Book picks similar to
Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley
poetry
hybrid
novels
fiction
Stilettos & Stubble
Amanda Egan - 2012
Criticised by her outwardly perfect mother, dearly loved by her father, she’s the ‘Queen of Low Self-Esteem’. Finding herself suddenly immersed in a world of glitz and glamour, where nothing is quite as it seems, will she finally realise ... ... ‘It’s what’s inside that counts’?
The To Sound
Eric Baus - 2004
Cassiopeia. A sister. A Marco Polo. A somnambulist. A documentary on the voyages of Columbus. A cartographer. Star charts. Young intellectuals in black robes. Jean-Michel Basquiat. More birds and still more birds. A mathematician. All these things appear in The To Sound’s beautifully warped cosmology. This is a stunning book that builds its own world, a world of ambiguous relations and loaded words; a lyrical world that explores the unstated connections between things. . . ."
Graveyard Special (Mill City 1)
James Lileks - 2012
One waiter, one customer. The overnight fry cook rambles up to the pie case to take his nightly hit of dessert-topping propellant. It’s not a complete surprise when he falls to the floor; the stuff gives him the spins. That’s the point. It’s a bad moment for the boss to arrive, though. It’s worse when the cook turns out to be dead - from a bullet no one heard. For the waiter, it’s the start of the the worst few months of his life, and before it’s done he’ll be neck-deep in drug deals, romances with a faithless minx and an unintelligible Russian teacher - and a plot by campus radicals to blow something big. It’s 1980, after all. No shortage of things to deplore. They’re not too concerned with disco, though; that seems to be on the way out. “Graveyard Special” is another humorous mystery by the author of “Falling Up the Stairs,” and the first in a series of interconnected mysteries that span six decades.
Swimming Home
Deborah Levy - 2011
Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera comes loose at the seams. Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel
Gayle Honeyman - 2018
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
We Were Young
Fortesa Latifi - 2015
We Were Young explores the heartbreaks, hangovers, and hang ups associated with growing up.
Renascence and Other Poems
Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1917
Vincent Millay (1892–1950) have been long admired for the lyric beauty that is especially characteristic of her early works. "Renascence," the first of her poems to bring her public acclaim, was written when she was nineteen. Now one of the best-known American poems, it is a fervent and moving account of spiritual rebirth.In 1917, "Renascence" was incorporated into her first volume of poetry, which is reprinted here, complete and unabridged, from the original edition. The 23 works in this first volume are fired with the romantic and independent spirit of youth that Edna St. Vincent Millay came to personify. In addition to "Renascence," this volume includes 16 other early lyric poems — "Interim," "Sorrow," "Ashes of Life," "Three Songs of Shattering," "The Dream," "When the Year Grows Old," and others, including six sonnets, to which Millay brought great distinction throughout her career.
We Are The Wolf
Toby Neighbors - 2017
With human colonies on 45 worlds and space stations in over a hundred different systems, serving with the elite Force Recon branch of the Extra Solar Defense Force is the most prestigious career anyone could hope for. Warfare is almost exclusively the domain of remotely operated drones, but when things go wrong, in space or on a colony world, the Off World Recon gets the call and they always come prepared. Dean is a young man with plenty of prospects ahead of him, but when he gets selected for the most coveted job in the world, he jumps at the chance. Little does he know the rigors of training to become an elite Force Recon specialist or the dangers waiting for him in off-world tours of duty that sometimes last for years on end, but it’s always been his dream to charge into the unknown with a band of brothers, facing any threat to humanity’s expansion across the galaxy and etching his name into the annals of history. The only question is does he have what it takes to stand between the threats of the galaxy and the rest of the human race? We Are the Wolf is the first book in an exciting new military space opera that will have you riveted from the very first page. Toby Neighbors reimagines what service in a militarized space force would look like and takes his readers on a roller coaster ride that introduces them to a whole new world of adventure. From training across the globe to missions in outer space, We Are the Wolf will capture your imagination and have you cheering for more.
Meditations in an Emergency
Frank O'Hara - 1957
O'Hara’s untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, "the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.” This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O'Hara’s conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, "you just go on your nerve.”
Saguaro: The Life & Adventures of Bobby Allen Bird
Carson Mell - 2006
Sons of Africa
Jeffrey Whittam - 2011
Settler wagons in their hundreds left the safety of the Cape Colony; generations on, their descendents are still fighting to keep a land they love...... "For that smallest of moments the two men stared at each other. Between them flew a hundred years, a thousand reasons. Ancient prophecies, the creak of wagons over rough ground and a woman's yearning for infinite horizons, the strengthening of one man's belief and the imminent death of another."From Rhodesia's final years, the clock turns back to the windswept, dusty streets of Kimberley’s infamous diamond fields. For Catherine Goddard and her son, Mathew, their decision to cross the Limpopo as part of a settler wagon train is one borne of desperation and a boy's need to be reunited with his father. For three months their ox-drawn trek wagon stands as their only defence against the African wilderness and the bloodlust of Lobengula Khumalo’s warring impis.Throughout the passage of a hundred years, three racially divided families are fatefully drawn together. Dynasties are shaped and smashed by kings, warrior chiefs and the indomitable lust for power and wealth by men like Cecil Rhodes and the perpetrators of Zimbabwe’s chaotic new order.From the latter part of the nineteenth century, Sons of Africa runs inexorably to the demise of Rhodesia’s white minority rule and the emergence of the new Zimbabwe.
The Far Mosque
Kazim Ali - 2005
Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.
Greed
Ai - 1993
Beginning with "Riot Act," a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, Ai explored racial and sexual politics through the voices of diverse characters.
Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women
Maya Angelou - 1995
They celebrate women with a majesty that has inspired and touched the hearts of millions.These memorable poems have been reset and bound in a beautiful edition--a gift to keep and to give.
Circles on the Water: Selected Poems
Marge Piercy - 1982
More than 150 poems from her seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982.