en-US Mon, 17 Mar 2025 15:38:21 -0700 60 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 25314509 99 Percy Bysshe Shelley Katie 5 3.33 1595
author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
name: Katie
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1595
rating: 5
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]]> 52764042
This fourth novel is an honest and brutal self-assessment, a meditation on life and art, and the sacrifice of one to the other. Written in Kalich’s spare style that seems effortless, but where each word carries the weight of years of writing and reflections, The Assisted Living Facility Library is a heart-breaking metafictional masterpiece by a tragic humanist.

Kalich experiments with narrative form and characters, pulling us into a murky place where we are left to wonder: what is the difference between Kalich the author, Kalich the character and Kalich the man? Can we ever know what is going on inside the head of another human being?

“What makes The Assisted Living Facility Library so powerful is its ability to combine formal rigor and meta-fictional playfulness with an almost yearning—but altogether genuine and painful—emotionality. This is experimental fiction at its best and most human. With the control of the great postmodernists and the precision of detail of Murnane, this is a book about the way in which books form a life, and how, as a life comes to its end, both the books and the life itself become whittled down to what is glowingly essential.” —Brian Evenson

“Last night I finished reading The Assisted Living Facility Library. I found it very moving and very disturbing – but more moving than disturbing. Please don’t take this wrong, but it’s possible that you’ve written the last postmodern novel; or maybe the last twentieth-century novel; or maybe the last novel, period. (Not really, of course; there’ll be plenty of books published in years to come with novel on the title-page. It’s just that there shouldn’t be.)” —Brian McHale to Richard Kalich]]> 204 Richard Kalich 0993433197 Katie 0 to-read 4.00
author: Richard Kalich
name: Katie
average rating: 4.00
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date added: 2021/06/19
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]]> 9560451

In 's Nachts komen de vossen dwaalt Cees Nooteboom naar mensen en gebeurtenissen uit het verleden: weg van de waan van de dag, weg van de levenden. Er is een prachtige lijn te ontdekken in het schrijverschap van Nooteboom. Waar in zijn debuutroman Philip en de anderen de jonge auteur op zoek ging naar de gebeurtenissen en stof zocht voor zijn schrijverschap, blikt hij nu terug en weet hij ontmoetingen, personen en gebeurtenissen te verweven tot ragfijne, maar ook spannende verhalen.]]> 252 Cees Nooteboom 0857050230 Katie 0 to-read 3.66 2009
author: Cees Nooteboom
name: Katie
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/03/10
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]]> 45010931
Part memoir, part magical realism, part hilarious trash-talking take on contemporary art and the poet's life, The Baudelaire Fractal is the long-awaited debut novel by the incomparable Lisa Robertson.]]> 208 Lisa Robertson 1552453901 Katie 0 to-read 3.95 2020
author: Lisa Robertson
name: Katie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/01/12
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]]> 51241786 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award winner Noor Naga's bracing debut, a novel-in-verse about a young woman's romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith.

Coocoo is a young immigrant woman in Toronto. Her faith is worn threadbare after years of bargaining with God to end her loneliness and receiving no answer. Then she meets her mirror-image; Muhammad is a professor and father of two. He's also married.

Heartbreaking and hilarious, this verse-novel chronicles Coocoo's spiraling descent: the transformation of her love into something at first desperate and obsessive, then finally cringing and animal, utterly without grace. Her best friend, Nouf, remains by her side throughout, and together they face the growing contradictions of Coocoo's life. What does it mean to pray while giving your body to a man who cannot keep it? How long can a homeless love survive on the streets? These are some of the questions this verse-novel swishes around in its mouth.]]> 80 Noor Naga 077100589X Katie 3 to-read 3.95 2020
author: Noor Naga
name: Katie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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]]> 24392810
Eileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which Myles not only lets her readers peer into existent places, like the East Village in her iconic Chelsea Girls, but also lifts them into dreams, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.

