I’m not gonna lie. This year has been a dumpster fire for me personally. Between raising a young child in this ongoing pandemic and trying to maintain the shelves here at the B, I had a helluva time focusing on reading for myself. Suffice it to say, I read far fewer books this year than at any point previous in my bookselling career. Call it exhaustion, I guess.
The cutting-edge Italian physicist returns to recount the odyssey of quantum mechanics, beginning on a small island in the North Sea where a young man has an astounding idea with the power to destroy the world, redefine consciousness, and ultimately upend the very notion of reality itself. This is where truth really does become stranger than fiction...
Published: New York Review Books - September 28th, 2021
But why should the truth have all the fun?! Labatut’s debut novel takes several key (and very real) scientific discoveries as its starting point to examine what happens to society and the individual mind when the world as we know it changes irrevocably. A page-turning feat of imagination, featuring some of the greatest minds of the 20th century, including some very interesting crossover with Helgoland. Consider reading both together!
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Published: Thames & Hudson - December 7th, 2021
This is not for the squeamish. Replete with grisly, actual crime scene photos, this second installment in the Murder Maps series is a grand tour through American bloodlust and infamy. From outlaw icons like Bonnie and Clyde to long forgotten crimes of passion and opportunity, consider this an illicit treasure trove of true crime!
Published: Albatross Funnybooks - August 24th, 2021
Back in the 1950s, Ed Gein’s notorious crimes and house of horrors in rural Wisconsin became the archetype for the modern American monster-next-door. This graphic novel explores his macabre legacy through stark black and white images accentuating Gein’s warped psychological state and the abject terror lying just beneath America’s sanitized mid-century image of itself.
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Published: MCD x FSG Originals - October 12th, 2021
The first great 21st century ghost story involves a young couple whose lives are being terrorized by a possessed smart speaker. What may sound kitschy at first blush turns out to be a dark tour through our inability to connect with one another in our hyperconnected world. Timely, horrifying, and psychologically intense.
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Published: W. W. Norton & Company - September 21st, 2021
A beautiful, tragic ode to the love between a father and son that spans from the deepest recesses of the human heart to the farthest reaches of the universe in a search for hope in a dying world. What would you do with boundless emotional intelligence? How would you cope? Could you? These are the questions posed by one of America’s greatest living authors in his latest offering.
A revelatory work. Proof positive that graphic novels are every bit as powerful as any other form of literature. Radtke’s words and images form a cultural, personal, and critical excavation of loneliness that perfectly captures our moment in time. Sad and yet full of hope, this is the book we need right now.
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Published: Liveright - November 16th, 2021
I’ve been waiting for this book for five years, and now it is finally here! Norton’s annotated classics are total literary candy, full of background info and historical context, not to mention tons of amazing images. This newest translation of The Arabian Nights -- the first ever translated by a woman -- is a thing of beauty. It’s an indispensable addition to any library of world classics.
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Published: Soho Crime - April 13th, 2021
This first volume from one of Japan’s seminal works of contemporary literature is based on true events surrounding a corporate kidnapping that remains unsolved to this day -- the case of “the Monster with 21 Faces.” But this epic crime drama only begins there, spinning out to expose the ethnic tensions, corruption, and greed hidden beneath the sheen of the country’s late 20th century success. Get started now, because the concluding volume is set to release in 2022!
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Published: Coffee House Press - August 3rd, 2021
Simply put, Brian Evenson is the most terrifying writer working today. His skill for compression and psychological suspense is unparalleled, so that each of his stories becomes its own suffocating capsular nightmare. He has already made a believer out of horror luminaries like Stephen King and RL Stine. If you are a fan of the spookies, read every word this man writes.
Here are ten books that have stuck in my brain this year. Most of them are children’s books. If you’re not reading children’s lit, you should be. Kidlit authors are (in my humble opinion) far more dedicated than much of adult lit to representing the full spectrum of the world and the people in it. Also, even the most literary of kidlit generally has a plot, which I can’t say for all adult literary fic. Not that a slice of life fic with no discernable scaffolding other than stream of consciousness is a bad thing. I just prefer a narrative arc.
