Category: Fiction
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Giovanni’s Room
(by James Baldwin) In his introduction to this edition, Kevin Young writes about buying a copy of this book “knowing only it was a book of Paris and exile.” That was more or less my starting point, too – knowing this book was a classic of queer lit, set in Paris, with an American expat…
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The Dallergut Dream Department Store
(by Miye Lee, Translated by Sandy Joosun Lee) What if dreams didn’t just come from your mind, but were things you could buy at a store? What if you could only go to that store while you were asleep, and you would have no memory of it when you woke up? That’s the premise of…
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The Secret Fruit of Peter Paddington
(by Brian Francis) I wish I’d read the original Canadian version of this rather than the Americanized one (I mean, geez, readers in the US are not going to be totally confused by a reference to Tim Hortons), but ah well. (I wonder if this would have been Americanized to the same extent if it…
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Greasepaint
(by Hannah Levene) This book is butches in suits and ties, butches playing piano in bars, butches in black jeans and white t-shirts and black leather jackets. It isn’t about plot: as the novel puts it at one point: “And up at the counter something else happens and outside on the street something else happens…
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That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon
(by Kimberly Lemming) I was late on reading this romance book club pick (seems to be a theme for me), but I’m glad I did get to it eventually. This was an entertaining romantasy romp, which was apparently exactly what I was in the mood for. At the start of the book we meet our…
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Cecilia
(by K-Ming Chang) What if you hadn’t seen your childhood friend/crush/obsession for ten years, since you were fourteen, and then you unexpectedly ran into her at your workplace? What if she was waiting for you at the bus stop the next day? What if you rode next to each other until the last stop? That’s…
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Banal Nightmare
(by Halle Butler) Banal Nightmare is a darkly funny novel about midlife millennial midwestern angst, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and found myself having to take breaks from it, because it’s kind of a lot of cynicism and malaise. At the start of the book, one character, Moddie, has recently broken up with her boyfriend…
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Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
(by Danielle Dutton) In “Writing Advice,” a short piece toward the end of this book that reads like nonfiction until it suddenly doesn’t, one writer tells another to “write something with a real story and get it over two hundred pages” as opposed to “writing little books that nobody reads.” I, for one, quite like…
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Vladivostok Circus
(by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) This probably would have been a better winter read than a summer one, but the fact that it transported me to chilly Russian landscapes in the middle of July in New York City is a testament to how atmospheric this short novel is. Like Winter in…
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Boy of Chaotic Making
(by Charlie N. Holmberg) The Whimbrel House books (of which this is the third) are reliably fun/quick comfort reads for me: the kind of book with a lot of action that I can happily devour over the course of a few days. They’re set in a version of the 1800s where magic is a thing;…