en-US Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:29:21 -0700 60 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 3348581 144 Robert Sward 0918273900 Aaron 0 4.33 1991
author: Robert Sward
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.33
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]]> 54102733 Alternative cover edition for ASIN B01CWZFBZ4

A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history
 
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,” roamed – virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 347 David Grann Aaron 5 4.27 2017
author: David Grann
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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]]> 238226944 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The dramatic story of the Jewish Bund—a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, the award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these paintings and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.

Itka is how Crabapple met the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.”

In the first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?

Here Where We Live Is Our Country reanimates a band of idealists who broadened our global political imagination. As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, the Bund’s remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.]]> 480 Molly Crabapple 0593229452 Aaron 0 4.54
author: Molly Crabapple
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]]> 242498895 Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that—there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Home by invitation, he has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumor, with tunnels, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unraveling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices, and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, “one of Ireland’s best writers, in a country with no shortage of them” (The Times).]]> 304 Keith Ridgway 0811240452 Aaron 0 3.56
author: Keith Ridgway
name: Aaron
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]]> 243020108 From a #1 New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and legal expert comes an accessible and modern guide on how to read and understand the U.S. Constitution.

Think of this as the U.S. Constitution explained by America’s favorite law professor, Melissa Murray. On her podcast, Strict Scrutiny, Murray and her cohosts, Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, provide in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities.

On that podcast, on MSNOW—where she is a frequent contributor—in opinion pieces, and when providing commentary as she did in a recent New York Times piece on Justice Brown Jackson, Murray spends an awful lot of time demystifying laws for everyone else. In this book, she tackles one of the founding American the Constitution. Each amendment will be annotated with some historical context provided, as well as examples of how it is relevant to our present day.

More necessary than ever, as we look to the Supreme Court and their interpretation of the Constitution as the last institution upholding our democracy, this book is an indispensable read for every thinking American.]]> 352 Melissa Murray Aaron 0 4.38
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]]> 231127398 A new collection of evocative personal essays from one of America’s most beloved nonfiction writers, Anne Fadiman.

In Frog, Anne Fadiman returns to her favorite genre, the essay, of which she is one of our most celebrated practitioners. Ranging in subject matter from her deceased frog, to archaic printer technology, to the fraught relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley, these essays unlock a whole world—one both mundane and mysterious—through sly observation and brilliant wit.

The diverse subjects of Frog are bound together by the quality of Fadiman’s attention, and subtly, they come to form a slantwise portrait of the artist, a writer dedicated to chronicling the world as it changes around her, in ways small and large.]]> 192 Anne Fadiman 0374608741 Aaron 0 4.29 2026
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average rating: 4.29
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]]> 238863709 88 Michael Bazzett Aaron 0 4.41
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]]> 216730623 Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped build an empire
 
From plebeians refusing to join the Roman army to bakers withholding bread, this is the first book to explore how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion to get their voices—and their labor—acknowledged. Sarah E. Bond explores Ancient Rome from a new angle to show that the history of labor conflicts and collective action goes back thousands of years, uncovering a world far more similar to our own than we realize.
 
Workers often turned to their associations for solidarity and shared identity in the ancient world. Some of these groups even negotiated contracts, wages, and work conditions in a manner similar to modern labor unions. As the world begins to consider the value—and indeed the necessity—of unionization to protect workers, this book demonstrates that we can learn valuable lessons from ancient laborers and from attempts by the Roman government to limit their freedom.]]> 272 Sarah E. Bond 0300273142 Aaron 0 3.87
author: Sarah E. Bond
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.87
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]]> 216684962 101 Ana Paula Maia 1917260105 Aaron 0 3.79 2017
author: Ana Paula Maia
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 226405182 A remarkable micro-history from the author of The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring

Now part of the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, the former Prussian and German port of Königsberg has always been a somewhat sleepy place, doomed to be famous for having once been the residence of Immanuel Kant. But in the late 1830s, just for a short while, it became famous for all the wrong reasons.

Christopher Clark’s brilliant new book is the result of many years of fascination with this strange case. Sensational accusations were bandied about, implying that beneath the town’s somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. For the Prussian authorities this was just the sort of moral collapse they feared most. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which had unsettled a generation, every lapse could be seen as the harbinger of new storms.

A Scandal in Königsberg beautifully brings to life a time and a place that we would now situate in the tranquil "Biedermeier" years between the seismic upheavals of the 1810s and 1840s. But there is a timeless quality to this small vortex of turbulence, in which spiritual hunger, vanity, professional rivalry, sexual incontinence, naivety and sheer human waywardness threatened to tear a city apart.]]> 177 Christopher Clark 1802069747 Aaron 0 3.29 2025
author: Christopher Clark
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2025
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]]> 36019826
]]> 109 Emily Skillings 0996778691 Aaron 0 4.23 2017
author: Emily Skillings
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 199056181
Dear Skunks, I wrote. Then I got stuck. What was there to say about the skunks? Of course there was the smell—the spraying. Everyone’s mind jumped to the spraying. I often forgot about the spraying entirely, which was nice because it made me feel that I wasn’t like other people.

From the outside, Isabel doesn’t seem to have much going on. It’s the summer after college graduation and she’s moved back to her hometown, where she spends her days house-sitting, babysitting, working the front desk at a yoga studio, and hanging out with her childhood friend Ellie. But on the inside, Isabel’s mind is always running, always analyzing, and right now, she’s trying hard to not let her thoughts give weight to boys. So when Isabel spots three baby skunks in the yard, their presence is not only a strangely thrilling break from the expected, it feels like a fortuitous sign from the universe. Skunks. That’s what she should be thinking about.

As the summer unfolds, Isabel becomes increasingly preoccupied with the skunks, while also navigating her various jobs and an ambiguous relationship with Eli, the son of the couple she’s house-sitting for. In her own life and in the imagined inner lives of the skunks, Isabel ponders the nature of existence, love vs. infatuation, and the many small moments that make us animal, make us human. The Skunks is an unforgettable coming-of-age story about the complexities of crushes, desire, friendship, and modern life.]]> 240 Fiona Warnick 1959030612 Aaron 0 3.61 2024
author: Fiona Warnick
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 244707465
“One of America’s most exciting violators of habit.” —Los Angeles Times

“Fiction ought to lead us to those precipices where language fails and silence begins. You would be well advised, with a master like Williams, to take the plunge.” —The New York Times

Diane Williams is one of the great masters of the American short story: her tiny, coruscating tales are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature. I Liked Rex is Williams’s newest collection, which explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive.

In these stories, a woman sees her soon-to-be ex-husband on the street, walking patiently at the end of a line of geese; a mother implores a total stranger to watch over her small child at the beach; a guest arrives at an orgy uninvited, and takes a nap beneath a dusty carpet; a woman reflects on her life with a man who used to belong to another, but is hers now—though can anyone really possess anyone else, truly?

Williams’s genius lies as much in what is left unspoken as in what is laid out on the page; behind images of startling beauty and strangeness, entire chamber dramas of the heart unfold, and the pleasure of these sphinx-like tales comes from their unremitting mystery, which is the same mystery fundamental to life and to love. A collection of rare originality and daring, I Liked Rex is a complete and utter delight.]]> 144 Diane Williams Aaron 0 2.96
author: Diane Williams
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average rating: 2.96
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]]> 45787916 Tokyo Maze – 42 Walks is no ordinary travel guide. The author is no stranger to Japan either, having spent over 25 years visiting the country as a student, on work assignments and as a writer. He even lived in Tokyo for five years. Alongside all the main attractions, this guide takes you to places which don’t get a mention elsewhere. The information included in the guide is fully up to date.