I Must Be Living Twice brings selections from the poet's previous work together with a set of bold new poems, through which Myles continues to refine her sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles's stomping grounds and the home of her most well-known work, she provides a wide-open lens into a radical life.]]> 368 Eileen Myles 0062389106 Katie 0 to-read 4.16 2015
author: Eileen Myles
name: Katie
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/04/11
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]]> 53003 216 Jean Genet 1596541369 Katie 0 to-read 4.05 1943
author: Jean Genet
name: Katie
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/04/11
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]]> 34146740 in the backseat a
portion of the music is
mucus flying into stillness
at what point do we submit
to the authority of flowers
at what point after it enters
the mouth is it no longer in the
mouth but the throat the colon
making sumptuous death of the world
this is what crossing the line gains
no need to pretend we
are the people we
want to be in
the next life
bone under
tongue drives
taste of snow to metal… CAConrad is the author of (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon , and The Book of Frank , as well as several other books of poetry and essays. Most recently, he has co-edited Selected Poems of John Wieners . A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.]]> 160 C.A. Conrad 1940696550 Katie 0 to-read 4.31 2017
author: C.A. Conrad
name: Katie
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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]]> 37858141 Fence Modern Prize in Prose

Much of what is read as news is fake; still the real news is, at its very best, partial. At the heart of Strawberry Fields is the storied figure of the journalist, who despairs of accountability yet must accept its disorienting weight. This is a global fiction; these shapeshifting journalists together demonstrate the ethics of reading and writing “news from elsewhere.” An antidote to the normalization wielded upon us by narrative, Hilary Plum crafts with dizzying invention a recursive disorientation of stories starting over and over again, without conclusion. The fragmentation of these harrowing truths, ripped from the headlines, is a reprieve; at least it’s not really “happening,” like normal fictions do, simulacra at the speed of life, not really “happening,” at least not at the rate of narrativity. Oh, but it is. This fiction jumps through genres, destabilizing players and circumstances: revolutionary Ireland, Iraq in the midst of US invasion, and Pakistan during years of drone warfare, an eating disorder clinic, a farming community in the midst of pesticide poisoning, the plight of a journalist imprisoned in Mexico. Our throughline is the recurring story of a reporter, Alice, and a detective, Modigliani: together they failed to solve a crime that occurred years ago amid the chaos of a hurricane, and we find them now piecing together the stories of five murdered veterans of the war in Iraq. Making up nothing, or everything, all around the globe these horrors go on daily.]]> 224 Hilary Plum 1944380035 Katie 0 to-read 4.12 2018
author: Hilary Plum
name: Katie
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/10/31
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]]> 7158213 Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of the most important living poets writing in Spanish today. Zurita was a 24-year-old student in Valparaíso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Anteparaíso (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life), Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile’s violent recent history.]]> 130 Raúl Zurita 0520259734 Katie 0 to-read 4.14 1979
author: Raúl Zurita
name: Katie
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/01/29
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]]> 29503700 National Book Critics Circle Award, Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistNew York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian Best Books of 2016Thomas De Quincey was an obsessive. He was obsessed with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose Lyrical Ballads provided the script to his life, and by the idea of sudden death. Running away from school to pursue the two poets, De Quincey insinuated himself into their world. Basing his sensibility on Wordsworth’s and his character on Coleridge’s, he forged a triangle of unusual psychological complexity.Aged twenty-four, De Quincey replaced Wordsworth as the tenant of Dove Cottage, the poet’s former residence in Grasmere. In this idyllic spot he followed the reports of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families, including a baby, were butchered in their own homes. In his opium-soaked imagination the murderer became a poet while the poet became a murderer. Embedded in On Murder as One of the Fine Arts, De Quincey’s brilliant series of essays, Frances Wilson finds the startling story of his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge.Opium was the making of De Quincey, allowing him to dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, and divest himself of guilt. Opium also allowed him to write, and under the pseudonym “The Opium-Eater” De Quincey emerged as the strangest and most original journalist of his age. His influence has been considerable. Poe became his double; Dostoevsky went into exile with Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in his pocket; and Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vladimir Nabokov were all De Quincey devotees. There have been other biographies of Thomas De Quincey, but Guilty Thing is the first to be animated by the spirit of De Quincey himself. Following the growth of his obsessions from seed to full flowering and tracing the ways they intertwined, Frances Wilson finds the master key to De Quincey’s vast Piranesian mind. Unraveling a tale of hero worship and revenge, Guilty Thing brings the last of the Romantics roaring back to life and firmly establishes Wilson as one of our foremost contemporary biographers.]]> 416 Frances Wilson 0374710414 Katie 5 3.94 2016
author: Frances Wilson
name: Katie
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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]]> 10394128 72 László Krasznahorkai 9631427455 Katie 5 4.23 2009
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Katie
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/12/04
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]]> 29633734 Lost Profiles is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by co-founder of the Surrealist Movement. Opening with a reminiscence of the international Dada movement in the late 1910s and its transformation into the beginnings of surrealism, Lost Profiles then proceeds to usher its readers into encounters with a variety of literary lions. We meet an elegant Marcel Proust, renting five adjoining rooms at an expensive hotel to "contain" the silence needed to produce Remembrance of Things Past; an exhausted James Joyce putting himself through grueling translation sessions for Finnegans Wake; and an enigmatic Apollinaire in search of the ultimate objet trouvé. Soupault sketches lively portraits of surrealist precursors like Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars, a moving account of his tragic fellow surrealist René Crevel, and the story of his unlikely friendship with right-wing anti-Vichy critic George Bernanos. The collection ends with essays on two modernist forerunners, Charles Baudelaire and Henri Rousseau. With an afterword by Ron Padgett recounting his meeting with Soupault in the mid 70's and a preface by André Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti, Lost Profiles confirms Soupault's place in the vanguard of twentieth-century literature.

