 

Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth's odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A translation of the work of the Taoist philosopher, Lieh-tzu. Includes, among others, Heaven's Gifts, Yang Chu and the Questions of T'ang.

 

 

 

 

 

Our ego, and its accompanying sense of nagging self-doubt as we work to be bigger, better, smarter, and more in control, is one affliction we all share. But while our ego is at once our biggest obstacle, it can also be our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to work with it. With great insight, and in a deeply personal style, renowned psychiatrist and author Dr. Mark Epstein offers a how-to guide that refuses a quick fix. In Advice Not Given, he reveals how Buddhism and Western psychotherapy, two traditions that developed in entirely different times and places, both identify the ego as the limiting factor in our well-being, and both come to the same conclusion: When we give the ego free rein, we suffer; but when it learns to let go, we are free.

 

 

“If you think Lucky Jim is the iconic OG British campus novel, think again. Barbara Pym's Less Than Angels—about a group of hapless anthropologists in London (featuring harried professors and abject grad students alike)—will have you lol-ing irl throughout.”

 

 

Catherine Oliphant writes for women's magazines and lives comfortably with anthropologist Tom Mallow—although she's starting to wonder if they'll ever get married. Then Tom drops his bombshell: He's leaving her for a nineteen-year-old student. Though stunned by Tom's betrayal, Catherine quickly becomes fascinated by another anthropologist, Alaric Lydgate, a reclusive eccentric recently returned from Africa. As Catherine starts to weigh her options, she must figure out who she is and what she really wants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I do not know who Doug Dibbern is, what he’s trying to do, or what he wants from us. This imposing volume exists to derail and confuse all the Letterboxd cinephiles out there who think they have a grasp on film history, who pay attention to the Sight & Sound poll, who don’t know that Fritz Lang didn’t make a film called Wet Pavement in 1946. Nothing is knowable, really, but some things are true in this epic retelling of the history of the international canon, fit only for the most serious cinema lovers, who may resent this book’s very existence. Thrill to a world in which Afternoon, Clichy (Adele Beyle, 1988) topped the “most recent” list of the best films ever made.”

 

 

Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema—or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time—a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, and thus a world in which Sergei Eisenstein never made movies and German filmmakers like Fritz Lang never fled to Hollywood, a world in which the talkies were invented in 1936 rather than 1927, in which the French New Wave critics didn’t become filmmakers, and in which Hitchcock never came to Hollywood.

 

 

 

 

 

Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko Odaka departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a brief affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge that she also hopes will free her. Takiko’s first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn. At first she seeks refuge in the company of other women—in the hospital, in her son’s nursery—but as the baby grows, her life becomes less circumscribed as she explores Tokyo, then ventures beyond the city into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and desire for a wilder freedom.

 

 

 

 

Following the Attica prison uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale—a poet and then professor at Buffalo State College—began leading poetry workshops with those incarcerated at Attica. Tisdale’s workshop created a space of radical Black creativity and solidarity, in which poets who lived through the uprising were able to turn their experiences into poetry. The poems written by Tisdale’s students were published as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica in 1974. When the Smoke Cleared contains the entirety of Betcha Ain’t, Tisdale’s own poems and journal entries from the three years he taught at Attica, a previously unpublished collection of poems by Attica poets, and a critical introduction by poet Mark Nowak. In addition to the poetry, Tisdale’s journal entries give readers a unique opportunity to experience what it was like to enter Attica as an educator and return week after week to discuss poetry. When the Smoke Cleared showcases these poets’ achievements, their desire for self-determination, and their historical role as storytellers of Black life in a prison monitored exclusively by white guards and administrators.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“A bear bites off a part of Nastassja Martin's face on the very first page of In the Eye of the Wild and it only gets more exciting from there. In a tiny, 128-page work of ground-breaking lyric nonfiction, Martin beautifully renders the nadirs of post-Soviet hospital horror, the disasters of French snobbism, and the warmth of the Even people of Kamchatka. Most importantly, she undertakes a serious contemplation of undigestible spiritual experience. Although she is a scientist—an anthropologist—she refuses to pretend that the systems of scientific, cultural, and spiritual inquiry she has studied are capable of accounting for what happened to her. A fascinating philosophical portrait of epistemological shadows and a woman's extraordinary hybridity.”

