Emily Skaja
[isbn]
"Everyone if we're going to talk about love please we have to talk about violence," says the speaker of one of these sharply glittering poems, and everything in Brute seems to pace and snarl around this sentiment. I picked up Skaja's debut collection for its gorgeous cover; I stayed for the thorny self-awareness and the nearly mythological treatment of the end of a relationship. The lines in this book are crunchy, splintered, and... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Marilynne Robinson
[isbn]
This gorgeous and heartbreaking novel RUINED me. Robinson's prose is deliberate and expansive, her characters vividly delineated, the world of her novel achingly familiar and yet full of astonishment.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Ibram X. Kendi
[isbn]
Kendi's book is everything I hoped it would be: instructive, taking the time to define its terms thoroughly and consistently. If you, like me, have questions about how to move from passive "not-racism" to active "anti-racism," this book is a great place to start; how can we hope to dismantle systems we don't fully understand? And even if you think you understand what racism is and how it works, I urge you to read this book anyway — so much of my... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Miranda July
[isbn]
My go-to book for when I'm feeling sad, lonely, or just need to be reminded that the world is a funny, heartbreaking place full of people who are all just trying to figure out how to get from one day to the next. I know the phrase "this book made me feel less alone" gets used an awful lot, but I can truly say this short story collection makes me feel less alone. Miranda July is a gift to this world and No One Belongs Here More Than You... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Maurizio Torchio, Anne Milano Appel
[isbn]
An unflinchingly difficult look at one man's life of crime, imprisonment, and finally, solitary confinement. Solitary is a deeply disturbing and complex exploration of the intersections between crime and punishment, and asks timely questions about the ethics and consequences of isolating human beings from each other. A challenging and rewarding read.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
James Baldwin
[isbn]
Wow, Giovanni's Room really ripped my heart out — and I loved every minute of it! Baldwin's distinctly American story is set in Paris, and the "most romantic city in the world" is an effective backdrop for this devastating exploration of repressed sexuality and squandered love, an exploration that is inspiring in its honest representation of American masculinity, bisexuality, and what's at stake in the battle between fear and love.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Magda Szabo
[isbn]
The Door is an astonishing novel. It left me speechless, reeling, heart between my teeth. Szabo's characters are so real, so lived in, so particular and surprising in the way that everyone is particular and surprising, if only we had the time and the perceptive capacities to see each other clearly, wholly, without judgement or fear. Her story is truly unlike anything I've read. If I were the kind of person to throw around words like... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Joy Williams
[isbn]
Strange, haunting, esoteric, unlike anything I've read before or since — Williams is a gem, and Changeling is not to be overlooked.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Solmaz Sharif
[isbn]
In Look, Solmaz Sharif rewrites the military dictionary to investigate the ways that language may be appropriated and changed, the way definition can be used to obscure meaning rather than to illuminate. One of the most powerfully intelligent and formally fascinating books of poetry I've read, Sharif's debut collection is urgent, asking us to care for the language we use, reminding us that words matter, have consequences, and that it is... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Kate Zambreno
[isbn]
Zambreno's book belongs, in my mind, to a growing collection of memoirs that mourn the loss of complicated, fully human mothers via fragment, memory and meditation, borrowed voices — if you've read and liked Mothers by Rachel Zucker, or Mother Winter by Sofia Shalmiyev, you'd do well to pick Book of Mutter up next.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Yoko Tawada and Susan Bernofsky
[isbn]
Memoirs of a Polar Bear is such a strange, enchanting book. Told from the point of view of three different generations of polar bears, it is both a work of magic and a poignant look at parenting and abandonment, and all the ways those terms can be complicated.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Diana Khoi Nguyen
[isbn]
Nguyen's poems aren't just ABOUT grief — they embody it in every line break, in every disruption of white space, in the way words and images repeat themselves — taking on different nuances and shapes, echoing themselves, shape-shifting. Since I first read it, Ghost Of has never been far from my thoughts — it's haunted and haunting, driven by sound and the absence of sound, painfully human and painstakingly constructed.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Madeline Miller
[isbn]
I devoured this book in two sittings and then immediately began rereading it: it's that good! Immersive, imaginative, tragic, and gorgeously written — Madeline Miller's novel makes you wish you never had to leave the world between its pages.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Carl Phillips
[isbn]
These poems are syntactically slippery; they digress, they double back, they split off in opposite directions, they turn to face themselves, they shimmer, they plunge. Phillips reminds me what I love best about poetry — the tending to mystery, which is at once a task of prolonged attention and also of turning away. These poems ache to the rhythms of love and loneliness, to happiness that is tinged by sadness, to questions that only become more... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Virginia Woolf
[isbn]
Anyone who's read and loved Woolf's more popular work would be remiss not to seek out The Waves, and anyone who has yet to discover her work would do well to start with this highly poetic and wonderfully experimental novel told from various points of view over the course of its characters' lives. If you're the kind of reader who has to underline beautiful sentences, you might want to sharpen your pencil — you'll be savoring paragraph... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Claire Louise Bennett
[isbn]
Few books have shaped my sense of what fiction can be so simply and radically as Bennett's Pond. Quiet yet bold, meditative and strange, sometimes fracturing into poetry, other times lingering long in prose that is driven by interiority, specificity, and a highly self-conscious syntax — I come to this book over and over again to remember that there is nothing more strange or surprising than the ordinary — if one is paying attention.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Kaveh Akbar
[isbn]
This slim volume of poems contains a glimmering galaxy of feelings: Kaveh Akbar chronicles the awfulness of addiction alongside experiences of benevolence, gratitude, and joy. These poems are oriented always in the direction of wonder, curiosity, and bewilderment: be it toward god, the violence and tenacity of the natural world, addiction, the quietly beautiful moments of daily life, or language itself, which becomes a kind of lifeline. Akbar's... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Franz Wright
[isbn]
Almost every one of the poems in this collection had me shouting obscenities and purring in delight, clutching my chest in overwhelm; what more could you want from a book of poems?