"Philippe Soupault was a central figure in both the Dada and Surrealist movements but throughout his long life walked under no banner except the one of artistic freedom. In this previously untranslated book, he gives us a collection of richly remembered portraits of some of his best-loved friends from the old days of the new modernism. As a glimpse into that time, these lost portraits are invaluable—and often deeply moving."—Paul Auster, author of Report from the Interior

"Reading Alan Bernheimer's splendid translation of Soupault's memoir, I forgot that it was a translation, that it was Soupault writing or talking about another time, about his friends of one century past. I read myself into these vivid and virile (so, sue me!) assaults on time, and Time stopped."—Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess

"Philippe Soupault was present at the creation of both Dada and Surrealism—collaborating with André Breton to produce The Magnetic Fields, the first book of automatic writing—before going his own way as a poet, novelist, and journalist. In this present volume, Soupault's fierce independence, deep wit, and generous heart shine through a set of sharply observed portraits of European writers—fellow geniuses, most of them known to him personally. Alan Bernheimer's fine translation allows Soupault's vibrant voice to come to life in our time, and to reanimate in turn some of the greatest spirits of the past century's literature—a marvelous and much-needed apparition."—Andrew Joron, author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems

"In this dazzling book—adroitly, smoothly & accurately translated by poet Alan Bernheimer—poet & co-founder of Surrealism Philippe Soupault trains his great secret eye & ear to auscultate an astounding range of core 20th century literary figures he knew personally. And does so with serenity, humor & profound insight. Like none of the academic histories covering this period, no matter how well written and documented, this book makes you say as you devour it: 'Wish I had been there.' Enough said, I’m going to call René Crevel right now."—Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012

Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) served in the French army during WWI and subsequently joined the Dada movement. In 1919, he collaborated with André Breton on the automatic text Les Champs magnétiques, launching the surrealist movement. In the years that followed, he wrote novels and journalism, directed Radio Tunis in Tunisia, and worked for UNESCO.


]]> 118 Philippe Soupault 0872867277 Katie 0 to-read 4.13 1963
author: Philippe Soupault
name: Katie
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1963
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]]> 6763627 n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature.

Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.]]> 296 Elif Batuman 0374532184 Katie 3 3.73 2010
author: Elif Batuman
name: Katie
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2010
rating: 3
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date added: 2016/08/28
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]]> 6748 Infinite Jest.]]> 353 David Foster Wallace 0316925284 Katie 5 4.24 1997
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Katie
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/07/08
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]]> 223480 277 Joyce Hackett 078671218X Katie 0 to-read 2.82 2002
author: Joyce Hackett
name: Katie
average rating: 2.82
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/05/29
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]]> 22748018
American poet Elizabeth Willis has written an electrifying body of work spanning more than twenty years. With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury .]]> 208 Elizabeth Willis 1590178645 Katie 5 3.96 2015
author: Elizabeth Willis
name: Katie
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/05/12
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]]> 664236 184 Donald Barthelme 0316082546 Katie 5 3.85 1964
author: Donald Barthelme
name: Katie
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1964
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/05/07
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]]> 25690473 342 Jim Krusoe 1941040187 Katie 5 3.37 2016
author: Jim Krusoe
name: Katie
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/02/08
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]]> 15712189
"He might be one of the great southern storytellers of our time." -VOL. 1 BROOKLYN