Inside the
• 42 complete walking tours to 500 sights in and around Tokyo.
• 20 virtual walks with Apple Maps, Top 10 virtual explorations and virtual museum visits.
• QR-Codes for all Online Maps available.
• Each itinerary begins and ends at a railway or subway station.
• Recommend lunch-break and coffee-stop for each walk.
• 48 area maps reliably steer the visitor through the maze of Tokyo streets.
• 160 high quality photos offer first impressions.
• Over 100 insider tips aid readers in their pre-trip preparations and during their stay.
• 450 bookmarks enable travellers to access additional information on the Internet.
• A calendar shows at a glance which festivals are taking place at any given time.
• Personal Top 10 tips on architecture, observation points, parks and gardens, shopping streets and malls, boutiques, hotels, restaurants, fine arts and other museums, showrooms, theatres, temples and shrines.
• Online maps are available for half of the tours, featuring additional tips on accommodation, shopping, and food and drink.

Regardless of whether you come to Japan on a package holiday or under your own steam or if you’re even planning to live in Tokyo for a while, this guide will enrich your stay.

* Since the last major update in October 2020, twenty cafés, restaurants and shops closed for good because of Covid-19, which I have replaced with new ones. Temporary closures and currently restricted opening hours have not been taken into account because this book is mainly aimed at tourists who will not travel again until the current restrictions have been relaxed.]]> 374 Axel Schwab Aaron 5 4.07
author: Axel Schwab
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.07
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rating: 5
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]]> 223530713 The never-before-published poems of one of the greatest American poets, John Berryman.

John Berryman’s Dream Songs are arguably the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of being at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed.

The collected Dream Songs consists of 385 discrete poems, combining those from 77 Dream Songs, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and those from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. But for Berryman, Henry lived on. Over the years, the poet wrote more than a hundred additional songs that didn’t make it into the various published editions of the songs. As elucidated by Shane McCrae in the introduction to this edition, Berryman hoped that readers might slot these unpublished poems in among the rest.

Only Sing, which includes both finished poems and drafts, isn’t merely the scraps left on a cutting room floor; it is a continuation of the epic cycle, an additional set of poems that crack language open, an extension of Berryman’s brilliant account of madness shot through with searing insight.]]> 192 John Berryman 0374617945 Aaron 0 4.18
author: John Berryman
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.18
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]]> 153592
The voices of her literary loves as well are woven into the narrative: Woolf, Eliot, Nabokov, Beckett, Sarraute, Lorca, Frisch, among others. These writers comment on and help guide us through the text. We hear the voices of her parents, who survived the Treblinka death camp, and of her Aunt Sophie, who did not. War permeates the text, for on Ava Klein's last day Iraq has invaded Kuwait. And above all we hear Ava's voice. Hers is the voice of pleasure, of astonishment, the voice of regret, the voice of gratitude as she moves closer and closer to the "music that is silence."

AVA is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, "to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates." The fragments of the novel are combined to make a new kind of wholeness, allowing environments, states of mind, and rhythms not ordinarily associated with fiction to emerge. AVA's theme is the poignancy of mortality, the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death&amp—the things never done, never understood, the things never said, or said right, or said enough. Ava yearns and the reader yearns with her, struggling to hold on to all that slips away.]]> 220 Carole Maso 1564780740 Aaron 0 4.21 1993
author: Carole Maso
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
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]]> 8151 292 Vladimir Nabokov 0811216748 Aaron 0 4.03 1932
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1932
rating: 0
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]]> 249725998 برخی معتقدند سال 1922 نقطه ی عطفی در تاریخ ادبیات است، در این سال آثار بسیار متفاوتی نسبت به گذشته عرضه شدند، از جمله اینکه اسکات مانکریف رمان"در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته" را به انگلیسی ترجمه کرد، "اولیس" اثر جیمز جویس، "سرزمین بی حاصل" اثر تی اس الیوت و "اتاق جیکوب" اثر وولف منتشر شدند.
چند سال پیش از انتشار این کتابها، یعنی در 1919 جنگ جهانیِ اول به پایان رسید. جنگی ویرانگر که میلیونها نفر در آن جان خود را از دست دادند و زندگی انسانهای بازمانده، نگاه شان به دنیا و احساسات و عواطف شان تحت تأثیر آن قرار گرفته بود. عده ای از نویسندگان و هنرمندان به این نتیجه رسیدند که داستان به سبک گذشته، نمی تواند پیچیدگی ها و درگیری های ذهنیِ انسانها را تمام و کمال بنمایاند، به همین جهت در صددِ راهی بودند تا احساس درونی و وضعیتِ اجتماعیِ آدمها را به بهترین وجه بیان کنند. به این ترتیب بود که نویسنده های دورانِ مدرن، هر کدام به نوعی دغدغه ها و حال و هوای بشر مدرن را با سَبکی در خورِ دوران جدید، مطرح کردند.
وولف از همین رمان، سبک جدید نوشتن اش را آغاز می کند، حالت میانه ای بین سبک مرسوم روایی آن زمان و سبک رادیکال خودش دارد، در "اتاق جیکوب"با رمانی بدون طرح داستانی و با گسستگی های زمانی مواجهیم ، به طوریکه خواننده با پیش رفتنِ داستان، ارتباط منطقی بین بخش های مختلف را درک می کند. زاویه دید دائماً تغییر می کند. مکان ها، چشم اندازها، زمان ها، خیال و واقعیت همه در هم تنیده اند. شخصیت ها به طور کامل معرفی نمی شوند و فقط تصاویر گذرایی هستند که شبح وار می آیند و می روند. او به شیوه ی خودش تأکید می کند که انسانها را نمی شود کاملاً شناخت، در طول رمان هیچ وقت به شخصیت اصلیِ رمان نزدیک نمی شویم و او مدام از دور دیده و بررسی می شود. وولف در این رمان به گونه ای این سؤال را دائماً ایجاد می کند که در دنیایی که نمی شود آدمها را شناخت و روابط آدمها چندان قوی و جدی نیست و سرنوشت نهاییِ همه مرگ است، چطور می شود فاصله ی بین تولد و مرگ را پر کرد؟
وولف در جنگهای مختلف، عزیزانِ زیادی را از دست داده بود. این رمان هم مثل چند رمان دیگر او متأثر از این واقعه ی شوم است، هر چند مستقیماً به صحنه های جنگ نمی پردازد اما حال و هوای دوران جنگ را به خوبی تصویر می کند، او در این رمان، نامِ خانوادگیِ شخصیت اصلی داستان را که به همراه برادرانش به جنگ می رود، " فلاندرز" گذاشته و فلاندرز نام منطقه ای است که بریتانیا در جنگ جهانی اول بیشترین تلفات را در آن مکان داشته است، انگار وولف با این نامگذاری می گوید نام خانوادگی تمام جوانهای کشته شده در جنگ، فلاندرز است تا از یادها نروند.
علاوه بر این، دغدغه های فمنیستی وولف در این کتاب هویداست، به آثار ادبی و تاریخی و باستانیِ بسیاری اشاره می کند، فضای ادبی و مسائل سیاسیِ روز را مورد توجه قرار می دهد. اما یکی از نکات مهم و قابل ذکر، غوغای رنگها در این رمان است و اینکه نویسنده طبیعت را مکرراً با ظرافت به تصویر می کشد و نام پرندگان و حشرات بسیاری متنوعی را می برَد تا به این وسیله چیزی را در ازای پوچیِ زندگیِ شخصیتهای داستان که در جهانی مدرن زندگی می کنند، ارائه کند.
از آنجا که ترجمه ی این کتاب نیاز به آگاهی در زمینه های مختلف داشت، با مطالعه و کمک گرفتن از کتابهای متعددی که در زمینه نقد و بررسی این رمان نوشته شده، به ترجمه آن پرداخته ام و به دلیل اینکه خواندن و درکِ کتاب برای مخاطب فارسی زبان، بدون توضیحات اضافه تقریباً غیر ممکن است، از پانویس استفاده کرده ام. نام حشرات و پرندگان و گیاهان، بر اساس نامهای علمیِ مورد قبول در حشره شناسی، پرنده شناسی ، گیاه شناسی ذکر شده اند و توضیحات لازم برای هر کدام نوشته شده است. هرجا که به آداب و رسوم یا مکانهای خاصی اشاره شده و در درکِ رمان نقش داشته اند، توضیحاتِ لازم در پانویس آمده است.
فرایند ترجمه هیچگاه خالی از اشکال نیست، اما تلاش خود را در زمینه وفاداری به لحن وولف و همچنین محتوای رمان کرده ام. این کتاب علیرغم حجم کم، جای بحث و بررسی فراوان دارد و معانی زیادی در کلمات و جملاتش نهفته است، اما خواننده با سپردنِ خود به دستِ جریانِ جملات، فضا را به خوبی درک خواهد کرد.]]> 202 Virginia Woolf Aaron 0 0.0 1922
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Aaron
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1922
rating: 0
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]]> 56269263
So far out, in the open,
cushioned in sleep.
In flight from the land
with love's heavy luggage.