Availability: OUT OF PRINT - Not Available for Order
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - September 7th, 2021
A searing and sometimes darkly funny set of essays on anti-Semistism that is a must read for everyone. There’s also a podcast that’s equally brilliant called Adventures with Dead Jews. Dara Horn is a brilliant scholar with a keen sense of both history and the absurd.
Published: Quill Tree Books - September 21st, 2021
When the ‘bloodless murders’ come to a small town in the 1950s, the sheriff’s son finds himself in the midst of the investigation. And the blood-soaked survivor he meets that one fateful night? She may not be what he thinks. Think: vampires meet Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
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Published: St. Martin's Griffin - June 1st, 2021
This one’s a love story with a time slip. What if you saw the girl of your dreams on the NYC subway? What if she’d been stuck there since the 70s? What would you do to be with your true love? Romantic and wonderful. Think Kate and Leopold meets LGBTQ fiction.
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) - May 4th, 2021
Milton P. Greene has had the worst school year ever. All he wants to do is hide in his room all summer and play his handheld game but his parents send him to Lone Island with his eccentric scientist uncle. Milton P. Greene is about to have the best summer of his life. Maybe. This is a happy, wonderful middle grade novel that will leave you cheering.
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Published: Walden Pond Press - March 30th, 2021
A boy named Alder and a girl named Oak. Two families with a connection that will slowly reveal itself. Stir in magic universal mysteries, time-portal kittens, and knitting, and you’ve got a heartwarming classic of a middle grade novel by one of the best authors writing today.
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Published: Atheneum Books for Young Readers - July 20th, 2021
This picture book is for everyone. An infinitely clever ‘switcheroo’ as the Dracula family visits the zoo and baby Drac and baby penguin change places -- and no one notices... except the reader! The clever narration tells one story and the clever illustrations tell the real story. Love. Love. Love.
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Published: Chronicle Books - October 12th, 2021
Exquisitely and whimsically illustrated, Wenzel follows the perspective of a cat peering at the world outside its window. Simple yet profound. A picture book for all ages.
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Published: Roaring Brook Press - November 23rd, 2021
Zookeeper Amos is back again in this follow up to Stead’s Caldecott winning A Sick Day for Amos McGee. This time Amos misses the bus and loses his hat, but the faithful zoo animals are there to help. The illustrations by Stead’s wife Erin E. Stead are simply stunning. Kind and gentle -- a perfect balm these trying times.
Published: Bloomsbury Publishing - February 9th, 2021
Spare and moving and wonderful, Laird Hunt’s Zorrie is nuanced and layered. If like me (see my intro above) you like your literary-ish fiction with a plot line, you will love this story of a woman named Zorrie whose life unfolds against the backdrop of historical events from the Depression on up over the decades. Filled with hope and tenacity and longing.
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Published: Gecko Press - May 4th, 2021
Pablo is a chick about to hatch from its egg. The book is lovely and clever, the artwork swoony. I bought this one for my four-year-old grandson. We read it together, he loved it, and I said, “Hey. Since Pablo the chick eats a croissant and drinks some hot chocolate to get ready for hatching, why don’t I take you to Starbucks and we’ll split a croissant and sip some hot chocolate?” So we do just that, and he says, “I’m thirsty,” so I get him an ice water and say “Sip it slowly,” but of course he sucks down 12 ounces. If you’re a parent you know where this is going. Back to the car (his mother’s car because I’m babysitting and that’s where the car seat is) I buckle him in and as soon as I click that belt tight I hear a stomach gurgle. I try to unbuckle him. Not fast enough. Luckily his mother is a smart woman and keeps a change of clothes and cleaning supplies in the trunk. But still. You should all buy Pablo.
With thousands of books released every year it can be difficult for a single book to be noticed or gain recognition. Oftentimes being a bookseller seems like a passion project, an enterprise focused solely on getting those undiscovered gems in people’s hands, perhaps the book with a small publisher or the book not endlessly lauded in the major newspapers and websites. Below is a list of some incredible books that may have been missed, perhaps received some acclaim but not, in my opinion, nearly enough.