"When I discovered the stories of Scott McClanahan last year, I was instantly enthralled with his natural storytelling voice and freaky funny tales. There's no pretense to Scott's work. It's like you're just dropped right into the middle of these fantastic and true stories. It's like a sweet blend of my favorite southern writers, Larry Brown and Harry Crews. Reading McClanahan is like listening to a good friend telling you his best real-life stories on your back porch on a humid night. And you both got a nice whiskey buzz going." -KEVIN SAMPSELL, author of "A Common Pornography"

"McClanahan's prose is unfettered and kinetic and his stories seem like a hyper-modern iteration of local color fiction. His delivery is guileless and his morality ambivalent and you get the sense, while reading him, that he is sitting next to you on a barstool, eating peanuts and drinking a beer, and intermittently getting up to pick a song on the jukebox." -THE RUMPUS

"Reads like Bukowski with more surprises." -IMPOSE MAGAZINE]]> 132 Scott McClanahan 1621050335 Katie 0 to-read 4.45 2012
author: Scott McClanahan
name: Katie
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 52258 The Price of Salt tells the riveting story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by an erotic epiphany - the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to stalk the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese's job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol in a choice between her daughter and her lover.]]> 262 Patricia Highsmith 0393325997 Katie 0 to-read 4.04 1952
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Katie
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/01/03
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]]> 13237099 Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion.

Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.]]> 326 Mary Ruefle 1933517573 Katie 3 4.42 2012
author: Mary Ruefle
name: Katie
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2016/01/03
date added: 2016/01/03
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]]> 235730 The Tempest to be Shakespeare's." This is the first critical edition. Arthur Kirsch's introduction and notes make the poem newly accessible to readers of Auden, readers of Shakespeare, and all those interested in the relation of life and literature--those two classic themes alluded to in its title.

The poem begins in a theater after a performance of The Tempest has ended. It includes a moving speech in verse by Prospero bidding farewell to Ariel, a section in which the supporting characters speak in a dazzling variety of verse forms about their experiences on the island, and an extravagantly inventive section in prose that sees the uncivilized Caliban address the audience on art--an unalloyed example of what Auden's friend Oliver Sachs has called his "wild, extraordinary and demonic imagination."

Besides annotating Auden's allusions and sources (in notes after the text), Kirsch provides extensive quotations from his manuscript drafts, permitting the reader to follow the poem's genesis in Auden's imagination. This book, which incorporates for the first time previously ignored corrections that Auden made on the galleys of the first edition, also provides an unusual opportunity to see the effect of one literary genius upon another.]]> 152 W.H. Auden 0691123845 Katie 5 4.00 1944
author: W.H. Auden
name: Katie
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1944
rating: 5
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]]> 1051959 Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.'

Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.]]> 192 Louis MacNeice 0571233813 Katie 4 4.13
author: Louis MacNeice
name: Katie
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/12/28
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]]> 16241810 48 Alejandra Pizarnik 0811220966 Katie 0 to-read 4.24 1971
author: Alejandra Pizarnik
name: Katie
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/12/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 27793754 216 Alan Rifkin 1941932045 Katie 0 to-read 4.78
author: Alan Rifkin
name: Katie
average rating: 4.78
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rating: 0
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]]> 508149
Mary Ruefle is the author of Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism (Wave Books, 2012), and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and include the publication of A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

]]> 56 Mary Ruefle 1933517034 Katie 0 to-read 4.12
author: Mary Ruefle
name: Katie
average rating: 4.12
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]]> 2459339
Fans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.

From “The Dart and the Drill”:

I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .

Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.]]> 96 Mary Ruefle 1933517298 Katie 0 to-read 4.21 2008
author: Mary Ruefle
name: Katie
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> 8317890
"In poems striking for their vivid, playful, and original use of the imagination, [Mary Ruefle] brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world."—Charles Simic

Selected Poems brings together the finest work from Mary Ruefle's distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most expert, surprising, and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining need look no further than this monolithic retrospective by a contemporary master.

Mary Ruefle, winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems, has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book; she is also an erasure artist whose treatments of nineteenth-century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.


]]> 168 Mary Ruefle 193351745X Katie 0 to-read 4.32 2010
author: Mary Ruefle
name: Katie
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/11/18
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]]> 17465598 was just loneliness, only loneliness
and nothing more.

But I was blind.
Little did I know.
If only I'd invented salt.
I might have died happy.
I wish I loved you,
but you can't have everything. Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her book of lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey , was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.]]> 136 Mary Ruefle 1933517735 Katie 0 to-read 4.19 2013
author: Mary Ruefle
name: Katie
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/11/18
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]]> 606104 80 Mary Ruefle 0887484670 Katie 0 to-read 4.33 2007
author: Mary Ruefle
name: Katie
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/11/18
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]]> 24961511 108 Bae Suah 147787755X Katie 5 3.42 1998
author: Bae Suah
name: Katie
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/11/18
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I can't stop thinking about this book.
]]> 53101 Librarian note: alternate cover here.

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.

Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it."

Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.]]> 182 Djuna Barnes 0811216713 Katie 5 3.66 1936
author: Djuna Barnes
name: Katie
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1936
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/11/18
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]]> 144073 176 Jean Rhys Katie 0 to-read 3.91 1939
author: Jean Rhys
name: Katie
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/11/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10203 214 Wisława Szymborska 0156002167 Katie 5 4.34 1995
author: Wisława Szymborska
name: Katie
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1995
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/11/08
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review:
How the hell have I never read this?
]]> 25082429
“Here Anne Boyer accounts for a form of life—form of life of a woman in this century living in Kansas City apartment complexes or duplexes with names like The Kingman or Colonial Gardens, form of life of a low-rent, cake-baking intellectual parenting a Socratic daughter, form of life of a person whose body refuses to become information or pornography, which are the same. These are the confessions of Anne Boyer, a political thinker who takes notes and invents movements, social and prosodic. Ta gueule, Rousseau.” —Lisa Robertson

Anne Boyer Artist Statement:

I read a lot, old works and new ones, but there were so many books that I couldn’t find. These were the books that should have contained an answer to the problem—how do we survive our survival? If a work of literature approached an answer, the answer was bent, asemic, obscured, distorted into sentimental accounts, melodrama, or pornography by literary convention established to make knowing what we needed to impossible.

.

Sometimes the answer was deformed by the failure of survival itself—there were texts severed by their author’s severed lives, by madness, by social isolation, by early death or a long life passed always wanting it. Literature, like garments, had so often been against so many of us, enforcing and sustaining the hostilities of a world with the unequal distribution of resources and the corresponding unequal distribution of suffering.

.

The libraries I needed were full of works written by ghosts of the dead so common their graves lacked stones, the literature of those humans whose names were never their own, whose names were mostly said aloud so that someone might make a command of them, whose names were never used as the mark of their own property—what was it they had known? How did the great human majority—women and girls, those without property, the poor and the workers and enslaved people—resist? In what forms, what languages, what codes were their poems? What possibilities inhabited their thinking, their philosophies, their politics? What names would they be called if they could choose their own?



During much of the time Garments Against Women was being written, I wanted to stop writing. I wanted to stop wanting and needing to write. This was so that my daughter and I could better survive; this was also because of my disappointment with literature.

.

But Garments Against Women exists because I failed. I failed to find the literature I needed, so I had to try to write it down. I failed, also, at refusal, failed at failing, failed at self-negating, failed at being ruined despite all that would ruin us, failed at keeping survival bare, failed at obeying history’s prohibitions, failed at being intimidated by the centuries of hostile traditions. What I failed at was not writing despite all the conditions that had been relentlessly calibrated to keep not writing sustained.

.

