Ghostroots
More powerful than gore, I find an eerie atmosphere is what really makes a collection like Ghostroots tick.
Favourites
Some of the novels that Hargrave very much enjoyed and recommends you read.
Overhead in a Balloon
Gallant clusters the stories like one is hearing about a circle of friends or acquaintances at a party.
Girl, Interrupted
Girl, Interrupted features one of my favourite structures — it is a memoir constructed via vignettes. There are lots of margins here.
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.
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.
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.
The Basement
This isn’t just a book about a crime nor is it a fictionalization of that crime. Millett spends time with victim and perpetrator and with her own reactions to the case.
Constant Reader
If you’ve never read Dorothy Parker, you are in for a real treat with this book. She’s a writer that was known just as much for the sharpness of her wit as for the products of her pen, and she is delightfully funny in that very special, dry, sarcastic way that I always love.
Brother, I’m Dying
It’s really a story of two fathers, since it was her uncle that became her father when Danticat was left behind by her parents as they established themselves in America.