Book picks similar to
Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss Selfies by Margaret Christakos
essays
poetry
experimental
canada
Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing
Michelle TeaDexter Flowers - 2006
Fiction is matched in excitement by graphic novel excerpts and personal essays. Certain to become a literary touchstone for a new generation of writers and readers, Baby Remember My Name speaks to the broad range of queer girl experiences in work that is brave, irreverent, funny, sensitive, and hot.
Never Drank the Kool-Aid
Touré - 2005
He has profiled Eminem, 50 Cent, and Alicia Keys for the cover of Rolling Stone. He's played high-stakes poker with Jay-Z and basketball with Prince and Wynton Marsalis. In Touré's world, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. sits beside Condoleezza Rice who sits beside hip-hop pioneer Tupac Shakur, and all of them are fascinating company.Never Drank the Kool-Aid is the chronicle of Touré's unparalleled journey through the American funhouse called pop culture. Its rooms are filled with creative, arrogant, kind, ordinary, and extraordinary people, most of whom happen to be famous. It is Touré's gift to be able to see through the artifice of their world and understand the genuine motivations behind their achievements--to see who they truly are as people. This is a searingly funny, surprisingly unguarded, and deeply insightful look at a world few of us comprehend.
Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century
Jenny Minton QuigleyLauren Groff - 2021
More than sixty years later, it is more important than ever to discuss this complex novel. Now, having commissioned original contributions by Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Erika Sánchez, Sloane Crosley, Andre Dubus III, Ian Frazier, Lauren Groff, Stacy Schiff, Emily Mortimer, Victor LaValle, and many more, Jenny Minton Quigley examines how we read Lolita today.Lolita both exists in and exemplifies many of the issues at the forefront of our current national discourse: art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma. Jenny, the daughter of Walter J. Minton, who published Lolita at G. P. Putnam's Sons after it had been rejected by five other American publishers, brings a unique vantage point to this conversation. In her introduction she tells the amazing true story of the original publication, a risk Walter took despite the very real possibility that he could be prosecuted and go to jail (and which, by the way, included Walter's daring flight through a storm to meet Nabokov and strike the deal).Lolita in the Afterlife is a riveting examination of the bright and dark spell that Nabokov's indelible novel left and still leaves on the cultural landscape. As these prominent writers of the twenty-first century attest, Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova.
Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)
Lorna Crozier - 2020
I was so happy for him, and I've continued to be every time an honour comes his way, but I knew if I didn't grow, if I remained merely someone who showed potential, we wouldn't last. I swore I wouldn't play the dutiful wife, cheerleader, and muse of the great male writer, and he didn't envision a partner like that. We aspired to flourish together and thrive in words and books and gardens.When Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane met at a poetry workshop in 1976, they had no idea that they would go on to write more than forty books between them, balancing their careers with their devotion to each other, and to their beloved cats, for decades. Then, in January 2017, their life together changed unexpectedly when Patrick became seriously ill. Despite tests and the opinions of many specialists, doctors remained baffled. There was no diagnosis and no effective treatment plan. The illness devastated them both.During this time, Lorna turned to her writing as a way of making sense of her grief and for consolation. She revisited her poems, tracing her own path as a poet along with the evolution of her relationship with Patrick. The result is an intimate and intensely moving memoir about the difficulties and joys of creating a life with someone and the risks and immense rewards of partnership. At once a spirited account of the past and a poignant reckoning with the present, it is, above all, an extraordinary and unforgettable love story.Told with unflinching honesty and fierce tenderness, Through the Garden is a candid, clear-eyed portrait of a long partnership and an acknowledgement, a tribute, and a gift.
Handsome
Holly Lorka - 2020
She had questions: Was she a monster? Would she ever be able to grow sideburns? And most importantly, where was her penis?The problem was, it was the 1970s, so there were no answers yet.Here, Lorka tells the story—by turns hilarious and poignant—of her romp through the first fifty years of her life searching for sex, love, acceptance, and answers to her questions. With a sharp wit, endearing innocence, and indelible sense of optimism, she struggles through the awkward years (spoiler: that’s all of them) and discovers that what she thought were mistakes are actually powerful tools to launch her into a magical—and ridiculous—life.Oh, and she discovers that she can buy a penis at the store, too.
The Yellow Leaves: A Miscellany
Frederick Buechner - 2000
In a myriad of commonplace activities, he finds the presence of the divine, and he elegantly describes these persons, events, and observations, nimbly transporting readers into these realities. With his masterly crafted prose, Buechner edifies, inspires, and offers a timeless model for approaching our human experience.
The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir
Anna Joy Springer - 2011
She later sang with The Gr'ups and Cypher in the Snow, and toured with Sister Spit, a raucous all-woman group of writers headed by Michelle Tea.The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts Springer's relationship with [Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she'd tested positive for HIV. Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.
