book list ₊˚✩⊹

The Exhibition of Persephone Q

Jessi Jezewska Stevens · 2020

<p><b>A <i>New York Times Book Review</i> Editors’ Choice</b><br><b>A <i>WALL STREET JOURNAL</i> AND <i>VOGUE</i> MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2020<br></b><br>"<b>A triumph of tone and intelligence. Percy Q's perspective is skewed and searching at once, and through her eyes, we see afresh not only New York's post-9/11 landscape but also the world of art, and love, and the process of becoming." —Rivka Galchen, author of <i>Atmospheric Disturbances</i> <br> </b><br>Percy is pregnant. She hasn’t told a soul. Probably she should tell her husband—certainly she <i>means </i>to—but one night she wakes up to find she no longer recognizes him. Now, instead of sleeping, Percy is spending her nights taking walks through her neighborhood, all the while fretting over her marriage, her impending motherhood, and the sinister ways the city is changing.<br><br>Amid this alienation—from her husband, home, and rapidly changing body—a package arrives. In it: an exhibition catalog for a photography show. The photographs consist of a series of digitally manipulated images of a woman lying on a bed in a red room. It takes a moment for even Percy to notice that the woman is herself . . . but no one else sees the resemblance.<br><br>Percy must now come to grips with the fundamental question of identity in the digital age: To what extent do we own our own image, and to what extent is that image shaped by the eyes of others?<br><br>Capturing perfectly the haunted atmosphere of Manhattan immediately after 9/11—and the simmering insanity of America ever since—Jessi Jezewska Stevens's <i>The Exhibition of Persephone Q </i>is a darkly witty satire about how easy it is to lose ownership of our own selves.</p>

Divorcer

Gary Lutz · 2011

Sugar, Baby

Celine Saintclare · 2024

Agnes Green is turning 21 and her life is heading nowhere. Still living at home with her devoutly religious Caribbean mother in a lifeless suburb, she works as a cleaner by day and spends her nights secretly going to clubs and dating Toby - who loves arthouse film, getting stoned, and ignoring her texts.<br/><br/>That is until she meets Emily, the daughter of one of her cleaning clients, who lives in London and works as a model - and a sugar baby. Emily's lifestyle is the escape Agnes has been longing for: tasting menus, private flights to Paris and Miami, rich older men who shower her with compliments and designer gifts.<br/><br/>Agnes' new life is beyond her wildest dreams, but it comes at a cost. As she begins to stray further from her mother's holy teachings, she must decide how far she is willing to go to be adored...

The Adult

Bronwyn Fischer · 2024

An addictively gripping coming-of-age story about an all-consuming, insidious love affair between a college freshman and a mysterious older woman, from an unforgettable new voice in fiction<br/><br/>Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone, whoever that might be.<br/><br/>And then she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her, and is drawn unstoppably into Nora’s orbit. She begins spending more and more of her time at Nora’s perfect, tidy home in her beautiful, quiet world. Natalie lies to her floormates about her absence, inventing a fake off-campus boyfriend, and carefully protects this sacred, adult relationship. This only deepens her obsession, even as she comes to suspect Nora is hiding something. As the secrets multiply and the intensity of the romance threatens to overwhelm her, Natalie realizes that the new, adult identity she had imagined for herself is far from the one she’s actually coming to know.<br/><br/>With atmospheric, electric prose that captures the anxiety and emotional intensity of young adulthood like never before, The Adult is about sex, yearning, poetry, and learning to free oneself from the expectations of others. Bronwyn Fischer is an immensely talented new writer to watch.

Beasts

Joyce Carol Oates · 2004

A bright, talented junior at Catamount College in the druggy 1970s, Gillian Brauer strives to realise more than a poet's craft in her workshop with the charismatic, anti-establishment professor Andre Harrow. For Gillian has fallen in love - with Harrow, with his aesthetic sensibility and bohemian lifestyle, with his secluded cottage, with the mystique of his imposing, russet-haired French wife, Dorcas. A sculptress, Dorcas has outraged the campus and alumnae with the crude, primitive, larger than life-sized wooden totems that she has exhibited under the motto 'We are beasts and this is our consolation'.As if mesmerised, Gillian enters the rarefied world of the Harrows. She is special, even though she knows her classmates have preceded her here. She is helpless. She is powerful. And she will learn in full the meaning of Dorcas' provocative motto . . .

