Book picks similar to
ULULU (Clown Shrapnel) by Thalia Field
poetry
women
architectures-of-possibility
fiction
The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year
Louise Erdrich - 1995
Moving, memorable… [The Blue Jay’s Dance is] a book that breaks ground.”—Boston Sunday GlobeFifteen years after its initial publication, New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich’s beloved memoir The Blue Jay’s Dance is available for a whole new generation of families to discover. The first major work of nonfiction by the author of such classics as Love Medicine and The Plague of Doves, The Blue Jay’s Dance is, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, an “observant, tender, and honest” meditation on the experience of motherhood.
HERmione
H.D. - 1981
(1886-1961) is what can best be described as a 'find', a posthumous treasure. In writing this book, H.D. returned to a year in her life that was 'peculiarly blighted.' She was in her early twenties--'a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place... Waves to fight against, to fight against alone... 'I am Hermione Gart, a failure'--she cried in her dementia, 'I am Her, Her, Her.' She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life.
Collected Stories
Carson McCullers - 1987
Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature themes: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Here too are "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be "assuredly among the masterpieces of our language." (A Mariner Reissue)
The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories
Stephen Crane - 2006
This is a book about the Civil War, and one Union soldier's struggle with his inner demons as he prepares for, and fights his first battle.
Cassandra at the Wedding
Dorothy Baker - 1962
At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has. First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Terry Tempest Williams - 2012
It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them. “They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.” What did Williams’s mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a voice?”
Take the Cannoli
Sarah Vowell - 2000
Vowell tackles subjects such as identity, politics, religion, art, and history with a biting humor. She searches the streets of Hoboken for traces of the town's favorite son, Frank Sinatra. She goes under cover of heavy makeup in an investigation of goth culture, blasts cannonballs into a hillside on a father-daughter outing, and maps her family's haunted history on a road trip down the Trail of Tears. Vowell has an irresistible voice—caustic and sympathetic, insightful and double-edged—that has attracted a loyal following for her magazine writing and radio monologues on This American Life.
AM/PM
Amelia Gray - 2009
In AM/PM, impish humor and cutting insight are on full display. Readers tour the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrödinger boxes, and volcano love. June wakes up one morning covered in seeds; Leonard falls in love with a chaise lounge; Betty insists everything except flowers are a symbol of her love for her husband; Andrew talks to his house in times of crisis. Written every morning and night for two months, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) recall Donald Barthelme in their whimsy and subtle yet powerful emotions. An intermittent love story as seen through a darkly comic lens, AM/PM mixes poetry and prose, humor and hubris to create a truly original work of fiction.
Felicity
Mary Oliver - 2015
Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes—with joy—the strangeness and wonder of human connection. As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.
Known and Strange Things: Essays
Teju Cole - 2016
The collection will include pre-published essays that have gone viral, like “The White Industrial Savior Complex,” first published in The Atlantic.
Your Glass Head against the Brick Parade of Now Whats
Sam Pink - 2016
The much-anticipated poetry chapbook by Sam Pink, author of the cult favorites Person and I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It, who the Los Angeles Review of Books called, “Simply one of the best, darkest, funniest, wildest, and [most] touching writers we’ve got.”
Stone Arabia
Dana Spiotta - 2011
For her and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family’s first defense against the world’s fragility. Friends die, their mother’s memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities seem to escalate.Dana Spiotta has established herself as a “singularly powerful and provocative writer” (The Boston Globe) whose work is fiercely original. Stone Arabia—riveting, unnerving, and strangely beautiful—reexamines what it means to be an artist and redefines the ties that bind.
Cost
Roxana Robinson - 2008
But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia's son Jack has spiraled into heroin addiction.In an attempt to save him, Julia marshals help from her looseknit clan: elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; removed sister; and combative eldest son. Ultimately, heroin courses through the characters' lives with an impersonal and devastating energy, sweeping the family into a world in which deceit, crime, and fear are part of daily life.
The Complete Butcher's Tales
Rikki Ducornet - 1980
P. Lovecraft, here are nearly sixty unforgettable stories that ignore the confines of space and time to offer, among other times and places: a cabinet of curiosities in contemporary Cairo, an alchemical ceiling in 18th-century Naples, the hallucinatory inner worlds of psychotics, anthropomorphic planets, and an Old West ruled by necromancy.This expanded, revised edition collects the complete short stories of one of the most immaginative writers of our time.
The Southwest Corner
Mildred Walker - 1981
So, with great resourcefulness, she advertised for a companion and eventually staked out a corner of her own—one with a view. Mildred Walker's skill as a storyteller never falters in this portrayal of an elderly woman who won't give up.