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A Stranger's Pose  |  Emmanuel Iduma
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Recommended by Elias Rodriques
 
"My favorite book of travel writing, this tale of transit across Africa sets a high bar, and succeeds at overcoming that bar, in attempting to sketch, to use Iduma's language, 'an atlas of a borderless world.'"
 
About the Book
 
Through stories remembered and imagined, and images by acclaimed photographers, A Stranger's Pose draws the reader into a world of encounters in more than a dozen African towns. Iduma blends memoir, travelogue and storytelling in these fragments of a traveller's journey across several African cities. Inspired by the author's travels with photographers between 2011 and 2015, the author's own accounts are expanded to include other narratives about movement, estrangement, and intimacy. These include: an arrest in a market in N'djamena, being punished by a Gendarmes officer on a Cameroonian highway and meeting the famed photographer Malick Sidibe in Bamako.
 

The Bell  |  Iris Murdoch
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Recommended by Dayna Tortorici
 
"Like many novels about intentional communities, The Bell reveals pretty quickly how in the absence of total culthood this rich-seeming subject gets boring pretty fast. Fortunately the novel has other things to say: about homosexuality, religion, falling out of love, and the struggle to be good when good characters do not make for good stories. Instead of going off the rails in a Blythedale Romance kind of way, The Bell actually delivers on its premise, and includes a handful of scenes—comic, tragic—that enjoy permanent residence in my head."
 
About the Book
 
A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean. Originally published in 1958, this funny, sad, and moving novel is about religion, sex, and the fight between good and evil.
 

A Way of Life, Like Any Other  |  Darcy O'Brien
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Recommended by A. S. Hamrah
 
"This slim 1977 memoir, by a James Joyce scholar who was also a writer of true crime paperbacks, covers his early years as the child of silent movie stars in the first decades of Hollywood’s sound era, when his parents had become obsolete. If you can imagine being brought up by Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard and a semi-coherent ex-cowboy-star lunk, this lapidary, side-eyed tale of dysfunction is for you. Timely aspect: the health benefits of avocadoes keep coming up."
 
About the Book
 
The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate, Casa Fiesta. But his parents' careers have crashed since then, and their marriage has broken up too.
 
Lovesick and sex-crazed, the mother sets out on an intercontinental quest for the right—or wrong—man, while her mild-mannered but manipulative former husband clings to his memories in California. And their teenage son? How he struggles both to keep faith with his family and to get by himself, and what in the end he must do to break free, makes for a classic coming-of-age story—a novel that combines keen insight and devastating wit to hilarious and heartbreaking effect.
 

Marshlands  |  André Gide (trans. Damion Searls)
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Recommended by Alexandra Kleeman
 
"A novel about the lows and even lower lows of talking at parties about the novel you're writing. Toes the line between cautionary tale and how-to manual, in case your self-promotion lacks pith!"
 
About the Book
 
André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader's hand.
 

Angle of Repose  |  Wallace Stegner
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Recommended by Charles Petersen
 
"A novel so much larger in scale, scope, interest—a plot point early on turns on one of the main characters inventing a new method for producing concrete—and sheer length that it makes you think again about what fiction can do, if we allow it. Could be better on empire, and Stegner should have admitted to more of his archival borrowings, but its central image of a man betrayed tearing up his rose garden with his bare hands remains among the most indelible in 20th century fiction."
 
About the Book
 
Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, and husbands and wives. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.
 

Fair Play  |  Tove Jansson (trans. Thomas Teal)
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Recommended by Rachel Ossip
 
"Few 20th century novels depict queer female relationships, and few explore female creative partnerships, but even fewer show a relationship that is both. In Fair Play—a book I wish I'd read much earlier in life—Jansson writes the deep intimacy of two women cohabitating and collaborating. Across seventeen sweet, brief chapters, Jonna and Mari travel, bicker, navigate each others' moods, fixate on their own work, doubt themselves, encourage one another, and demonstrate a unique kind of partnership that honors each woman's independence and their mutual devotion."
 
About the Book
 
Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they've never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona's intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other's work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson's The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.
 

Being Here Is Everything  |  Marie Darrieussecq (trans. Penny Hueston)
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Recommended by Christine Smallwood
 
"Modersohn-Becker was a German expressionist painter, a friend of Rilke's, and, according to Darrieussecq, the first person to ever paint a naked pregnant self-portrait. Her work is gorgeous and strange, especially her paintings of children. She lived courageously and died tragically young. Being Here is Everything is a perfect book."
 
About the Book
 
First published in France in 2016, Being Here Is Everything traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). In a brief career, cut short by her death from an embolism at the age of thirty-one, shortly after she gave birth to a child, Modersohn-Becker trained in Germany, traveled often to Paris, developed close friendships with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and became one of her generation's preeminent artists, helping introduce modernity to the twentieth century alongside such other painters as Picasso and Matisse.
 
Marie Darrieussecq's triumphant and illuminating biography at once revives Modersohn-Becker's reputation as a significant figure in modernism and sheds light on the extreme difficulty women have faced in attaining recognition and establishing artistic careers.
 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead  |  Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) 
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Recommended by Rachel Ossip
 
"If you've ever wondered whether or not deer are capable of savage killings, please delight in this moody murder mystery. Set in a rural Polish village, Nobel-winner Tokarczuk's eighth novel features odd nicknames, complex astrological calculations, and a twist ending that puts M. Night Shyamalan to shame. Reading this novel in winter made the snow feel spooky and glamorous, and helped assuage my crippling seasonal depression."
 
About the Book
 
In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .
 
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?
 

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature  |  David George Haskell
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Recommended by Astra Taylor
 
"The last book I really savored. A professor of biology, Haskell visits a small square meter of forest in the Tennessee woods over the course of the year and reports on his observations in short chronological, poetic, and illuminating chapters. A lesson in paying attention; even a tablespoon of dirt is a universe of its own."
 
About the Book
 
Each of this book's short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell spins a brilliant web of biology and ecology, explaining the science that binds together the tiniest microbes and the largest mammals and describing the ecosystems that have cycled for thousands- sometimes millions-of years. Each visit to the forest presents a nature story in miniature as Haskell elegantly teases out the intricate relationships that order the creatures and plants that call it home.
 
Written with remarkable grace and empathy, The Forest Unseen is a grand tour of nature in all its profundity. Haskell is a perfect guide into the world that exists beneath our feet and beyond our backyards.
 

The Anatomy of Melancholy  |  Robert Burton
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Recommended by Mark Greif
 
"It really is as good as 400 years of readers have said it is. And as funny. And as insulting to Burton's enemies. Possibly even as good in relieving melancholia, through its absurd anecdotes and its reminders that sadness is eternal."
 
About the Book
 
One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing," while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. 
 
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