Sirens & Muses

Antonia Angress · 2023

Thirst for Salt

Madelaine Lucas · 2023

Weird Fucks

Lynne Tillman · 2021

A young woman drifts through a series of one night stands and truncated love affairs. Finding herself in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, she turns her curious and savage eye out on the foibles of the world around her. The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, and preen, and fall hopelessly in love. Through these snapshots we get a biting psychopathology, not just of masculinity in its various masks, but of sex and desire in the early 1970s.

Hungerstone

Kat Dunn · 2025

A Touch of Jen

Beth Morgan · 2021

When Angels Speak of Love

Bell Hooks · 2025

GIRL MESS: a Katabasis in verse

Kim Rashidi · 2024

Reservoir Bitches

Dahlia de la Cerda · 2024

<i>Life's a bitch. That's why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she's foaming at the mouth.</i><br> <br> In the linked stories of <i>Reservoir Bitches</i>, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, <i>Reservoir Bitches</i> is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers.<br> <br> <br> '<i>Reservoir Bitches</i> is a blisteringly urgent collection of interconnected stories about contemporary Mexican women. It absolutely bangs from the first page to the last. It's extremely funny but deadly serious and we loved the energy and flair of the dual translators' approach. It packs an enormous political and linguistic punch but is also subtle, revelatory, and moving about the ways in which these women hustle, innovate, survive or don't, in a world of labyrinthine dangers. This book weaves the riotous testimony of the living and the dead to create an expletive-rich feminist blast of Mexican literature.'<br> <b>-Judges' comments from the 2025 International Booker Prize</b><br> <br> 'The stories are all narrated by women, from the daughters of crime bosses to designer-clad socialites, whose voices are all so alive and vibrant that reading this collection was a genuine thrill. <i>Reservoir Bitches</i> doesn't shy from portraying Mexico's gritty underbelly but, much like her fellow countrywoman Fernanda Melchor, De La Cerda's stories scrutinise Mexican society with great humour. It is a remarkably good debut collection.'<br> <b>-Barry Pierce, <i>The Big Issue</i></b><br> <br> 'Women lie, cheat, kill, and die in Mexican writer de la Cerda's searing English-language debut ... de la Cerda offers a refreshingly unapologetic voice for women who refuse to be placated. This is worth a look.'<br> <b>-<i>Publishers Weekly</i></b>

Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love

Joanne Ella Parsons · 2024

'Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now.'<br/><br/>A prophecy threatens a volcanic upheaval for a star-crossed pair. A forbidden rite binds a dark arts dabbler to a phantom bride. A barstool chancer invites a devilish retribution on the dance floor.<br/><br/>Beckoning from this tome are twelve tales of dark romance and undying passions hailing from 1832 to 2022, marrying bewitching classics by Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins and Angela Carter with twisting modern pieces by Nalo Hopkinson, Tracy Fahey and V. Castro - alongside the classic Gothic novella of sapphic vampire romance, Carmilla. Indulging in the strangest eddies of literary love, this new anthology bids you enter a doom-laden yet irresistibly seductive corner of the Weird.

The Woman Destroyed

Simone De Beauvoir · 1987

Monsters What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People?

Claire Dederer · 2024

Strip Tees

Kate Flannery · 2023

How To Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond

James Monaco, David Lindroth · 2013

Women on Porn One Hundred Stories. One Vital Conversation

Fiona Vera-Gray · 2024

The Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women

Anushay Hossain · 2021

Explore real women’s tales of healthcare trauma and medical misogyny with this meticulously researched, in-depth examination of the women’s health crisis in America—and what we can do about it.<br/><br/>When Anushay Hossain became pregnant in the US, she was so relieved. Growing up in Bangladesh in the 1980s, where the concept of women’s healthcare hardly existed, she understood how lucky she was to access the best in the world. But she couldn’t have been more wrong. Things started to go awry from the minute she stepped in the hospital, and after thirty hours of labor (two of which she spent pushing), Hossain’s epidural slipped. Her pain was so severe that she ran a fever of 104 degrees, and as she shook and trembled uncontrollably, the doctors finally performed an emergency C-section.<br/><br/>Giving birth in the richest country on earth, Hossain never imagined she could die in labor. But she almost did. The experience put her on a journey to explore, understand, and share how women—especially women of color—are dismissed to death by systemic sexism in American healthcare.<br/><br/>Following in the footsteps of feminist manifestos such as The Feminine Mystique and Rage Becomes Her, The Pain Gap is an eye-opening and stirring call to arms that encourages women to flip their “hysteria complex” on its head and use it to revolutionize women’s healthcare. This book tells the story of Hossain’s experiences—from growing up in South Asia surrounded by staggering maternal mortality rates to lobbying for global health legislation on Capitol Hill to nearly becoming a statistic herself. Along the way, she realized that a little fury might be just what the doctor ordered.<br/><br/>Meticulously researched and deeply reported, this book explores real women’s traumatic experiences with America’s healthcare system—and empowers everyone to use their experiences to bring about the healthcare revolution women need.

