personal favorite reads

Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press)

Emily Dickinson • 1998

Girl, Interrupted A Memoir

Susanna Kaysen • 1994

<b>30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION <b>• </b>NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (<i>The New York Times Book Review</i>). <br><br><b>WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR <br></b></b><br>The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. <br><br><i>Girl, Interrupted</i> is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

Sylvia Plath's Selected Poems

Sylvia Plath • 1985

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson • 2006

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman • 2018

Nausea

Sartre Jean Paul • 2013

The Secret History

Donna Tartt • 2004

<b><b><b><b>ONE OF <i>TIME MAGAZINE</i>'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • </b>INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "a<b>n accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (<i>Village Voice</i>)</b>, f<b>rom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of <i>The Goldfinch.<br><br></i></b></b></b>One of <i>The Atlantic</i>’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years</b><br><br>Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.<br><br><b>“A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment . . . Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” —<i>The New York Times</i></b>