Nikki Darling’s fab debut novel Fade into You is recently out from Feminist Press! It’s burning a hole on my shelf and I cannot wait to read it. She shared her to-read pile along with some pithy comments on each this month:
Artist Johnnie JungleGuts — meditations on therapy, dating apps, gay hook up culture and time spent as a research assistant in various jungles and frozen landscapes studying wildlife remains one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years and I return to often. (Johnnie JungleGuts)
A Lie of the Mind with the poem a “War In Heaven” by Joseph Chaikin is an all-time favorite. I reread the Chaikin poem often when I have writers block. (Sam Shepard)
Hard To Love, just started it but it’s easy to love a book with an essay called “Spinsters.” I much dug it. (Braillen Hopper)
East of Eden. Like the AA big book, I return to it often and find things I missed before. Always something new to discover in this masterpiece. (John Steinbeck)
Jessica Hopper’s Night Moves about her years in early 0’s Chicago gave my winter life. Her writing is alive, electric and pulses on the page. Quick staccato sentences.
12&12 gotta stay sobes to keep writing! This book is my spiritual home.
Anne Carson Autobiography in Red. Anne Carson is such a freak. So amazing this experiment in language and suspension of disbelief. Not on the table, but Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World has an amazing meta-Anne moment.
bell hooks All About Love. Please let me absorb this knowledge and live it as truth.
I am really proud of how much I read on my shelf before going to AWP Conference and buying three (!) totebags’ worth of books. Fun reading for months ahead of me. I’m hoping my shelf doesn’t fall…
– NEWIES –
Roll Deep, Major Jackson
Killing Floor, Ai
Chateau Wichman, Ben Pease
A Sand Book, Ariana Reines
Mercury, Ariana Reines
Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
On Some Hispano Luso Miniaturists, Mark Faunlagui
Lucy 72, Ronaldo V. Wilson
Dissolve, Sherwin Bitsui
The Beekeeper, Dunya Mikhail
The Lice, W.S. Merwin
The White Card, Claudia Rankine
Potted Meat, Steven Dunn
Eternal Friendship, Anouck Durand
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde
Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar
Joy Enough, Sarah McColl
Why I’m Sad, Dorothea Lasky
Autobiography of Death, Kim Hyesoon
Monsters I Have Been, Kenji C. Liu
Two Hunters, Marina Blitshteyn
Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky
Landscape with Sex and Violence, Lynn Melnick
Some Animal, Ely Shipley
Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love, Anna Moschovakis
Home Remedies, Xuan Juliana Wang
The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantú
Spectra, Ashley Toliver
Indecency, Justin Phillip Reed
Austerity, Marion Bell
The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison
Orient, Nicholas Gulig
Green-Wood, Allison Cobb
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James (in progress)
– OLDIES –
Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-din Attar; Confessions, St. Augustine; Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole; Severance, Ling Ma; Magical Negro, Morgan Parker; Fade into You, Nikki Darling; The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang; Experiments in Joy, Gabrielle Civil