A butterfly-zone of dreams
like an open parasol
held up against the truth.

Flight and Metamorphosis marks the culmination of Nelly Sachs’s development as a poet. Sachs, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, speaks from her own condition as a refugee from Nazi Germany―her loneliness while living in a small Stockholm flat with her elderly mother; her exile, her alienation, her feelings of romantic bereavement; and her search for the divine. Forced onto a journey of endless change, Sachs created her own path forward.

From these sublime poems, she emerges as a visionary, one who harnesses language’s essential power to create and transform our world. Joshua Weiner’s translations (with Linda B. Parshall) are the first in more than half a century to elucidate Sachs’s enduring poetic power and relevance.]]> 208 Nelly Sachs 0374157081 Aaron 0 4.02 1959
author: Nelly Sachs
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1959
rating: 0
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]]> 15121260 88 Joseph Millar 0887485499 Aaron 0 4.35 2012
author: Joseph Millar
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 238226991 A spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 AM he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.]]> 361 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385548532 Aaron 0 4.28 2026
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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]]> 574980 Ring of Bone collects poems, songs, and even a few drawings, documenting the full sweep of his creative output, from his early years until just before his death.

Welch entered Reed College in 1948, and the following year moved into a house with Gary Snyder; they were soon joined by Philip Whalen. With the emergence of the Beat movement, Welch's friends began receiving national attention and his desire to devote himself completely to his poetry was galvanized. He soon became a part of the San Francisco poetry scene.

Legendary editor Donald Allen included Welch's poetry in The New American Poetry—the seminal anthology published in 1960. That same year Welch's first book, Wobbly Rock, was released. He continued to write extensively, and in 1965 published three books. Despite his burgeoning success, Welch suffered from bouts with depression, and on May 23, 1971, Gary Snyder went up to Welch's campsite in the Sierra Nevada mountains and found a suicide note. Despite an extensive search, Welch's body was never recovered.

"Lew Welch writes lyrical poems of clarity, humor, and dark probings . . . jazz musical phrasings of American speech is one of Welch's clearest contributions." —Gary Snyder

"...Music permeates his poems, which range from scored lyrics to epistolary correspondence to formal villanelles... It's fascinating to trace the evolution of this artist, from his early, lax, exultant style to his later, less jubilant work, characterized by benedictions, invocations, and requests. This is a necessary read for anyone interested in the greater Beat movement and its progenitors." —Booklist

"His luminous poems feel as vibrant today as when they first burst from the wellsprings of creativity in his own head... A postmodern Walt Whitman. . ." —San Francisco Chronicle]]> 244 Lew Welch 0912516038 Aaron 0 4.29 1973
author: Lew Welch
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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]]> 216997824 Special Brands of the Déjà Vu, he showcases new and old places, people, and emotions that call out to be explored.

The collection weaves exotic locales, interesting characters, and trying times into poems readers can’t help but enjoy.]]> 128 Duane A. Partain Aaron 0 3.00
author: Duane A. Partain
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.00
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]]> 59467919
Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.]]> 128 Taylor Byas 1593767412 Aaron 5 4.31 2023
author: Taylor Byas
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2026/08/14
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]]> 241392702 A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, a poet who “has engaged the whole human contraption” (The New York Times).

In a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a “poet of large ambitions and reckless music." In the fifteen collections that followed, she has remained ambitious and reckless, each book addressing the world anew.

Graham is a poet in the vein of the modernists, Wallace Stevens in philosophical in approach, yoking together a world of things finely observed and that immaterial realm neither beneath nor beyond it, distinctly alive to the present. Environmental devastation, aging, loss, and political instability appear in Killing Spree, transfigured in a manner in which they might be both timeless forces and distinctly of the 2020s. Here is a poet taking stock of the world around her, looking to the literary traditions that have shaped her work and finding herself, despite it all, at the height of her powers.]]> 96 Jorie Graham 037461802X Aaron 5 4.43
author: Jorie Graham
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 5
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]]> 37941589 Human Hours, shuttles between a Whitmanian embrace of others and a kind of rapacious solitude. Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited—and unanswered—by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow—or at least measure—time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.]]> 80 Catherine Barnett 1555978142 Aaron 0 4.01 2018
author: Catherine Barnett
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2026/08/11
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]]> 178565 Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those “excellent women,” the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors—anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door—the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.]]> 231 Barbara Pym 014310487X Aaron 0 3.90 1952
author: Barbara Pym
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at: 2026/08/09
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]]> 1887517 Poems. Cover by Joe Brainard. 80 Bernadette Mayer Aaron 0 4.31 1978
author: Bernadette Mayer
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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]]> 60147181 From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds--past, present, and future. Choi's third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples and calls us to imagine what will persist in the aftermaths.

With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time. They look into the collective psyche of our years in the pandemic and in the throes of anti-racist uprisings, while imagining other vectors, directions, and futures. Stories of survival collide across space and time--from Korean comfort women during World War II to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Throughout, Choi grapples with where the individual fits within the strange landscapes of this apocalyptic world, with its violent and many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope.]]> 144 Franny Choi 0063240084 Aaron 0 3.97 2022
author: Franny Choi
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 51541351 The breathtaking debut collection from one of America’s most inventive new poets

A name for the people of Honduras, Catrachos is a term of solidarity and resilience. In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders—between life and death and between countries—invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity—an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.]]> 112 Roy G. Guzmán 1644450232 Aaron 0 4.18 2020
author: Roy G. Guzmán
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 60853075
‘The fever burning through this story, its suspense and its lyrical escapes don’t curb its sensuality, and precision. [Kerangal’s] language has an incredible driving force. It is both like a stone made up of many crystals, mixing registers with fluidity, and juxtaposing the poetic and the trivial. The whole thing has a unique rhythm, a sense of breathless speed: the sort of graceful rockslide that only she can pull off. In flux between interior and exterior, this is the perfect voyage.’ – Le Monde des Livres]]> 140 Maylis de Kerangal Aaron 0 3.93 2012
author: Maylis de Kerangal
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 63183114 82 Helge Torvund 1737277565 Aaron 0 4.50 2022
author: Helge Torvund
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 217452250 96 Margaret Ross Aaron 5 4.47
author: Margaret Ross
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.47
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rating: 5
read at: 2026/08/06
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]]> 221330082


“[T]he poem / should be a world, a real world” writes Brooks-Motl. Ultraviolet of the
Genuine is a thrilling poetic search for utopian ants under real rocks. Brooks-Motl’s
poems snake from “mouth to anus” through a python of philosophical and aesthetic
questions in her attempt to grapple with the allure and limits of “ecstatic personal
austerities.” This is intellectual poetry of the highest order bent on bringing us the news
from nowhere. —Jennifer Moxley