We Two Alone: Stories
Jack Wang - 2020
A young laundry boy risks his life, pretending to be a girl to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple is caught in when Shanghai is succumbs to violence during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A family struggles to buy a home in South Africa in the early years of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive while yearning to reconcile with his estranged wife.From the vulnerable and disenfranchised to the educated and privileged, the characters in this extraordinary collection embody the diversity of the Chinese diaspora past and present. In these deeply affecting stories, Jack Wang subverts expectations as he captures the hope, pain, and sacrifices of the millions who journey into the unknown to create better lives, and explores the shifting boundaries of morality, the intimacies and failings of love, and the choices circumstances force us to make.
The Russländer
Sandra Birdsell - 2001
Here they lived in a world bounded by the prosperity of their landlords and by the poverty and disgruntlement of the Russian workers who toil on the estate. But in the wake of the First World War, the tensions engulfing the country begin to intrude on the community, leading to an unspeakable act of violence. In the aftermath of that violence, and in the difficult years that follow, Katya tries to come to terms with the terrible events that befell her and her family. In lucid, spellbinding prose, Birdsell vividly evokes time and place, and the unease that existed in a country on the brink of revolutionary change. The Russländer is a powerful and moving story of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times.
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse
Lonely Christopher - 2011
Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, with an unyielding imagination in the lovely/ugly architecture of his stories.Lonely Christopher is the author of several poetry chapbooks and is a contributor to the poetry volume Into (Seven Circles Press). His plays have been published, staged in New York City and internationally, and released in Mandarin translation. His fiction received Pratt Institute's 2009 Thesis Award. He is a founding member of the small press The Corresponding Society and an editor of its biannual journal Correspondence. He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
All Together Now: A Newfoundlander's Light Tales for Heavy Times
Alan Doyle - 2020
Is there a more sociable province than Newfoundland and Labrador? Or anywhere in Canada with a greater reputation for coming to the rescue of those in need?At this time of Covid, singer, songwriter and bestselling author Alan Doyle is feeling everyone's pain. Off the road and spending more days at home than he has since he was a child hawking cod tongues on the wharfs of Petty Harbour, he misses the crowds and companionship of performing across the country and beyond. But most of all he misses the cheery clamour of pubs in his hometown, where one yarn follows another so quickly you have to be as ready as an Olympian at the start line to get your tale in before someone is well into theirs already. We're all experiencing our own version of that deprivation, and Alan, one of Newfoundland's finest storytellers, wants to offer a little balm.All Together Now is a gathering in book form--a virtual Newfoundland pub. There are adventures in foreign lands, including an apparently filthy singalong in Polish (well, he would have sung along if he'd understood the language), a real-life ghost story involving an elderly neighbour, a red convertible and a clown horn, a potted history of his social drinking, and heartwarming reminiscences from another past world, childhood--all designed to put a smile on the faces of the isolated-addled.Alan Doyle has never been in better form--nor more welcome. As he says about this troubling time: We get through it. We do what has to be done. Then, we celebrate. With the best of them.
Law and Disorder: Confessions of a Pupil Barrister
Tim Kevan - 2010
He has just one year to win, by foul means or fair, the sought-after prize of a tenancy in chambers. Competition is fierce, but, armed with a copy of Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War', BabyBarista launches a no-holds barred fight to the death to claim the prize.
100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism
Chavisa Woods - 2019
From gender-based discrimination in work places, to unsolicited groping from strangers in public, to the attempted assaults on herself and the assaults of close friends, Woods uses personal stories to prove that sexual violence and discrimination never just happen once, but that it is a consistent battle women and woman aligned people face every day. "All my life, when I've tried to talk to men about sexism, my main obstacle has just been trying to convince them it exists, and that it is something that actually has a deep and near constant impact on my life. When I talk to most women, though, [. . .] there is immediate understanding that the incidents we are discussing are part of an endless stream of sexist experiences."100 Things is powerful in its straightforwardness, demonstrating how often women are forced to silently endure sexism and harassment and how men are encouraged to feel entitled to another person's space and body. Woods reveals that no age, orientation, time, or place helps prevent sexual violence and that a more in depth conversation is needed to bring it to an end.
Whip Smart: A Memoir
Melissa Febos - 2010
In poetic, nuanced prose she charts how unchecked risk-taking eventually gave way to a course of self-destruction. But as she recounts crossing over the very boundaries that she set for her own safety, she never plays the victim. In fact, the glory of this memoir is Melissa’s ability to illuminate the strange and powerful truths that she learned as she found her way out of a hell of her own making. Rest assured; the reader will emerge from the journey more or less unscathed.
How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human
Melanie Challenger - 2020
But we are also an animal that does not think it is an animal. How well do we really know ourselves?How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Challenger's book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the way we distance ourselves from other species. We travel from the origin of homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet, and on to the futures of AI and human-machine interface. Challenger examines how technology influences our sense of our own animal nature and our relationship with other species with whom we share this fragile planet.That we are separated from our own animality is a delusion, according to Challenger. Blending nature writing, history, and moral philosophy, How to Be Animal is both a fascinating reappraisal of what it means to be human, and a robust defense of what it means to be an animal.