Book picks similar to
Another America / Otra América by Barbara Kingsolver
poetry
barbara-kingsolver
fiction
non-fiction
When I Was a Child I Read Books
Marilynne Robinson - 2012
Her compelling and demanding collection The Death of Adam—in which she reflected on her Presbyterian upbringing, investigated the roots of Midwestern abolitionism, and mounted a memorable defense of Calvinism—is respected as a classic of the genre, praised by Doris Lessing as “a useful antidote to the increasingly crude and slogan-loving culture we inhabit.” In this new collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her work: the role of faith in modern life, the inadequacy of fact, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as a modern rhetorical master.
Rhett's Make-Believe Marriage
Liz Isaacson - 2019
He wants to help a neighbor. Will their fake marriage take them out of the friend zone? Rhett Walker has been in Three Rivers for a year, relying on the Foster sisters next door as he rebuilds his ranch after a tornado hits town. He's closest to Evelyn, and they spend a lot of time together. While he's entertained thoughts of starting a relationship with her, there's always a boyfriend and their friendship between them. Evelyn Foster runs a successful, secretive matchmaking service for the women of Three Rivers. She helps set up situations so cowboys can get out of their own way and see the beautiful woman standing right in front of them. Business is great—until people start to lose confidence in her abilities because her boyfriends all seem to break up with her. To save her business, she'll have to risk her heart. And her pride. She knocks on Rhett's door—the only person she thinks will go along with her crazy plan. Could their make-believe marriage be exactly what they both need to get out of their own way and find a happily-ever-after?
The Portable Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker - 1944
This collection ranges over the verse, stories, essays, and journalism of one of the twentieth century's most quotable authors.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson - 1890
Early posthumously published collections-some of them featuring liberally “edited” versions of the poems-did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson’s bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson’s extraordinary poetic genius.This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems, brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.
Beowulf: A New Translation
Maria Dahvana Headley - 2020
A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment — of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child — but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation; her Beowulf is one for the twenty-first century.
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Camille Paglia - 1992
A collection of twenty of Paglia's out-spoken essays on contemporary issues in America's ongoing cultural debate such as Anita Hill, Robert Mapplethorpe, the beauty myth, and the decline of education in America.
The Witches Are Coming
Lindy West - 2019
From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You’ve got one.In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with dark lies in the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the twenty-first century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in the media she and her peers devoured growing up, a buffet of distortions, delusions, prejudice, and outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics-and that delivered us to this precarious, disorienting moment in history.West writes, “We were just a hair’s breadth from electing America’s first female president to succeed America’s first black president. We weren’t done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form—like the Balrog’s whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, ‘If I can’t have you, no one can’—white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.”We cannot understand how we got here-how the land of the free became Trump’s America—without examining the chasm between who we are and who we think we are, without fact—checking the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. The truth can transform us; there is witchcraft in it. Lindy West turns on the light.
The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump
Rob Sears - 2017
By simply taking the 45th President of the United States' tweets and transcripts, cutting them up and reordering them, Sears unearthed a trove of beautiful verse that was just waiting to be discovered.This groundbreaking collection gives readers a glimpse of Trump's innermost thoughts and feelings on everything from the nature of truth, to what he hates about Lord Sugar. And it will reveal a hitherto hidden Donald, who may surprise and delight both students and critics alike.Now with fifteen all-new poems as we lurch deeper into the Trump presidency, this timely publication also includes Sears' scholarly footnotes and introduction, in which he excavates new critical angles and insights into the President's poetry which the casual reader might initially overlook.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Alix Kates Shulman - 1972
Described by The New York Times as "the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society", Alix Kates Shulman takes a wry look in this sardonic, funny novel at a world of experience long considered taboo or trivial. As relevant and delicious as ever, this frank story of one woman's intellectual and sexual awakening is so superbly written and devastatingly -- sometimes frighteningly -- on target that readers will treasure this beauty for many years to come.
No Land to Light On
Yara Zgheib - 2022
Hadi and Sama are a young Syrian couple flying high on a whirlwind love, dreaming up a life in the country that brought them together. She had come to Boston years before chasing dreams of a bigger life; he’d landed there as a sponsored refugee from a bloody civil war. Now, they are giddily awaiting the birth of their son, a boy whose native language would be freedom and belonging. When Sama is five months pregnant, Hadi’s father dies suddenly in Jordan, the night before his visa appointment at the embassy. Hadi flies back for the funeral, promising his wife that he’ll only be gone for a few days. On the day his flight is due to arrive in Boston, Sama is waiting for him at the airport, eager to bring him back home. But as the minutes and then hours pass, she continues to wait, unaware that Hadi has been stopped at the border and detained for questioning, trapped in a timeless, nightmarish limbo. Worlds apart, suspended between hope and disillusion as hours become days become weeks, Sama and Hadi yearn for a way back to each other, and to the life they’d dreamed up together. But does that life exist anymore, or was it only an illusion? Achingly intimate yet poignantly universal, No Land to Light On is the story of a family caught up in forces beyond their control, fighting for the freedom and home they found in one another.
Milk and Honey
Rupi Kaur - 2014
About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. 'milk and honey' takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy to a City
Xu Xi - 2017
Xu Xi explores her tumultuous relationship with Hong Kong, her personal frustrations with how the city has developed in the recent past, and how these changes have informed her decision not to spend her later years there—a farewell address to the place that has shaped so much of her own identity.
Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick - 1979
An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.
A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid - 1988
Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonization and tourism. The book is a missive to the traveler, whether American or European, who wants to escape the banality and corruption of some large place. Kincaid, eloquent and resolute, reminds us that the Antiguan people, formerly British subjects, are unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own tiny realm—that behind the benevolent Caribbean scenery are human lives, always complex and often fraught with injustice.