The spirit of utopia lives on in Hannah Brooks-Motl’s luminous new collection, Ultraviolet of the Genuine: through its linguistic eclecticism, radiant intelligence, and homespun rebellion against everything given. In poems that know “nowhere’s exactly perfection,” Brooks-Motl takes us directly and slantwise to the middle of everywhere: to “the woods / where fate waits,” up the mountain again to have “a dutiful dialogue / with fallen leaves,” home with its bowl of fruit “like an image of utopia”—tracing the meanders and spirals of desire paths made by a mind alert and alerting. With her fourth collection, Brooks-Motl proves herself not only among this generation’s truly singular poets, but also one of its most philosophical. Hers are excitingly philosophical poems that think with the whole body, dancing to the music of thought and feeling for “the vaster partaking of anything that is.” Every poem here is a momentary stay against the artificial, an insistence on the authority of our hopes, imagination, desires, and anticipations. Separately and singly, they essay to locate the paradoxes of joy amid the wilderness of life. I have happily roamed the woods of these words for days, tracking traces of elegy, analysis, dream, finding much nourishment, company, and countless small wonders “sufficient to all”—and I’ll keep returning for years to come because Ultraviolet of the Genuine shows me new possibilities for what poems can be, what language can do. —Hai-Dang Phan



It starts with blueberries and it ends with quartz and heaven. In between it’s all reeling from tender adventure, cutting a path through bird cannons and scurfpea. Our poet has a literary injury. She attends to the ants, to the ticks and the weeds. Goethe said that blue shadows on snow are a demanded colour, produced by the eye itself. Somewhere Marianne Moore swishes her cape, tilts her tricorner cap, stares directly at the sun. It’s a mortal world, and we know after all that what looks like a vase can also be an urn. Mystic concentration/lyric dispersal: Hannah Brooks-Motl makes a serious book. —Luke Roberts]]> Hannah Brooks-Motl Aaron 0 4.40
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name: Aaron
average rating: 4.40
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]]> 60477320 63 Arda Collins 1737277549 Aaron 0 4.46
author: Arda Collins
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.46
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]]> 91368738 A Duration, writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies—animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies—that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles. 

Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention—be it to a line spoken by Lear’s Fool, a train to Kingston, or  “red inside green stem below eight white petals in a spiral with space between them attached to the yellow center”—into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present. In the collapse of the border between writing and the body, A Duration “play[s] both hearts with a heartbeat and kinship of place, time, mundanity in the continuous onrushing imagined joy.”]]> 120 Richard Meier 1950268780 Aaron 0 4.38
author: Richard Meier
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.38
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]]> 51559740 Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof. Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves in other nations, as well as the ways cuisine is inextricably linked to occupation, transmission, and survival. Dwelling on the personal as much as the historical, Some Are Always Hungry traces the lineage of the speaker’s place in history and diaspora through mythmaking and cooking, which is to say, conjuring.]]> 66 Jihyun Yun 1496222180 Aaron 0 4.33 2020
author: Jihyun Yun
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2026/08/02
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]]> 198800943 100 Robin Gow 1949065286 Aaron 0 4.17 2023
author: Robin Gow
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2026/08/01
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]]> 439817 355 D.B. Wyndham-Lewis 0827423675 Aaron 5 4.38 1928
author: D.B. Wyndham-Lewis
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2026/07/29
date added: 2026/07/29
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]]> 236916484 Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets’s highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.

With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation—what changes, and what stays the same, in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?

Arranged as a quartet, this collection begins with a meditation on apocalypse. In 2018, nearly two hundred feral horses were found mired in mud that had once been a stock pond near Northern Arizona—a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time in order to situate the fragile, eroding moment of the present. “Dust storms lope at the sprig / and spur of low hills,” he writes, witnessing the formation and destruction of the land as it changes alongside the creatures who depend on one another for stability and hummingbirds, horse grass, humans.

In poems composed using numbers important to Diné thought and lifeway, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon—hope, complicated and held close.]]> 152 Jake Skeets 1639551522 Aaron 5 4.32
author: Jake Skeets
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 5
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]]> 512168 131 Ronald Johnson 0971005907 Aaron 0 4.58 2001
author: Ronald Johnson
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> 40779082 The Pulitzer Prize-winning classic about the outbreak of World War I.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.

In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages.

Praise for The Guns of August

“A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—Newsweek

“More dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.”—Chicago Tribune

“A fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.”—The New York Times

“[The Guns of August] has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.” —The Wall Street Journal]]> 710 Barbara W. Tuchman Aaron 5 4.17 1962
author: Barbara W. Tuchman
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1962
rating: 5
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]]> 1660376 235 Miltos Sachtouris 0976395061 Aaron 0 4.09 1977
author: Miltos Sachtouris
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/07/26
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]]> 1542334 120 Andrei Voznesensky 1125159405 Aaron 5 4.07 1964
author: Andrei Voznesensky
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2026/07/26
date added: 2026/07/26
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]]> 242525632
The follow-up to his global bestseller Slow Down and a new introduction to Marx's Capital, Capital From Zero is a reading guide, a manifesto, a revision, and a reclamation of Marx's foundational work of political theory. Building on his signature argument of "degrowth communism", Saito's introduction brings Capital squarely into the 21st century, offering a uniquely non-Western, non-dogmatic and eco-socialist reading of the famous text.

Saito is a singular intellect with an essential and innovative point of view—a fresh new voice in Marxist theory who will sit alongside David Harvey and Thomas Piketty in educating and guiding the next generation of radical intellectuals. The book reconstructs Marx’s Capital from a totally new perspective based on more recent research findings, liberating Marx from old dogmas of the Soviet socialism and aiming to rekindle our ability to envision a more equal and sustainable society beyond capitalism.]]> 256 Kōhei Saitō 166260341X Aaron 0 4.06 2023
author: Kōhei Saitō
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 236917636 112 David Mason 1636284582 Aaron 0 5.00
author: David Mason
name: Aaron
average rating: 5.00
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rating: 0
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]]> 217204419 The Office meets Six Feet Under meets About a Boy in this coming-of-middle-age tale about having a second chance to write your life’s story.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.

As Bud awaits his fate at work, his life hangs in the balance. Given another shot by his boss and encouraged by his best friend, Tim, a worldly and wise former art dealer, Bud starts to attend the wakes and funerals of strangers to learn how to live.

Thurber Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author John Kenney tells a funny, touching story about life and death, about the search for meaning, about finding and never letting go of the preciousness of life.]]> 294 John Kenney Aaron 0 4.00 2025
author: John Kenney
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 45184300 447 H.P. Lovecraft 1101097140 Aaron 0 3.82 1928
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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]]> 220998996 From the James Beard Award-nominated author of Tacky, a boldly funny, warts-and-all tour of the bad habits that make Rax King who she is

"Most writers are boring people. King, though, seems Bettie Page meets Carrie Bradshaw."—Washington Post

With Rax King's trademark blend of irreverent humor and heartfelt honesty comes a new collection of personal essays unpacking bad behavior. Sloppy explores sobriety, begrudging self-improvement, and the habits we cling to with clenched fists. 

In “Proud Alcoholic Stock,” King examines her parents’ unwavering dedication to 12 step programs and the texture her family history has lent to her own sobriety. “Shoplifting from Brandy Melville” is a lighthearted look at, what else?, shoplifting from Brandy Melville—one of her few remaining indulgences now that she doesn’t drink. King writes about her overspending and temper control issues as well as her poorly managed mental health. These seventeen essays capture the personal and generational vices that make us who we are. From being a crummy waitress to using uppers to force friendships, from obsessing over the Neopets forums to lying for no discernable reason, these essays approach bad habits with emotional intelligence, kindness and—most importantly—humor.]]> 272 Rax King 0593688457 Aaron 0 3.84 2025
author: Rax King
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 1111 The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]> 1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Aaron 5 4.53 1974
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1974
rating: 5
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]]> 61340201 By profession I am a soldier, a general in the glorious Roman army. As a playwright, I think of myself as a sublime amateur.