The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai

Gary Bettinson · 2025

Munkey Diaries The Extraordinary Early Years of an International Icon

Jane Birkin · 2021

Slow Days, Fast Company The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

Eve Babitz · 2016

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

Katya Apekina · 2018

*2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist *Longlisted for The Crook’s Corner Book Prize  *Longlisted for the 2019 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award *Shortlisted for the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Fiction *A Best Book of 2018 —Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed News, Entropy, LitReactor, LitHub *35 Over 35 Award 2018 *One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Fall —Vulture, Harper's BAZAAR, BuzzFeed News, Publishers Weekly, The Millions, Bustle, Fast Company It’s 16-year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother’s dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success. The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart—Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further. Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession. "The structure, characters and storyline are all refreshingly original, and the writing is nothing short of gorgeous. It's a stunningly accomplished book, and Apekina isn't afraid to grab her readers by the hand and take them to some very dark and very beautiful places." —Michael Schaub, NPR

Angel Meat

Laura Lee Bahr · 2017

Dead Relatives

Lucie McKnight Hardy · 2021

Iris has never left the big house in the country she shares with Mammy and the servants. When The Ladies arrive, she finds that she must appease her dead relatives. Other stories in this collection explore themes of motherhood and the fragile body, family dynamics and small town tensions, unusual traditions and metamorphosis. Dead Relatives and Other Stories is the highly anticipated, no-holds-barred short story collection from Lucie McKnight Hardy, and readers can expect more of the suspense and trepidation evident in her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them. Not for the faint-hearted, Dead Relatives invites you behind closed doors, and will leave you wondering if it’s better that they’re kept shut and firmly locked.<br/><br/>The highly anticipated new collection from the author of Water Shall Refuse Them. 'Lucie McKnight Hardy brings a slick perfectionism to the genre of folk horror…a fine writer, sensitive to detail and with a knack for gruesome imagery'- Black Static

Mina

Kim Sagwa · 2018

Deliver Me

Elle Nash · 2023

“To read the work of Elle Nash is to be restored to faith in the wildness, wetness, and visceral power of contemporary American fiction. Deliver Me is a barbed liturgy of bugs, babies, meat, the gospel, women lusting women, women lusting men, and the human body. Get saved.” —MELISSA BRODER, author of Milk Fed, The Pisces, and Death Valley<br/>“...an explosive ending that will stun readers… Readers drawn to gritty character studies should take a look.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY<br/><br/>“Haunting and at times relentlessly cruel, this novel will keep readers guessing.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.<br/><br/>The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish.<br/>With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.

Waterfall Girls

Kimberly White · 2021

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

Xiaolu Guo · 2021

Girls Against God

Jenny Hval · 2020

Selfish Girls

Abigail Bergstrom · 2025

Something Happened Here

Felicity Meadow · 2024

The Last Sane Woman

Hannah Regel · 2024

A beguiling debut novel about friendship and failure Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman – a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession. She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola’s feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?

The Torn Skirt

Rebecca Godfrey · 2002

<p>I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years. . . . And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me.</p><p>At Mt. Douglas (a.k.a. Mt. Drug) High, all the girls have feathered hair, and the sweet scent of Love's Baby Soft can't hide the musk of raw teenage anger, apathy, and desire. Sara Shaw is a girl full of fever and longing, a girl looking for something risky, something real. Her only possible salvation comes in the willowy form of the mysterious Justine, the outlaw girl in the torn skirt. The search for Justine will lead Sara on a daring odyssey into an underworld of hookers and johns, junkies and thieves, runaway girls and skater boys, and, ultimately, into a violent tragedy.</p><p>One of the most provocative and original coming-of-age novels to appear in a long time, The Torn Skirt is a lyrical story that soars with an honest understanding of the teenage condition.</p>

New Animal

Ella Baxter

Amelia is no stranger to sex and death. Her job in her family's funeral parlour, doing make-up on the dead, might be unusual, but she's good at it. Life and warmth comes from the men she meets online - combining with someone else's body at night in order to become something else, at least for a while. But when a sudden, brutal loss severs her ties with someone she loves, Amelia sets off on a seventy-two-hour mission to outrun her grief - skipping out on the funeral, running away to stay with her father in Tasmania and experimenting on the local BDSM scene. There, she learns more about sex, death, grief and the different ways pain works its way through the body. It'll take a pair of fathers, a bruising encounter with a stranger and recognition of her own body's limits to bring Amelia back to herself.

Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery

Brom · 2023

Temper

Phoebe Walker · 2023

"There's a gap where my sense of place should be. It's quite a useful one sometimes. It allows me to sit on the cusp of an opinion." Following a move to the Netherlands, a young woman dissects the developments of her new life: awkward exchanges with the people she meets, days spent alone freelancing in her apartment, her confrontation with boredom and unease. In her newfound isolation, she develops an unusual friendship with Colette, a woman she neither likes nor can keep away from. As her feelings of dislocation grow, larger anxieties about her purpose - or lack of it - begin to encroach. And underneath it all, a burgeoning frustration bubbles. Intimate, incisive and brilliantly observed, Temper explores loneliness, self-worth and disconnection with head-nodding accuracy.

Tennis Lessons

Susannah Dickey · 2021

For fans of I MAY DESTROY YOU and FLEABAG and for readers who want to laugh and cry: the brave, beautiful, sometimes brutal story of a young misfit and her rocky road to womanhood, stopping at each year along the way. 'I loved Tennis Lessons so much. Susannah is a phenomenally talented writer' ELIZABETH DAY 'A raw, fierce, shockingly honest coming-of-age story' LOUISE O'NEILL 'Incredibly funny . . . by turns charming and disgusting and I loved it' NELL FRIZZELL You're strange and wrong. You've known it from the beginning. This is the voice that rings in your ears. Because you never say the right thing. You're a disappointment to everyone. You're a far cry from beautiful - and your thoughts are ugly too. You seem bound to fail, bound to break. But you know what it is to laugh with your best friend, to feel the first tentative tingles of attraction, to take exquisite pleasure in the affront of your unruly body. You just need to find your place. From dead pets and crashed cars to family traumas and misguided love affairs, Susannah Dickey's revitalizing debut novel plunges us into the private world of one young woman as she navigates her rocky way to adulthood. 'Brilliant . . . a wonderful writer, hugely talented, very funny and insightful' ALAN DAVIES 'Propulsive . . . brilliantly vivid . . . stays in the mind long after reading' IRISH TIMES 'A beautifully written and psychologically incisive bildungsroman...the arrival of a young writer to watch' OBSERVER

Stargazer

Laurie Petrou · 2022

What a Shame

Abigail Bergstrom · 2022

THE WORD-OF-MOUTH PHENOMENON THAT EVERYONE HAS BEEN TALKING ABOUT: 'Intelligent, moving and darkly comic . . . taking us deftly from serious explorations of trauma to riotously funny scenes of modern life' The Sunday Times 'Haunting and hilarious' Daily Mail 'A brilliant debut' Cariad Lloyd 'Full of heart, wit and feeling' Caroline O'Donoghue 'I loved it!' Lauren Bravo 'Heartfelt, sharp-but-tender' Erin Kelly 'I couldn't stop reading' Angela Scanlon 'A glorious new talent has arrived' Emma Gannon 'Raw and utterly brilliant' Otegha Uwagba 'Absorbing and clever . . . I fell in love with Mathilda' Cathy Rentzenbrink 'Will be read for years by any and all young women looking for a friend' Scarlett Curtis __________________________________ There is something wrong with Mathilda. She's still reeling from the blow of a gut-punch break up and grieving the death of a loved one. But that's not it. She's cried all her tears, mastered her crow pose and thrown out every last reminder of him. But that's not helping. Concerned that she isn't moving on, Mathilda's friends push her towards a series of increasingly unorthodox remedies. Until the seams of herself begin to come undone. Tender, unflinching and blisteringly funny, What a Shame glitters with rage and heartbreak, perfect for fans of Emma Jane Unsworth, Dolly Alderton and Holly Bourne. __________________________________ 'Ever-so-relatable' Cosmopolitan 'Delightfully frank' The Skinny 'A modern story of grief and loss' Refinery29 'Dazzling . . . By turns funny, sharp, raw and overwhelming' Heat 'Fizzes with energy, rage and love' Jessica Moor 'A book that beautifully balances the light and the dark' Chloe Ashby 'Dark, nuanced and provocative' Laura Jane Williams 'An extraordinary novel that will stay with me for a long time' Laura Kay

Post-traumatic

Chantal V. Johnson · 2023

Drugs Are Nice A Post-Punk Memoir

Lisa Crystal Carver · 2005

Paul Takes the Form of A Mortal Girl

Andrea Lawlor · 2019

It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, women's studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco - a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure. Andrea Lawlor's debut novel offers a speculative history of early 90s identity politics during the heyday of ACT UP and Queer Nation.

