to read

Milk Fed

Melissa Broder • 2021

Black Swans

Eve Babitz • 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.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë • 1847

Murder Before Evensong

The Reverend Richard Coles • 2023

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.

The Queen of Wishful Thinking

Milly Johnson • 2017