In Cesar Aira’s new novel, Fulgentius, a fictitious 67-year-old imperial Roman general—“Rome’s most illustrious and experienced”—is sent to pacify the remote province of Pannonia.



He is a thoughtful, introspective person, a Saturnine intellectual who greatly enjoys being on the march away from his loving family, and the sometimes deadly intrigues of Rome. Fulgentius is also a playwright (though of exactly one play) and in every city he pacifies, he stages a grand production of his farcical tragedy (written at the tender age of twelve) about a man who becomes a famous general only to be murdered “at the hands of shadowy foreigners.” Curiously what he had imagined as a child turns out to be the story of his life, almost. As the playwright-turned-general broods obsessively about his only work, the magnificent Lupine Legion, “a city in movement” of 6,000 men, an invincible corps of seasoned fighters, wearing their signature wolfskin caps, kill, burn, pillage, and loot their way to victory. But what does victory mean? As he leaves each conquered city behind, Fulgentius suspects that once Rome’s eyes are again elsewhere, the “subdued” provinces will go right back to their old ways. For it seems there is no end of rebellions to pacify—or opportunities to stage productions of his favorite play: Fulgentius takes his theater of war quite literally. ]]> 163 César Aira 0811231690 Aaron 5 4.07 2020
author: César Aira
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2026/07/05
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]]> 2156

When Captain Wentworth returns, wealthy and successful, their paths cross again. Amidst the intricate social dynamics of Regency England, Anne must navigate her lingering feelings for him while grappling with the pressures of family, society, and her own sense of self-worth.


Austen’s masterful exploration of resilience, maturity, and enduring love makes Persuasion a deeply moving and timeless classic. With its sharp social commentary and compelling characters, this novel is a treasure for lovers of romance, wit, and literary brilliance.]]> 249 Jane Austen 0192802631 Aaron 0 4.15 1817
author: Jane Austen
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1817
rating: 0
read at: 2026/07/05
date added: 2026/07/05
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]]> 63231062 Although their brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion—bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. We travel into the field and to the laboratories of noted bee biologists who have spent their careers digging into the questions most of us never thought to ask (for example: Do bees dream? And if so, why?). With each discovery, Buchmann’s insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder is infectious.
What a Bee Knows will challenge your idea of a bee’s place in the world—and perhaps our own. This lively journey into a bee’s mind reminds us that the world is more complex than our senses can tell us.]]> 298 Stephen Buchmann 1642831247 Aaron 0 4.06
author: Stephen Buchmann
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 60675831 This is the essential English edition of the complete poems of the eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Bashō.
 
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō offers in English a full picture of the haiku of Bashō, 980 poems in all. Andrew Fitzsimons’ translation is the first to adhere strictly to all of the poems are translated following the syllabic count of the originals. This book also translates a number of Bashō’s headnotes to poems ignored by previous English-language translators.
 
In Fitzsimons’ beautiful rendering, Bashō is much more than a philosopher of the natural world and the leading exponent of a refined Japanese sensibility. He is also a poet of queer love and eroticism; of the city as well as the country, the indoors and the outdoors, travel and staying put; of lonesomeness as well as the desire to be alone.

His poetry explores the full range of social experience in Edo Japan as he moved among friends and followers high and low, the elite and the demi-monde, the less poor farmers, abandoned children, disregarded elders. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō reveals how this work speaks to our concerns today as much as it captures a Japan emerging from the Middle Ages. For dedicated scholars and those coming upon Bashō for the first time, Fitzsimons’ elegant translation—with an insightful introduction and helpful notes—allows readers to enjoy these works in all their glory.
 ]]> 472 Matsuo Bashō 0520385586 Aaron 5 4.28
author: Matsuo Bashō
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/31
date added: 2026/07/05
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]]> 210363138 A lavish collector’s edition of the complete poems of eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Bashō—​with a new index that contains the full Japanese text of the original poems.

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō offers in English a full picture of the haiku of Bashō, 980 poems in all.

In Fitzsimons’s beautiful rendering, Bashō is much more than a philosopher of the natural world and the leading exponent of a refined Japanese sensibility. He is also a poet of queer love and eroticism; of the city as well as the country, the indoors and the outdoors, travel and staying put; of lonesomeness as well as the desire to be alone. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō reveals how this work speaks to our concerns today as much as it captures a Japan emerging from the Middle Ages. For dedicated scholars and those coming upon Bashō for the first time, this beautiful collector’s edition of Fitzsimons’s elegant award-winning translation, with the original Japanese (including kanji, hiragana, and katakana), allows readers to enjoy these works in all their glory.]]> 480 Matsuo Bashō 0520400739 Aaron 5 4.25
author: Matsuo Bashō
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2026/07/05
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]]> 302053
In Blood Passion, journalist Scott Martelle explores this little-noted tale of political corruption and repression and immigrants’ struggles against dominant social codes of race, ethnicity, and class. More than a simple labor dispute, the events surrounding Ludlow embraced some of the most volatile social movements of the early twentieth century, pitting labor activists, socialists, and anarchists against the era’s powerful business class, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and helped give rise to the modern twins of corporate public relations and political “spin.” But at its heart, Blood Passion is the dramatic story of small lives merging into a movement for change and of the human struggle for freedom and dignity.]]> 280 Scott Martelle 0813540623 Aaron 0 3.78 2007
author: Scott Martelle
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2026/07/03
date added: 2026/07/03
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]]> 702539 killer movie, though it could very possibly kill him to get it made.]]> 384 Elmore Leonard 006008216X Aaron 0 3.97 1990
author: Elmore Leonard
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at: 2026/07/02
date added: 2026/07/03
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]]> 60106 118 Italo Calvino Aaron 4 3.93 1983
author: Italo Calvino
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2026/06/28
date added: 2026/06/28
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]]> 19089 "People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are"

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".]]> 912 George Eliot 0451529170 Aaron 5 4.02 1872
author: George Eliot
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1872
rating: 5
read at: 2026/06/28
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]]> 25622780 Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

A new introduction by the award-winning Edwidge Danticat, author most recently of Claire of the Sea Light, expresses the enduring importance of this work. Drawing on her own Caribbean background, she illuminates the setting’s impact on Rhys and her astonishing work.]]> 176 Jean Rhys 0393352560 Aaron 0 3.63 1966
author: Jean Rhys
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/24
date added: 2026/06/24
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]]> 55867897
Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beach-side paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, Remy and Alicia tumble into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization” looks like?

Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.]]> 320 Beth Morgan 0316704261 Aaron 4 3.22 2021
author: Beth Morgan
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2026/06/24
date added: 2026/06/24
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]]> 201375308 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • SOON TO BE A NETFLIX FILM

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met—Pedro Páramo—but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul. Although initially published to a quiet reception, Pedro Páramo was soon recognized as a major novel that has served as a touchstone text for writers including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso. Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century.]]> 139 Juan Rulfo 0802163483 Aaron 0 4.06 1955
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/23
date added: 2026/06/23
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]]> 18839 Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.]]> 336 Virginia Woolf 0141184272 Aaron 5 3.87 1928
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2026/06/21
date added: 2026/06/21
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]]> 177617090 143 Mariette Navarro 1739751574 Aaron 0 3.63 2021
author: Mariette Navarro
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/15
date added: 2026/06/15
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]]> 215511912

[Sample Poem]

from ARS POETICA 1: CORAL

To write poetry after Castle Bravo.
Then to write poetry after 1500 feet.
After high-quality steel frame buildings
not completely collapsed, except
all panels and roofs blown in.
After 2,000 feet.
After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed
or standing but badly damaged.
After 3,500 feet.
After church buildings completely destroyed.
After brick walls severely cracked.
After 4,400 feet.
After 5,300 feet.
After roof tiles bubbled and melted.
After 6,500 feet.
After mass distortion of large steel buildings.
To write the Cold War and doves.
The Cold War and tapeworms.
The Cold War and sails of ships.
The Cold War and the steel of bridges.
To write poetry after that.
To write in a world with few nutrients,
one that rocks back and forth.
The same beginning in both the sea and the land.
To write poetry that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton.
And then poetry that knows
the long, stinging tentacles capturing.
Knows the water.
The Atlantic and the Pacific.
The connections between.
The one moving into the other.
To develop poetry in the stomach
that then exits through the mouth
which is the anus.
To write poetry in the blue
that is the absence of green.
Light penetration.
Whorls of tentacles.
The slime earth too.
Hunters and farmers.
Shallow water.
Few nutrients.
High fecundity.
Rapid growth.
Multiarmed morphology and tube feet.
To write tube feet.
To write the exact place.
Seaward slope place.
Sea terrace place.
Algal ridge place.
Coral algal zone place.
Seaward reef flat place.
Islet or interisland reef crest place.
Lagoon reef flat place.
Lagoon terrace place.
Lagoon floor or basin place.
Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place.
To write poetry after.]]> 74 Juliana Spahr 0819501522 Aaron 0 4.20
author: Juliana Spahr
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.20
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]]> 704573
The novel is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a Chinese puzzle, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Cabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman's discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond...

As impossible to describe as it is to put down, The Stone Door establishes once and for all that the author has no peer in the realms of fantasy or black humor.]]> 118 Leonora Carrington 0312762100 Aaron 0 3.66 1976
author: Leonora Carrington
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/14
date added: 2026/06/14
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]]> 61261605 81 Seneca Aaron 0 4.10 49
author: Seneca
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.10
book published: 49
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/14
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]]> 720872 Seasons of Sacred Lust is Kazuko Shiraishi's challenge to the conventions of Japanese erotic poetry. Born in Vancouver, Canada, Shiraishi was taken to Japan by her family just prior to World War II, and her first poetry (written at age seventeen, published at twenty) emerged from the violence and ugliness of postwar Tokyo. Her earliest work, associated with the avant-garde magazine Vou, shows her talent for vivid, bizarre, almost surrealistic imagery. Her later writing, coming out of her deepening involvement in the world of modern jazz and her increasing emphasis on the performance of her poetry, dramatizes a society of estrangement and alienation where music and poetry provide the only values, and sex the only solace, in a disintegrating world. This selection is translated by a group of Japanese and American poets: Iluko Atsumi, John Solt, Carol Tinker, Yasuyo Morita, and Kenneth Rexroth who provided an informative, perceptive introduction.]]> 86 Kazuko Shiraishi 0811206785 Aaron 0 3.82 1968
author: Kazuko Shiraishi
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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]]> 223443665 A bilingual anthology of poems from Palestine (2023-2024), You Must Live attests to existence in the face of suppression. Bearing witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry from Gaza and the West Bank. Translated from Arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, this collection gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory, most of whom have never left. Yet the poems in You Must Live refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine throughout—powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even humorous—as poets write love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, and proclamations for the future. Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live sounds as an urgent call to the global community.]]> 320 Sherah Bloor 1556597207 Aaron 0 4.77 2025
author: Sherah Bloor
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.77
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 222850887 In this powerful reframing of the stories that make us, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec leads us into the borderlands of history, science, memoir, and fiction to What worlds do books written by marginalized people describe and invite us to inhabit?

When a friend asked what books could help them understand Indigenous lives, Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin, gave them a list. This list became a book club and then a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, and then this book. The writers in Bad Indians Book Club refuse to let dominant stories displace their own and resist the way wemitigoozhiwag--European settlers--craft the prevailing narrative and decide who they are.

In Bad Indians Book Club, we examine works about history, science, and gender as well as fiction, all written from the perspective of "Bad Indians"--marginalized writers whose refusal to comply with dominant narratives opens up new worlds. Interlacing chapters with short stories about Deer Woman, who is on her own journey to decide who she is, Krawec leads us into a place of wisdom and medicine where the stories of marginalized writers help us imagine other ways of seeing the world. As Krawec did for her friend, she recommends a list of books to fill in the gaps on our own bookshelves and in our understanding.

Becoming Kin, which novelist Omar El Akkad called a "searing spear of light," led readers to talk back to the histories they had received. Now, in Bad Indians Book Club comes a potent challenge to all the stories settler colonialism tells--stories that erase and appropriate, deny and deflect. Following Deer Woman, who is shaped by the profuse artistry of Krawec, we enter the multiple worlds Indigenous and other subaltern stories create. Together we venture to the edges of worlds waiting to be born.]]> 231 Patty Krawec 1506499120 Aaron 0 4.08 2025
author: Patty Krawec
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/14
date added: 2026/06/14
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]]> 199532033 Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores loneliness, art, addiction, regret, love, and hard-won empathy in this poignant novel—his most personal to date—that captures the life of a journeyman musician unable to escape the tragedies of his past.

Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada fifty miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his sixties, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he’s lost, and his life as a touring musician. Hampered by insomnia, bouts of anxiety, and a chronic lethargy that keeps him from moving back to town, Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on—until a horse arrives on his doorstep: nameless, blind, and utterly helpless.

Al hopes the horse will vanish as mysteriously as he appeared. Yet the animal remains, leaving him in a conundrum. Is the animal real, or a phantom conjured from imagination? As Al contemplates the horse’s existence—and what, if anything, he can do—his thoughts are interspersed with memories of his life as a musician, from the moment his mother’s part-time boyfriend gifts him a 1959 butterscotch blonde Telecaster, to the day his life as a traveling musician begins. He joins various bands—all who perform his songs once they discover his talent–playing casinos, truck stops, clubs, and bars. He falls in love, and finds pockets of companionship and minor success along the way. Never close to stardom or financial success, he continues as a journeyman for decades until alcoholism and a heartbreaking tragedy lead him to the isolation of the barren Nevada desert.

A poignant meditation on art, addiction, loneliness, heartbreak, and the reality of life on the road in smalltime bands, The Horse is a beautiful, haunting tale from an author working at the height of his powers.]]> 194 Willy Vlautin 0063346575 Aaron 0 4.07
author: Willy Vlautin
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.07
book published:
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]]> 2172703 192 Willy Vlautin 0571235700 Aaron 0 4.03 2008
author: Willy Vlautin
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/10
date added: 2026/06/10
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]]> 54275850 Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores the impact of trickle-down greed and opportunism of gentrification on ordinary lives in this scorching novel that captures the plight of a young woman pushed to the edge as she fights to secure a stable future for herself and her family.

Barely thirty, Lynette is exhausted. Saddled with bad credit and juggling multiple jobs, some illegally, she’s been diligently working to buy the house she lives in with her mother and developmentally disabled brother Kenny. Portland’s housing prices have nearly quadrupled in fifteen years, and the owner is giving them a good deal. Lynette knows it’s their last best chance to own their own home—and obtain the security they’ve never had. While she has enough for the down payment, she needs her mother to cover the rest of the asking price. But a week before they’re set to sign the loan papers, her mother gets cold feet and reneges on her promise, pushing Lynette to her limits to find the money they need.

Set over two days and two nights, The Night Always Comes follows Lynette’s frantic search—an odyssey of hope and anguish that will bring her face to face with greedy rich men and ambitious hustlers, those benefiting and those left behind by a city in the throes of a transformative boom. As her desperation builds and her pleas for help go unanswered, Lynette makes a dangerous choice that sets her on a precarious, frenzied spiral. In trying to save her family’s future, she is plunged into the darkness of her past, and forced to confront the reality of her life.

A heart wrenching portrait of a woman hungry for security and a home in a rapidly changing city, The Night Always Comes raises the difficult questions we are often too afraid to ask ourselves: What is the price of gentrification, and how far are we really prepared to go to achieve the American Dream? Is the American dream even attainable for those living at the edges? Or for too many of us, is it only a hollow promise?]]> 208 Willy Vlautin 0063035081 Aaron 5 3.80 2021
author: Willy Vlautin
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2026/06/10
date added: 2026/06/10
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]]> 782151 With "echoes of Of Mice and Men" (The Bookseller, UK), The Motel Life explores the frustrations and failed dreams of two Nevada brothers — on the run after a hit-and-run accident — who, forgotten by society, and short on luck and hope, desperately cling to the edge of modern life.

