Where is your nonfiction section please.
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma, by Stephanie Foo Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn't vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power. Reading the new memoir... Continue Reading →
The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story, by Kate Summerscale Some events are so dark that to find them is an act of imagination as much as memory. In 1938, as a storm gathered on the continent and Europe braced for something coming, yet unknown but surely terrible, in England a 34-year-old housewife... Continue Reading →
Self-help is not my thing whatsoever. When I started this blog, it was with the intention to show how much nonfiction actually encompasses beyond areas like self-help. When telling people I only read nonfiction for years, I often got that response: that I must read a lot of self-help. Um, no. I'm perfect. But seriously,... 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 →
My reading lately has been heavily gearing towards pop science and medical and social science topics. These two deal with very specific breeds of evil: mediocre white men who think they deserve the world at the expense of people of color and women, and the middle school experience. Both are atrocious in their own special... Continue Reading →
Two new essay collections out this month, both with weird, different looks at aspects of Americana. First, Tom Zoellner's The National Road: Dispatches From a Changing America, which "attempts to paint a picture of 'American place' in this uncertain era of political toxin and economic rearrangement. These are observations collected from thirty years of traveling... Continue Reading →
There are few things I love more than a good memoir of Russia. Recently I've read two, both around emigration to the US and the lingering ties to family and country that remain. The park looked well kept, even cheerful, as darkness settled over the tress. Here, history inundated every square centimeter of ground --... Continue Reading →
How's your reading for Women in Translation Month? I haven't actually read anything new in translation yet this month, but I can recommend three fantastic memoirs by women in translation that I've read recently. Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany, by Marie Jalowicz Simon, translated... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Trauma Cleaner, by Sarah Krasnostein (Amazon / SecondSale.com) This is how it ends, sometimes, with strangers in gloves looking at your blood and your too-many bottles of shampoo and your now-ironic Make Positive Changes postcard of Krishna and the last TV channel you flipped to on the night you died and the... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Other Side, by Lacy M. Johnson (Amazon / Book Depository) The short version: Lacy Johnson was kidnapped by her ex-boyfriend and held prisoner in a soundproofed basement he'd constructed solely for the purpose of raping and brutally killing her. He didn't succeed in killing her. This book is about that event, how it... Continue Reading →
Book review: After the Eclipse, by Sarah Perry Amazon She believed in the souls of housecats and in the melancholy of rainy days. She believed in hard work, and the energy she poured into her job -- hand-sewing shoes at a factory -- seemed boundless...She was terrified of birds, at close range, and moths, at any... Continue Reading →
Book review: Hunger, by Roxane Gay (Amazon / Book Depository) The story of my body is not a story of triumph. This is not a weight-loss memoir. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book's cover, with me standing in one leg of my former,... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 