 

 

In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin's near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin's professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with.

Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear.

 

 

 

 

 

Sojourning for Freedom portrays pioneering black women activists from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, focusing on their participation in the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women's rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity. McDuffie explores the lives of black left feminists, including the bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, who wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class; Esther Cooper Jackson, an Alabama-based civil rights activist who chronicled the experiences of black female domestic workers; and Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist who emerged as one of the Communist Party's leading theorists of black women's exploitation. Drawing on more than forty oral histories collected from veteran black women radicals and their family members, McDuffie examines how these women negotiated race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics within the CPUSA. In Sojourning for Freedom, he depicts a community of radical black women activist intellectuals who helped to lay the foundation for a transnational modern black feminism.

 

 

 

“I often recommend this book to friends who are anxious about balancing their ambitions to write or make art with the necessity of working for money. Ingeborg Bachmann prepared her first volume of poetry in the off hours from her day job at a radio station. After that title brought her recognition in the postwar German-language literary world, she wrote for money, and worked on her novel trilogy, Death Styles, when she could. Correspondence, a collection of letters exchanged by Bachmann and Paul Celan over the course of their decades-long love affair, is a very romantic book, but the passages I find the most special are those that open so many of Bachmann's letters to Celan: I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write back, I am the worst, work has been sewwww crazy.”

 

 

Paul Celan (1920–70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) is recognized as one of post–World War II German literature’s most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence.

Collected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living—as a woman, as a man, as writers. 

 

 

 

“Amit Chaudhuri’s editors at the London Review of Books gave his infamous review of The Unconsoled a brutal title—‘Unlike Kafka’—that always calls to mind the scene in The Royal Tenenbaums when a despondent Owen Wilson asks why a reviewer would “make the point of saying someone’s not a genius.” James Wood, meanwhile, wrote that the novel ‘invents its own category of badness.’ Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like, your opinion, men. The Unconsoled is great! So much art is described as adhering to dream logic, but this book gets closer than most: a pianist named Ryder arrives in a European city and spends the next five hundred or so pages getting stymied, flummoxed, disoriented, bewildered, etc. Ishiguro constructs Ryder’s missed encounters, non-encounters, and anti-encounters with such steady confidence that it’s impossible to lose interest in the narrative, even as it’s clear that the narrative will go nowhere. Because The Unconsoled is an elusive novel, it has been saddled with many unfortunate covers. The only edition that captures the mystery within is the mid-’90s Vintage paperback with the Jean Dieuzaide photo. $4.99 on eBay!”

 

 

The Unconsoled is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control. The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past.

 

 

 

 

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law's motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat. The terror and anxiety unleashed by the war would transform him from a comfortable obscurity into the most influential and controversial intellectual of his day—a man whose ideas still retain the power to shock in our own time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969-71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Gumbs’s book opens by asking “What is the scale of breathing?” and turns to the question of submerged knowledge and other ways of knowing. Under consideration here: what we can learn from marine mammals. But it is also about, as Gwendolyn Brooks puts it “what / is going on / is going on”—and not just for our species. Gumbs “identifies with” dolphins and their love, learns from marine kinship arrangements, looks to whales and their migration patterns to argue that they were and are a species that witnessed the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. A prose poem or elegy or prayer, this guidebook doubles as a manual for how to be in relation. Undrowned is a book about how we know and can learn and unlearn, through the other, at distance and at scale.”

 

 

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning.

 

 

“T Fleischmann’s Time Is A Thing The Body Moves Through is an elegant long meditation on desire, queerness, trans identity, art, New York roof parties, the guy who won’t come closer and won’t go away, the way love can be like a hangnail or an opera. Smart, smart fun, and a fine example of the long essay, lately in resurgence.”

 

 

How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzáles-Torres's artworks—piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles—as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.

 

 

 

 

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance—a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation—her bringing to life—writes Rudick, is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle's life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness.

 

 

“John Keene's poetry collection Punks is a finalist of this year's National Book Award and his experimental/archival story collection Counternarratives helped him garner a MacArthur Genius Award. Less known is Annotations, an unusual autobiographical text he wrote as a young man. Written under the sign of Lyn Hejinian's slippery memoir, My Life, Annotations similarly disrupts the conventions of the memoir by never offering a coherent self or narrative. Instead, the story of the self—specifically, Keene's coming of age as a gay Black kid in St. Louis, against the subtext of a process of racial capitalism—is told through extravagantly constructed sentences that endeavor to construct a kind of experimental syntax. The book suggests an alternative direction for both experimental literature (Jamesian ornamentalism rather than fragmentation) and for the racial memoir (thwarting representation rather than claiming it).”

