Book-et List

One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.In the taut opening, "Victory Lap," a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In "Home," a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antique store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders' signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov's dictum that art should "prepare us for tenderness."

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell—an enthralling collection that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition. Major literary talent Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, coming Summer 2016, combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form. A Guide toBeing Born is organized around the stages of life—love, conception, gestation, birth—and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel’s stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.In “Atria” a pregnant teenager believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; in “Catch and Release” a girl discovers the ghost of a Civil War hero living in the woods behind her house; and in “Tributaries” people grow a new arm each time they fall in love. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange—all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel’s primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.

A scathingly funny, wildly erotic, and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex, and god from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today.Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life.In Excavation: A Memoir, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present-day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.

Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.Contains:Car Crash While HitchhikingTwo MenOut on BailDundunWorkEmergencyDirty WeddingThe Other ManHappy HourSteady Hands at Seattle GeneralBeverly Home'

Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell." But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the off-handed knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Fréderique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. Now translated into six languages, I beati anni del castigo in its Italian original won the 1990 Premio Bagutta and the 1990 Premio Speciale Rapallo. In Tim Parks’ consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem"), Sweet Days of Discipline was selected as one of the London Times Literary Supplement’s Notable Books of 1992: "In a period when novels are generally overblown and scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend [one that is] miraculously short and beautifully written."

Jacaranda is a dreamy young woman moving between the planets of Los Angeles and New York City. She’s a beach bum, a part-time painter of surfboards, sun-kissed and beautiful. Jacaranda has an on-again, off-again relationship with a married man and glitters among the city’s pretty creatures, blithely drinking White Ladies with any number of tycoons, unattached and unworried in the pleasurable mania of California. Yet she lacks a purpose―so at twenty-eight, jobless, she moves to New York to start a new life and career, eager to make it big in the world of New York City.Sex and Rage delights in its sensuous, dreamlike narrative and spontaneous embrace of fate, work, and of certain meetings and chances. Jacaranda moves beyond the tango of sex and rage into the open challenge of a defined and more fulfilling expressive life. Sex and Rage further solidifies Eve Babitz's place as a singularly important voice in Los Angeles literature―haunting, alluring, and alive.

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair--such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

Core's nineteen stories, set in and around New York City, have an other-worldly quality along with a deep seriousness—even a moral seriousness. What we know of identity is smashed and in its place, true individuals emerge, each bristling with a unique sexuality, a belief-system all their own. Reminiscent of Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, and Colette, her writing glows with an authenticity that is intoxicating and rare. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 HonoreeWhiting Award WinnerPEN/Hemingway Award FinalistLambda Literary Award FinalistLonglisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction & The Story

Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson was born a few years after Jane’s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related "true crime" books, and fragments from Jane’s own diaries written. Each piece in Jane has its own form that serves as an important fissure, disrupting the tabloid, "page-turner" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another’s life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane’s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do—what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.