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Published: Fitzcarraldo Editions - August 3rd, 2021
This novel is easily my favorite book of the year as well as a sad statement about the lack of curiosity (or sense of possibility) for major US publishers. How this was largely ignored by American publishers is embarrassing. It's a groundbreaking novel whose themes accumulate slowly until one understands the web Mallo has spun. This novel incorporates history (our own and the world’s): the moon landing, the Spanish Civil War, and moves literally everywhere, from Brooklyn to Florida to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Complex, but never complicated. Ideal for fans of Roberto Bolaño and the films of David Lynch.
A dense, bitter book about family, money, and the lies we tell ourselves. Told by a chorus of voices, the different characters slowly begin to blend, leaving the reader immersed in the echoes of the greed that took place following the dictatorship in Spain. Ideal for fans of Faulkner.
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Published: Coffee House Press - September 7th, 2021
What is family? What is it supposed to look like? In stunning prose Singh walks us through a humane and new way of seeing oneself in the world. Told as a letter to her daughter, this book-length essay is tender, loving and filled with some of the most beautiful writing. While never ignoring the social, environmental, and political problems we face, this is a magical and singular book.
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Published: University of Chicago Press - October 27th, 2021
One of America’s great writers returns with a collection of essays ranging from art to subjects as vast as photography, epiphany, and family. A stunning collection that contains essays read at the University of Chicago.
A light and luminous collection that feels like a dream. Steeped in the pleasures of books and reading, Eisendrath focuses on Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century pastoral romance, Arcadia. Yet the reader needs no knowledge of this work as the essays inside are universal and uplifting.
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Published: Coffee House Press - April 13th, 2021
Rikki is an American treasure. Her novels and essays are some of the most original and singular works in the last two decades. This tiny novel bursts with imagination and a love of language. A post-earth, cosmic adventure, Quiver (mostly human) and her sidekick robot, Mic travel through space until they find themselves on the run. Evoking a longing for a planet they never knew, Quiver and Mic search for the fabled planet Trafik. An entire galaxy in under 100 pages. Magnificent.
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Published: Dalkey Archive Press - July 6th, 2021
Based largely on events which took place during the Chinese Civil War, Anderson’s brief novel is a powerful statement on the futility, mania, and waste of war. A group of young civilians are conscribed to fight a mysterious enemy and, once indoctrinated, they travel. This, in fact, is all they do: travel. Amidst skirmishes and death the soldiers slowly realize no one is in charge and never has been. Even more frightening, they realize there is no safe haven in their own country. A haunting little novel.
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - August 10th, 2021
A classic of contemporary Italian literature, this is Calligarch’s first novel translated into English. A young man moves to Rome as a freelance journalist. He mostly drinks, attends parties, and reflects on his circle of friends writing and living in Rome. A love letter to youth, aimlessness, and the classic Italian city.
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Published: Transit Books - June 22nd, 2021
A thoughtful, provoking meditation on nature, migration, and the spaces we inhabit. This book is both grounded and yet light, with essays on the Berlin Wall, Revolutionary Cuba, and more. Delightful and quietly profound.
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Published: Coach House Books - September 7th, 2021
A day in the life of a plumber and yet so much more. It’s the plumber’s first day back at work after a nervous breakdown. The plumber is also a married father whose son went to prison for attempting to kill his mother (yes, the plumber’s wife) believing she was an imposter and not his ‘real’ mother. This novel's inner monologue is as funny and manic as it is sad and human. A tender look at masculinity and mental health.
The Texas Library Association has officially announced their list for the 2021-2022 Bluebonnet Award! You can find their list here on the Brazos website!
Each year, 20 books are chosen for the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List. Schools and libraries around the state participate in the program, encouraging students to read a minimum of five books from the list. In January, students vote for their favorite title and the books with the most votes win!