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Carmen Maria Machado
[isbn]
Machado reimagines everything from folklore to Law & Order: SVU in ways that are psychologically wrought, fiercely feminist in their concerns, and urgently real. Each of the stories in this collection grabs hold and doesn't let go, but "Especially Heinous" and "Difficult at Parties" are particularly haunting — both dealing with the emotional aftermath of sexual violence and the voicelessness that violence elicits in its victims — a... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Esmé Weijun Wang
[isbn]
This collection of powerful essays not only confronts issues of misrepresentation of mental illness by looking at mainstream media's harmful perpetuation of stereotypes, stereotypes that are driven by pop psychology and a deep fear of the unknown, but it also offers an incredibly personal, meticulous, and dignified look into the writer's own experience living with schizoaffective disorder, an experience that first and foremost impacts the life of... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Franny Choi
[isbn]
Choi's collection is a brilliant exploration of how we choose to recognize or deny other people's humanity. The tension between "hard" and "soft" sciences, between machinery and emotion, art and artifice, the real world and an online one, human and cyborg, was a constant reminder of the way we make hard and fast distinctions between "us" and "them" — and what we lose in doing so. Implicating everything from gendered language to Twitter trolls,... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Jos Charles
[isbn]
This book is astounding in so many capacities — its queering of language, its commitment to ambiguity and opacity, its attentiveness to violence against trans bodies on the one hand and to beauty and wonder on the other. What I love most is the way I find myself having to sound out each and every word in order to really recognize the language I am reading — the alternate spellings of words not only allow for different possible readings of a word,... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Amy Hempel
[isbn]
I loved every story of this concise, precise collection. As the title suggests, Hempel's prose sings — to a harmed and harmful world, to shelter dogs, to cuckolds and climate change and children given away at birth. Not a soothing song, but an aching-loving-necessary one.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Sophia Shalmiyev
[isbn]
Fiercely feminist, deeply meditative, and constantly evocative, I found myself inescapably engrossed in Shalmiyev's Mother Winter from the very first sentence. From her seamless integration of literary influences to her grappling with memory, loss, familial violence, longing, and motherhood, I found every aspect of Shalmiyev's hybrid beast of a memoir deftly handled and beautifully realized.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, Johnny Lorenz
[isbn]
A dazzling novel of surfaces — every sentence enchants. Lispector's protagonist, Lucrecia Neves, becomes a kind of vehicle for exploring the function of looking — the way that looking is not a passive act but a participatory one, an act in which we not only observe the world we live in, but create it. The Besieged City is one of Lispector's more experimental novels, and as far as I'm concerned, one of her best.
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Jay Ponteri
[isbn]
This deeply introspective and meditative memoir is near and dear to my heart: I reread it often, and recommend it to those who aren't afraid to ask difficult questions and sit with the uneasiness of where those questions might lead — deeper into the unknown, unknowing self, perhaps. Wedlocked deals heavily with questions of shame and its consequences: the struggle to be both seen and to remain secretive inside a marriage, the appeal of... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Danielle Sered
[isbn]
Until We Reckon is a powerful examination of the brutality of the U.S. prison system. Sered illustrates through research, rational thought, and her experiences with Common Justice — a racial equity program that offers alternatives to incarceration — the ongoing cost of separating people from their communities, and how our current system punishes and degrades those who have caused harm without actually holding them accountable, making our... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|
Ocean Vuong
[isbn]
Vuong's debut novel is easily my favorite book I've read in the past year. He writes from a place of incomprehensible loss and heartbreak, but also from deep, abounding love for the world. The prose is evocative, lyrical, and I found myself struggling not to underline every sentence as each was a perfect gem I want to revisit again and again. Vuong's novel reads like a love letter: to immigrants, to single, working mothers, to loss, to queerness,... (read more)
Recommended by Darla M.
|