]]> 206 Willy Vlautin 0061171115 Aaron 5 3.91 2006
author: Willy Vlautin
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2026/06/10
date added: 2026/06/10
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]]> 511299 Born into a deeply religious family, the author and his siblings are taken by their mother across the Midwest and South as she searches for the "right" religious sect and educates them in various forms of fundamentalism, a trip that ends with the mother speaking in tongues and eventually in her total isolation.
It is not only his mother, however, but the author's brothers who are utterly transformed by her spiritual thirst. Unable to cope properly with a world of little moral values, the brothers themselves become involved in shade business operations and sham religious institutions. One brother is imprisoned for his activities.
Yet the author neither psychologizes nor preaches, nor does he judge his family. Rather, his plain, poetic prose searches out events, actions, and results as clues of their desperate quests for meaning. As American authors from Hawthorne and Poe to Faulkner and O'Connor have understood, the American experience is anything but nice and sweet. Below the surface of American family life are spooky tales of fear, madness, and destruction. In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop explores these tales through the memories of his own life with love, understanding, and all the horror they evoke. This is a true American family classic.]]> 208 Keith Waldrop 1557131368 Aaron 5 4.09 1993
author: Keith Waldrop
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2026/06/08
date added: 2026/06/08
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]]> 237693055 Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this pacy, thrilling novel, a Japanese Breaking Bad, in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in Tokyo of the 1990s, a world rapidly dividing into haves and have-nots.

All of them are fleeing something. Growing up without a father, Hana’s tired of the pity in her classmates’ eyes, and finds a flashier mother figure in Kimiko. Kimiko is older than Hana's mother but seems much younger, chatting easily about school and boys and wanting a better life. Fate throws them together with two more young women—bruised but not broken by life. Together the four set out to remake their lives, fighting predatory lenders, organized criminals, and plain bad luck as they open a bar called Lemon.

Keeping the business going, and trying to take care of each other, forms the core of this enrapturing novel. It is a story of startling reversals and vivid portraits of the matriarchy of Tokyo nightlife and its adjacent criminal underclasses. From the bar owners to the aging hostesses to the young street touts coaxing people off the street to places like Lemon, everyone wants a chance at renewal, but can everyone get it?

Narrated by Hana in Kawakami’s trademark evocatively poetic style and paced like a noir, Sisters in Yellow will be the literary blockbuster of the season. This epic of friendship and betrayal is the kind of book one longs to return to when away from a world until itself, and a book that makes you think while it produces immensities of feeling. It is a major novel that, like so many of the best recent phenomena—from Donna Tartt to Hanya Yanigahara—explores how we survive (or don't) together.]]> 448 Mieko Kawakami 0593537734 Aaron 0 3.67 2023
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/08
date added: 2026/06/08
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]]> 220160387 An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.]]> 352 Daniel Kehlmann 1668087790 Aaron 5 3.82 2023
author: Daniel Kehlmann
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2026/06/07
date added: 2026/06/07
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]]> 216407333 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026

A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran.

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.

1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.

1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.

2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down …

A topical, moving novel about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.]]> 228 Shida Bazyar 176138600X Aaron 0 3.74 2016
author: Shida Bazyar
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2026/06/07
date added: 2026/06/07
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]]> 235992303 Instant New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith returns with a new collection of poems on the sometimes-blurry distinction between mind and body, and how the self shifts and moves through time and space.

The title of Maggie Smith’s new collection comes from the eponymous

You ask what I’ll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.
But you want one specific thing,
so here—I’ll miss my body. I’ll miss
its companionship, how it’s traveled
with me, never leaving me—& by me,
I mean my mind.
my body hasn’t traveled with me.
I’ve traveled inside it.
Do I wear it, or does it carry me?
Is the body a suit, or a suitcase?

Within, poems turn over the strange relationships between the body and the mind, the self and the world. With her signature tenderness and clarity of observation, and with stunning swoops of imagination, Smith considers—and reconsiders—what it is to be Does one life matter in the grand scheme of space and time? How can it be that we are the same people we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, but also different people? And could there be more to life, just beyond the borders of we can experience?

Each poem is an ode to the power of our minds, and proof that both a life and a self, whether within a suit or a suitcase, is infinitely expandable.]]> 128 Maggie Smith 1668090058 Aaron 0 4.10 2026
author: Maggie Smith
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2026
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]]> 34434537
The fluid and mesmeric lines of these new translations by the award-winning poet Sarah Arvio bring us closer than ever to the talismanic perfection of the great García Lorca. Poet in Spain invokes the "wild, innate, local surrealism" of the Spanish voice, in moonlit poems of love and death set among poplars, rivers, low hills, and high sierras. Arvio's ample and rhythmically rich offering includes, among other essential works, the folkloric yet modernist Gypsy Ballads, the plaintive flamenco Poem of the Cante Jondo, and the turbulent and beautiful Dark Love Sonnets — addressed to Lorca's homosexual lover—which Lorca was revising at the time of his brutal political murder by Fascist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Here, too, are several lyrics translated into English for the first time and the play Blood Wedding— also a great tragic poem. Arvio has created a fresh voice for Lorca in English, full of urgency, pathos, and lyricism—showing the poet's work has grown only more beautiful with the passage of time.]]> 576 Federico García Lorca 1524733113 Aaron 0 4.44
author: Federico García Lorca
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.44
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]]> 233411626
A psychologically timeless story—anyone who’s ever had an overbearing parent and resented them will relate—The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks is Eka Kurniawan’s most contemporarily relevant book: he’s thinking about (and rejecting) militancy and moral certitude of any kind.]]> 128 Eka Kurniawan 0811239764 Aaron 0 3.49
author: Eka Kurniawan
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.49
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]]> 28881 Philadelphia Inquirer).

Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes. Even the considerable wiles and devotion of the Savior's pal may not be enough to divert Joshua from his tragic destiny. But there's no one who loves Josh more—except maybe "Maggie," Mary of Magdala—and Biff isn't about to let his extraordinary pal suffer and ascend without a fight.]]> 444 Christopher Moore 0380813815 Aaron 0 4.22 2002
author: Christopher Moore
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> 231387262 From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store―or to erase―our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.]]> 144 Ben Lerner 0374618593 Aaron 0 3.81 2026
author: Ben Lerner
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at: 2026/05/30
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]]> 237895905 173 Mark Nowak 1566897513 Aaron 5 4.20
author: Mark Nowak
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2026/05/23
date added: 2026/05/26
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]]> 846353 143 Nancy Lemann 0452258863 Aaron 5 4.17 1985
author: Nancy Lemann
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2026/05/21
date added: 2026/05/26
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]]> 214614 Desert Solitaire is one of Edward Abbey’s most critically acclaimed works and marks his first foray into the world of nonfiction writing. Written while Abbey was working as a ranger at Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, Desert Solitaire is a rare view of one man’s quest to experience nature in its purest form.

Through prose that is by turns passionate and poetic, Abbey reflects on the condition of our remaining wilderness and the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world as well as his own internal struggle with morality. As the world continues its rapid development, Abbey’s cry to maintain the natural beauty of the West remains just as relevant today as when this book was written.]]> 337 Edward Abbey 0345326490 Aaron 0 4.18 1968
author: Edward Abbey
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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]]> 60932 Parable of the Sower continues the story of Lauren Olamina in socially and economically depressed California in the 2030s. Convinced that her community should colonize the stars, Lauren and her followers make preparations. But the collapse of society and rise of fanatics result in Lauren's followers being enslaved, and her daughter stolen from her. Now, Lauren must fight back to save the new world order.]]> 448 Octavia E. Butler 0446610380 Aaron 0 4.31 1998
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2026/05/11
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]]> 203893153 "Required reading for anyone seeking to understand Christian nationalism." —Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne

A propulsive account of the network of charismatic Christians that consolidated support for Donald Trump and is reshaping religion and politics in the US.