Look at these photos! We were all undeniably adorable and we were also all incredible bookworms! Here are some of our all-time favorite books from when we were kids. Take a look, relive those golden days of childhood, and check out our picks in-store on the green cube outside the kid's room! Feeling nostalgic? Come on in and tell us about your most beloved stories!
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Published: Firebird - September 30th, 2002
SONIA
High fantasy and talking animals? Yes, please! The once and future Sonia will always have a soft spot for the lovely little critters that populate Brian Jacques's Redwall series. The first book in particular, propelled by the threat posed to the picturesque Redwall Abbey by Cluny the Scourge and the unlikely heroism of the mouse Matthias, holds a special place in my heart. A great read for adventurers of all sizes and species!
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Published: Aladdin - September 1st, 1998
LAURA M.
1. This is an almost forgotten children's book written long before my actual childhood, but it was one of my favorites growing up. In the vein of Edward Tulane, this is the tale of a little wooden doll and her many adventures, from her first home in a small New England town to her voyage across the ocean all the way to India. Loved the gorgeous woodcut illustrations and imagining the secret lives of my own toys.
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Published: HarperCollins - January 22nd, 2002
2. This book and the movie Fly Away Home inspired my OBSESSION with geese as a kid. This is the charming story of a girl growing up on the shores of Walden Pond, who one night is visited by a Canada goose who teaches her how to fly. A beautiful, poignant book about the power of imagination, generosity, and the quiet kind of strength.
I compulsively read and re-read the Dear America books when I was in middle school in 2001. At the time there were dozens, now there are only 5 available to order. You should be able to find the rest at your local library, as I did all those years ago. I recently revisited A PICTURE OF FREEDOM, and it handled difficult, complex subjects beautifully, while remaining true to historical reality. The series were just some of the many books that instilled in me a love of reading and writing and imagining!
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Published: Puffin Books - April 5th, 2007
KEATON
*note: This is the photo Keaton provided. Any issues with accuracy must be taken up with Keaton.
I don't know what is was about this book. Maybe it just found me at the right time, but TALES OF A FOURTH GRADE NOTHING is the first book I ever read that really resonated with me as a reader--even if I didn't know what that meant at the time! The feelings of being overlooked and overwhelmed as a child trying to build a sense of individuality, the horrors of a younger sibling, the earliest twinge of social awkwardness developing at school. What can I say? Judy Blume just GOT 9-10 year old Keaton! It's one of my earliest memories of feeling seen in a work of fiction, and I still love TALES OF A FOURTH GRADE NOTHING to this day.
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Published: Simon Pulse - August 1st, 1994
ALANA
Fear Street. I specifically remember checking out The Prom Queen. The girl on the cover was wearing a very 80s/early 90s puffy sleeved dress and her reflection in the window/mirror WAS A SKULL. Trippy. So someone is murdering all the prom queen candidates at Shadyside High. Teen hijinks and murder ensue. I'm not sure why 11 year old Alana liked reading spooky things, but here we are.
This book is all about a group of kittens who were born with wings. They decide to escape the danger of city life and fly away. Country life, however, is not as easy as they expect. I remember being completely spellbound by the illustrations, and my mom could get me to read anything if it was about a cat.
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Published: Clarion Books - May 24th, 2016
JOY
When I was eight I discovered Edward Eager's HALF MAGIC, which is about British siblings who, one boring summer, find a magic amulet on the ground which allows all sorts of amazing wishes to come true... but only half way. I adored this book. I read it over and over, scouring our Chicago neighborhood, hoping to stumble on a magic amulet and make my own boring summer with my younger brother become magical. I mean, who doesn't want to transform into a quippy British kid who finds magic? I'm still waiting, only slightly bitter.
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Published: Scholastic Paperbacks - June 1st, 1999
LAURA G
1. I have never once met anyone else who's read THE SECRETS OF DROON, but everyone should know about it! This chapter book series has magic, adventure, llamas with six legs, and talking pillows called Lumpys! If that doesn't strike your fancy I don't know what will!
