Pillow Thoughts


Courtney Peppernell - 2016
    It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.

SWIM


Eric C. Wat - 2019
    For years, he's been able to meet the increasing demands from his aging immigrant parents, while hiding his crystal meth use every other weekend. One Friday night, as he's passed out from a drug binge, he misses thirty-eight phone calls from his father, detailing first the collapse and eventually the death of his mother. Carson has always been close to his mother; he was the only person she confided in when his father had a one-night affair with her younger sister twenty years ago. For the following two weeks, he throws himself into the preparation of his mother's funeral, juggling between temptations and obligations. Sometimes slipping into relapse, his efforts are thwarted by a stoic father who is impractical and unable to take care of himself, a grandmother suffering dementia, a sister with a failing marriage, and a young niece with unknown trauma that can be triggered by the sound of running water. He tries to find support from his ex, Jeremy. Now clean and sober, Jeremy rebuffs him. As Carson assumes his mother's caregiving role, her secret resurfaces and now haunts him alone. Will this tragedy plunge him deeper into his abuse or finally rouse him from his addiction stupor?

Chouette


Claire Oshetsky - 2021
    Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.”When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother.Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.

Apathy and Other Small Victories


Paul Neilan - 2006
    Usually on a Greyhound bus, right before his life falls apart again. Just like he planned. But this time it's complicated: there's a sadistic corporate climber who thinks she's his girlfriend, a rent-subsidized affair with his landlord's wife, and the bizarrely appealing deaf assistant to Shane's cosmically unstable dentist. When one of the women is murdered, and Shane is the only suspect who doesn't care enough to act like he didn't do it, the question becomes just how he'll clear the good name he never had and doesn't particularly want: his own.

A Day and a Night and a Day


Glen Duncan - 2009
    He is an American. His torturer will stop at nothing to extract the information he requires. He, too, is an American.A Day and a Night and a Day is a Grand Inquisition for the twenty-first century, in which love, loyalty, reason, and truth are on trial, and morality hangs in the balance. It is the story of Augustus Rose, an unlikely operative in a terrorist network, and his interrogator, Harper, a ruthless ambassador for the darkest forces at work in our times.Beyond the law and without hope of escape or reprieve, Augustus endures an emotional and physical assault that brings his whole life under brutal scrutiny: his race, religion, politics, and past, the people he has loved, and the few he is still desperate to protect. Alone and certain of death, Augustus raises the only shield he has: memory.He remembers his outcast Euro-American mother, Juliet, whose erratic love was refuge from the unforgiving streets of Harlem in the 1950s; he recalls the strange solace of Elise Merkete, the ravaged vigilante who recruited him into the ranks of her underground army; he relives the cool touch of the young Spanish prostitute, In�s, perhaps the last female tenderness he's ever likely to know.Outshining them all is the memory of Selina, a stunning, troubled, and rebellious white New York aristocrat. Their epic, taboo love affair, begun in 1960s Manhattan, would yield a lifetime's worth of passion, heartbreak, and wanderlust, leading Augustus from Harlem to Greenwich Village, from El Salvador to Barcelona, from Morocco to a bleak British island where death seems his only companion.Dramatic, far-reaching, and beautifully written, A Day and a Night and a Day is both a piercing love story and a timely, harrowing evaluation of the shape the Western world is taking.

Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners


Sigmund Freud - 1920
    Because the information in the unconscious is in an unruly and often disturbing form, a "censor" in the preconscious will not allow it to pass unaltered into the conscious. During dreams, the preconscious is more lax in this duty than in waking hours, but is still attentive: as such, the unconscious must distort and warp the meaning of its information to make it through the censorship. As such, images in dreams are often not what they appear to be, according to Freud, and need deeper interpretation if they are to inform on the structures of the unconscious.

Amy, My Daughter


Mitch Winehouse - 2012
    A legion of dedicated fans had lost their idol; a devastated family had lost their Amy. With this difficult news came an outpouring of love and grief from her fans, along with troubling questions about Amy's very public struggles with drugs and alcohol, as people tried to understand how such a soulful singer had been silenced so young.Now, in this intimate and tender account, her father and confidant, Mitch, offers an inside view of Amy's life as she lived it, putting to rest once and for all the controversies that have long surrounded her. Sifting fact from fiction, he pre-sents a portrait of Amy unlike any other, detailing the events and the people that shaped her youth--from her mischievous childhood to her grandmother's Jazz Age stories, to her father singing Frank Sinatra around the house. Shedding light on Amy's musical coming-of-age, Mitch explores how she honed her distinctive sound, created her unforgettable look, and channeled her own life into hits such as "You Know I'm No Good," "Rehab," and "Back to Black"--some of the most memorable and personal pop music in years.While her beehive hair, larger-than-life voice, and outrageous personality made her famous, her life offstage made her infamous. Here Mitch holds nothing back about Amy's addiction to drugs and alcohol, mixing the painful with the poignant as he describes the realities of her dependencies and the toll they took on the family and friends who refused to give up on her. Revealing the truth about Amy's substance abuse and dispelling many of the tabloid-fueled rumors about her tumultuous marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, Mitch exposes the years of behind-the-scenes drama that consumed his life and explains how, for those who knew Amy in her last months, the greatest tragedy of all was that she finally appeared to be conquering her demons.Filled with insights into Amy Winehouse's music, photographs from her life, and stories of the real woman behind the headlines, "Amy, My Daughter" is an emotional journey into music, addiction, and the unbreakable bond between a daughter and her father.

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities


Herman Melville - 1852
    None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.When Pierre Glendinning's lifelong desire for a sister is seemingly realized on the eve of his marriage, his world is suddenly turned upside down, for he must choose between acknowledging his illegitimate half-sister or perpetuating his unsullied family legacy. Melville unfolds the story of an idealistic young man whose steadfast beliefs lead him to destroy his world and himself.HarperCollins is proud to present this controversial masterpiece of American literature, now restored to its original form and illuminated with 30 full-color pictures by Maurice Sendak.

The Book of Shadows


James Reese - 2002
    A child alone in the nineteenth-century French countryside, she makes her way to the secluded convent, where she is taken in as a foundling orphan and raised by nuns who teach the children of the privileged to fear a wrathful God. But shy, unworldly Herculine is not like the others in this cold, forebidding place. And when she is led down a dark path by a rebellious fellow student, she soon finds herself convicted of crimes unimaginable.But death at the hands of the ignorant and falsely pious is not to be Herculine's lot. Held captive in the convent library, she is visited by four unexpected saviors with timeless needs of their own: the incubus priest Father Louis; the tragic, damned beauty Madeleine; the demonic Asmodei; and Sebastiana d'Azur, a witch. By dawn, Herculine is free yet forever changed as she follows her liberators into a world of sensuous pleasures and great mysteries both wondrous and strange.Secreted away in Sebastiana's once-grand manor high above the Breton sands, Herculine sets out to find out why she has been "chosen" and for what purpose. Her quest - ripe with erotic discovery, dark magic, heresy, and blood - propels her headlong through the perils of the age, across borders between the living and the dead, and back through a time when hysteria and madness reigned, when noble heads were impaled and paraded through the streets of Paris. For only when her mysterious mission is completed - and the terrible, otherworldly roots of a gruesome Revolution are finally revealed - can she understand who and what she truly is. Until then, she must simply trust...and learn.