en-US Sat, 10 Oct 2020 06:17:08 -0700 60 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 7945374 A literary event: one of the most celebrated novels ever written, in a magnificent new translation.

Seven years ago, the incomparable Lydia Davis brought us an award- winning, rapturously reviewed new translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way that was hailed as "clear and true to the music of the original" (Los Angeles Times) and "a work of creation in its own right" (Claire Messud, Newsday). Now she turns her gifts to the book that defined the novel as an art form.

When Emma Rouault marries dull, provincial doctor Charles Bovary, her dreams of an elegant and passionate life crumble. She escapes into sentimental novels but finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. She spends lavishly and embarks on a series of disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter. When published in 1857, Madame Bovary was embraced by bourgeois women who claimed it spoke to the frustrations of their lives. Davis's landmark translation gives new life in English to Flaubert's masterwork.]]> 384 Gustave Flaubert 0670022071 Nadia 5 4.01 1856
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1856
rating: 5
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]]> 41880605 Following The Missing Person and Inside, Alix Ohlin's third novel is a masterful achievement: a joint coming-of-age story and an achingly poignant portrait of the strange, painful, ultimately life-sustaining bonds between sisters.

Lark and Robin are half-sisters whose similarities end at being named for birds. While Lark is shy and studious, Robin is wild and artistic. Raised in Montreal by their disinterested single mother, they form a fierce team in childhood despite these differences. As they grow up, Lark excels at school and Robin becomes an extraordinary pianist. At seventeen, Lark flees to America to attend college, where she finds her calling in documentary films, and her sister soon joins her.

Later, in New York City, the sisters find themselves tested: Lark struggles with self-doubt, and Robin chafes against the demands of Juilliard. Under pressure, their bond grows strained and ultimately broken, and their paths diverge. Lark leaves New York when she meets Lawrence Wheelock, a renowned filmmaker who becomes both her employer and occasional lover, while Robin returns to Canada. When Wheelock denies Lark what she hopes for most of all--a child--she is forced to re-examine a life marked by unrealized ambitions and thwarted desires. And as she takes charge of her destiny, Lark discovers that despite their complicated, oftentimes painful relationship, there is only one person she can truly rely on: her sister.

In this gripping, unforgettable novel about motherhood, sisterhood, desire, and self-knowledge, Alix Ohlin traces the rich and complex path towards fulfillment as an artist and a human being, capturing the peculiar language of sisters and making visible the imperceptible strings that bind us to the ones we love--or have loved--for good.]]> 288 Alix Ohlin 0525521895 Nadia 4 3.66 2019
author: Alix Ohlin
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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date added: 2020/05/24
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]]> 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly]]> 158 Han Kang 0553448188 Nadia 5 3.63 2007
author: Han Kang
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2020/05/24
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]]> 45289222 Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.]]> 320 Lily King Nadia 4 3.93 2020
author: Lily King
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 4
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]]> 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth.]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 Nadia 4 3.72 2017
author: Sally Rooney
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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]]> 36692478 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525520375.

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.]]> 294 Tommy Orange Nadia 5 3.97 2018
author: Tommy Orange
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> 7331435
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.]]> 274 Jennifer Egan 0307592839 Nadia 5 3.70 2010
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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]]> 8442457 What have we done to each other?

These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

So what did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?]]> 399 Gillian Flynn Nadia 4 3.93 2012
author: Gillian Flynn
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2012
rating: 4
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]]> 3679 On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars-on both sides of the Atlantic-serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.]]> 445 Zadie Smith 0143037749 Nadia 5 3.79 2005
author: Zadie Smith
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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]]> 6425404 A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith's nonfiction over the past decade.

Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.

Split into four sections—"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"—Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.

In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers—E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others—have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences—in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond—that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.

Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.]]> 320 Zadie Smith 1594202370 Nadia 4 3.84 2009
author: Zadie Smith
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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]]> 2303179 384 Amy Irvine 0865477035 Nadia 5 3.83 2008
author: Amy Irvine
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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]]> 9214995 The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman's developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.]]> 310 Lidia Yuknavitch 0979018838 Nadia 5 4.22 2011
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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]]> 18803640 300 Helen Macdonald 0224097008 Nadia 5 3.72 2014
author: Helen Macdonald
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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]]> 17934655 The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection; winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others’—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.]]> 230 Leslie Jamison 1555976719 Nadia 5 3.68 2014
author: Leslie Jamison
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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]]> 26893819 355 Emma Cline 081299860X Nadia 4 3.48 2016
author: Emma Cline
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2016
rating: 4
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]]> 37573567 113 Natalie Eilbert 1934819719 Nadia 5 4.49
author: Natalie Eilbert
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.49
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rating: 5
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]]> 14241 The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was.]]> 352 Mary Karr 0143035746 Nadia 4 3.94 1995
author: Mary Karr
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/05/07
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]]> 34355776 Beast Meridian narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at-risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, she survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinos in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer—another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities—and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle—a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma—is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history.]]> 100 Vanessa Angélica Villarreal 1934819654 Nadia 5 4.44 2017
author: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2019/05/02
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]]> 29873311 The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.]]> 126 Safiya Sinclair 0803290632 Nadia 5 4.20 2016
author: Safiya Sinclair
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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]]> 37570595
These stories explore urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and the ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,” Adjei-Brenyah reckons with the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,” we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.]]> 194 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 1328911241 Nadia 5 4.05 2018
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2019/05/02
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]]> 19073499 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 104 James Baldwin 0804149720 Nadia 5 4.64 1963
author: James Baldwin
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.64
book published: 1963
rating: 5
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]]> 29430746 In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.

Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.]]> 241 Kiese Laymon 1501125656 Nadia 5 4.48 2018
author: Kiese Laymon
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> 40363341
Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the former president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer.

Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents.

Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.]]> 202 Samuel Stein 1786636395 Nadia 4 3.92 2019
author: Samuel Stein
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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]]> 35840657 Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.]]> 143 Terese Marie Mailhot 1619023342 Nadia 5 3.82 2018
author: Terese Marie Mailhot
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> 34883050 al youm, is an examination of what is inherited, particularly in the face of Zionism when the body is queer, Palestinian, and wildly alive. It is a chapbook composed with form as much as it is with the erasure of form—form as poetics, form as memory, form as function, form as home. Redaction, too, is a wound that bleeds, as when Zionist revision forces a reissuing of meaning, an eschewing of Palestine, a violence bristling confessional into agonized song. But George is more than the black bars that keep him. His is a voice scarred but inviolate, able to move in the preternatural way survivors must carry themselves on. He travels forward and backward in his memories with a rage that starts to bloom into something new and haloed.

Through erasure, redaction, and traditional and new forms, he transforms the solipsism of his condition into a psalm: "you've danced with oblivion many times, / if anything else, she will remember your name." With nods to powerful contemporary poets such as Marwa Helal, Angel Nafis, and Ocean Vuong, this is a book that looks history down the barrel and sees beyond it the real community that drives us to speak. "& i, lone traveller, reshaping continents with my hands" George writes in the final poem "ode to my multiple orgasms." In his work, he gives the powers that occupy no credit to their destruction. It is resistance through subversion, immersion, a "body bursting mid / -air."]]> 59 George Abraham Nadia 5 4.67 2017
author: George Abraham
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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]]> 7815 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A landmark work about grief, love, and survival from one of America’s most iconic writers

One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Joan Didion delivers a searing portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost a husband or wife or child. In a work of electric honesty and passion, Didion explores how we all, somehow, will ourselves to survive. “An utterly shattering portrait of loss and grief.” –The New York Times

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana Roo, fall ill with septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner after visiting their daughter in the hospital when John suffered a fatal heart attack. In that one moment, their partnership of forty years came to an end.

This powerful narrative is Didion's “attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

“Didion has transformed grief into literature.” —The Guardian]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 Nadia 5 3.93 2005
author: Joan Didion
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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]]> 35297339 A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art, from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday.

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, Folly also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.

A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.]]> 277 Lisa Halliday 150116676X Nadia 5 3.43 2018
author: Lisa Halliday
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> 35099035
In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.

Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.]]> 356 Leni Zumas 0316434817 Nadia 5 3.66 2018
author: Leni Zumas
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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]]> 40121993 224 Esmé Weijun Wang 1555978274 Nadia 5 4.12 2019
author: Esmé Weijun Wang
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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Wang is fiercely intelligent, vulnerable, and honest. These essays illuminate the lived experience of mental and chronic illness. They invited me to interrogate my own beliefs, biases, and misconceptions. This book is a gift.
]]> 40121980

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky's long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection]]> 80 Ilya Kaminsky 1555978312 Nadia 5 4.40 2019
author: Ilya Kaminsky
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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date added: 2019/05/01
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Crime, even the darkest and most unsayable acts, can happen to any one of us. As Alex pores over the facts of the murder, they find themself thrust into the complicated narrative of Ricky’s childhood. And by examining the details of Ricky’s case, they are forced to face their own story, to unearth long-buried family secrets, and reckon with a past that colors their view of Ricky's crime.

But another surprise awaits: They weren’t the only one who saw their life in Ricky’s.

An intellectual and emotional thriller that is also a different kind of murder mystery, THE FACT OF A BODY is a book not only about how the story of one crime was constructed -- but about how we grapple with our own personal histories. Along the way it tackles questions about the nature of forgiveness, and if a single narrative can ever really contain something as definitive as the truth. This groundbreaking, heart-stopping work, ten years in the making, shows how the law is more personal than we would like to believe -- and the truth more complicated, and powerful, than we could ever imagine.]]> 326 Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich 1250080541 Nadia 4 3.79 2017
author: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
name: Nadia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/05/01
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]]> 40611194 Magical Negro is an archive of Black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless Black melancholies and triumphs.]]> 112 Morgan Parker 1947793187 Nadia 5 4.32 2019
author: Morgan Parker
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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date added: 2019/05/01
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]]> 38532137 This extraordinary, timely new collection of essays by the award-winning writer of The Other Side—rooted in her own experience with sexual assault—pursues questions of justice, sexual violence, and retribution.

In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection, a meditative extension of that answer, draws from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and other fields, as well as Johnson’s personal experience, to consider how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.

From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the concept of evil; to “Girlhood in a Semi-Barbarous Age,” about the sacred feminine, “ideal woman,” and feminist art, Johnson creates masterful, elaborate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current era. She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, and sexual assault and workplace harassment, as well as the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, government malfeasance, police killings. The Reckonings is a powerful and necessary work, ambitious in its scope, which strikes at the heart of our national conversation about the justness of society.]]> 336 Lacy M. Johnson 1501159003 Nadia 4 4.27 2018
author: Lacy M. Johnson
name: Nadia
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/04/30
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The Reckonings is an extraordinary collection of essays. Johnson is both unflinching and empathetic as she explores some of the most urgent questions of our time. What is justice? How is trauma healed? How can white people dismantle white supremacy? One reading is not enough. I have returned to these essays again and again.
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