Book picks similar to
Burning Questions: A Novel by Alix Kates Shulman
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Two Serious Ladies
Jane Bowles - 1943
Copperfield at a party. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience. Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, 'Two Serious Ladies' is a daring, original work that defies analysis.
After Claude
Iris Owens - 1973
Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. She will stay and exact revenge—or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Once moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Girlfriends patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives. In a surprise twist, she finds a savior at New York's Chelsea Hotel.
Ice
Anna Kavan - 1967
The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair. Acclaimed upon its 1967 publication as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.
My Dream of You
Nuala O'Faolain - 2001
A globetrotting Irish travel writer, Kathleen de Burca is used to living--and loving--on the run. On the brink of fifty, she decides to leave her job and rethink her life. Intrigued by a divorce case dating back to the days of the Potato Famine, she tries hand at writing about it. The case, called "The Talbot Affair," detailed the clandestine liaison between the wife of a British landlord and an Irish servant in Ireland in the 1850s. After a bitter thirty-year absence, Kathleen returns to Ireland, the land of her troubled childhood and turbulent heritage, in search of answers to her questions about desire and lasting love.
Dogs at the Perimeter
Madeleine Thien - 2011
Three decades later, Janie has relocated to Montreal, although the scars of her past remain visible. After abandoning her husband and son and taking refuge in the home of her friend, the scientist Hiroji Matsui, Janie and Hiroji find solace in their shared grief and pain—until Hiroji’s disappearance opens old wounds and Janie finds that she must struggle to find grace in a world overshadowed by the sorrows of her past.Beautifully realized, deeply affecting, Dogs at the Perimeter evokes the injustice of tyranny through the eyes of a young girl and draws a remarkable map of the mind’s battle with memory, loss, and the horrors of war. It confirms Madeleine Thien as one of the most gifted and powerful novelists writing today.
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
John Cleland - 1748
She soon escapes her fate for the loving arms of a wealthy young man, but misadventure and fate conspire to keep her from domestic bliss. Instead, Fanny discovers that sex need not be just for love; that it can be had for pleasure. She then sets out to explore those pleasures in as wide a variety as she can. With old men and young, and women as well; in positions of power, and situations where she has none; either watching or participating, Fanny's journey through the realms of sexual pleasure is a literary tour-de-force.