This novel puts you in the mind of a young girl thrust into the messy world of the adults around her as her normalcy is taken away without her understanding why. Full of visceral images & poetic language that makes Quintana's explorations of depression & the patriarchy more easily digestible without losing the bite and seriousness these topics deserve.
A simmering look at a relationship wrought with domestic abuse through the eyes of a widowed mother's adolescent children. Barnhill writes scenes tinged with surrealism to illuminate the horrors of a very real situation that inevitably feels unreal. Full of beautiful descriptions and striking prose, this book whirlwinds you to a haunting, thought-provoking conclusion.
Beneath seemingly mundane backdrops, the stories in this collection pulse with an ethereal unease that shades everyday terrors as astonishingly horrific. Schweblin forces us to face what's left behind in these empty houses in immersive and disorienting fashion.
Written with a prose that's sparse & dreamlike while still maintaining vivid descriptions, this book immerses you in the medical world to explore how we maintain hope in lives destined to one day end. Imbued with the narrator's dry sense of humor, DeForest has crafted a story that tackles the bleakest parts of the human spirit without removing hope and empathy.
These stories give an authentic insight into tender yet landmark moments of these characters lives as they grapple with heartbreak, maturity, & self. Written with a prose that leans toward poetry in moments, you'll be submersed in these lives that feel as genuine as the pages in your hand.
An endearing coming-of-age story with a narrator smart beyond her years, yet still naive to the secrets of the adults' lives around her. You'll feel immersed in her story as she's introduced to hardships of the world through the lens of innocence and childhood optimism.
An immersive tale of a young woman's quest through post-apocalyptic deserts of the American West and her encounters with the surreal landscape, horrific creatures, and human betrayal. Yet in this grim world, false beliefs and deceptive promises can still dissipate, inviting a return of faith and hope as our protagonist comes of age and assesses her humanity in an inhumane world.
What begins as retellings of tragic architects delves into ruminations on artists and the ways their creations are perceived by the world. Van den Broeck melds her experiences writing the book with her subject, drawing parallels between her self-doubts and those of the people she biographizes. A mix of memoir, architectural designs, and historical recounting that coalesces into an intriguing, strange read.
How High We Go in the Dark is one of the best sci fi books I've read in a while. Humorous, heartbreaking, & hopeful all at once, this novel left me thinking for days after I'd finished it. Plus who could resist a conversational pig, an amusement park of death, and dimensions outside space and time?
A rumination on two women's relationship where one wants to leave their life together while the other seeks to entangle it even more by becoming parents. Written with simmering and poetic language, Baltasar gives insight into intimacy with the biting realism of love turning toward resentment.
Bridle guides us through an examination of technology and the ways in which artificiality has begun impacting our daily life and environment. He argues to move away from anthropocentrism toward a larger sense of relationity between the natural world and the technological one. A mind-opening read that challenges how we conceptualize intelligence in a way that prepares you for the future of our world.
This timely & propulsive novel tackles issues of police brutality, systemic racism, & islamophobia through the perspective of a Muslim detective grappling with her place among institutions set against the communities that raised her--all as her team works to solve missing persons cases going uninvestigated by the local sheriff's department. A gripping read that invokes conversations on current events in our own world.
A magical noir set in an alternate-history Chicago with demons, warlocks, and a vampiric serial killer on the loose. Polk crafts a mystery tinged with personal, emotional stakes that barrels along to a satisfying, yet surprising conclusion.
In the wake of a world war, a small Scottish village still faces the annual emergence of Celtic creatures that appear as crows but may be souls of the dead. An eerie tale of a woman returning to her hometown as fears of generations erupt into life-changing events.
When a writer loves their subject, it's evident, and that can be said here for Mieville's impassioned, extensive telling of the October Revolutions. Full of rich details and obscure characterizations, this was one of the most exciting, easily readable history books I've read. Highly recommend!
A deeply meditative novel with a mystery pulsing at its center, this story moves briskly while still leaving space for contemplations of multiversality and possible versions of ourselves from other lives. A layered tale that's not afraid to get a little weird, but never in a way that feels disingenuous to the world Pokwatka creates, this book gripped my attention all the way through.
A brief yet concentrated read that delves into the stigma associated with sex workers & the dichotomy of a culture that expects purity but calls for survival through any means. Told in vignettes of important moments in Fitzgerald's life & interspersed with her childhood obsession with X-Files, this book was a weird, thought-provoking experience all the way through.
A moving story of three orphaned siblings with only each other around to nurture their growth. Asghar navigates the liminal spaces of gender, religion, & family with a poetic, experimental prose that reads like a lucid dream, all while maintaining sincerity as they explore heavy topics.
This is a book that meets you where you are, whatever your experiences may be, to show that you are loved. Lunn choreographs insightful conversations that explore the intricacies of love and illuminate how it exists constantly around us in forms of friends, family, and so much more. A delightful, sweet read, like an ice cream cone distilled into book form.
Ng crafts a new-age Fahrenheit 451 set in dystopia where hate and fear have led to speech-censoring laws and state-sanctioned children removals. Combine this setting with a mystery of a boy traversing the riddles his mother left behind when she disappeared, and you get an expansive, ambitious story that still retains the closeness of Ng's previous novels. A wonderful read.
Over the span of a single summer, three generations of an Italian matriarchal family are forced to face their unspoken, shared traumas when a curse proves to be not superstition, but reality. A sense of foreboding permeates this novel as we witness these characters' lives fall apart and morph into their new normalcy.
Here Denton gives us a true crime tale drenched in the backstory of FLDS communities that still manages to center the stories of women living in polygamist colonies. Using this history, she questions why they submit to the oppressive, unequal lifestyle, all while giving insight to the women and their children who suffered a horrific crime because they were unaware of the world they lived in.
This collection consists of seemingly innocuous childhood memories filtered through hindsight in a way that catches the moments when childhood begins to morph into maturity. Told with thoughtful, visceral imagery of small countryside towns, these semi-autobiographical stories read like flipping through old photographs and rediscovering forgotten pieces of the past.
This novel reads like modern folk tales of people who visit the unchangeable past in search of lost happiness and missed opportunities. It could easily switch to heartbreak under its premise, but the stories stay warming, if not sometimes a little bitter, much like a cup of coffee.
A sense of unease ripples throughout this novel that explores the aftereffects of a military coup on an old man who spent most of his life in prison & now lives by a lighthouse alone. Lose yourself in a prose that mimics the currents of the man's unsteady mind as mysteries unravel around him.
Here's a handbook that examines the intrinsic connections between gentrification, capitalism, and the modern-day hipster. Pierrot's writing is scholarly while maintaining an air of casualness, almost like listening to someone talk social theory at a college party, except, here, the speaker seems to have a point and a knowledge of what they speak of. An interesting read that forces us to answer questions we may tend to avoid on an intrapersonal level.
A heartbreaking story of a woman attempting to leave her trauma-infested life behind her as she moves to Japan, only to find that memories can be unspoken but not forgotten. Full of sparse, yet specific imagery that sets the scene for this tale of discovering hope after violence, Solo Dance is an intimate read that leaves you feeling connected to its narrator.
With a new TV adaptation being released, it's the perfect time to revisit, or introduce yourself, to this story of conscripts of faith and the extremes people are led to by their interpretations of the divine. Krakauer illuminates the violent history of Mormonism through the framework of a supposed Godly-instructed murder. A gripping exploration of an American religion and its widely unpublicized past.
America, Goddam is a wonderful new read that centers black women in the struggle for justice, systemic and otherwise, in the U.S. Lindsey weaves her work with personal moments alongside stories of people overlooked or disregarded in the conversations about racism and brutality against marginalized people. An eye-opening exploration of the gender-dynamics of anti-Black violence in America.
A delightfully strange read centered around a building that does not exist and the tenants who reside there alongside chickens, cursed teeth, & records pressed on x-rays. What more could you ask for in a satire?
In Having and Being Had, Biss explores the modern notions of class and capital through stories of her personal life braided with examinations of everything from RuPaul and Didion to washing machines and sex work. Thoughtful with a wry sense of humor at times, this collection of essays is a great meditation on money and the privileges that come with having it.