Books I'm yet to read but NEED to

The Regrets

Amy Bonnaffons • 2020

Woman, Eating

Claire Kohda • 2022

Twin Peaks The Final Dossier

Mark Frost • 2017

The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Mark Frost • 2016

One Last Stop

Casey McQuiston • 2021

<p><b>*INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*<br>*INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER*<br>*INSTANT #1 INDIE BESTSELLER*</b><br><b><br>From the <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Red, White & Royal Blue</i> comes a new romantic comedy that will stop readers in their tracks...</b><br><br>For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures.<br><br>But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train. <br><br>Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges and swoopy hair and soft smile, showing up in a leather jacket to save August’s day when she needed it most. August’s subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her. Maybe it’s time to start believing in some things, after all.<br><br>Casey McQuiston’s <i>One Last Stop </i>is a magical, sexy, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.<br><br><b>"A dazzling romance, filled with plenty of humor and heart." - <i>Time Magazine</i>, "The 21 Most Anticipated Books of 2021"<br><br></b><b>"Dreamy, other worldly, smart, swoony, thoughtful, hilarious - all in all, exactly what you'd expect from Casey McQuiston!" - Jasmine Guillory, <i>New York Times </i>bestselling author of <i>The Proposal </i>and</b><i><b> Party for Two</b></i></p>

Wonderland (The London Trilogy #3)

Juno Dawson • 2020

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Andrea Lawlor • 2019

If Cats Disappeared From The World

Kawamura Genki • 2018

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

Larry Mitchell • 2019

<p><b><i>The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions</i> is a beloved queer utopian text</b> written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love women who are surviving the ways and world of men. Cherished by many over the four decades since its publication, <i>The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions</i> offers a trenchant critique of capitalism, assimilation, and patriarchy that is deeply relevant today. This new edition will feature essays from performance artist Morgan Bassichis, who adapted the book to music with TM Davy in 2017 for a performance at the New Museum, and activist filmmaker Tourmaline.</p>

Lobster

Guillaume Lecasble

Bear: Marian Engel

Engel • 2021

Open Throat: A Novel

Henry Hoke • 2023

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly

Sun-mi Hwang • 2014

The People in the Trees

Hanya Yanagihara • 2014

A thrilling anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide—from the bestselling author of National Book Award–nominated modern classic, A Little Life<br/><br/>“Provokes discussions about science, morality and our obsession with youth.” —Chicago Tribune<br/><br/>It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself.<br/><br/>Look for Hanya Yanagihara’slatest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Temporary

Hilary Leichter • 2021

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE 2021 'Terrifyingly entertaining.' Kelly Link 'Masterful.' Washington Post ''Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy.' New York Times 'What is this?' Los Angeles Times Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's 2020 First Novel Prize 18 boyfriends. 23 jobs. One ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice. Welcome to the world of the Temporary. 'There is nothing more personal than doing your job'. So goes the motto of the Temporary, as she takes job after job, in search of steadiness, belonging, and something to call her own. Aided by her bespoke agency and a cast of boyfriends - each allotted their own task (the handy boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the real estate boyfriend) - she is happy to fill in for any of us: for the Chairman of the Board, a ghost, a murderer, a mother. Even for you, and for me. Wild, hopeful, infinitely sad and infinitely funny, Temporary is the smartest, most humane story of what it is to work and live, here and now.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

TJ Klune • 2024

Hotel Magnifique

Emily J. Taylor • 2022

Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

Kurt Vonnegut • 1999

Slaughterhouse-Five is a satirical novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a chaplain's assistant named Billy Pilgrim. It is generally recognized as Vonnegut's most influential and popular work. Vonnegut's use of the firebombing of Dresden as a central event makes the novel semi-autobiographical, because he was present then.

