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Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan
Compared to A Visit From the Goon Squad and other pieces of short fiction Jennifer Egan has published in the years since, her newest novel Manhattan Beach is unexpectedly straightforward. Moving from those experimental, future-reaching works, she has turned to historical...more
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Meaty
Samantha Irby
At times bawdy and at others incisively poignant, Samantha Irby dishes on topics like sex & celibacy, reality TV, body image, and Crohn’s disease. Then she will switch tracks and talk about becoming the primary caretaker of her mother, who was disabled from a combination of...more
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The Book of Dust
Philip Pullman
Seventeen years after the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman returns to the same world for a new trilogy, La Belle Sauvage. While this first book in the new series does include the character Lyra who was the heart of the first series, she is only a baby...more
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Borderlands / La Frontera
Gloria Anzaldúa
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and
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Unaccompanied
Javier Zamora
Very topical poems on the immigrant experience. Javier Zamora is from El Salvador, and his parents left for the US when he was very young and he followed when he was 9 years old. He writes from the perspective of his parents and other people in his family on the savagery of civil war and the ordeals people like his...more
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Wildwood Imperium
Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis
A jam-packed finale to this trilogy set in a version of Portland where Forest Park is the Impassable Wilderness, a magical land most humans in the city can’t physically enter. After establishing a new set of characters and new thread of narrative in the second book, this one starts with yet another new thread. It makes the story get...more
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Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of queer poetry and apparently also fiction involving ghosts as characters. Like Katalin Street, Jesmyn Ward’s third novel involves spirits of those who have passed on but haven’t entirely departed the company of the living. Here they are a...more
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In Full Velvet
Jenny Johnson
The title of this book refers to furry skin on the antlers of young deer, which most shed as the antlers finish calcifying. The titular poem mentions some whitetails that don’t shed their velvet, described by hunters as “raggedy-horn freaks” who live “long solitary lives, unweathered / by the rutting season.”
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Things I Don’t Want to Know
Deborah Levy
A response to George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write,” much of this book is less obviously about writing than I was expecting. But looking through Orwell’s four motives for writing just now [Sheer egoism; Aesthetic enthusiasm; Historical impulse; Political purpose],...more
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Don’t Call Us Dead
Danez Smith
Apparently I’m having a moment of reading contemporary poems by gay men.* They’ve all been great, but this is probably my fave of the bunch by just a little bit. As a collection, it feels so cohesive with poems about being a black man, a gay man, HIV-positive, and the intersections between them. Favorites...more
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When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
Chen Chen
Most of this collection feels playful and cheeky, yet there is a mournful undercurrent, from the poems with some form of “elegy” in their titles, references to the sickness of Chen Chen’s mother and her unrealized expectations of him, and even his consideration of a friend’s comment, “…All you write about / is being gay or...more
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Katalin Street
Magda Szabó
Fragmented and a bit confusing while meeting all the characters, Katalin Street spans key moments before, during, and after the German occupation of Budapest for three intertwined families in Budapest. Before the war, they have an idyllic life as neighbors in three row houses on Katalin Street, and the novel portrays the effects of...more
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Life in Code
Ellen Ullman
After reading Ellen Ullman’s novel By Blood, I’ve been meaning to get to her memoir Close to the Machine, but before I could get around to that, she published another book centered around her experiences as a programmer, from before and during the early years of the internet. These...more
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Forest Dark
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love has been a standby favorite I recommend to people often — something I’ve noted while writing about every subsequent book of hers that I’ve read. Realizing now that it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve read it makes me think it’s time for a re-read, especially...more
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The Chronology of Water
Lidia Yuknavitch
I thought I would love this, based on recommendations. But I did have one friend say she wasn’t as entranced as she expected, and I found my reaction much the same. A memoir told in vignettes that roughly progresses chronologically, Lidia Yuknavitch grew up in an abusive, neglectful household, and her one escape was swimming. At the end...more
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Under Wildwood
Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis
When I read the first book in this trilogy, I made a comment about reading this second part “at my earliest convenience,” which turned out to be about five years later. This volume explores more areas of the fantastical land of Wildwood, where people and anthropomorphized animals coexist. It is a...more
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Devotion
Patti Smith
Compared to Just Kids or M Train, this little book feels so slight and incomplete. But as a small continuation of the themes of creation and artistic drive, it’s a pleasure. Devotion is an expansion of a talk she gave at the 2016 Windham-...more
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I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
Grace Jones
As celebrity memoirs go, this one is fully par for the course. Rock writer Paul Morley has shaped Grace Jones’s life stories into somewhat of a narrative, but it still has a tendency to ramble back and forth over time, likely from hours and hours of conversation that did just that. Her stories are fascinating, no doubt, even more so if...more
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My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Aja Monet
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she is an archipelago of shanty towns, she is invention and
necessity. found scraps, a bouquet of bloody music in her
hands. cane of sugar, leaves of tobacco, a cluster or bananas,
coffee
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