Non-Fiction
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When Brooklyn Was Queer
Hugh Ryan
This has been a slow reading year for me, but for the most part I’ve been spending my decreased reading time with really good books, cutting out the ones I would have been pushing myself to finish or charging through disinterestedly. Quality over quantity is not a bad approach. If I were to make a top ten list at the end of this...more
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Essayism
Brian Dillon
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at “therefore”) at the
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Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole
This collection of essays is divided into three sections — “Reading Things,” “Seeing Things,” and “Being There” — and for me they progress from the least cohesive to the most cohesive. Many of the literary essays feel more like sketches than fully fleshed out essays, and I slowly worked through these over the summer before lulling out...more
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Forty-One False Starts
Janet Malcolm
As a collection, Forty-One False Starts falls to the side of indiscriminate, especially the several shorter essays at the end that felt like they were included more because they fit the theme of artists and writers than because they had something truly remarkable to say. Maybe they were victims of placement, but they probably stand...more
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Writings
Agnes Martin
There is in reality no need for self-sacrifice and no call for it. Do not settle for the experience of others. If you follow others you are in reality at a standstill, because their experience is in the past. That is circling. Even following your own past experience, is circling. Know your own response to your own work
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Our daily lives have to be a satisfaction in themselves
Emily Larned (publisher)
You may remember how it was in the early ’70s. Feminists were really angry. We thought that we’d suddenly discovered something that we’d explain to men and everything would change. —Selma Miriam
This beautiful book is handmade by Emily Larned, put...more
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Tell Me How It Ends
Valeria Luiselli
First published in 2016, Valeria Luiselli wrote this long essay before the Trump administration came into office and further muddled already insufficient immigration policies. Structured around the forty questions she asked undocumented children from Central America during her volunteer work helping connect these children with legal...more
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Ongoingness
Sarah Manguso
Sometimes I think there is an order you need to read books by certain authors; maybe the chronological sequence gives you a context of their development that helps you progress with them, but other times a truly excellent later work will make you more interested to read less mature works than if you had started with those. And after reading ...more
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H Is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald
This is one of those books that defies quick categorization. You could call it a grief memoir or non-fiction nature writing, but it’s some of both and more than those too. At the root level, H Is for Hawk does center around the sudden death of Helen Macdonald’s father, and she expresses the devastation that...more
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Silence: In the Age of Noise
Erling Kagge
I thought this book would be a slam dunk for me, written around the questions: What is silence? Where is it? How do we create it? Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer who in 1990 became one of the first people to travel to the North Pole unsupported. For that expedition he had a partner, but three years later he spent fifty...more