Staff Picks

Love Songs is an unapologetically Black, feminist (womanist) novel; it is also an American novel. Ailey Pearl Garfield is a scholar, a feminist, a survivor of childhood sexual trauma, an historian, a girl, is of Indigenous, white, and Black heritage, and has impeccable home training. Spending the majority of this book's 879 pages with her is so delightful. And, though I cried several times during this book, I also cried because it was over. This gift of a book is pedagogical. It helped me to see the flaws in racial assumptions that I didn't even know I possessed. I can't wait to read this one again.

 

Publisher's description: To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family's past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.

 

In sparse but rich prose, Tsushima evokes unique flavors and seasons of light. Outside lightness, coming into the apartment through the windows on all four sides, plays against the darkness growing within the newly single mother at the center of the story. Poetic and dazzling.

 

Publisher description:
Follows a year in the life of a recently divorced woman in Tokyo who struggles to care for her young daughter while confronting growing inner darkness, painful losses and the changes she is forced to make to survive.

 

I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone, but if you're into ambiguity, transgressive sexuality, and a plot that doesn't fully resolve, read on. Dhalgren is a wonderfully strange book with amazing worldbuilding and eclectic characters. I read it a few years ago and think of it almost weekly.

 

Publisher's description:

In Bellona, reality has come unglued, and a mad civilization takes root A young half-Native American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellona-only something is wrong there...In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound. So begins Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany's masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction could mean. A labyrinth of a novel, it raises questions about race, sexuality, identity, and art, but gives no easy answers, in a city that reshapes itself with each step you take...

 

Comyns' writing is utterly unique and so good, and fortunately, much of her work has recently been rediscovered and republished. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is quirky, sharp-witted, and darkly funny, all with a fairytale ending. I want to read everything she has written.

 

Publisher's description: I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes her morning sickness to a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and in any case, the money Sophia earns at her occasional modeling gigs are not enough to make up for her husband's lack of interest in keeping the heat on. Predictably, the marriage begins to falter; not so predictably, Sophia's optimistic guilelessness is the very thing responsible for turning her life around

 

Wilson skillfully discusses the difficult subjects of land dispossession and contemporary farming, family separation and legacy, and Dakota and settler lifeways through food, the growing of and caring for seeds. This book is so warm hearted and eventually full of connection. It's sad and beautiful.

 

Publisher's description:

One snowy winter's day, Rosalie Iron Wing returns to the home from which she was taken as a child. Orphan, widow, and mother--journalist and gardener--Rosalie has spent the previous two decades watching as her white husband's family farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, she finally begins to confront the past and embrace the future--and, in the process, learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron, women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss.

 

Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a beautiful exploration of queer historiography. In an interpersonal use of the archive, Shapland walks the reader through her discovery of Carson McCullers within the documents Carson has left behind. While writing on Carson's life, Shapland simultaneously is documenting her life in the process. Shapland delicately explores the conflict between traditional historiography and queerness within the treatment of the archive, exploring new ways a historian can write history and treat queerness.

 

Publisher's description:

While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie—letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters' language—but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers's life: she wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at McCullers's childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives McCullers's days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and McCullers, she sees the way McCullers's story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable life, but about the way we tell queer love stories. In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of America's most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

 

I found A Tale for the Time Being through unusual circumstances, much like Ruth finds Noa's diary on the Pacific Northwest shore; so cool. The quantum storyline, vivid ecological setting and playful incorporation of Zen creates a shimmering matrix through which these endearing characters gleam.

 

Publisher's description:

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

 

If you have read anything by Duras, chances are it's The Lover, a slim book set in prewar Indochina (colonial Saigon) where Duras spent her childhood. Though The Lover is about an affair between an adolescent French girl and a Chinese man, it was written when Duras was 70 years old. The sensuous and despairing infatuation and brutal shifts of power between the lovers echo many issues of modern colonialism. The North China Lover is a fuller retelling of this same story. It is written in the luminous, confident, and sparse style for which Duras is known and revered.

 

Publisher's description

Far more daring and truthful than any of her other novels, The North China Lover is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of Duras's adolescence that shaped her most famous work. Initially conceived as notes toward a screenplay for The Lover, this later novel, written toward the end of her life, emphasizes the tougher aspects of her youth in Indochina and possesses the intimate feel of a documentary.

Both shocking and enthralling, the story Duras tells is so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that it . . . lingers like a strong perfume (Publishers Weekly). Hailed by the French critics as a return to the Duras of the great books and the great days, it is a mature and complex rendering of a formative period in the author's life.

 

Find The North China Lover on our online catalog

If you love a book with a punk anti-hero and a sharp analysis of gender and feminism thrown in, Nevada is a must read. Maria and James are on opposites sides of transitioning, but their stories intersect in a surprising and anti-climactic way. Hooray for the reissue of this cult classic!

 

Publisher description:

Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip. Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She's in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn't inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she's trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James's savior--or his downfall. One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie's Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist.