to read

A Magical Girl Retires: A Novel

Park Seolyeon • 2024

Carnality

Lina Wolff • 2022

Zig-Zag Boy: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood

Tanya Frank • 2023

In The Miso Soup

Ryu Murakami • 2005

The Follow Up To In The Miso Soup, Piercing Confirms Ryu Murakami As The Master Of The Psycho-Thriller Every Night, Kawashima Masayuki Creeps From His Bed And Watches Over His Baby Girl S Crib While His Wife Sleeps. But This Is No Ordinary Domestic Scene. He Has An Ice Pick In His Hand, And A Barely Controllable Desire To Use It. Deciding To Confront His Demons, Kawashima Sets Into Motion A Chain Of Events Seeming To Lead Inexorably To Murder&

Child of Fortune

Yuko Tsushima • 2018

'A terrific novel' Angela Carter Koko won't do what is expected of her. Defying her family's wishes, she has brought up her eleven-year-old daughter alone in her apartment. And now, after a casual affair, she is unexpectedly pregnant again. What will this mean for her already troubled relationship with her daughter? As she faces the future, memories of her own childhood loss flood into her consciousness, threatening to overwhelm her. Combining the beauty and unease of a dream, this haunting novel is an unflinching portrayal of a woman's innermost fears and desires. 'As relevant today as when it was published ... at once powerfully uplifting and achingly sad' Japan Times

The Age of Doubt

Kyongni Pak • 2022

El corazón del daño

María Negroni • 2023

Y líbranos del mal

Santiago Roncagliolo • 2021

Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire

Tracy Clark-Flory • 2021

Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life

Amanda Stern • 2018

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

Lori Gottlieb • 2019

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo • 2023

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life<br/><br/>“Achingly exquisite . . . providing real hope for those who long to heal.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone<br/><br/>ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, NPR, Mashable, She Reads, Publishers Weekly<br/><br/>By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.<br/><br/>Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.<br/><br/>In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.<br/><br/>Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado • 2019

A Certain Hunger

Chelsea G. Summers • 2020

Lost Cat

Mary Gaitskill • 2020

‘Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don’t know for certain.’<br/><br/>So begins Mary Gaitskill’s stunning book-length essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir. Lost Cat begins with the story of how Gaitskill rescued a stray cat in Italy and brought him to live with her in the US, where he went missing.<br/><br/>As she explores the unexpected trauma of her loss, Gaitskill describes how she came to foster two siblings, Caesar and Natalia, a pair of inner-city children who spent summers and holidays with Gaitskill and her husband. The joys and ultimate difficulties of this relationship leads to a searing examination of loss, love, safety and fear. Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.

The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

Fernando Pessoa • 2017

For the first time—and in the best translation ever—the complete Book of Disquiet, a masterpiece beyond comparison The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography” or “diary” containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa’s entire writing life.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong • 2019

Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original – poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling<br/><br/>On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born – a history whose epicentre is rooted in Vietnam – and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to the American moment, immersed as it is in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.<br/><br/>With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir

Ruth Wariner • 2017

Hunger

Roxane Gay • 2017

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

Caitlin Doughty • 2015

"Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)―a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession.<br/>Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan • 2013

An anniversary edition of the award-winning memoir and instant New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity—with a new note to readers by the author.<br/><br/>When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?<br/><br/>In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen. “A fascinating look at the disease that...could have cost this vibrant, vital young woman her life” (People), Brain on Fire is an unforgettable exploration of memory and identity, faith and love, and a profoundly compelling tale of survival and perseverance that is destined to become a classic.

Girl, Interrupted

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.

Ms Ice Sandwich

Mieko Kawakami • 2020

Making a Scene

Constance Wu • 2022

Pure Colour

Sheila Heti • 2023

A new novel about art, love, death, and time from the author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?<br/><br/>Here we are, just living in the first draft of creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.<br/><br/>In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home for school. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal―to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters the strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up.<br/><br/>Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Post-traumatic: A Novel

Chantal V. Johnson • 2023

In this “deeply original” (Elif Batuman) and “violently funny” (Myriam Gurba) story, a young lawyer finally confronts her dark past so she can live in a more peaceful future. To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story—a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood—compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.<br/><br/>For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?<br/><br/>A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Deesha Philyaw • 2023

Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir

Lisa Crystal Carver • 2005

Breasts and Eggs

Mieko Kawakami • 2020

A novel that “considers the agency . . . women exert over their bodies and charts the emotional underpinnings of physical changes . . . with humor and empathy” (The New Yorker). On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. Over the course of their few days together in the capital, Midoriko’s silence will prove a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and family secrets. On yet another summer’s day eight years later, Natsu, during a journey back to her native city, confronts her anxieties about growing old alone and childless. Bestselling author Mieko Kawakami mixes stylistic inventiveness and riveting emotional depth to tell a story of contemporary womanhood in Japan. “Took my breath away.” —Haruki Murakami, #1 New York Times–bestselling author The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle “Kawakami lobbed a literary grenade into the fusty, male-dominated world of Japanese fiction with Breast and Eggs.” —The Economist “A sharply observed and heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a woman.” —TIME “Raw, funny, mundane, heartbreaking.” —The Atlantic “A bracing, feminist exploration of daily life in Japan.” —Entertainment Weekly “Timely feminist themes; strange, surreal prose; and wonderful characters will transcend cultural barriers and enchant readers.” —The New York Observer “Bracing and evocative, tender yet unflinching.” —Publishers Weekly “Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body—its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions. And she is especially good at capturing its longings.” —The New York Times Book Review

