what I’ve been reading lately:
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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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New Yorkers
(by Craig Taylor) Near the start of this book, Craig Taylor writes about how he “wanted to craft a book about New York in the twenty-first century, filled with the voices and sounds and places and people of New York, the life of the city right now,” and I think the book definitely succeeds at…
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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;…
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All Fours
(by Miranda July) The unnamed narrator of All Fours is an artist in her mid-forties who, when the book opens, is about to take a trip to New York – a birthday gift to herself where she’s going to stay at the Carlyle and see friends and do things by herself while her husband, Harris,…
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Strangers to Ourselves
(by Rachel Aviv) This book, whose subtitle is “Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” takes the form of the psychiatric case study and goes somewhere a little different with it. In the book’s six sections, the author explores six different people’s experiences of mental illness, including her own (she stopped eating when she…
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Inverno
(by Cynthia Zarin) I wanted to love this book because I’ve loved Cynthia Zarin’s nonfiction, but this was a slow read for me and I didn’t find it quite as compelling as I wanted to. That said, I didn’t hate it, and it might be a good book for me to reread in winter, when…
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Incubation
(by Bhanu Kapil) It’s been a while since I’ve read poetry other than the poems that are in the New Yorker, and so maybe I was extra grateful for Eunsong Kim’s foreword and Emgee Dufresne’s “afternotes”, both of which were helpful in providing context/points of orientation for Kapil’s text. In the foreword, Kim writes about…
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Glitter and Concrete
(by Elyssa Maxx Goodman) This book, which looks at the history of drag in New York City from the 1860s to 2023, was an interesting introduction to a subject I didn’t know a lot about. I’ve seen performances that incorporate drag and drag aesthetics (Justin Vivian Bond as Kiki in the cabaret duo Kiki and…
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The Idea of You
(by Robinne Lee) I have, yet again, finished last month’s romance book club read a little late—thanks to the movie adaptation of this one, I had to wait a while for my hold to come in at the library. The plot: a divorced mom takes her daughter (who is twelve when the book opens) and…