Fruit of the Dead

Rachel Lyon · 2024

<b>An electric contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter set over the course of one summer on a lush private island, exploring who holds the power in a modern underworld.</b><br><br> Camp counsellor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. <br><br> The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island off the coast of Maine. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she’s in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. When her daughter seemingly disappears, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears.<br><br> Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, <i>Fruit of the Dead</i> incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a lush and haunting story that explores love, attraction, control, obliteration and America’s own late capitalist mythos. <br><br><b>Advance praise for <i>Fruit of the Dead</i></b><br><br> 'A gripping literary thriller, <i>Fruit of the Dead </i>presents a coming-of-age tale that is so well-observed and intoxicating that the reader will lose track of time, but won't forget how they spent it. Egan and Cline fans: assemble.' <b>Caoilinn Hughes, author of <i>The Wild Laughter</i></b><br><br> ‘Ancient Greece meets <i>Succession</i> by way of Emma Cline, <i>Fruit of the Dead</i> is a deliciously dark examination of agency and power, and the savage complexity of the mother-daughter bond.’ <b>Ruth Gilligan, author of <i>The Butchers</i></b><br>  <br> ‘Mesmerised and profoundly alarmed, I read this in one go; I’ve been haunted by it ever since. I’ve passionately loved Lyon’s writing for years, and <i>Fruit of the Dead</i> further confirms what I’ve long suspected: I want to lunge to read anything she writes.’ <b>R. O. Kwon, author of <i>The Incendiaries</i></b><br><br> ‘Irresistible and devastating. Lyon has spun an utterly absorbing, lush and terror-laced retelling of an ancient, archetypal tale – a young woman tempted and taken, a mother’s feral grief – that is both timeless and crisply contemporary.' <b>Melissa Febos, author of <i>Girlhood</i></b>

Territory of Light

Yuko Tsushima · 2019

Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann · 1997

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson · 1987

Sunburn

Chloe Michelle Howarth · 2023

Innocents

Cathy Coote · 2007

Life of the Party

Tea Hacic-Vlahovic · 2020

Skin

Sergio del Molino · 2021

Skin is the border of our body and, as such, it is that through which we relate to others but also what separates us from them. Through skin, we speak: when we display it, when we tan it, when we tattoo it, or when we mute it by covering it with clothes. Skin exhibits social relationships, displays power and the effects of power, explains many things about who we are, how others perceive us and how we exist in the world. And when it gets sick, it turns us into monsters.<br/>In Skin, Sergio del Molino speaks of these monsters in history and literature, whose lives have been tormented by bad skin: Stalin secretly taking a bath in his dacha, Pablo Escobar getting up late and shutting himself in the shower, Cyndi Lauper performing a commercial for a medicine promising relief from skin disease, John Updike sunburned in the Caribbean, Nabokov writing to his wife from exile, ‘Everything would be fine, if it weren’t for the damned skin.’ As a psoriasis sufferer, Sergio del Molino includes himself in this gallery of monsters through whose stories he delves into the mysteries of skin. What is for some a badge of pride and for others a source of anguish and shame, skin speaks of us and for us when we don’t speak with words.

Blueberries

Ellena Savage · 2021

<p><i>Sometimes I think it’s possible to live with anything. That we’re wired to survive-survive-survive, to grip onto the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think, it’s not possible to live at all. Not at all.</i></p> <p><i>Blueberries</i> could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification: a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. It is a new horizon in storytelling.</p> <p> In crystalline prose, Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life: what is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?</p>

The Perversions of Quiet Girls

Anonymous · 2017

The Perversions Of Quiet Girls is a semi-autobiographical novel penned by an anonymous author, first published in Paris in 1971. The novel was banned in the United States until a 1981 Justice Department ruling declared that its contents were not obscene. It was also banned in Turkey. The narrator Ashley Dvorak works in the personnel division of the paternal Longacre communications company. Although the narrator's experiences are highly sexual and at times non-consensual there has been some doubt over the years that the novel was meant to be a work of fiction and reads more like a memoir. An Amazon exclusive, enjoy.

Disorientation

Elaine Hsieh Chou · 2022