Men Explain Things to Me - And Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit

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Category: society culture gender

In her comic, scathing essay "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit takes on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She writes about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, air ing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note-- because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, "He's trying to kill me " The updated edition of this national bestseller features two new essays, including Solnit's recent essay on the remarkable feminist conversation that arose in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista killings. "This slim book hums with power and wit."--Boston Globe "The Antidote to Mansplaining."--The Stranger "Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions."--Salon "Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society."--San Francisco Chronicle Top Shelf "Solnit is] the perfect writer to tackle the subject: Her prose style is so clear and cool."--The New Republic   ...Show more

The Vegetarian by Han Kang; Deborah Smith (Translator)

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Category: fiction a-z | Reading Level: very good

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, The Vegetarian is a beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul. Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams--inva sive images of blood and brutality--torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman's struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. ...Show more

Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship by Clementine Ford

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Category: society culture gender

Clementine Ford reports that one of the questions she is most asked in person and online is 'how do I raise my son to be a feminist? How do I make sure he's a supporter rather than a perpetrator?' That is a question that many parents with sons are haunted by. Now that Clem is mother to a baby boy of he r own, it is a question that haunts her, too. How does a feminist raise a son in a world that conditions boys into entitlement, privilege and power at the expense not just of girls' humanity but also their own? All boys start innocent, but by the time they are adolescents many of them will subscribe to a view of masculinity that is openly contemptuous of women and girls. This explosive new work will look at toxic masculinity and the closed ranks of brotherhood that shape an entitled, disrespectful and potentially dangerous idea of manhood. In Boys Will Be Boys, bestselling and groundbreaking author of Fight Like a Girl Clementine Ford dismantles the age-old idea that entitlement, aggression and toxicity are natural realms for boys and reveals how the patriarchy we live in is as harmful to boys and men as it is to women and girls. ...Show more

The Girls by Emma Cline

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Category: fiction a-z

THE WORLDWIDE BESTSELLERIf you're lost, they'll find you...Evie Boyd is fourteen and desperate to be noticed. It's the summer of 1969 and restless, empty days stretch ahead of her. Until she sees them. The girls. Hair long and uncombed, jewelry catching the sun. And at their centre, Suzanne, black-haire d and beautiful.If not for Suzanne, she might not have gone. But, intoxicated by her and the life she promises, Evie follows the girls back to the decaying ranch where they live.Was there a warning? A sign of what was coming? Or did Evie know already that there was no way back?'A coming-of-age tale like no other ... the book of the summer' Grazia ...Show more

Outline (Outline Trilogy #1) by Rachel Cusk

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Category: fiction a-z | Series: Outline Trilogy | Reading Level: very good

Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss. Outline is the first book in a short and yet epic cycle - a masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times. 'Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller... A stellar accomplishment.' James Lasdun, Guardian ...Show more

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

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Category: classics | Series: Penguin Essentials

'His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad'. Jix Dixon has a terrible job at a second-rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without: the tedious and ridiculous Professor Welch, a neurotic and unstable girlfriend, Margaret, burnt sheets, medieval recorder music and over-enthusiastic students. If he can just deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England', a moderately successful career surely awaits him. But without luck, life is never simple... ...Show more

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

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Category: fiction a-z

Julie Otsuka's "The Buddha in the Attic", the follow-up to "When the Emperor Was Divine" was shortlisted for the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction 2012. Between the first and second world wars a group of young , non-English-speaking Japanese women travelled by boat to America. They were picture brides, clutching photos of husbands-to-be whom they had yet to meet. Julie Otsuka tells their extraordinary, heartbreaking story in this spellbinding and poetic account of strangers lost and alone in a new and deeply foreign land. "Sweeping, symphonic, empathic ...subtle, infinitely skilful ...an exhilarating, compulsive read. Otsuka's haunting, heartbreaking conclusion, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, is faultless". ("Daily Mail"). "A tender, nuanced, empathetic exploration of the sorrows and consolations of a whole generation of women ...the distaff equivalent of a war memorial". ("Daily Telegraph"). "A haunting and heartbreaking look at the immigrant experience...Otsuka's keenly observed prose manages to capture whole histories in a sweep of gorgeous incantatory sentences". ("Marie Claire"). "An understated masterpiece ...she conjures up the lost voices of a generation of Japanese American women without losing sight of the distinct experience of each". ("San Francisco Chronicle"). Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She is the author of the novel "When the Emperor Was Divine", and a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her second novel, "The Buddha in the Attic", was nominated for the 2011 National Book Award. She lives in New York City. ...Show more

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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Category: fiction a-z

NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR MYSTERY/THRILLERFINALIST FOR THE 2019 WOMEN'S PRIZE   Korede's sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the hea rt with Ayoola's knife. Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her "missing" boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.   Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she's exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola's phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she's willing to go to protect her. ...Show more

Ancient Light by John Banville

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Category: fiction a-z | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.

'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early memories comes something sharper and much darker - the more recent recollection of the actor's own daughter's suicide ten years before. Ancient Light is the story of a life rendered brilliantly vivid: the obsession and selfishness of young love and the terrifying shock of grief. It is a dazzling novel, funny, utterly pleasurable and devastatingly moving in the same moment. 'Illuminating, funny, devastating. A meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death' Financial Times 'Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence. A luminous, breathtaking work' Independent on Sunday 'Startlingly brilliant. Terrific - full of sadness and yearning' Sunday Telegraph ...Show more

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

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Category: fiction a-z | Reading Level: near fine

ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW   A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Vogue.com, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed   In the beginning, it was easy to imagine their future. They were young and giddy, sure of themselves and of their love for each other. "Dept. of Speculation" was their code name for all the thrilling uncertainties that lay ahead. Then they got married, had a child and navigated the familiar calamities of family life--a colicky baby, a faltering relationship, stalled ambitions.   When their marriage reaches a sudden breaking point, the wife tries to retrace the steps that have led them to this place, invoking everything from Kafka to the Stoics to doomed Russian cosmonauts as she analyzes what is lost and what remains. In language that shimmers with rage and longing and wit, Offill has created a brilliantly suspenseful love story--a novel to read in one sitting, even as its piercing meditations linger long after the last page. ...Show more

Monogamy (PB) by Sue Miller

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Category: fiction a-z

'One of the most emotionally truthful novels I have ever read' DAISY BUCHANAN Annie is not the first love of Graham's life but she is, he thinks, his last and greatest. Very recently, he has faltered; but he means to put it right. Here they are in marriage, in late middle age, in comfort. Mismatched, a nd yet so well matched- the bookseller with his appetite, his conviviality, his bigness; the photographer with her delicacy, her astuteness, her reserve. The children are offstage, grown up and scattered on either coast; Graham's first wife, Frieda, is peaceably in their lives, but not between them. Then the unthinkable happens. Now Annie stumbles in the dark- did she know all there was to know about the man who loved her? If no marriage is without its small indiscretions, how great does a betrayal have to be to be to break it? A novel about marriage, family, secrets and love, Monogamy confirms Sue Miller's place among the greatest writers at work in America today.       ...Show more

Outlawed by Anna North

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Category: fiction a-z

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all. ...Show more