 

 

An experimental first novel of poem-like compression, Annotations has a great deal to say about growing up Black in St. Louis. Reminiscent of Jean Toomer's Cane, the book is in part a meditation on African-American autobiography. Keene explores questions of identity from many angles—from race to social class to sexuality (gay and straight). Employing all manner of textual play and rhythmic and rhetorical maneuvers, he (re)creates his life story as a jazz fugue-in-words.

 

 

 

 

 

When Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought home with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father with his criticisms of the landowning way of life and his determination to overthrow the traditional values of contemporary society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“When people recommended this book as ‘a hidden feminist classic about a woman who has sex with a bear!’ I really imagined something in the vein of, I don't know, The Mermaid and the Minotaur—something magical and mythic. But no, this book is 100% realist fiction, which is what makes it so great. Spoiler alert: if ‘sex’ to you means exclusively penetrative sex, then no, the isolated, depressed, historical-preservationist/librarian protagonist does not manage to have sex with a bear. But she does come close, and how she gets there could be considered proto-femcel canon. Can't say for certain, but I imagine it pairs well with In the Eye of the Wild.”

 

 

Lou, a shy and secretive young librarian is called to a remote Canadian island to inventory the estate of the recently deceased Colonel Cary. In a cabin on the island, she discovers the colonel had a secret as well. A bear is chained inside. Fascinated, Lou brings the bear into the house and slowly gains the animal's trust. She sinks her fingers into the bear's fur—and soon realizes her darkest desire is for this large, powerful animal to be her lover.

 

 

“I would argue that this slim book is in fact Mantel's best historical novel. The Giant, O'Brien is the fictional retelling of a 18th century ‘Irish Giant’ who toured London as a spectacle before his untimely death at 22 (which is, incidentally the same age when Mantel began seriously to write novels). It's a feat of storytelling. I've never read a contemporary novel like it.”

 

 

 

 

“This is Mantel's novel about psychics and the supernatural world. It's somehow at once goofy and menacing. Think: a historical novel, but about predicting the future. Or: Thelma and Louise, but featuring London fortune-tellers.”

 

 

Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Jack the Ripper and the grotesque psychogeography of his time, True Detective before True Detective. An amazing use of setting to move the story forward.”

 

 

From the squalid alleys of the East End to the Houses of Parliament, from church naves to dens of the occult, all of London feels the uniquely irresistable blend of fascination, revulsion, and panic that the Ripper offers. The city teeters on the brink of the twentieth century, and only the slightest prodding is necessary to plunge it into a modern age of terror.

 

 

 

 

 

From the start, nothing goes right for Coffin Ed and Grave Digger. They are disciplined for use of excessive force. Grave Digger is shot and his death announced in a hoax radio bulletin. Bodies pile up faster than Coffin Ed and Grave Digger can run. Yet, try as they might, they always seem to be one hot step behind the cause of all the mayhem—three million dollars’ worth of heroin and a giant albino called Pinky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“This book is intended for readers between the ages of 4 and 8, though in my experience it also has much to offer readers between the ages of 34 and 38. Based on an old house Blackall bought and from which she salvaged various scraps—handmade dresses, pieces of wallpaper, a button in the shape of a seashell—before the excavator came to knock it down, Farmhouse is told in verse and features beautiful illustrations that in their scale and lavish detail call to mind quilts. Blackall identified the family that lived in the house and spoke to their relatives and descendants. We watch as the family rises and falls, the house flourishes and decays, and the narrator arrives just in time to salvage the scraps. Those in the 34–38 range have been known to cry at the end.”

 

 

Step inside the dollhouse-like interior of Farmhouse and relish in the daily life of the family that lives there, rendered in impeccable, thrilling detail. Based on a real family and an actual farmhouse where Sophie salvaged facts and artifacts for the making of this spectacular work, page after page bursts with luminous detail and joy. Join the award-winning, best-selling Sophie Blackall as she takes readers on an enchanting visit to a farmhouse across time, to a place that echoes with stories.

