Staff Recommendations

This is one of my favorite books of all time. The premise, of a person who can change their gender at will, taps into a very urgent magical realist genderqueer longing. Lawlor's writing is creative and lush and made me feel fully emersed in their imaginative space. From Iowa to Provincetown to San Francisco, Paul took me on a journey that I was so glad to be invited to, so much so that I didn't want to leave. This book is heartbreaking and joyous and sexy and funny, and I recommend it to absolutely everybody.

Perhaps one of Toni Morrisons lesser known works, Sula is a powerful story of friendship, community, and what it means to forge your own path. Set in the racially segregated town of Bottom, Nel and Sula are the best of friends, until Sula's distain for convention comes between them. I fell in love with these characters, and I was stunned by Morrison's twisted and lyrical description of their lives. I finished reading and immediately had a million thoughts, which is always a sign that this is a book that I will be reading over and over again.

Andrea Long Chu knocks it out of the park with her latest release. Her keen and stunningly pointed observations on the nature of criticism kept me enthralled from beginning to end. Never settling for the easy answer, Long Chu goes deep into the underlying forces that plague societal reactions to contemporary literature and culture and pulls out insightful gems each time. Always a provocateur, her dismissal of certain works being, not bad per se, but horribly boring, set in motion for me a whole new way of evaluating and thinking about art.

Another one of my absolute favorites, this novel-in-verse moves through a myriad of different perspectives of characters who are, if not friends, then somehow intricately connected. Each voice is distinct, while weaving together to create a layered tapestry of a novel that left me feeling too many emotions to count. Girl, Woman, Other, is a deeply immersive and passionately written novel about how entangled we are with each other and what that means for all of us.

A preeminent book of trans literature, Nevada follows Maria Griffiths, a bookseller in NYC as she breaks up with her girlfriend and takes a road trip across the country to Nevada on a whim. Rather than focusing on Maria's transition, the action takes place years after she comes out, and focuses instead on her life as an out trans woman in the early aughts. An irreverent story that thrives in ambiguity, Nevada is a perfect book for when you have no idea where your life is headed, but can't wait to find out.

This new science fiction collaboration between El-Mohtar and Gladstone is a gripping epistolary work written in poetic verse about two agents on the opposite sides of a war being waged, quite literally, through time. It takes a few chapters to sink into this world, but once you get there, it is well worth it. The lesbian romance made me suddenly sob uncontrollably and the imagery of the threads of time being tangled and manipulated was both visceral and ethereal.

When hearing that this book is about video game developers, many non-gamers (myself included) might think that their lack of interest in video games would be an indication to skip this book. Please do not fall into this trap! While the backdrop of the story is gaming, the book is mostly about making art. Even more than that, it is about what it means to love and be loved. Zevin investigates the stakes involved in relationships of many kinds, and how tempting it is to undo our past mistakes, to press "restart" on our lives over and over again....tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

The Gilda Stories is a masterful reimagination of the vampire story from a Black lesbian perspective. The vampire Gilda does not drain life from her victims, but infuses them with it---an exchange of life force that only vampires can bestow. In this way, the vampire narrative becomes not a living death, but a creation of life through death that resonates with the afro-futurist style that Gomez fully inhabits. A sweeping tale, Gilda's story starts in the mid 19th century and continues through 2025. Along the way she meets friends and lovers (both vampires and mortals) with whom she shares a little life and with whom she learns what is truly needed in order to live on.

If you'd like to develop an understanding of how the global economy became what it is today, this is the book for you! Whether you have a background in economics or not, Walter Rodney's work is incredibly accessible and readable. Rodney fights colonialism with the pen by writing a case study illuminating how European intervention derailed the structural and economic development of the African continent so that the people of the world may better understand our circumstances. He is incredibly thorough in holding the West accountable for an issue it is constantly trying to claim it is aiding.

There's nothing like a work of nonfiction beautifully written by an author of fiction! I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in understanding the revolutions of 1917, as well as anyone looking for an exciting story. This is an excellent entry point into Russian politics and history, as Mieville weaves the facts together with deft prose that make it feel like a novel, delivering nonstop action along with insight. I listened to the audiobook and couldn't believe how quickly I burned through it, as Mieville maintains a constant velocity that propels the reader through history.