Severance

Ling Ma • 2018

The School for Good Mothers

Jessamine Chan • 2022

Blue Ticket

Sophie Mackintosh • 2020

They

Kay Dick • 1977

High-Rise: A Novel

J. G. Ballard • 2012

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro • 2006

<b>NOBEL PRIZE WINNER <b>•</b> From the acclaimed, bestselling author of <i>The Remains of the Day</i> comes “a Gothic tour de force" (<i>The New York Times</i>) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.<br><br>One of <i>The New York Times</i>’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A <i>Kirkus Reviews </i>Best Fiction Book of the Century • A <i>Los Angeles Times</i> Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years</b><br><br>As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. <br><br>Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

The Doloriad

Missouri Williams • 2022

The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

Cormac McCarthy • 2006

I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman • 2019

Conversations on Love

Natasha Lunn • 2022

Something That May Shock and Discredit You

Daniel M. Lavery • 2020

Fed Up and Hungry: Women, Oppression and Food

Lawrence • 1987

So Sad Today

Melissa Broder • 2016

In the Kitchen: Essays on food and life

Juliet Annan • 2020

The White Album: Essays

Joan Didion • 2017

The God Desire

David Baddiel • 2023

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson • 2021

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

Aldous Huxley • 2009

"A genuine spiritual quest. . . . Extraordinary." — New York Times<br/>Among the most profound and influential explorations of mind-expanding psychedelic drugs ever written, here are two complete classic books—The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell—in which Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, reveals the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. This edition also features an additional essay, "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds," now included for the first time.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Nikole Hannah-Jones • 2021

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER • A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Marie Claire, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn Ward

Blueberries

Ellena Savage • 2020

‘I mean who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.’<br/><br/>The body frequently escapes her, but is always very much present in these compellingly vivid, clear-eyed essays on an embodied self in flight through the world, from the brilliant young writer Ellena Savage.<br/><br/>In Portuguese police stations and Portland college campuses, in suburban Melbourne libraries and wintry Berlin apartments, Savage shows bodies in pain and in love, bodies at work and at rest.<br/><br/>She circles back to scenes of crimes or near-crimes, to lovers or near-lovers, to turn over the stones, reread the paperwork, check the deeds, approach from another angle altogether. These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Blueberries is ripe with acid, promise, and sweetness.

Naming the Violence: Speaking Out about Lesbian Battering (New Leaf Series)

Lobel • 1993

Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry

Adrienne Rich • 2019

A New York Times Critics’ Pick<br/><br/>A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.<br/>Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, Essential Essays showcases Adrienne Rich’s singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.

The Straight Mind: And Other Essays

Monique Wittig • 1992

Your Silence Will Not Protect You Essays

Audre Lorde • 2017

Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag • 2002

It Came from the Closet

Joe Vallese • 2022

Serious Face

Jon Mooallem • 2022

Crackpot

John Waters • 2007

What White People Can Do Next

Emma Dabiri • 2021

Kill Billionaire

Anders Lustgarten • 2026

Thirteen

Steve Cavanagh • 2020

Out

Natsuo Kirino • 2022

Other People's Clothes

Calla Henkel • 2021

The Last Thing He Told Me

Laura Dave • 2021

The Maidens

Alex Michaelides • 2021

The Thief

Fuminori Nakamura • 2012

The Guest List

Lucy Foley • 2020

Eileen: A Novel

Ottessa Moshfegh • 2015

Death in Her Hands

Ottessa Moshfegh • 2021

Blood and Guts in High School

Kathy Acker • 2017

Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee

Mary G. Thompson • 2017

A story of loss, love, and survival for readers of Room and The Cellar.<br/><br/>“An intelligent, tense psychological drama.”—Kirkus Reviews<br/><br/>When sixteen-year-old Amy returns home, she can't tell her family what’s happened to her. She can’t tell them where she’s been since she and her cousin Dee, were kidnapped six years ago—who stole them from their families or what’s become of Dee. She has to stay silent because she's afraid of what might happen next, and she’s desperate to protect her secrets at any cost. Amy tries to readjust to life at “home,” but nothing she does feels right. She’s a stranger in her own family, and the guilt that she’s the one who returned is insurmountable. Amy soon realizes that keeping secrets won’t change what's happened, and they may end up hurting those she loves the most. She has to go back in order to move forward, risking everything along the way.

