Where is your nonfiction section please.
Authors Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney have similar, or at least compatible writing styles: meditative, super-smart and humorous, deeply self-aware, and literary without feeling academic. I think they've even collaborated on a poetry book together. It worked out well to read two of their books in tandem over this past week. Gabbert's The Unreality of... Continue Reading →
Editor Natalie Eve Garrett's Eat Joy was an essay collection I adored: well-known writers from a spectrum of backgrounds and genres writing about their favorite comfort foods, or what that concept meant to them. Her latest curated collection The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone follows a similar... Continue Reading →
Given my obsession with Indian food and curries of all kinds it only seemed fitting to learn more about them. Madhushree Ghosh's memoir-in-essays Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family (April 4, University Of Iowa Press) weaves together fragments of her life, both brighter and darker ones, loosely linked through food. It includes... Continue Reading →
Eking in at the veeeery last minute, I've compiled my new release favorites of 2021. Let's dive in! Unsurprisingly, nothing surpassed Elissa Washuta's White Magic for me. This memoir-in-essays is like nothing I've ever read before, although I've come across a lot of memoirs that attempt similar things less successfully. This uses a blend of... Continue Reading →
I've disappointed myself massively this year in terms of one of my favorite book events, Women in Translation Month. The wonderful Rachel@PaceAmoreLibri introduced me to this event and initiative a few years ago and I absolutely love it. Books published in English translations by female authors account for less than 31% of translated literature every... Continue Reading →
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, by Morgan Jerkins (2018) This book is not about all women, but it is meant for all women, and men, and those who do not adhere to the gender binary. It is for you. You. Our blackness doesn't... Continue Reading →
White Magic, by Elissa Washuta I have nothing now but my big aura, my fistful of keys, and my throat that still knows how to scream because no man has succeeded in closing it. I've kind of dreaded assembling my thoughts to write about this book, because it moved me like little else, certainly in... Continue Reading →
Festival Days, by Jo Ann Beard It's a lofty goal, to imagine translating one's own personal experiences in a way that instructs and illuminates, moves and inspires, another human being. Jo Ann Beard is long known for her essay collection The Boys of My Youth, frequently cited as groundbreaking amongst literary personal essays. After a... Continue Reading →
In my desperate attempt to finish endless back reviews (and I mean way, way back -- these are from 2019, dare we even cast our memories back to such a halcyon time?) I'm rounding up a few true crime-themed titles that are worth discussing even if I couldn't form them into full-fledged reviews. You know... Continue Reading →
Book review: Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, by Slavenka Drakulic What a weird day to be writing about a book on democracy in Europe, as it teeters precariously in the United States. But I think Americans would do well to consider democratic processes and totalitarian histories in Europe, because it's abundantly clear that... Continue Reading →
It's finally time to close the book on a year none of us will forget, much as we'd like to! 2020 may have sucked unendingly for so very many reasons, but it did have some redeeming qualities in the new nonfiction department. Here are my favorites, in no particular order, from the 2020 new nonfiction... Continue Reading →
Essay mini reviews today, plus exciting news from the wonderful Shelleyrae @ Book'd Out: the Nonfiction Reader Challenge is back! Annie Dillard's 1977 Holy the Firm is a brief book, more like an extended essay. From 1975, Dillard lived in a one-room cabin on an island at Puget Sound for two years. It seemed like... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 