Before Night Falls
Penguin Vitae editions are easy to love and to gush over. The colours! The foil text! The hardcover, in a comfortable size!
Diversity
Most old books are written by rich, straight, white men. These books were written by people who were not. Authors from a visible minority and women writing outside of ‘acceptably feminine’ topics can be found here.
Close to the Knives
Wojnarowicz is asking us to listen to him crying from his deathbed and the reader cannot turn away.
Goodbye to Berlin
Reading Isherwood brings you into a moment in history, and there’s something really powerful and rare about that.
Airless Spaces
Sometimes books constructed out of vignettes seem to be built on a faulty foundation and have frames that are not enough to withstand the weight of a message or a book. Firestone here has used the flexibility of very short vignettes to construct just what her title implies — an airless space.
The Flowers of Buffoonery and The Beggar Student
I do love a short novel. Not only do they reliably help me out of even the most prolonged of reading slumps, but short novels are where writers really shine. It takes a lot of skill to craft a narrative that is tight but still full of intent and power.
Voices of the Fallen Heroes
When you read these stories, it’s easy to start looking for threads of his eventual fate or at least the mental state that led to it. Are they there? Yes, but they are subtle.
Written on Water
These essays are talks over coffee and catching up after a long week. They are close friends talking about the issues that matter to them and the parts of the past still stuck to the hem of their clothes.
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood
I came late to the work of Dorothy Parker and I came to it in a piecemeal way that I think many modern readers come to it. Honestly, I knew more about the saga of Parker’s mortal remains being stored in a filing cabinet for decades than I did about her.
The Lover
While the book is called The Lover, I would argue that it’s not much about the lover at all.
Victorian Murderesses
Hartman asks for serious scholars only, and for the reader to commit to thinking about more than how much blood the scene contained and which gory details are the most disgusting.