 

 

 

 

An Obedient Father introduced one of the most admired voices in contemporary fiction. Set in Delhi in the 1990s, it tells the story of an inept bureaucrat enmired in corruption, and of the daughter who alone knows the true depth of his crimes. Decried in India for its frank treatment of child abuse, the novel was widely praised elsewhere for its compassion, and for a plot that mingled the domestic with the political, tragedy with farce. Yet, as Akhil Sharma writes in his foreword to this new edition, he was haunted by what he considered shortcomings within the book: almost twenty years later, he returned to face them. Here is the result, a leaner, surer version with even greater power.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Country Women was published in 1975, at the height of the commune movement in the United States. With beautiful illustrations by Leona Walden, this handbook for the end of the world tells you how to: speed compost, castrate sheep, trim hooves, attend to a goat’s prolapse (!), use a two-women saw, negotiate a land purchase, dig a well, build a fence, skin a lamb, and raise a flock of egg-laying hens, ‘all at the least possible expense and with minimum reliance on outside and professional help.’ At once an artifact for a bygone era and a blueprint for the future.”

 

 

 

 

 

“I loved Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick The Latch. In short, stylized vignettes, Scanlan tells the story of Sonia, an Iowan horse trainer's career at the track. Based on interviews Scanlan polished and fictionalized, the language is spare, the grit is gritty, the horses are horsey. ‘Fiction’ that’s real.”

 

 

Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman's life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner's circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the "particular language" of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Rouenna is Sigrid Nunez's haunting novel about the poignant and unusual friendship between a writer and a retired army nurse who seeks her out decades after their childhood in the same housing project. Among the letters the narrator receives is one from a Rouenna Zycinski, recalling their old connection and asking if they can meet. Though fascinated by the stories Rouenna tells about her life as a combat nurse in Vietnam, the narrator flatly declines her request that they collaborate on a memoir. It is only later, in the aftermath of Rouenna's shocking death, that the narrator is drawn to write about her friend—and her friend's war. Writing Rouenna's story becomes all-consuming, at once a necessity and the only consolation.

 

 

 

 

 

Set in ’90s Manhattan, Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn’t been and with people he doesn’t know. He’s living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another on the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York City history. And now it’s time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century—and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary—and exemplary—career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution's collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world.

 

 

“On one of my first visits to Russia, a friend advised me that if I ever got into any kind of dispute with a cashier, it was extremely important I get the people in line on my side. Not long after, I was at an art museum trying to get a refund; it turned out the exhibition I wanted to see was at a different museum. As the cashier was berating me over my error, I started to hear some grumbling behind me: (in Russian) She’s right. It’s not clear. They don’t mark anything properly. It is nice to see a young person taking an interest in art. In the 1970s in the Soviet Union, Vladimir Sorokin was just trying to get a kilo of caviar. When the cashier told him they were only giving out half kilos, someone in line yelled, “Give him a fucking kilo, goddamit!” Sorokin’s first novel, The Queue, about the long lines that defined Brezhnev’s Russia, is a joyful read. I swear! It is full of funny, horny strangers, getting really involved in one another’s lives and complaining about their government. Reading it always leaves me inspired and hopeful, reminded of that day the line helped me get my money back.”

 

 

Vladimir Sorokin's first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet "years of stagnation." Thousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn't matter—if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin's tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on.

 

 

“Fatale is perhaps Manchette’s strangest novel. The female protagonist, Aimée, is a cold directed killer, almost a machine, whose ambition and death drive are perfectly in sync. She’s seen from way outside, in this “behaviorist” account, a technique Manchette claims he learned from Guy de Maupassant. Aimée roves around the blandest of wealthy towns like a robot vacuum cleaner, killing the structurally guilty. At the end, her failure is also, somehow, an exquisite and hallucinogenic triumph.”

 

 

Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there's no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she's set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.

 

 

 

“These small (4 1/4” x 5 3/4”) elegant (not decadent) books each pair one excellent film critic with a film from the 2000s. The ones I’ve read are Nick Pinkerton on Tsai Ming-Liang’s mournful, crepuscular Goodbye, Dragon Inn; Melissa Anderson on David Lynch’s insane, maligned Inland Empire; and Erika Balsom on James Benning’s expansive, subversive Ten Skies (“a film so peaceful that you wouldn’t think about war,” according to the filmmaker). As with Benning’s film, viewers and readers will hope this compact, well-ordered, somewhat insidious series continues past ten.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we've organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd's death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it? In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery's afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all.

