Mircea Cartarescu and Sean Cotter
[isbn]
You might not think you need a 630-page Romanian surrealist novel to take over your life for a month, but I'm here to encourage the incineration of your to-read list in favor of this sui generis trip through the underbelly of 1970s/80s Romania. From the childhood visions of a schoolteacher with a predilection for termites and dreams of revelation, to meandering notes on philosophy, undecipherable manuscripts, and the fourth dimension, this is a... (read more)
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Ben Lerner
[isbn]
For poets who hesitate to call themselves poets, this essay is a reminder of the futility of our beloved form. Lerner incisively guides the reader through transcendent and terrible poems, all of which are failures of a different kind, only some of which succeed by virtue of their failure. I'm partial to Lerner's idea that every poet harbors some resentment towards poetry, and every poetry hater masks a certain envy, maybe even a curiosity, of... (read more)
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Roberto Bolaño
[isbn]
Deliriously good. A kaleidoscopic vision of 1970s Mexico City whose heart lies with its young poets. Rich in character and circumstance, with fibrous, idiosyncratic narratives that slither madly and swallow themselves. At once a bildungsroman, a road novel, a collection of worldclass short stories, a book of literary criticism, and a thinly veiled autobiography, The Savage Detectives effortlessly goes where few novels have dared.
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring
[isbn]
As someone with no knowledge of Charles Manson beyond his caricatured depictions in pop culture, this book blew open my notion of sixties counterculture and left me with an equal number of questions and answers regarding the dominant narrative of its decline. Follow Tom O'Neill's ambitious project from its genesis as a magazine article about the Manson murders into Chaos: an investigative vortex exposing the darkest recesses of the... (read more)
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Marguerite Duras
[isbn]
One of the most elegant and devastating novels in existence. There is no wisdom like the wisdom of a young girl determined to unwind life's mysteries on her own terms.
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Marlen Haushofer and Shaun Whiteside
[isbn]
A woman is plunged into the bitter heart of isolation after a mysterious event separates her from the whole of humanity. It's not simply the imaginative premise, the beautiful depictions of care amongst animals, or the political underpinnings of this novel that make it one of the most important and criminally unrecognized books of the 20th century, but some ineffable linguistic quality particular to the experience of a woman (and mother) trying... (read more)
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Sappho, Anne Carson
[isbn]
Of Sappho's fabled nine books of lyrics, only one poem remains intact. The rest are punctuated by blank spaces, words, and phrases sacrificed to time. Many translators have attempted to fill these absences with language; Carson prefers to honor the scraps. Her translation is brilliant and incisive, each word a precious jewel magnified by empty space. Missing words are signified by brackets, an invitation for the reader to join in the iterative... (read more)
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Benjamin Labatut
[isbn]
Spellbinding, illuminating, imaginative. The sort of book that imbues the everyday with a wash of light. Labatut defies genre, taking creative liberties in charting the relationship between scientific discovery, madness, and mutually assured destruction. Sure to keep you up at night, perhaps in the garden, pondering the existence of black holes while replicating them in the earth below...
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Roland Barthes, Richard Howard
[isbn]
Before Anne Carson wrote Eros, the Bittersweet, Barthes set to paper this treasure trove of musings on the nature of being in love. Told in fragments or "figures" (the figure is the lover at work), laden with references to philosophers, artists, strangers, and friends, this book promises to, in equal parts, delight and annihilate.
Recommended by Nadia N.
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Izumi Suzuki, Polly Barton, Sam Bett
[isbn]
Terminal Boredom: what phrase could better describe the tepid yet frenetic aura of modern life? This collection, originally written in the 1980s and newly available in English, fizzles with dark, punky magnetism. The reader is seamlessly initiated into Suzuki's universe of fantastical queer landscapes, green-haired aliens, and societies in which people are cryogenically frozen into the dreams of the living as a form of population... (read more)
Recommended by Nadia N.
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