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Published: Square Fish - October 27th, 2015
2. Piper McCloud can fly. Just like that. Easy as pie! This is a soaring tale of a farm girl who's just a little bit different. It's odd, it's sweet, it's one of my all-time favorites! Just read the first page and tell me you're not in love! You just can't keep a good girl down!
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Published: Riverhead Books - July 11th, 2017
This is a complete and utter escape en par with a certain other Irish writer's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece. Contemplative, rich, and an absolute delight - pure natural aesthetic pleasure!
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Published: Nobrow - March 5th, 2019
Filled with rich, jewel-toned comic pages as well as luscious, dizzyingly detailed spreads, Alvarez brings the imagination to life in her latest graphic novel! Filled with nature-inspired imagery, this book is a gorgeous work of art for people of all ages!
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - March 12th, 2019
This book by primatologist, atheist and philosopher De Waal will break your heart and fill it with wonder. Using the life of chimpanzee matriarch Mama as a case study, his ever empathetic and brilliant mind explores the complex emotional life of our animal cousins.
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - April 2nd, 2019
Out in paperback 4/2! A masterpiece. This dizzying tale draws together several strangers and the natural world that is fading around them in an epic struggle for the future of American forests. Engaging and timely without being didactic, THE OVERSTORY is Powers at his best.
Richard Powers will be with Tayari Jones for an event with Inprint on 4/22!
Mooallem dives deep into our conflicted relationship with animals, and the extreme lengths we will go to save endangered species. A beautiful, tender book that reveals much more about us than it does about the creatures we are trying to save.
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Published: University of Chicago Press - April 14th, 2014
Artist and scientist Rachel Sussman set out to photograph the old living things in the world. This stunning coffee table book reminds us how fleeting and precious a single human life is against the backdrop of mosses, lichen, and tree systems that have lived for centuries.
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Published: G.P. Putnam's Sons - August 14th, 2018
This latest pick for Reese Witherspoon's Book Club is part coming of age story and part murder mystery, set against the backdrop of the lonely North Carolina marsh lands, so vividly depicted they serve as their own sort of fully-realized and mesmerizing character.
Published: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books - March 12th, 2019
Set in Houston both past and present, ANGEL THIEVES intertwines the stories of a father and son eeking out a living stealing cemetery angels, an escaped slave and her daughters, an ocelot, a marble carver, a teenage girl, and the ever-present, ever-moving Buffalo Bayou, which sees them all in Newbery Award winner and National Book Award nominee Appelt's lyrical, gorgeous new YA novel. We are hosting Kathi Appelt on 4/24! Join us!
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Published: Two Dollar Radio - September 18th, 2018
Each character in this novel are extremely flawed, facts become blurred as the Louisiana humidity and swamps take over a mother with mental illness and her two daughters are left to understand what has happened. A story of family and the dark cloud our past and the choices our family make that effect our past present and future.
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Published: Avery Hill Publishing - October 15th, 2018
A story that shifts between the surreal and the everyday as a woman looks back on her childhood and growing up, ultimately about discovering who we are and want to be in life while not having just one coming-of-age, but multiple in a lifetime. A beautiful reminder that who we are in this moment does not define who we can become.
Green thumb or not this book will inspire you to create a garden of your own no matter where you live. Full of gorgeous photos and inspiration for all types of spaces.
Our very own Habes has the jungle down pat in his exploratory, lucid adventure story. Life, death, renewal, past, present — all is represented in this obsessive and philosophically driven novella. Out this fall. Sorry, you'll have to wait for this one!
Taro is one of the last residents in a 12-apartment complex slated for demolition, each home named after a zodiac symbol. He becomes friends with a woman in his complex who is obsessed with the beautiful and unusual house next door. This book beautifully encompasses themes of growth, rebirth, and nostalgia.
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Published: New Directions - February 26th, 2019
This incredible feminist writer just passed away, and her works have been woefully under-worshipped. In BINSTEAD’S SAFARI, a woman finds agency during a trip to Africa with her husband. As they travel, she transforms from a rather bland woman to a fabulous social butterfly who is able to find satisfaction wholly separately from her self-indulgent husband. Tongue-in-cheek and utterly pleasing, this book engages the mystique of the local fauna (it is Rachel Ingalls, after all... hint, hint).