 

Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care.

 

 

 

 

 

In Passport to Here and There, Grace Nichols traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape. In these movingly redemptive and celebratory poems, she embraces connections and re-connections, with the ability to turn the ordinary into something vivid and memorable whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, most notably in a sonnet-sequence which grew out of a recent return trip to Guyana.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina's morphine addiction, Freud's un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Frantz's negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author's relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions—frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking—are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one's true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.

 

 

 

 

 

Wittman Ah Sing is an unstoppable hipster poet and playwright on the streets of San Francisco, after the Beats have left and before the hippies have arrived. He falls in love with Nancy the Beautiful, marries Tana, and chases his dream to write and stage an epic drama spanning America and China.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I genuinely feared at some point that this book would be too scary for me (because it is seriously scary!), but it wasn't, by just a hair. What saved it was its dialogue, which is truly funny and smart, more reminiscent of Dawn Powell or Iris Murdoch than your standard genre fiction. Read it after We Have Always Lived in the Castle if you want a less-spooky entry to the Jackson universe.”

 

 

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a haunting; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

 

 

“Who knew flowers could be so thrilling?! Maybe you’ve seen Adaptation but never read the source text. Almost miraculously, the true John Laroche story is just as bizarre and electrifying as Charlie Kaufman’s fictionalized version.”

 

 

A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion.

 

 

 

“After the collected works of novelist Charles Portis were reissued recently, I spent a few months blasting through his ruthlessly funny fiction: the picaresque-ish Gringos, the deadpan road novel Dog of the South, the even deadpan-er road novel Norwood. But it was True Grit, his riveting tween-narrated western, that really cemented my status as a Portishead. The narrative voice of its plucky and hugely charming protagonist, Mattie—both goofy and biblically vengeful, and constantly placing things in arch quotation marks—grounds the novel in comedy, but it’s her avuncular hired-gun-turned-friend, a grouchy US marshal named Rooster (every Portis character has a name like Rooster), who ultimately steals the show. Portisheads unite!”

 

 

True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 cash. Filled with an unwavering urge to avenge her father’s blood, Mattie finds and, after some tenacious finagling, enlists one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, as her partner in pursuit, and they head off into Indian Territory after the killer.

 

 

“Secretly one of the best novels ever written about Los Angeles, not only for its perfect description of dissociating while driving on the freeway.”

 

 

Welcome to sunny suburban 1960s Southern California. George is a gay middle-aged English professor, adjusting to solitude after the tragic death of his young partner. He is determined to persist in the routines of his former life. A Single Man follows him over the course of an ordinary twenty-four hours. Behind his British reserve, tides of grief, rage, and loneliness surge—but what is revealed is a man who loves being alive despite all the everyday injustices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age 11 until his AIDS-related death at 39. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan's self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

 

 

 

“The Sellout won the Booker Prize and thus doesn’t need my help. Is ‘no one is talking about this’ an inherently solipsistic thing to say? Surely lots of people are still talking about The Sellout! Still, the funniest novel of the 21st century deserves to be talked about ad nauseam, pontificated to death, cited to the point of cliché, like Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. Instead it seems to exist apart from its contemporaries, like many of the novels Beatty draws from in Hark, his essential anthology of African-American humor writing. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but no serious discussion of recent American fiction can or should avoid this wild and liberated novel.”

 

 

Born in the agrarian ghetto of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake. Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

 

 

 

 

 

Crack climbing is a highly technical form of movement in which climbers position their hands, feet, and even their entire body in cracks to make upward progress on rock. An advocate for the sport's aesthetic lines, physicality, and technical know-how, author Pete Whittaker teaches more than sixty Crack School Masterclasses each year and was featured in the popular climbing film Wide Boyz.

 

 

 

“In Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, a decayed British upper class finds itself alarmed at its inability to reproduce. There's only one person who can set things right: a gleefully competent Type A twink. Despite its chilly title, Love in a Cold Climate is an ideal book to read at a summer house, where you can entertain your fellow guests by updating them with Mitford's little scandals—the sheer oddness of which give away the book's status as roman a clef—like updates from a Twitter scroll.”

