Category: Nonfiction
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Calypso by David SedarisLittle, Brown and Company, 2018
I’d read some of the twenty-one pieces in Calypso before, since some of them appeared in The New Yorker, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of this book at all: I feel like a David Sedaris essay generally stands up to a re-read. A back cover blurb from Marion Winik at Newsday captures the appeal…
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Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-BoseFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
I found some of the fourteen essays in this collection more compelling than others, but, overall, I like Chew-Bose’s voice and the way she writes about memory/family/personal history and larger issues like race and the experience of being a first-generation North American. I liked “Summer Pictures,” about going to the movies in the summertime, a…
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Draft No. 4 by John McPheeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
The eight essays in Draft No. 4 were all originally published in The New Yorker (albeit in slightly different form), so I think I’ve read them all before. I remembered some of them more vividly than others, though, and they were all satisfying to read in book form. They’re all, as the book’s subtitle puts…
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Secret Brooklyn by Michelle Young and Augustin PasquetJonglez Publishing, 2017
Though Secret Brooklyn is a guidebook (separated into sections by neighborhood, with color photos and page-long listings about various places/attractions), I think it’d be useful only to very intrepid tourists. I think it’s a better book for NYC/Brooklyn residents who are interested in the weird/quirky/overlooked: there are some things in this book I would go…
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Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz ChastBloomsbury USA, 2017
Despite loving Roz Chast’s work whenever I see it in the New Yorker (speaking of which: her recent cover is amazing), I hadn’t known she had written a book about NYC until Jenny from Reading the End mentioned it in a comment here last year. I immediately put a hold on it at the library,…
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Everywhere I Look by Helen GarnerText Publishing, 2016
I picked up Everywhere I Look at the library on the strength of its really lovely/well-designed cover: the author’s name in bold black sans serif, the title beneath in the same font but smaller and red, and then a color photo that spans the front, spine, and back: the author in the center, looking at…
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Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara ShopsinMCD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2017
I loved Tamara Shopsin’s Mumbai New York Scranton when I read it a few years ago, so I was super-excited when I learned she had a new book out this year, and Arbitrary Stupid Goal did not disappoint. It’s an illustrated memoir that’s more a series of vignettes, but with some unifying elements; a lot…
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More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory by Franklin Veaux and Eve RickertThorntree Press, 2014
More Than Two is, as its subtitle says, “a practical guide”: there’s a lot in this book about navigating particular kinds of relationship circumstances/scenarios/difficulties specific to polyamorous relationships, a lot of which didn’t feel super-applicable to me (like: being polyamorous and having kids, or coming out to your family as non-monogamous when you’ve historically been…
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How to Murder Your Life by Cat MarnellSimon & Schuster, 2017
When I started reading How to Murder Your Life, Cat Marnell’s addiction memoir, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it: her style is heavy on exclamation points and felt, at first, a bit dumbed-down. But as I kept reading, I found myself liking it a whole lot: the (dark) humor and vividness of…
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An Arrangement of Skin by Anna JourneyCounterpoint, 2017
The fact that An Arrangement of Skin has cover blurbs from Mark Doty and Maggie Nelson, both of whom I really like, probably helped convince me to check this book out from the library, even though I wasn’t actually sure I was in the mood for a book of essays. As it turns out, I…