Over the last decade, the Religious Right has evolved. Some of the more extreme beliefs of American evangelicalism have begun to take hold in the mainstream. Scholar Matthew D. Taylor pulls back the curtain on a little-known movement of evangelical Christians who see themselves waging spiritual battles on a massive scale. Known as the New Apostolic Reformation, this network of leaders and believers emerged only three decades ago but now yields colossal influence, galvanizing support for Trump and far-right leaders around the world. In this groundbreaking account, Taylor explores the New Apostolic Reformation from its inception in the work of a Fuller Seminary professor, to its immense networks of apostles and prophets, to its role in the January 6 riot. Charismatic faith provided righteous fuel to the fire that day, where symbols of spiritual warfare rioters blew shofars, worship music blared, and people knelt in prayer. This vision of charismatic Christianity now animates millions, lured by Spirit-filled revival and visions of Christian supremacy.

Taylor's unprecedented access to the movement's leaders, archives, internal conference calls, and correspondence gives us an insider account of the connection between charismatic evangelicalism and hard-right rhetoric. Taylor delves into prophetic memes like the Seven Mountains Mandate, the Appeal to Heaven flag, and the Cyrus Anointing; Trump's spiritual advisor Paula White's call for "angelic reinforcements"; and Sean Feucht and Bethel Music's titanic command of worship styles across America. Throughout, Taylor maps a movement of magnetic leaders and their uncompromising beliefs--and where it might be headed next. When people long to conquer a nation for God, democracy can be brought to the brink.]]> 292 Matthew D. Taylor 1506497780 Aaron 0 4.34
author: Matthew D. Taylor
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.34
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]]> 223363549 Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.

In her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.

At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.]]> 224 Lana Lin 1948980290 Aaron 0 4.08
author: Lana Lin
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.08
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]]> 238226942
Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up in a strange, horrible version of reality. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Is this a hoax? A reality show? A test from God? Natalie knows just two things for sure: this isn't her perfect life, and she must escape, by any means possible.

As darkly funny as it is shocking and gripping, Yesteryear is an electrifying examination of tradition, fame, faith and the grand performance of womanhood, from a thrilling new talent in fiction.]]> 400 Caro Claire Burke Aaron 0 3.84 2026
author: Caro Claire Burke
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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]]> 860500 135 Merrill Gilfillan 051759739X Aaron 5 4.57 1994
author: Merrill Gilfillan
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2026/05/01
date added: 2026/05/01
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]]> 263723 144 Russell Hoban 0747559090 Aaron 0 3.72 1987
author: Russell Hoban
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2026/04/29
date added: 2026/04/29
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]]> 92780 233 Stella Gibbons 0143039598 Aaron 0 3.88 1932
author: Stella Gibbons
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1932
rating: 0
read at: 2026/04/26
date added: 2026/04/26
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]]> 243854945 256 Mike Silverton 1963846656 Aaron 5 5.00
author: Mike Silverton
name: Aaron
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2026/04/20
date added: 2026/04/20
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]]> 9720855 208 Aimé Césaire 0819570702 Aaron 0 4.44 1948
author: Aimé Césaire
name: Aaron
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at: 2026/04/19
date added: 2026/04/19
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]]> 58724718
Carla Karolak is doing just fine. Having escaped the clutches of her controlling mother and founded a successful writing retreat in which participants are confined to windowless cells until they hit their daily word count, she lives a comfortable, if solitary, existence. If only her therapist, Toonie, would stop going on about Carla's nonexistent love life and start addressing her writer’s block, she might be able to make some progress. But then Carla finds Toonie murdered, and suddenly her unfinished memoir is the least of her concerns. Without quite knowing why, she dials an old phone number.

Amy Gallup, retired after decades as a writing instructor, is surprised to hear from her former student Carla out of the blue, three years since they last spoke. She’s even more shocked when she finds out the reason for Carla's call. Suddenly, she finds herself swept up in a murder investigation that soon brings her old writing group back together. But they’ll need all the help they can get, as one murder leads to another, and suspicions of a serial killer mount across San Diego.

Full of Jincy Willett’s trademark dark humor, an unforgettable cast of characters, and two of the most endearingly imperfect protagonists who have ever attempted to solve a murder, Amy Among the Serial Killers shows us what can be gained when we begin to break down our own walls and let others inside…as long as they aren’t murderers.]]> 400 Jincy Willett 1250275148 Aaron 0 3.40 2022
author: Jincy Willett
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 18528009 256 Ana Castillo 1558618635 Aaron 0 3.15 2014
author: Ana Castillo
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2026/04/14
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]]> 48890225 A whipsmart debut about three women—transgender and cisgender—whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.

Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.]]> 337 Torrey Peters 0593133374 Aaron 0 3.92 2021
author: Torrey Peters
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2026/04/12
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]]> 217245548 Another instant classic from Carl Hiaasen—laugh-out-loud funny, tackling the current chaotic and polarized American culture (following in the path of Squeeze Me), with two wonderful new Hiaasen heroes

“The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Falls, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he’d take him there after finishing an errand.”

Thus begins Fever Beach, with an errand that leads—in pure Hiaasen-style—into the depths of Florida at its most a sun-soaked bastion of right-wing extremism, white power, greed, and corruption. Figgo, it turns out, is the only hate-monger ever to be kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too dumb and incompetent. On January 6, 2021 he thought he was defacing a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but he wound up spreading feces all over a statue of James Zacharia George, a Civil War Confederate war leader.

Figgo's already messy life is about to get more complicated, thanks to two formidable adversaries. Viva Morales is a newly transplanted Floridian, a clever woman recently taken to the cleaners by her ex-husband, now working at the Mink Foundation, a supposedly philanthropical organization, and renting a room in Figgo’s apartment because there’s no place else she can afford. Twilly Spree has an anger management problem, especially when it comes to those who deface the environment, and way too many inherited millions of dollars. He's living alone a year after his dog died, two years after he sank a city councilman’s party barge, and three years after his divorce.

Viva and Twilly are plunged into a mystery—involving dark money and darker motives—they are determined to solve, and become entangled in a world populated by some of Hiaasen’s most outrageous Claude and Eletra Mink—billionaire philanthropists with way too much plastic surgery and a secret right-wing agenda—and Congressman Clure Boyette—who dreams of being Florida’s (and maybe America’s) most important politician. The only things standing in his way are his love for hookers and young girls, and his total lack of intelligence. We meet Noel Kristianson—a Scandinavian agnostic injured when Figgo thinks he’s aJewish threat to humanity and runs him over with his car; Jonus Onus—Figgo’s partner in white power idiocy; and many, many more. Hiaasen ties them all together and delivers them to their appropriate fates, in his wildest and most entertaining novel to date.]]> 368 Carl Hiaasen 0593320948 Aaron 0 3.84 2025
author: Carl Hiaasen
name: Aaron
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
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]]> 233411547
When pet rat Gouri finds himself locked out of his owner’s apartment, he has no choice but to strike out alone onto the pavements of Paris.

But what begins as a strange and marvellous bedtime story — Gouri and his new friend Raka selling flour-coated worms to pigeons for spare change — soon spirals into an exhilarating whirlwind of murder, sex, unionised hamsters, courtroom drama, and, finally, Armageddon.

Told through a series of letters from Gouri to Argentinian playwright Copi, City of Rats channels Copi’s lifelong fascination with society’s outcasts—queer people, immigrants, the homeless, and criminals—into a fiercely imaginative, unflinchingly provocative tale of a world hurtling into madness.]]> 144 Copi 0811238377 Aaron 0 2.69 1979
author: Copi
name: Aaron
average rating: 2.69
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/09
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]]>