perfect for the holidays … very short fictionOne of Davis’s influences, from a young age, was Samuel Beckett. In this interview http://www.believermag.com/issues/200... Davis talks about her craft and other things literary. Here’s a second interview with very little overlap to the previous one: http://brickmag.com/interview-lydia-d....\ boneless fiction\ It’s been said that Davis has, with her short stories, created her own genre. Well, what is this genre? I’ll be so bold as to attempt a description. Most of the stories in this collection, one of her earliest, are, I believe, fairly representative of her style. They employ a first person narrator much more commonly than usual; there is usually very little in the way of plot; characters are employed sparingly (usually only the narrator, who may be talking about one other person, often unnamed); no dialogue between characters (except in the narration itself: “I said … and you said …”); and at times extremely short stories, a paragraph in some cases, even a sentence. Bare bones is something that suggests itself, because her stories are so stripped down. But what’s missing from them, plot, character, dialogue (never narration, that is the only thing that can’t be jettisoned) are, after all, the skeleton of traditional fiction, are they not? So to do without them is not “bare bones”, it is “boneless”. Boneless fiction.Break It Down (1986)This collection of short stories contains 33 stories in 140 pages. Fourteen stories are less than three pages long; most of those are a page or a paragraph. These were probably the best short stories I’ve ever read, taking into account how little time they required, and how tempting it was to keep picking up the book. Having finished it, and now moving into her second collection, Almost No Memory, I keep going back to stories in this volume. They do cast a spell.Here’s one of my favorite micro stories.What She KnewPeople did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?Themes and StyleIn the first version of this review, I thought that I could get away with simply presenting the following stories. No. No. Not only did I try to learn a new trick, I also learned that I didn’t do the trick very well. At any rate, these are the stories, but with a little bit of context, that should make the points better. (The stories themselves are the same as before.)First of all. I said above that Davis employs first person narration often. Yet in the four of these stories that have a narrator, I employed the first person in ALL of them. That’s actually what I was thinking that Davis did. But no, I was fooled by seeing it so much that I thought I’d seen it nearly everywhere.Here’s an actual count from the collection.First person narrator: 9 (7 female, 2 male)No narrator: 2Third person narrator: 22 (Some of these are difficult to categorize, since so few pronouns appear.)About 1 in 3 are first person, not 4 in 4! SO. These stories are not representative in that sense, for sure.Instances of DisturbanceThis story is a retelling of the last selection in the book, Five Types of Disturbance. For whatever reason, I transferred the narrator from an impersonal one, to first person. But not the person whom the story is about. And why I inserted the very last sentence somehow escapes me. Lydia’s version is a very disturbing tale; near the end I wrote that it reminded me of Polanski’s movie Repulsion.(view spoiler)[I have watched her for three months now. Across the avenue, in a friend’s apartment. I know that the friend is away in Greece. He will return in November. It’s now the middle of October. He told me a woman would be staying in the apartment while he was gone. Then they would trade places. He would be there, and she would be gone.She stands looking out at the park, on my side of the street. All times of the day. Even at night sometimes. When I see her there I pick up my binoculars, always kept near the window just in case. They no longer have to be focused for her.Sometimes her venetian blinds are down but open, other times they are up. She usually wears some ratty looking tee shirt, sometimes a robe, sometimes nothing. I can only imagine what else she does or doesn’t have on.She did not notice me until recently. One day last week, after the sun had risen, watching her, I suddenly saw her look directly at me. She crossed her arms, what I could see of her was naked, and smiled just a little. She looked somewhat drunk.She stared. I stared. Then she pointed at her head and made a circling motion with her finger cuckoo? then pointed at her chest. Perhaps at her breast? I don’t know, that’s what I looked at.I understood her to sign that she was crazy. Or something like that. Then she pointed at herself, pointed across at me, pointed at herself, seemed to move her mouth.I lowered the binoculars and looked across. I didn’t know what to do. I was nodding yes, but then thought to make the same finger signs me-you-me-you that she made. Then she moved to the side and shut the blinds.We met later that day in the park. I’m not sure that she recognized me, she seemed surprised when I took my binoculars out of my bag and signed toward her with them. But she walked over. We walked a little ways and sat on a bench.I had no idea what to say. She just said I must find an apartment. I was going to say why but realized I knew why. Yes, I said. After a while she asked if I knew of any not too expensive. No, I said. Oh … . We sat for a while. I was thinking of whether to ask if she might want to stay in my place. But I didn’t really like the looks of her. She looked disturbed, in five different ways at least.After a while, saying nothing else, she got up and walked up the block, without looking back. I followed her. She took the subway to the last stop along the sound. I followed her. She walked a couple blocks to the deserted beach. The sun was getting low. I followed. Then she walked right into the water, up to her waist.I was a little bit alarmed, but not too. I don’t think I cared much, I didn’t know her. But I cared some. I stood just off the beach watching. No one came by. She did nothing except stare out across the water. Finally I looked at my watch. The sun was going down. I thought of calling out to her, but remembered that I didn’t know her name. I wanted to go back to the city. I walked away, looking back once, she was still standing in the small waves, up to her waist.I didn’t see her across the way yesterday, nor the day before. I’m feeling more than a bit disturbed. I drank myself to sleep last night and didn’t go to work today.My friend will be back this weekend. Perhaps he will know where she is. I have quite short hair. I can’t help wondering if she had been surprised when I showed up a woman the one time we met. (hide spoiler)]

There is a quarry made of meat, marbled rich with fat. There is a family who lives at the meat quarry’s edge. There is a girl who lives with a knotted body, as does her mother, as does her mother’s mother. There is a girl who yearns to be seen with kind eyes, to be touched with soft hands, to be loved by an open heart. In the utterly unique and remarkable The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter has crafted an intriguing world not quite like our own. She takes the surreal and expertly shapes it into a portrait that is as beautiful and compelling as it is horrifying and unbearable. In doing so, Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything.

A sinisterly funny modern-day Through the Looking Glass that begins with cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream."My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life, and the importance of literature.

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.

This rarefied novel adopts the form of the interior monologue characteristic of Lispector's (1925-1977) oeuvre. A woman sits by the open window of her Brazilian beachfront studio, writing a long letter to someone no more specific than "you." She parries with language (which is "only words which live off sound") and is wholly consumed with problems of epistemology: "I want to die with life." A painter, she struggles as well to recreate the world around her: "On certain nights, instead of black, the sky seems to be an intense indigo blue, a color I've painted on glass." When she listens to music, she says, "I rest my hand lightly on the turntable and my hand vibrates, spreading waves through my whole body." While the narrator's self-consciousness ("And if I say 'I,' it's because I don't dare say 'you,' or 'we,' or 'a person.' I'm limited to the humble act of self-personalization through reducing myself, but I am the 'you-are.' ") and diction ("the ultimate substratum in the domain of reality") may strike some readers as academic, others will appreciate the challenges of Lispector's philosophical investigations. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grace's father believes in science and builds his daughter a dollhouse with lights that really work. Grace's mother takes her skinny-dipping in the lake and teaches her about African hyena men who devour their wives in their sleep. Grace's world, of fact and fiction, marvels and madness, is slowly unraveling because her family is coming apart before her eyes. Now eight-year-old Grace must choose between her two very different, very flawed parents, a choice that will take her on a dizzying journey, away from her home in Vermont to the boozy, flooded streets of New Orleans--and into the equally wondrous and frightening realm of her own imagination.With eloquence and compassion, Jenny Offill weaves a luminous story of a wounded family and of a young girl yearning to understand the difference between fiction, fact, and hope. A novel of vibrant imagination and searing intelligence, Last Things is a stunning literary achievement.