Los amores de Nishino (Spanish Edition)

Hiromi Kawakami • 2017

Una novela de la autora de El cielo es azul, la tierra blanca, ganadora del Premio Akutagawa, el Premio Ito Sei, el Premio Woman Writer's, el Premio Tanizaki y el Man Asian Literary Prize, con más de 1.000.000 de lectores. « ¿Qué será el amor? Las personas tienen derecho a enamorarse de otros, no a que los demás las amen.» Todas han amado a Nishino. Todas han sucumbido, aunque solo sea durante una hora, a ese hombre seductor, imprudente y salvaje como un gato, que se inmiscuía de manera natural en la vida de las mujeres a las que deseaba conquistar. Pero, ¿quién era Nishino? Ellas, que guardan en la memoria el vivo recuerdo de su cálido aliento, de sus silencios indescifrables y sus gestos de indiferencia, toman la palabra para recrear la figura llena de encanto de un hombre conmovedor e inalcanzable. A través de este retrato también ellas revelan quiénes son. Sus testimonios son variaciones llenas de humor, sensualidad, inteligencia y melancolía sobre ese extraño sentimiento llamado amor. Reseñas: «Sutileza y delicadeza, una prosa detallada que describe a conciencia las marcas del alma.» Pere Guixà, El País «Si te gusta Haruki Murakami, adorarás Los amores de Nishino.» DozoDomo.com « Los amores de Nishino es una canción que se nos susurra en voz baja y que nos atrapa hasta el infinito.» L'Express «La japonesa es una reina en el difícil arte de golpear al lector sin hacer ruido.» Eugenio Fuentes, La Opinión de A Coruña «Leer a Kawakami es como darse un baño de agua tibia. Lo más importante es el homenaje que se rinde a la melancolía, o a la imposibilidad o, mejor aún, a este estado de indefinición -prerreflexivo- podríamos decir, en el que habitualmente nos movemos los humanos.» Pablo D'Ors, ABC «La prosa de Kawakami bien puede definirse como cristalina: está construida con la precisión hermosa y reticular, perfectamente conectada, de un cristal.» Ciro García, El Norte de Castilla «Una capacidad descriptiva y de evocación visual, sutileza y una disección apasionante de las relaciones y la conducta humana.» Flavia Company, El País «Kawakami cautiva con sus palabras y su estilo poético.» Jacinta Cremades, El Mundo «Lo que Hiromi Kawakami cuenta es tan carnal, hermoso y estimulante para el lector, que no exige ser más explícita. Su misterio radica en el extraordinario poder alusivo de la escritura, legado de los grandes artistas de la narrativa japonesa moderna. Sin duda.» Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia «Original, ágil y directa, con una prosa liviana que esconde el peso de la vida y sus contrastes: es delicada, pero dura; fría, pero pasional; divertida, pero seria.» Revista Paula (Chile)

Astragal

Albertine Sarrazin •

Empty: A Memoir

Susan Burton • 2020

An editor at This American Life reveals the searing story of the secret binge-eating that dominated her adolescence and shapes her still. “Her tale of compulsion and healing is candid and powerful.”—People NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE For almost thirty years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.   When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents’ abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But in the fallout from her parents’ breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from “peculiarity to pathology.”   Susan entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success—she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse—she’d binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again—and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to “quit food.”   Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of narrative and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner

Chris Atkins • 2020

Sociopath: A Memoir

unknown author • 2024

<p><b>'Deliciously wicked and insightful.' - <i>The Guardian</i></b><br> <br> <b>'Addictively page-turning.' - <i>The Telegraph</i><br> <br> 'Thought-provoking and surprisingly life-affirming.' - <i>Cosmopolitan</i></b><br> <br> <i>Sociopath: A Memoir</i> is the astoundingly honest true story of a life lived on the edge of the law, and a fascinating account of one woman's battle to understand her diagnosis. Jaw-dropping, moving and illuminating, it will challenge everything you thought you knew about sociopathy.<br> <br> <b><i>'Your friends would probably describe me as nice. But guess what? I can't stand your friends. I'm a liar. I'm a thief. I'm highly manipulative. I don't care what other people think. I'm capable of almost anything.'</i></b><br> <br> From stabbing elementary school classmates with pencils to stealing car keys from fellow frat party guests and joyriding around her college town, to breaking and entering, even stalking, Patric Gagne doesn't hold back when it comes to describing the behaviour that, eventually, made her realize she is a sociopath.<br> <br> But her discovery forced her to question the official descriptions of sociopathy. After all, she had a plan for her life, had nurtured close relationships and was doing her best (most of the time) to avoid harming others.<br> <br> While her darker impulses warred against her attempts to live a settled, loving life with her partner, Patric began to wonder - was there a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society? And could she find it before her own behaviour went a step too far?<br> <br> <b>'Surprising, thoughtful and deeply personal.' - Pandora Sykes<br> <br> 'Arresting and addictive.' - <i>The Times</i><br> <br> 'She is compelling, like a movie character - a sociopath who's beautiful, warm and funny, articulate and charming' - <i>The Guardian</i></b></p>