I Am Barbarella, a composite collection by Beth Gilstrap, is narrated by characters at the fringes of contemporary society –working-class characters with a raging taste for self-destruction. Many of the stories take place in Charlotte, North Carolina –a place people rarely end up on purpose. These characters aren’t bankers or old money, nor entirely belles …
In this beautiful and raw debut collection, Denton Loving offers us poetry of the earth, of history, of the natural world’s rawness that both sears and warms as it flows. It’s difficult to be both solid and ephemeral, but Loving manages to walk both deliberately and carefully through his lived or imagined mire with elegance …
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Ordinary Life by Tracy K. Smith From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The …
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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; …
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The Little Free Library Book by Margret Aldrich “Take a book. Return a book.” In 2009, Todd Bol built the first Little Free Library as a memorial to his mom. Five years later, this simple idea to promote literacy and encourage community has become a movement. Little Free Libraries—freestanding front-yard book exchanges—now number twenty thousand …
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BodyHome by Chelsey Clammer In her debut essay collection, Chelsey Clammer dives flesh-first into finding her home. But these essays aren’t about places, but a state of mind-when you’re at home in your body, you’re at home in the world. With both lyricism and wit, Clammer uses her body to explore a complicated history of …
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#Newsfail by Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny A hilarious and informative primer on the most urgent issues of our day, from the creators and co-hosts of Citizen Radio, a 100% listener-supported show whose slogan is “independent radio that won’t lead you to war.” #Newsfail is not your grandmother’s comedic-memoir-slash-political-manifesto. From page one (in a preface …
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Rocket and Lightship by Adam Kirsch In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last eight years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Kirsch shows how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art. In Rocket and Lightship …
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Citizen by Claudia Rankine Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams …
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Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone by Annelyse Gelman “Look, the future is all telepathy and disappointment and pretending we haven’t always been winging it. Every day we’re the strongest we’ll ever be. What doesn’t kill you hasn’t killed you yet.” From Greek mythology to Top 40, Pavlov to Sartre, …
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