'Every story is a new catastrophic future, and every story ends with some (partial, hard, or fantastical) victory of love. This is speculative fiction whose authors have been living through apocalypse for 500 years and still keep making art, love, and community - somehow both a warning and something deeply hopeful.' - Kyra View More...
'Friday Black COMPLETELY reset my standard for short story collections. After the first couple, I had already begun to imagine a rec that included the phrase "a Blacker Black Mirror without as much tech." And that still kind of works, but it doesn't need the comparison or any help from the show. It stands on its own. Everything about it is excellent. The premises are so fresh and unique and necessarily jarring. Small stretches to get at deeper truths and realities. It's perfectly paced and laid out (both the individual stories and the larger arc). It's approachable and relatable, especially if... View More...
'Friday Black COMPLETELY reset my standard for short story collections. After the first couple, I had already begun to imagine a rec that included the phrase "a Blacker Black Mirror without as much tech." And that still kind of works, but it doesn't need the comparison or any help from the show. It stands on its own. Everything about it is excellent. The premises are so fresh and unique and necessarily jarring. Small stretches to get at deeper truths and realities. It's perfectly paced and laid out (both the individual stories and the larger arc). It's approachable and relatable, especially if... View More...
'Friday Black COMPLETELY reset my standard for short story collections. After the first couple, I had already begun to imagine a rec that included the phrase "a Blacker Black Mirror without as much tech." And that still kind of works, but it doesn't need the comparison or any help from the show. It stands on its own. Everything about it is excellent. The premises are so fresh and unique and necessarily jarring. Small stretches to get at deeper truths and realities. It's perfectly paced and laid out (both the individual stories and the larger arc). It's approachable and relatable, especially if... View More...
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "An unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice." --Tommy Orange, New York Times Book Review "An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny." --George Saunders "Dark and captivating and essential . . . A call to arms and a condemnation . . . Read this book." --Roxane Gay A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree, chosen by Colson Whitehead Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book A piercingly raw debut story collection fro... View More...
'I went into this book blind, not knowing anything about the premise, and I definitely recommend you get this book and just read it too. But to give you the vibe: this book is tense, uncertain, atmospheric, claustrophobic, and thought-provoking. Just trust me on this one.' -Molly View More...
Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub, Book Riot' and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." --Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book ha... View More...
"Spiritual without getting woo-woo. Riley takes a critical look at a lofty, disembodied Christianity and asks us to see the sacred in the everyday, the cast aside, and, most importantly, in direct action. A great work for anyone who was raised Christian and grew up to leave it." -Marissa View More...
'Margaret Atwood stirred something up in me with this. It's topical, engaging, and damn her writing is good. You won't be able to put this down.' View More...
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker PrizeWinner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme CourtBorn in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles--the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since... View More...
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker PrizeWinner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme CourtBorn in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles--the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since... View More...
Winner of the 2016 Man Booker PrizeWinner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme CourtBorn in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles--the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since... View More...
'Alison Bechdel has authored (and illustrated) a graphic memoir so compact, so intimate and heart wrenching that I don't think it could have been done with mere words. Gorgeous in prose and artistry, lovingly literary, and humorous despite everything. It is ingenious.' -Olivia View More...
NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR MYSTERY/THRILLERFINALIST FOR THE 2019 WOMEN'S PRIZE Korede's sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola's knife. Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mour... View More...
A Good Morning America 2021 Top Summer Read Pick The visionary author's masterpiece pulls us--along with her Black female hero--through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters,... View More...
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers.
If on aWinter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another. View More...
"Dennis Cooper is one of the last true literary outlaws (I'm borrowing that descriptor from someone, sorry to whoever it is). Reading one of his books is to question what a book even is; what fiction can do; what it can mean, or not mean; and what it says about who writes it. I didn't think anyone was allowed to write what he writes. After 10 years, Cooper has returned and in perhaps his most shocking artistic decision yet, bares his soul for the reader in his new novel. Painful, exasperated, grief-stricken, fucked-up and scalpel-sharp, I Wished might be my favorite Cooper novel to date. Don't... View More...
"Dennis Cooper is one of the last true literary outlaws (I'm borrowing that descriptor from someone, sorry to whoever it is). Reading one of his books is to question what a book even is; what fiction can do; what it can mean, or not mean; and what it says about who writes it. I didn't think anyone was allowed to write what he writes. After 10 years, Cooper has returned and in perhaps his most shocking artistic decision yet, bares his soul for the reader in his new novel. Painful, exasperated, grief-stricken, fucked-up and scalpel-sharp, I Wished might be my favorite Cooper novel to date. Don't... View More...
'A family values story that sticks like a hot knife and isn't afraid to twist. A laser-sharp generational tale of carnie freaks in the 70s and the fall of their Big Top lives. This book changed my life forever, absolutely. This story is the story to end all stories for me. I cannot think of anything better.' - RFA View More...
National Book Award finalist Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious--and dangerous--asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwater... View More...
