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.
These interconnected stories are guided by generations of intelligent, determined Nigerian women as they attempt to control their destinies as sorrow and hard times hit our characters. We see them face their struggles at varying degrees of success, but always with a grain of hope somewhere buried within them.
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.
I hesitate to use the cliched word "vulnerable" to describe a memoir, but the essays in this confessional often read like transcriptions of private therapy sessions, and left me struggling to find a more apt word. Full of reflection & recognition of the need for continued growth, these stories uncovered hope in places we usually don't even search for it. A funny, emotional 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.
Two immoral narrators amidst a cast of characters almost as ethically detestable as our annoying speakers. That said, Allende guides us through this comedy of errors in a tongue-in-cheek way that had me laughing at the protagonists' successes, but moreso their hilariously terrible failures.
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.
A memoir of language and literature, Hunt uses this book to search for patterns among that which has influenced her life, whether it be family, books, or ghosts of things that never were. She writes with a tongue-in-cheek style that carries through to the last sentence. She'll tell you herself, but be sure to focus on what's left unwritten here.
I'm a big fan of conversational poetry, the kind that reads like someone sharing a story with you, and Limon does this perfectly in The Hurting Kind. Full of visceral images and thoughtful turns-of-phrase, she illuminates the connectiveness between nature and the human experience while tackling subjects like intimacy, ancestry, and aging. A wonderful read.
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?
What the Fireflies Knew scratched my itch for a good coming-of-age story. With a narrator as smart as she is naive to the secrets of the adults' lives around her, this book lets you experience hardships of the world through the lens of innocence and childhood optimism.
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?
Tides throws you in the mind of a woman who has lost everything and questions if she has done so by choice. With sparse, poetic prose that leaves you shellshocked like our narrator, this book is a heartbreaking read that'll only leave you wishing you could've spent more time in the reality Freeman creates.
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.