Take a deep dive into the Gulf of Mexico with this Pulitzer Prize-winning work of ecological history. Davis weaves a rich narrative that looks closely at the people, industries, and wildlife that call this sea home.
Celie's story is like a blooming flower: out of traumas imposed by men, and the violence of the Jim Crow South, she comes into the love that can exist between people who care for one another. All of this pivots on her lover Shug's theology of nature, rooted in the sensuality of fields of flowers, rain, wind and the sky.
Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks - April 3rd, 2018
Winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, Ukrainian author Svetlana Alexievich is an utterly original voice in modern writing. Her books are described as "oral histories" where Alexievich interviews people from every facet of society: farmers to government officials to soldiers. Her books look bravely into the abyss of the 20th and 21st century, seeing the brutal reality of events like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, war and its aftermath. There's very little in modern writing as visceral and urgent as her books; they're as important as they are moving.
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Published: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers - September 11th, 2018
Written and Illustrated by two women this picture book is not only beautiful but full of amazing powerful women from around the world. From artists to activists, this book guarantees to teach you about an important woman in history you maybe don't know.
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Published: Tin House Books - April 10th, 2018
A drunken heroine meets a dark and mysterious stranger, who whisks her away to an isolated island estate overrun with near-feral children. What unfolds is a haunting and utterly odd take on the modern fairy tale from one of America's greatest living writers.
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Published: Biblioasis - November 13th, 2018
This translated book cuts to the heart of what it is to occupy a female body - the fear, the joy, and the rage. Twelve speculative stories demonstrate a vast range of emotion - at times they are uplifting and peaceful before diving back into the narrative's constantly present, violent underbelly. Haunting, visceral, and so important.
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Published: Deep Vellum Publishing - January 24th, 2017
RECITATION charts the travels of a mysterious traveler and voice actress after she arrives at an empty train station in Europe. As the book’s pages creep by, the lone woman’s narrative becomes ever more tangled in her personal identity, family past, and the imagined collective past of city dwellers in general. Bae Suah weaves a lyrical exploration of self-discovery through the eyes of what could be any number of female identities. This is a remarkable book that manages both experimentation and nonlinearity and thoughtful, deliberate plot.
Brazos Bookstore is excited to partner with the Goethe-Institut's Houston pop-up for a year of cultural events in our city.
The Goethe Pop Up Houston presents LitHAUS, a monthly reading series for contemporary German literature. Each month’s selection will be accompanied by a talk or discussion around the work and its wider themes. Reading the work is encouraged but not required. Everyone is welcome to join in! Find more information about Goethe Pop Up Houston here.
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Published: New Directions - November 8th, 2016
Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers. Famous stars of the literary world, the circus, and the zoo, they happen to be polar bears who move human society. In part one, the matriarch, enjoying “the intimacy of being alone with my pen,” accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography in the Soviet Union. In part two, her daughter Tosca moves to East Germany and pioneers a thrilling circus act. And Tosca’s son—the last of their line—is Knut, born in part three and raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo.
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Published: Tin House Books - June 14th, 2016
It’s the evening before the feast in the village of Fürstenfelde. The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman—he’s dead. And Mrs. Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells—the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than to quit smoking. Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football jerseys bump into one another. They all want to bring something to a close, on this night before the feast.