The Keeper: A Novel

Jessica Moor • 2020

Good Girls Die Last

Natali Simmonds • 2024

My Husband: A Novel

Maud Ventura • 2023

The Exhibition of Persephone Q: A Novel

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>

Eileen: A Novel

Ottessa Moshfegh • 2016

Stargazer

Laurie Petrou • 2022

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke • 2026

My Sister, the Serial Killer

Oyinkan Braithwaite • 2018

A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing

Jessie Tu • 2020

The Giant Dark

Sarvat Hasin • 2022

First Love

Ivan Turgenev • 1860

Every Last Word

Tamara Ireland Stone • 2017

That Was Then, This Is Now

S. E. Hinton • 1998

A Separate Peace

John Knowles • 1951

Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann • 1966

Foul is Fair

Hannah Capin • 2020

If I Had Your Face

Frances Cha • 2020

Hysteria

Jessica Gross • 2020

Happy Hour

Marlowe Granados • 2020

Torchlight to Valhalla

Gale Wilhelm • 1985

The Last Letter

Rebecca Yarros • 2019

No Hard Feelings

Genevieve Novak

little scratch

Rebecca Watson • 2020

Consent

Annabel Lyon • 2022

New Animal

Ella Baxter • 2022

Breasts and Eggs

Mieko Kawakami • 2020

You've Reached Sam

Dustin Thao • 2021

The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh • 2012

She Gets the Girl

Rachael Lippincott • 2023

<b><i>She’s All That</i> meets <i>What If It’s Us</i> in this <i>New York Times </i>bestselling hate-to-love YA romantic comedy from the coauthor of <i>Five Feet Apart </i>Rachael Lippincott and debut writer Alyson Derrick.</b><br><br>Alex Blackwood is a little bit headstrong, with a dash of chaos and a whole lot of flirt. She knows how to get the girl. <i>Keeping</i> her on the other hand…not so much. Molly Parker has everything in her life totally in control, except for her complete awkwardness with just about anyone besides her mom. She knows she’s in love with the impossibly cool Cora Myers. She just…hasn’t actually talked to her yet. <br> <br>Alex and Molly don’t belong on the same planet, let alone the same college campus. But when Alex, fresh off a bad (but hopefully not permanent) breakup, discovers Molly’s hidden crush as their paths cross the night before classes start, they realize they might have a common interest after all. Because maybe if Alex volunteers to help Molly learn how to get her dream girl to fall for her, she can prove to her ex that she’s not a selfish flirt. That she’s ready for an actual commitment. And while Alex is the last person Molly would ever think she could trust, she can’t deny Alex knows what she’s doing with girls, unlike her. <br> <br>As the two embark on their five-step plans to get their girls to fall for them, though, they both begin to wonder if maybe they’re the ones falling…for each other.

Red, White and Royal Blue

Casey McQuiston • 2021

Blood Moon

Lucy Cuthew • 2020

This Close to Okay

Leesa Cross-Smith • 2021

In the Seeing Hands of Others

Nat Ogle • 2022

Panenka

Ronan Hession • 2022

I Kissed Shara Wheeler

Casey McQuiston • 2022

Yolk

Mary H. K. Choi • 2022

The Cat and the City

Nick Bradley • 2020

Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis • 2010

People We Meet on Vacation

Emily Henry • 2021

Emergency Contact

Mary H. K. Choi • 2018

Milk Fed

Melissa Broder • 2022

First Time for Everything

Henry Fry • 2022

Open Water

Caleb Azumah Nelson • 2021

Meat Market (London Trilogy #2)

Juno Dawson • 2019

Clean (London Trilogy #1)

Juno Dawson • 2018

The Amendments

Niamh Mulvey • 2024

Notes of a Crocodile

Qiu Miaojin • 2017

Tampa

Alissa Nutting • 2014

The Impatient: A Novel

Djaili Amadou Amal • 2022

Ms Ice Sandwich

Mieko Kawakami • 2018

Maurice: A Novel

E. M. Forster • 2005

Transcendent Kingdom: A novel

Yaa Gyasi • 2020

Big Swiss

Jen Beagin • 2024

HEY, GOOD LUCK OUT THERE: A NOVEL

Georgia Toews • 2022

Sunburn

Chloe Michellq Howarth • 2023

<p><b>** Shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2024 **</b><br><b>** Shortlisted for the 2024 Book of the Year: Discover Award by the British Book Awards **<br>** Shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction **<br>** Longlisted for the Diverse Book Awards 2024 **<br>** An <i>Evening Standard</i> 'One to Watch in 2023 **<br>** An <i>Independent</i> ‘Best Romantic Summer Reads' **<br>** A Book of the Month pick for <i>Diva</i>, <i>Irish Examiner</i>, <i>Novellic </i>& <i>Sainsbury’s Magazine</i> **<br>** A Most Anticipated pick for <i>PinkNews</i> & <i>Queer on the Street</i> **</b></p><br> <p>It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.</p><br> <p>Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.</p><br> <p>Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.</p><br> <p>But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. Neither will be easy, but only one will offer her happiness.</p><br> <p><b><i>Sunburn</i> is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp. An atmospheric sapphic love story and coming-of-age novel with the intensity of Megan Nolan's <i>Acts of Desperation</i>, the long hot summer of André Aciman's <i>Call Me By Your Name</i> and the female friendships of Anna Hope's <i>Expectation</i>.</b></p><br> <p>‘A tender and heartfelt coming-of-age tale’ – <b><i>Heat</i></b></p><br> <p>‘A compassionate take on the push and pull between what's expected and what is felt’ – <b><i>Herald</i></b></p><br> <p>‘A deeply moving, heartfelt love story’ – <b><i>Daily Mail</i></b></p><br> <p>‘Lucy tells her story in a true, compelling voice, with an eye for minutiae, quaint apercus, and confidences that make her account moving and convincing’ – <b><i>SAGA Magazine</i></b></p><br> <p>‘Tender and poignant... Ideal reading for the last month of summer’ – <b><i>Diva</i></b></p><br> <p>'Intense and all-consuming - like the first love it describes - <i>Sunburn</i> transported me to the heart of summer and the heady days of late adolescence. I won't soon forget Chloe Michelle Howarth's addictive, lushly written debut' - <b>Laura Sims</b></p><br> <p>'Capturing all the intensity of first love, blended with the claustrophobia of small-town life, this debut, inspired by real experience, is tender and raw' - <b><i>The Bookseller</i></b></p><br> <p>'A beautiful coming of age love novel written with an insightful poetical prose, rich with religious allegory and texture which underscores the transformative, spiritual power of first love explored' - <b><i>Scene Magazine</i></b></p>

Scaffolding

Lauren Elkin • 2024

Nevada

Imogen Binnie • 2013

At Certain Points We Touch

Lauren John Joseph • 2022

Post-traumatic: A Novel

Chantal V. Johnson • 2023

The Poet

Louisa Reid • 2023

Juliet the Maniac: A Novel

Juliet Escoria • 2019

Sylvia

Leonard Michaels • 2015

Motherhood

Sheila Heti • 2018

Mona

Pola Oloixarac • 2022

Mister N

Najwa Barakat • 2022

Lie with Me

Philippe Besson • 2020

Paradais

Fernanda Melchor • 2022

A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel

Ruth Ozeki • 2013

If Beale Street Could Talk

James Baldwin • 2006

From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime—"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless" (The New York Times Book Review).<br/><br/>"One of the best books Baldwin has ever written—perhaps the best of all." —The Philadelphia Inquirer<br/><br/>Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions—affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

Play It As It Lays

Joan Didion • 1970

Speak

Laurie Halse Anderson • 2011

Jay's Gay Agenda

Jason June • 2021

Eleven-Inch (The Pride List)

Michal Witkowski • 2021

On Beauty: A Novel

Zadie Smith • 2005

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Noor Naga • 2022

The Inseparables

2022

Ripe: A Novel

Sarah Rose Etter • 2023

Troubling Love

Elena Ferrante • 2006

Disorientation: A Novel

Elaine Hsieh Chou • 2023

The Easy Life

Marguerite Duras • 2022

For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.<br/><br/>The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence.<br/><br/>An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