Some of us write because there are problems to be solved. My life is different than it was when I wrote Garments Against Women, but there’s still a problem: the world as we know it remains the world.]]> 90 Anne Boyer 1934103594 Katie 5 4.22 2015
author: Anne Boyer
name: Katie
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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]]> 2931098 80 Rita Gabis 1882295013 Katie 5 4.50 1994
author: Rita Gabis
name: Katie
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1994
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/11/08
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]]> 294731
In a tale redolent with the crumbling loyalties and age-old strife of the post-war American South made familiar to us by Cormac McCarthy, Gay's characters inhabit a world driven by blood ties that strangle as they bind. A coming of age novel, a love story, and a portrait of a family torn apart, Provinces of Night introduced a distinctive new voice in American fiction and a superb cast of characters.]]> 292 William Gay 057121214X Katie 5 ]]> 4.20 2000
author: William Gay
name: Katie
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2000
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/11/07
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I listened to this as a book on tape. terrific!

]]> 150250 Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.]]> 142 Anne Carson 0811213021 Katie 5 4.33 1995
author: Anne Carson
name: Katie
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1995
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/11/06
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]]> 22929741
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.]]> 160 Maggie Nelson 1555977073 Katie 3 4.04 2015
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Katie
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/11/03
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]]> 17573207 New York Times Book Review called "the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century." An intense and lyrical work, it chronicles its female protagonist's journey of self-discovery and self-affirmation.]]> 88 Clarice Lispector 0141197366 Katie 4 4.13 1973
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Katie
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1973
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/11/03
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]]> 106096 Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black comedy."

Death on the Installment Plan is the story of young Ferdinand's first 18 years. His life is one of hatred, of the grinding struggle of small shopkeepers to survive, of childhood sensations and fantasies—lusty, scatological, violent, but also poetic. There is a running battle with his ineffectual insurance clerk of a father, with his mother, who lives and whines around the junkshop she runs for the boys benefit; there is also the superbly funny Meanwell College in England, where the boy went briefly, a Dickensian, nightmare institution. Always there is humiliation, failure, and boredom, at least until he teams up with the "scientist" des Pereires. This inventor, con-man, incorrigible optimist—whose last project is to grow enormous potatoes by electricity—rescues him, if only temporarily; for the reader he is one of the most lovable charlatans in French literature.]]> 592 Louis-Ferdinand Céline 0811200175 Katie 5 4.25 1936
author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
name: Katie
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1936
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/11/03
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]]> 24796211 Shock Treatment. "The Black Sheep," "We Keep Our Victims Ready," "I Was Never Expected to Be Talented,"--these are some of the seminal works which excoriated homophobia and misogyny at a time when artists and writers were under attack for challenging the status quo. This twenty-fifth anniversary expanded edition features a new introduction in which Finley reflects on publishing her first book as she became internationally known for being denied an NEA grant because of perceived obscenity in her work. She traces her journey from art school to burlesque gigs to the San Francisco North Beach literary scene. A new poem reminds us of Finley's disarming ability to respond to the era's most challenging issues with grace and humor.]]> 168 Karen Finley 0872866912 Katie 0 to-read 3.81 1990
author: Karen Finley
name: Katie
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/10/29
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]]> 48214 The Song of the Lark charts the story of a young woman's awakening as an artist against the backdrop of the western landscape. Thea Kronborg, an aspiring singer, struggles to escape from the confines her small Colorado town to the world of possibility in the Metropolitan Opera House. In classic Cather style, The Song of the Lark is the beautiful, unforgettable story of American determination and its inextricable connection to the land.

"The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway." -- Leon Edel]]> 417 Willa Cather 0395345308 Katie 4 3.88 1915
author: Willa Cather
name: Katie
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1915
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/10/29
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]]> 23453099 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]> 260 Ottessa Moshfegh 1594206627 Katie 4 3.56 2015
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Katie
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2015
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/10/29
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]]> 25376017
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between works and lives -- from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to the depredations of the AIDS crisis -- Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.]]> Olivia Laing Katie 0 to-read 4.17 2016
author: Olivia Laing
name: Katie
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/10/29
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]]> 1356826 Corless-Smith, Martin 79 Martin Corless-Smith 0820319473 Katie 5 4.47 1997
author: Martin Corless-Smith
name: Katie
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/10/26
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review:

]]>