This book brought me comfort and validation during an incredibly difficult time in my life. Like so many, my journey has been rough, and a neighbor recommended this book to me at one of my lowest points when I expressed feeling overwhelmed by the vast and largely unhelpful and even scary information available to pregnant people. Not only did this book help me feel less alone, it empowered me to be my own best advocate. Garbes writes with fury and compassion in equal measure, weaving science into a personal memoir to provide an accessible look at how cool, gross, terrifying, heartbreaking, fascinating, and beautiful pregnancy and birth can be.

To say "this book changed by life" would be an understatement! Here is a book about autism by an autist with a PhD in psychology, a sparkling wit, and an empathetic tone. I would recommend this book for anyone who knows or suspects they are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, or knows/loves someone who is/may be. Dr. Price walks us through what it feels like to be autistic, why you may or may not want to pursue a diagnosis, and the challenges facing all of us as well as specific groups within the autistic community. There is no miracle cure promised, rather this book can provide the autistic peer review that many of us miss due to alienation and isolation.

The newest installment in The Hunger Games series did not disappoint! I recommend this series for adults and teens who are looking for an action and emotion packed adventure, as well as a tool in our kit for learning how to fight fascism. I have rarely read a work of fiction that so deeply grasped politics and economics, and Suzanne Collins does so while weaving an incredible story. I was especially impressed with Sunrise on the Reaping as the 4th book in a series, and having been published over ten years after the first book in the series, it felt authentic and not forced.

Kathy Acker lead me to this book, and it was one of the most beautiful novels I've read. Acker was a fan of Pasolini's work and political life, and it was from her I learned that Pasolini first conceptualized the story that would become Theorem as a poem, and subsequently wrote the novel and film. He crafts elegant prose into a bizarre parable that culminates into a sophisticated critique of an unequal distribution of wealth in society. He manages to be intellectually rigorous and titillating at the same time. A compact read with a powerful impact!

Full disclosure: I'm still working on this one! I was introduced to Kathy Acker while working on my BA in English, and she has remained a favorite of mine, mostly due to how enigmatic she was as a person. McKenzie Wark was personally acquainted with Kathy before her untimely passing, and the book of their correspondence (I Am Very Into You) was an impetuous for me falling in literary love with Kathy. Wark is an excellent writer and theorist, and I'm very excited to look at Kathy's work through Wark's radical lens.

Ernest Hemingway is one of my favorite authors, and this is my favorite book about him! Having been a personal friend of Hemingway and accompanying him on many adventures later in his life, Hotchner offers a unique perspective on a seemingly-well-known figure. Such an intimate perspective shrinks Hemingway down from the macho egotist his public persona was inflated to be and presents him as a friend, mentor, and flawed human being. I also highly recommend the appendage to the memoir, "Hemingway In Love", though we don't carry it (yet!).

I'd recommend anything by Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald. His SoCal is less hard-boiled, and more emotionally complex with winding psychological turns, nascent environmentalism, and plenty of secrets and lies. It feels so real, too, the palpable California of the 50s-70s.

Friend of Dickens and unusual man in his own right, Collins was an author of many novels, most famously The Moonstone, which is sometimes called the first detective novel. But if you've read The Moonstone, don't stop there! My personal favorites are Poor Miss Finch, Hide and Seek, and Armadale.

While The Quiet American, Travels With My Aunt, and Doctor Fischer of Geneva are all re-reads for me, my favorite has to be Monsignor Quixote, Greene's novel about friendship between a priest and a communist mayor, in a slightly off-kilter Spain.

LeGuin's Daoist novel asks you to consider what are the repercussions of action, and what is your relationship to everything and everyone around you. It contains some of the loveliest lines I've ever read.

While Americans often perceive the Vietnam War as occurring during a discrete period in 1960s and 70s, ending with the withdrawal of American troops in 1974, it is a misunderstanding of the conflict to limit it to these years. Furthermore, American involvement in Vietnam predates the war by five decades, and postdates the war until at least the 1990s. Young is also writing at the cusp of the first Gulf War, without knowing the future of our continuing involvement in the Middle East, and so she mentions a possible comparison without full knowledge of just how prescient that comparison might be.

Now thirty years old, Link's book is a historical document in its own right. The evening chats of the title, with China's intellectuals (a designation with deep roots in Confucian ideals), are recorded in the wake of 1989's Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and are largely about the idea of responsibility to China and its citizens.