Ever since I was a little guy, I've been told that I complicate things unnecessarily. I overthink and over-communicate, and often, my feelings are outsized to the situation. These are not things I do on purpose, but involuntary, like a sneeze or the way you reflexively clench with cuteness aggression when you see a grizzly bear’s little ears, even though you know it can hurt and eat and kill you. I love to find books with narrators who seemingly share this affliction. It makes me feel less alone, but more importantly, I love to see how other people's Rube Goldberg machines function.
My childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. Riding shotgun as my mother fled abusive relationships, I didn't care where we were going—to a roadside midwestern motel, a shelter, or the cluttered mansion my Pentecostal grandparents called home—as long as we were together. But every so often, my mom would surprise me and leave.
As I grew and questioned my own complicated relationships and the poverty, abuse, and instability that enveloped me, I realized hell wasn't the place from the Bible; it was the cycle of violence that entrapped my family. Through footholds such as horror movies, neuropsychology, and strong bonds, I make sense of this cycle and find a way to leave it.
This book made me dizzy with love. This memoir is overflowing with love. Love of the self, love of language, romantic love, familial love, pet love, fear of love, unrequited love, tough love, tender love.
Perhaps most of all, I was taken with the way the author navigates the world so internally, a very solitary yet romantic pursuit of belonging. I kept catching myself leaning forward while reading, propelled through the nonlinear story of Stewart's life by the swelling emotions and incredible control of language.
I spent two weeks reading this book on repeat because the powerful, poetic prose kept inspiring me to write. If this book were a cake, I would eat it forthwith.
From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up. Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee--and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet--he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix…
Nobody can make you aware of the inherent terror of a cornfield quite like a Hoosier. Having grown up in rural Indiana, What Stalks Among Us poked anxieties in me that I wasn't even aware I had.
In Hollowells’s murderous maze, I found myself rooting for and strongly identifying with the main character as she struggled to wrangle her thoughts, communicate her needs, or muster appropriate reactions to the chaos around her. I was rapt to see if the characters could not only survive but also learn how to overcome the very real hangups that sometimes keep us from being there for each other.
Horror is my jam, and this book deeply satisfied that urge I get sometimes to read something that makes it hard to sleep.
From Sarah Hollowell, author of A Dark and Starless Forest, comes a spine-tingling, deliriously creepy YA speculative thriller about two best friends trapped in a corn maze with corpses that look just like them.
Best friends and high school seniors Sadie and Logan make their first mistake when they ditch their end-of-year field trip to the amusement park in favor of exploring some old, forgotten backroads. The last thing they expect to come across is a giant, abandoned corn maze.
But with a whole day of playing hooking unspooling before them, they make their second mistake. Or perhaps their third?…
I didn't realize a book could get the zoomies. América del Norte has instilled in me such great wonder and vicious prose envy that I may never recover. Rambunctious, bombastic, and sprawling, this work of autofiction left me saying things like, “No way!” and “What the hell?!” out loud like a complete buffoon. Sometimes because of the story and sometimes because of the audacity of the sentence structures.
Medina Mora weaves history, literature, politics, translation, and much more into a grand chronicle. Amid devastating historical narratives and global tragedy, I still laughed out loud at some parts and startled my little cat, who then also got the zoomies.
Moving between New York City, Mexico City, and Iowa City, a young member of the Mexican elite sees his life splinter in a centuries-spanning debut that blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole.
Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa’s MFA program.
But Sebastián’s life is shaken by the Trump administration’s restrictions on immigrants, his mother’s terminal cancer, the cracks in…
I had the incredible fortune of seeing Alabi read from Against Heaven about a month ago, and what I most remember is the feeling of calm that came over me as they read. It's the kind of calm you get when you're in the presence of incredible beauty—like a waterfall, a mountain, or a vast crowd of protestors—and you realize that this is what life is for.
These poems are dear to me because of the way Alabi wrestles biblical language into meanings that they, and we, need. I wish I could feel all the time the way I feel reading this book.
Kemi Alabi's transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country's central and ordained fictions-those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.
Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of…
A very dear friend suggested this book to me, and for that, they are now a very, very dear friend. I was in the middle of trying to figure out my own unwellness when I started reading, and I think I needed to see the kind of scouring vulnerability that Mailhot put into this memoir.
There are scenes that still play in my mind and lines that haunt me. It made me think about how messy survival is, how ungraceful it is to have to claw your way to stability, and how carefully you can create your own new kind of grace in telling that story.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the Whiting Award for Non-Fiction Selected by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick
'I loved it' Kate Tempest 'Astounding' Roxane Gay 'A sledgehammer' New York Times
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on an Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalised 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.
Charley Byrne isn’t really living. She hunkers down in her apartment above the bookstore she manages, until quirky activist Xander Wallace lures her out of social exile with the prospect of friendship and romance. Charley joins Xander’s circle of diverse friends and thrives, even leaving her comfort zone to join protests in a city struggling with social justice ills.
But the new friendships bring back-to-back betrayals that threaten the bookstore—Charley’s haven—and propel her into a dangerous depression, in a stark reminder that friendship has the power to destroy as well as save lives. Can her friends save the store? And Charley?
"A beautifully crafted story of friendship and self-discovery set amidst the harsh realities of today's world. Superb!" -Eileen O'Finlan, author of Erin's Children
Charley Byrne isn't really living. At age 29, she hunkers down in her apartment above the bookstore she manages, afraid of a 7-year curse. Then quirky activist Xander Wallace lures her out of social exile with the prospect of friendship and romance. Charley joins Xander's circle of friends diverse in their heritage, race, gender and sexual orientation. She thrives, even leaving her comfort zone to join protests in a city struggling with social justice ills.