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Published: Fitzcarraldo Editions - May 8th, 2018
Bricks and Mortar is the story of the sex trade in a big city in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to the present day, charting the development of the industry from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following the reunification of Germany. The focus is on the rise and fall of one man from football hooligan to large-scale landlord and service- provider for prostitutes to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter…
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses Japan and Europe, memory and actuality, fox-possession myths and psychiatric mythmaking. The novel begins near the story’s end, in Dr. Shimamura’s retirement. A feverish invalid, he’s watched over by four women: his wife, his mother, his mother-in- law, and a nurse (originally one of his psychiatric patients). As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is sent—to his dismay—to the provinces: he is asked to cure scores of young women of an epidemic of fox possession. He considers the assignment a joke, believing it’s all a hoax, until he sees a fox moving under the skin of a beauty. He comes to believe not just in fox possession, but also that he in fact “cured” the young woman with a kiss, by breathing in the fox demon (the root of his lifelong fever). Next he travels to Europe and works with such luminaries as Charcot, Breuer and (briefly) Freud himself.
Set in Frankfurt, All Russians Love Birch Trees follows a young immigrant named Masha. Fluent in five languages and able to get by in several others, Masha lives with her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling to obtain residence permits, and her parents rarely leave the house except to compare gas prices. Masha has nearly completed her studies to become an interpreter, when suddenly Elias is hospitalized after a serious soccer injury and dies, forcing her to question a past that has haunted her for years. With cool irony, Grjasnowa’s debut novel tells the story of a headstrong young woman for whom the issue of origin and nationality is immaterial—her Jewish background has taught her she can survive anywhere. Yet Masha isn’t equipped to deal with grief, and this all-too-normal shortcoming gives a particularly bittersweet quality to her adventures.
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Published: Transit Books - September 4th, 2018
A woman moves to a London suburb near the River Lea, without knowing quite why or for how long. Over a series of long, solitary walks she reminisces about the rivers she has encountered during her life, from the Rhine, her childhood river, to the Saint Lawrence, and a stream in Tel Aviv. Filled with poignancy and poetic observation, River is an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.
North Africa, 1972. While the world is reeling from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a series of mysterious events is playing out in the Sahara. Four people are murdered in a hippie commune, a suitcase full of money disappears, and a pair of unenthusiastic detectives are assigned to investigate. In the midst of it all, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. . . .
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Published: New Vessel Press - September 9th, 2014
Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori—a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction—in his parents’ home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life around him from a park bench. Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a middle-aged salaryman who has lost his job but can’t bring himself to tell his wife, and shows up every day in a suit and tie to pass the time on a nearby bench. As Hiro and Tetsu cautiously open up to each other, they discover in their sadness a common bond. Regrets and disappointments, as well as hopes and dreams, come to the surface until both find the strength to somehow give a new start to their lives.
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Published: New Directions - September 26th, 2017
Go, Went, Gone tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns into compassion and an inner transformation as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes.
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Published: Darf Publishers - October 18th, 2018
A child attacks Loribeth with an iron while she is sleeping. In retaliation Loribeth throws the iron onto the child from an upstairs window, packs the damaged body into a suitcase and sets off on her travels. Thus starts Steinbeck’s unusual, poetic novella about a young woman’s transition from childhood to adulthood. Loribeth and her suitcase begin an odyssey through nightmarish locations in search of her absent father. What ensues is a Freudian adult fairytale.
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Published: Europa Editions - April 26th, 2011
Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously nasty and wily narrator of this rollicking family saga. When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, “stupid Sulfia,” is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa’s surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother’s eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.
In improvising poetry, aka a live-action cento, aka fashioning a poetry jam band, I start with a makeshift canon. Like throwing a party, you put different poets, different styles at play with/in each other, and see if it takes off. Like throwing a party, I try to be well-rested and hydrated before I host. I spend time thinking of who to invite. I light a candle. I open the space up. I have party games ready in case it gets awkward. There is some noise, which starts out steady and comforting, before we trust each other enough to get real weird.
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Published: AK Press - April 18th, 2017
Other recommended texts include Sun Ra's This Planet is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra and CA Conrad's Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for Future Wilderness.
Elena Gonzales Melinger is a poet and writer. Her work has appeared in the Texas Review, Glass Mountain and Dangerous Constellations. She has performed most recently with Public Poetry and Poetry Fix. Her chapbook, Write What You Know, and zine, Light Skinned Tears, will be available at Brazos Bookstore on February 8th, 2019 for her event.
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