 

 

Polly Hampton has long been groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, the fearsome and ambitious Lady Montdore. But Polly, with her stunning good looks and impeccable connections, is bored by the monotony of her glittering debut season in London. Having just come from India, where her father served as Viceroy, she claims to have hoped that society in a colder climate would be less obsessed with love affairs.

The apparently aloof and indifferent Polly has a long-held secret, however, one that leads to the shattering of her mother's dreams and her own disinheritance. When an elderly duke begins pursuing the disgraced Polly and a callow potential heir curries favor with her parents, nothing goes as expected, but in the end all find happiness in their own unconventional ways.

 

 

 

 

Manhattan's East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band's biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack's prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack's search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack's punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse's outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First published by Gallimard in 1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. Guibert chronicles three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life as, in the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, describing the progression of the disease and recording the reactions of his many friends.

 

 

 

 

In this eye-opening memoir, Lisa Crystal Carver recalls her extraordinary youth and charts the late-80s, early-90s punk subculture that she helped shape. She recounts how her band Suckdog was born in 1987 and the wild events that followed: leaving small-town New Hampshire to tour Europe at 18, becoming a teen publisher of fanzines, a teen bride, and a teen prostitute. Spin has called Suckdog’s album Drugs Are Nice one of the best of the ’90s, and the book includes photos of infamous European shows. Yet the book also tells of how Lisa saw the need for change in 1994, when her baby was born with a chromosomal deletion and his father became violent. With lasting lightness and surprising gravity, Drugs Are Nice is a definitive account of the generation that wanted to break every rule, but also a story of an artist and a mother becoming an adult on her own terms.

 

 

 

 

Immersed in a world of isolation and loneliness, Barker’s ill-fated young heroine Janet turns to literature, nature, and her Aunt Lila, who offers brief flashes of respite in an otherwise foreboding life. People, birds, and beasts move through the background in a tale that is as rich and atmospheric as it is witty and mordant. The family’s motto—Moriens sed Invictus (Dying but Unconquered)—is a well-suited epitaph for wild and courageous Janet, whose fierce determination to remain steadfastly herself makes her one of the most unforgettable protagonists in contemporary literature.

 

 

 

“It’s Fourth of July weekend, and Carlotta is back in Brooklyn after twenty years in prison. Among the chaos of family parties and the stress of introducing everyone to her updated, fabulously femme self, Carlotta must also navigate the endless hurdles of parole and the astonishing changes to the city. A contemporary reimagining of the epic journey (with nods to The Odyssey and Ulysses), Carlotta follows the titular character as she traverses south Brooklyn and comments—by interrupting the narrator in mid-sentence—on gentrification, over-priced grapes, gender transition, job interviews, injustice, extremely expensive shoes, incarceration, old friends, and what it might mean to be free.”

 

 

Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary. In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.

 

 

 

“I long avoided reading Shirley Jackson after being traumatized by ‘The Lottery’ as a middle school student, but I recently came around and I'm so glad I did. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is psychological ghost fiction in the vein of Turn of the Screw, but with an intimate—you might say agoraphobic—attention to home life you're more likely to find in Wharton than in James. Add a feral teen narrator whose voice mirrors her kooky cognition and you get Castle. Jackson played up the haunted aspects of the domestic realm—housework, neighbors, errands that require you to cross the street to avoid a group of men on the corner—and created something genius. This book is not scary, but it is very spooky. ”

 

 

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

 

 

 

“Novel With Cocaine was written under a penname and, though it was once falsely attributed to Nabokov, its authorship remains unknown. You can kind of see why its author might not want to show their face: this book is fucking bleak! It sticks close to its truly loathsome narrator, who’s so consumed by drugs and sex that he neglects his friends, his heartbreakingly forgiving mother, and, finally, the entire force of history (the book is set in Moscow in 1917 but only glancingly hints at the revolution). What's compelling about the novel is that it has all the trappings of a morality tale but is ultimately so ludicrously brutal that it transcends the genre entirely, a feat.”

 

 

A Dostoevskian psychological novel of ideas, Novel with Cocaine explores the interaction between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its frank portrayal of an adolescent's cocaine addiction. The story relates the formative experiences of Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise.