my library

Just Kids

Patti Smith · 2010

<p> It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. </p> <p> Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. </p> <p> <i>Just Kids</i> begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. </p>

Open, Heaven A Novel

Seán Hewitt · 2025

Whereabouts

Jhumpa Lahiri · 2021

The Anthropologists

Aysegül Savas

All the Lovers in the Night

Mieko Kawakami · 2022

Giovanni’s Room

James Baldwin

Robin

Dave Itzkoff · 2019

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner · 2021

Open Throat

Henry Hoke · 2023

The Obscene Madame D

Hilda Hilst · 2025

Hotel Iris

Yoko Ogawa · 2010

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Andrea Lawlor · 2019

Gachiakuta, Vol. 9

Kei Urana · 2026

Gachiakuta, Vol. 8

Kei Urana · 2025

Gachiakuta, Vol. 7

Kei Urana · 2025

Gachiakuta, Vol. 6

Kei Urana · 2024

Gachiakuta, Vol. 5

Kei Urana · 2024

Gachiakuta, Vol. 4

Kei Urana · 2024

Gachiakuta, Vol. 3

Kei Urana · 2024

Bunny

Mona Awad · 2020

Perfume

Patrick Suskind · 2014

If Cats Disappeared from the World

Genki Kawamura · 2018

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar · 2024

<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • ONE OF <i>THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S </i>10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR <b>• <b>A<b> <i>TIME</i> MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR</b></b> • </b>A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original<i>, Martyr!</i> heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.<br><br>“Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.” —Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of <i>There There</i><br><br>“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” —Lauren Groff, best-selling author of <i>Matrix</i> and <i>Fates and Furies</i></b><br><br>Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.<br><br>Kaveh Akbar’s <i>Martyr!</i> is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.

Gachiakuta, Vol. 1

Kei Urana · 2024

Coraline 10th Anniversary Edition

Neil Gaiman · 2012