Sex and Rage: A Novel

Eve Babitz • 2017

When I Hit You

Meena Kandasamy • 2017

Death in Venice

Michael Cunningham • 2004

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

Xiaolu Guo • 2009

Nirvana Is Here: A Novel

Aaron Hamburger • 2019

White Nights

Fyodor Dostoevsky • 2024

Thirst for Salt

Madelaine Lucas • 2023

Mailman

J.Robert Lennon • 2003

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison • 1981

Watching Women & Girls

Pender • 2022

Vladimir: A Novel

Julia May Jonas • 2022

An NPR, Washington Post, Time, People, Vulture, Guardian, Vox, Kirkus Reviews, Newsweek, LitHub, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year * “Delightful…cathartic, devious, and terrifically entertaining.” —The New York Times * “Timely, whip-smart, and darkly funny.” —People (Book of the Week) * One of Shondaland’s 13 Best College-Set Novels of All Time A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own... “When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.” And so we are introduced to our narrator who’s “a work of art in herself” (The Washington Post): a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir—a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus—their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding. “Timely, whip-smart, and darkly funny” (People), Vladimir takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. This edgy, uncommonly assured debut perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.

In The Cafe Of Lost Youth

Patrick Modiano • 2017

Snuff

Chuck Palahniuk • 2009

Crossroads: A Novel

Jonathan Franzen • 2021

The Flowers of Buffoonery

Osamu Dazai • 2023

Lullabies for Little Criminals

Heather O'Neill • 2006

Love in the Big City

Sang Young Park • 2021

Pretend I'm Dead

Jen Beagin • 2018

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

Emily Austin • 2021

Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)

Bernardine Evaristo • 2019

My Last Innocent Year: A Novel

Daisy Alpert Florin • 2023

<p><b>An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.</b><br><br>It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place—until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.<br><br>Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.<br><br>A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's <i>My Last Innocent Year</i> is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.</p>

Suicide Notes

Michael Thomas Ford • 2011

The Poet X

Elizabeth Acevedo • 2020

Acts of Desperation

Megan Nolan • 2021

No Longer at Ease

Chinua Achebe • 2011

Waiting for Ted

Marieke Bigg • 2022

Looking for Alaska

John Green • 2006

Sweet Days of Discipline

Fleur Jaeggy • 1993

Rent Boy

Gary Indiana • 2023

The Inverts

Crystal Jeans • 2021

Wild Women and the Blues

Denny S. Bryce • 2021

The Henna Artist

Alka Joshi • 2020

The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox

Maggie O'Farrell • 2008

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien • 2017

Munichs

David Peace • 2024

Saltblood

Francesca De Tores • 2024

The Girls

Emma Cline • 2017

McGlue

Ottessa Moshfegh • 2016

Cursed Bread

2023

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

Victoria MacKenzie • 2023

The Chelsea Girls: A Novel

Fiona Davis • 2019

Outlawed

Anna North • 2021

NETTLEBLACK

Nat Reeve • 2022

The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski • 2007

Songs in Ursa Major: A novel

Emma Brodie • 2021

Beloved

Toni Morrison • 2004

The Idiot: A Novel

Elif Batuman • 2018

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction<br/><br/>“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ<br/><br/>“Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair<br/><br/>A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.<br/><br/>The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.<br/><br/>At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.<br/><br/>With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.<br/><br/>Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions

Mary Jane: A Novel

Jessica Anya Blau • 2021

"The best book of the summer." -- InStyle<br/>"I LOVED this novel....If you have ever sung along to a hit on the radio, in any decade, then you will devour Mary Jane at 45 rpm." —Nick Hornby<br/>Almost Famous meets Daisy Jones & The Six in this "delightful" (New York Times Book Review) novel about a fourteen-year-old girl’s coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straight-laced family and the progressive family she nannies for—who happen to be secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer.<br/>In 1970s Baltimore, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her family’s subscription to the Broadway Showtunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. In a respectable house.<br/>The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, Impeachment: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): the doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.<br/>Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be.

The Girls

Emma Cline • 2016

I Am Trying To Fall in Love with Myself but Instead I Keep Falling in Love with Unemployed Noise Musicians Who Do Coke and Believe in the Power of Crystals

Emma Shepard • 2016

The Poetry of Sex

Sophie Hannah • 2014

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass

Lana Del Rey • 2020

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke • 2018

<p>Facsimile of 1943 Edition. Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, ten in all, remain a fresh source of inspiration and insight to the poetic sensibility to this day.</p>

Mercies: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)

Anne Sexton • 2020

Manorism

Yomi Sode • 2022

Credence

Penelope Douglas • 2020

From New York Times bestselling author, Penelope Douglas, comes a new standalone!Three of them, one of her, and a remote cabin in the woods. Let the hot, winter nights ensue...Tiernan de Haas doesn't care about anything anymore. The only child of a film producer and his starlet wife, she's grown up with wealth and privilege but not love or guidance. Shipped off to boarding schools from an early age, it was still impossible to escape the loneliness and carve out a life of her own. The shadow of her parents' fame followed her everywhere. And when they suddenly pass away, she knows she should be devastated. But has anything really changed? She's always been alone, hasn't she?Jake Van der Berg, her father's stepbrother and her only living relative, assumes guardianship of Tiernan who is still two months shy of eighteen. Sent to live with him and his two sons, Noah and Kaleb, in the mountains of Colorado, Tiernan soon learns that these men now have a say in what she chooses to care and not care about anymore. As the three of them take her under their wing, teach her to work and survive in the remote woods far away from the rest of the world, she slowly finds her place among them. And as a part of them. She also realizes that lines blur and rules become easy to break when no one else is watching. One of them has her. The other one wants her. But he...He's going to keep her.*Credence is a full length, stand-alone romance suitable for readers 18+.

Under the Roofs of Paris

Henry Miller • 1994

Nearer the Moon: From a Journal of Love : The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939

Anais Nin • 1996

Women Without Men

Shahrnush Parsipur • 2012

Untold Night and Day

Bae Suah • 2020

Things We Lost in the Fire

Mariana Enriquez • 2018

Cursed Bunny

Bora Chung • 2021

Someone who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

Raphael Bob-Waksberg • 2019

Objects of Desire

Clare Sestanovich • 2021

Young Skins

Colin Barrett • 2015

Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Jan Carson • 2024

Daddy: Stories

Emma Cline • 2021

Homesick for Another World: Stories

Ottessa Moshfegh • 2017

BLISS MONTAGE

Ling Ma • 2022

Peach Pit

Molly Llewellyn • 2023

Toddler Hunting and other stories

Taeko Kono • 2018

New Erotica For Feminists

Caitlin Kunkel • 2018

He calls me into his office and closes the door . . . to promote me. He promotes me again and again. I am wild with ecstasy.<br/><br/>Imagine a world where erotica was written by feminists: Their daydreams include equal pay, a gender-balanced Congress, and Tom Hardy arriving at their doorstep to deliver a fresh case of LaCroix every week.<br/><br/>Both light-hearted and empowering, New Erotica for Feminists is a sly, satirical take on all the things that turn feminists on. From a retelling of Adam and Eve to tales of respectful Tinder dates, New Erotica for Feminists answers the question of "What do women really want?" with stories of power, equality, and an immortal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Woman Destroyed

Simone De Beauvoir • 1987

Cockfight

María Fernanda Ampuero • 2020

Reservoir Bitches

Dahlia De la Cerda • 2024

Angel Meat

Laura Lee Bahr • 2017

I'm a Therapist and My Patient Is Going to Be the Next School Shoote

Harper • 2019

Parallel Hells

Leon Craig • 2022

The Complete Maus

Spiegelman Art • 2003

Grass

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim • 2019

Chicken with Plums

Marjane Satrapi • 2009