Gretchen's Adult Fiction and Non-Fiction Picks
A bold, cacophonic story of divided loyalties, divided families, and the people and stories who make us. This novel of a queer Palestinian-American woman deciding whether to follow her love or her family intricately melds mythic proportion, fallible and specific humanity, humor, and insight into the self and its legacies. A stunning debut.
Kelly Link is a national treasure. These stories are like prismatically unsettled and modern versions of familiar tales, equipping each eerie element with a hefty dose of the banal, like any of these tales can happen in your living room—even if they're mired in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or peopled by robots on an abandoned asteroid. Stunning marvels, each of these stories is burrowed into my body.
A chaotic T4T dirtbag romance in epic matte color pages, this story follows ex-nun Jules, whose possession by his lover the Devil makes him impervious to harm, and Casper, whose carefree interest in petty thievery/mayhem and collecting cursed objects make him a perfect enabler for a madcap, dissolute, ne’er-do-well life of hot sex, larceny, and theater performance. The two soon catch feelings and have to come to a reckoning with Jules’s jealous demonic passenger. This is a one-of-a-kind, beautifully illustrated erotic ROMP.
I adored this intentional and deeply considered defense of bookselling. Danny balances the contexts of 12 great bookstores with considerations about what we do, why we do it, and how we can move ourselves into a future that embraces equality, equity, and change as more than simply buzzwords. I feel reinvigorated.
I love the grace and humanity Mercury puts into her work. She presents necessary practical skills with a care and specificity around what to consider if you rent your home that I’ve never seen in a home repair book. An invaluable resource!
A sapphic coming-to-selfhood survivalist thriller, this gripping novel about a young woman on a survival reality show weaves Braverman's deep observations of the natural world with her profound insights into character and the efforts we go to not just to survive, but to live. With spare prose that beautifully captures the immediacy of Mara's increasingly dire circumstances, as well as her evaluations on how to thrive in the deep Wisconsin wilderness, this novel delivers a tense and layered read.
A slim book that packs a lot of heat and heart into a gentle romance! This story beautifully balances lovely prose and tenderly built and sexy relationships between three trans people living in a remote woodland in 1948.
The insightful and delightful BraverMountain mushers, Q and Bler, and the larger than life personalities of their team are a real gift that will brighten the worlds of anyone who loves queer athletes, the outdoors, off-the-beaten-track sports, and of course dogs.
A memoiric collection of essays full of deep insight into the meanings and uses of language, of memory, of rage and joy and decolonial love by a young gay Cree author. His reservoir of feminist academic scholarship, Indigenous liberation thinkers, and study of the craft of poetry and the wider uses and deconstructive possibilities of the colonizer's tongue inform Belcourt's own introspection in complex, and often searing personal essays against white supremacy and colonialism and in search of the sparking possibilities of queer liberations and radical reimagination. - Gretchen, Room co-owner
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It's been 7 years since Allie Brosh’s Internet-altering essays (all the things!) were published to an adoring audience in Hyperbole and a Half. Brosh’s life has been hard since then—divorce, illness, catastrophic grief over her sister’s death—which she describes with her characteristic hilarity and vulnerability in this wonderful new collection of cartoon essays. Insights into depression, young adulthood, and dog ownership will resonate just as meaningfully in this new volume as in the first book. - Gretchen, Room co-owner
Emezi is one of the most kaleidoscopically interesting authors writing today--from bildungsroman (Freshwater) to socially just young adult detective story (Pet) to this, their take on a classic family literary novel, Emezi's command of their prose, sharply-drawn and heartbreakingly flawed characters, and the ever-present, matter-of-fact experience of the manifest spirit in everyday life make for a stunning reading experience. Vivek Oji's death, noted from the first page, draws the reader through a series of emotional, specific, and utterly complex moments in various family members' lives, both before and after the unsolved, sudden, tragic death of Vivek. Emezi's deep understanding of contemporary Nigerian family life and the complexities of gender, sex, sexuality, secrecy, and national identity make for a gripping and heartbreaking story of one person's life, before and after death.
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Jesmyn Ward's new novel hearkens back to the incredible intimacy, impact, and import of Morrison's Beloved. Ward's prose is sinewy, unsentimental, and perfectly balanced, her characters whole and presented with unflinching brutal honesty, her themes of the costs of historical slavery, the layered cruelties of modern-day racism, and the deleterious effects of racism, drugs, poverty, and incarceration on a family held together by secrets, guilt, love, and ghosts. This is a book that, by rights, should make incredible waves this year--I've rarely read its like.
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It's been a long time since I have read a book that both affirmed and challenged me the way this book did. It's an incredible look at the choices, constraints, and creative ways that a variety of brilliant, genius women related to being mothers and juggling mothering and their vocation for creative life. Phillips writes with such honesty and sharp insight--her self-interjections give shape and depth to a project that reverberates in the lives of anyone juggling the seemingly vast chasm between professional vocation and the sundry and consuming demands of raising children. This is a book that goes beyond the standard presentation of a biography and connects to not just an associative range of women's lives and choices, but does so in a narrative style and structure that is beautifully thought out and adds to the experience. I'll be thinking about what I learned from this book for a long time, and using the perspective it gives often as I make decisions about my own vocation and parenting. A truly worthy book for the shelves of any mother or parent looking for a thoughtful examination of lives lived fully--mistakes, social constraints, and flawed genius all making an impact just as much as the more conventionally lauded traits of mothering. I particularly appreciated the book's willingness to frankly discuss miscarriage and the choices most of these women made in considering and choosing abortion as well as motherhood.
one of the best books I have read in the last decade, if not the best. It's such an intense, unflinching, careful, loving, pitiless, above all beautifully written book, a spiraling letter from a son to his Vietnamese immigrant mother, meditating upon the abuse and joy they have each felt in their lives, the moments where their connections burned bright and flared out, the timid hopeful, secretive first love he found with a boy, the intergenerational trauma and PTSD of a family borne through the effects of war and colonization. Intimate, beautiful, absolutely gutting, rarely have I seen such a clear evocation of a life. All the warnings, including for child abuse, animal abuse, racial abuse, homophobia, sexual abuse, war trauma. An incredible feat of a novel if you think you can face the brutal truth of it. Also, one of the best (awkward, terrifying reality and incredible wonder of it at once) first time gay sex scenes I've ever read.
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