Sam's Fiction Picks
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A radically odd novella about waiting for the old world to die so that the new world may be born.
A vivid, aching work of autofiction. Frankie Goldberg (the author's fictionalized self) struggles under the weight of loneliness, history, and cultural memory after years spent away from home as a journalist documenting political violence in Guatemala and Mexico.
A collection of consistently surprising and moving stories about desire, loss, and regret. Dantiel Moniz molds her characters with both generosity and cunning, exposing complicated weaknesses and contradictions under a harsh light.
The surreal voyage of a woman who shapeshifts through a procession of temporary employment opportunities. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll observe the psychic damage of precarity filtered through a sieve of absurdism.
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Tells an urgent yet witty story about status, assimilation, and generational pressure within a hyper-ambitious Indian-American community in the Atlanta exurbs. Sanjena Sathian writes with an agile intimacy that dances from laughter to dread to tenderness and back again. The most elementally powerful moments in this novel took me completely by surprise.
A captivating novel about a woman's intense, deadening feelings of alienation from society that mutate into something far more eerie and disturbing. Be warned: some parts will turn your stomach.
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In many coming-of-age stories, the teenager's inevitable "loss of innocence" is crystallized in a discrete event, suggesting an idyllic before and a corrupted after. For the youth in The Knockout Queen, the presence of violence is not suddenly unveiled because it was never particularly veiled to begin with. Rufi Thorpe casts a wary light on the myriad violences of class warfare, of homophobia, of strife within families and friendships, and insists that innocence is always already being lost (and found again). A novel as full of heart as it is unsparing in its appraisal of human heartlessness.
Bryan Washington's debut novel is a bluntly contemplative guide through the joys and miseries of love. He pits millennial listlessness against familial drama in gutting and unexpected ways, building worlds of feeling within his characters' silences.
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Two newly orphaned siblings struggle to survive in the waning days of the Gold Rush in the western United States. The duo must reckon with the ghosts of their family history and the cruel whims of a hostile wilderness as they search for a place to belong. By the final pages I was completely heartbound to these characters, thanks to the overflowing tenacity and humanity with which debut novelist C Pam Zhang has shaped them.
If you are anything like me, then you might have trouble expressing in plain language the existential anxiety/dread that fills you when you consider the looming global climate crisis. Jenny Offill has found words for us. This is the story of a woman who, like all of us, must live, love and find purpose while coming to terms with the dying world around her. A beautiful reckoning, communicated in fragments.
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My favorite novel of 2019. Two unlikely friends -- one rendered mute by self-loathing, the other overconfident to the point of sociopathy -- fake their way to social and intellectual prestige at an elite Midwestern creative writing program using a single composite alias. Lucy Ives plumbs philosophical questions of authenticity, creativity, and fellowship with equal amounts profundity and irreverence. Novels never make me laugh out loud, but this one really did.
One of my favorite novels of all time. Part Scarface-grade crime saga, part ghost story, part postcolonial manifesto. Pulpy, profound, and so, so bad-ass.
Usually, when a book is described as "cinematic," it's meant to mean that the book is grand and flashy like a Hollywood blockbuster. The Spud is a cinematic novella of a differend breed: less Spielberg, more Korine or Malick. It bursts with fragmented and overlapping images, emotions, and perspectives.
A young woman puts herself through a dangerously escalating regimen of self-medication in order to overcome her ennui. A darkly entertaining work of 21st century social satire, recommended reading for misanthropes.
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Despite this book's widespread acclaim as a work of 'satire', Paul Beatty has interestingly rebuked the term in multiple interviews. In any case, The Sellout is caustically funny and a hard shove into the closet where America keeps its skeletons.
A widower, struck with sickness and caring for a son with Down's Syndrome, abandons his previous life to travel an ethereal countryside as a census-taker. This novel is full of bittersweet truths about family, grief, and responsibility. A quiet treasure.
A troubled and troubling man, utterly terrified of the responsibilities of fatherhood, escapes into a spree of self-destructive behavior. It took me months after finishing this book to fully process it; Kenzaburo Oe can write in a way that ricochets between happiness and hate, between humor and horror, with jarring speed and violence.
One of my favorite novels of all time. An unassuming undergrad goes to extreme lengths to keep the hyper-intellectual friends he's made at college. Magnificent imagery, confounding characters, and MURDER!
This item is out of stock with our warehouse. Some recently published books may be in stock @ Room. Email to check.
This item is out of stock with our warehouse. Some recently published books may be in stock @ Room. Email to check.
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