Sean Michaels
[isbn]
I'm honestly tired of hearing or thinking about AI, but this book about an aging, accomplished poet (modeled after Marianne Moore, tricorne hat and all) being asked to co-write a poem with an AI engineered to write poems enthralled me. What is the inherent power of language and what of art relies on the fact of an artist, a human being who has lived a real human life and creates with intention? This book takes up these huge questions to... (read more)
Recommended by Claire A.
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Lydia Davis
[isbn]
Lydia Davis's stories absolutely hum with strange beauty — contemplative, inventive, confident in their own singular power. This is the kind of book I want to throw across the room for being too good and also hug to my heart for existing. And it's only available at libraries and independent bookstores like Powell's!!
Recommended by Claire A.
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Lauren Groff
[isbn]
I read this book in three delirious days and was so frustrated whenever I had to do anything other than read it! Absolutely stunning — on its surface an adventure, at its beating heart a story of human limitation and fire to survive, of how and why one claims a home, a name, a self, of the divine, and so much more.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Katie Henry
[isbn]
Fun, funny, engaging, and uplifting. You'll root for Gideon as he tries to solve two mysteries — one a classic, noir-inspired whodunnit and one the mystery of how to be a person in the world.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Mary Doria Russell
[isbn]
This book absolutely dazzled me, taking a common sci-fi premise — humanity finally makes contact with alien life — and making it feel completely new. A team of scientists, anthropologists, and linguists journeys into space to meet the newly discovered extraterrestial culture. Their mission is funded by the Jesuits, but there are a range of religious beliefs, and lack thereof, among them. The vision of what the alien world would be like is... (read more)
Recommended by Claire A.
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Rebecca Dinerstein Knight
[isbn]
This is one of most dazzling, weirdest, boldest books I've ever read and I'm so glad it exists. Our narrator recently left a PhD program in botany, studying poisons and their antidotes, and now spends her time obsessing over the people in her insular cohort, especially her charismatic advisor Joan, and filling her apartment with plants on which to conduct her rogue research. Dark academia, obsessive cathexis, weird love... (read more)
Recommended by Claire A.
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Angeline Boulley
[isbn]
This is a powerful story about an eighteen-year-old biracial Native American woman who confronts deep pain and corruption in her community, navigating her own sense of self and what it means to belong to a history, a lineage, to your people, and yourself. I couldn't put it down.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Esmé Weijun Wang
[isbn]
This powerful, beautiful book speaks truth to the/a reality of mental illness. Combining keen research with the intimacy of her experience as a person with schizoaffective disorder, Esme Weijun Wang gives a courageous, nuanced, stunning voice to a still highly stigmatized illness.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Thi Bui
[isbn]
This deeply moving, graphic-novel memoir is nuanced, brave, and beautifully illustrated, a feat of visual storytelling. Intimate and powerful, Thi Bui's exploration of her family's experiences as refugees from the Vietnam War asks complex questions and refuses easy answers. Mesmerizing.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Moniquill Blackgoose
[isbn]
I can't stop talking/YELLING about this book! Set in the 1800s in an alternate North America colonized by Vikings, a world where dragons can be beasts of war or lifelong companions sacred to communities, it follows a young Indigenous woman as she and her dragon try to navigate a colonizer-run school for dragoneering. Alternate history, a magic system deeply informed by science and spirituality, a coming-of-age story that is also a coming to... (read more)
Recommended by Claire A.
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Morgan Parker
[isbn]
This book is so heartening, hilarious, and real. It grapples honestly with the suffocating feeling of not being seen for who you are and with the freedom of becoming yourself through accumulation of little moments of rightness — songs, friends, protests, real conversations, perfect Saturday nights.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Mackenzi Lee
[isbn]
This book is SO much fun — narrated by a lovable, bisexual disaster, it's full of action, adventure, historical intrigue, queer romance, pirates, alchemy, and more. Fast-paced and hard to put down!
Recommended by Claire A.
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Nicola Griffith
[isbn]
A fascinating and lush retelling of Arthurian legend that feels as true and strange, as lofty and immediate, as queer (in every sense of the word) as a myth should be — I devoured this book and it haunted me wonderfully.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Julia Phillips
[isbn]
Both a mystery and lyrical, character-driven exploration of a tightly-knit community on the remote Siberian peninsula Kamchatka. Each chapter is told from a different perspective — I loved how this illuminates not only the mystery of who committed the crime the book revolves around, but the mysteries of the bonds of family, community, nation, and time.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
[isbn]
It's such an important thing when a book affirms that kids are not always born into the families they deserve and not always given life experiences they can handle. Fighting Words is an incredibly compassionate and powerful story, leavened with humor and emotional warmth, of ten-year-old Della and her sixteen-year-old sister building a new life and home after trauma. I'm so glad this book is in the world.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Daniel Nayeri
[isbn]
A hilarious and heartwarming autobiographical novel about a preteen boy from Iran growing up in 1980s Oklahoma and making sense of who he is, where he's from, and who he belongs to. I love how well this book combines the universal absurdity of middle school with the specific stories of Daniel's experiences as a refugee and his family's and ancestors' history in Iran. Powerful, unique, and unputdownable!
Recommended by Claire A.
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Adrienne Rich
[isbn]
Rich's poems make me feel so seen, so enlivened, so empowered to pay better attention to the world and my place in it. They are simultaneously lush and spare — exact — and so lucid both in terms of their clear-eyed perception and the brilliant light they give to gender, sexuality, power, and so much else. Winner of the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry, this is a collection that rewards rereading year after year.
Recommended by Claire A.
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Pablo Neruda
[isbn]
This is a wonderful introduction to and a beautiful distillation of the work of Nobel Prize–winning poet Pablo Neruda. His poems express such loving, honest, awestruck attention to the world with dizzying beauty and powerful clarity of vision. This book spans forty years of Neruda's career and features translations by multiple scholars and poets, which provides a really interesting sense of his poetics. I love that this edition includes the... (read more)
Recommended by Claire A.
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Elizabeth Kostova
[isbn]
This literary mystery is a nested puzzle-box that keeps opening and opening. I love what a slow burn it is and how seriously it takes its premise — what if a real historian really inherited an ancient book that had led to ruin for its previous owners? The seemingly fantastical elements are grounded in real history. Deeply creepy, deeply satisfying.
Recommended by Claire A.
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