Arielle's Staff Picks

"I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can't handle."

For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles.... Read more »

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her... Read more »

“Harry Crews is magnificently twisted and brutally funny.” - Carl Hiaasen

A Penguin Classic
 

Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his... Read more »

This program is read by the author.

"Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda... Read more »

The long-awaited first short story-collection by the author of the cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, tales of weird love, heartfelt friendships, and the unsettling nature of human existenceWith Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan,... Read more »

Art Sex Music is the autobiography of a musician who, as a founding member of the avant-garde group Throbbing Gristle and electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey, has consistently challenged the boundaries of music over the past four decades.

It is the account of an artist who, as part of COUM Transmissions, represented Britain at the IXth... Read more »

Her Body and Other Parties

“Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado is a blend of urban legends and horror stories all focusing on the roles women play in society. Machado writes in the most beautiful, haunting way, and each story is truly unique and almost always a little uncomfortable.”

Emma, Quail Ridge Books

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

"Her most unsettling work yet — and her most realistic." --New York Times

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Vulture, Bustle, Refinery29, and Thrillist

A visionary novel about our interconnected present,... Read more »

"This book will change you." --Chicago Tribune

White Girls is about, among other things, blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Eminem, Louise Brooks, and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true, it is one of the most daring and provocative books... Read more »

Flann O’Brien’s most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder. Weird, satirical, and very funny, it is read by Irish master reader Jim Norton. Read more »

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn... Read more »

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road trip circumnavigating the... Read more »

A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men

The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her... Read more »

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until her family drives into the mountains of... Read more »

A genre-warping, time-traveling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto for fans of Clarice Lispector and Jeanette Winterson.

Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin... Read more »

Surreal and splendidly unconventional, The Hearing Trumpet is an apocalyptic fairytale quest about an occult old ladies’ home and the spry nonagenarian who ends up there. After coming into possession of a hearing trumpet, 92-year-old Marian Leatherby discovers her son’s plans to send her to a nursing home. But this is no ordinary place… Strange... Read more »

A gripping novel of myth, environment, adventure, and an unlikely friendship, from an award-winning Australian author.

Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup d'état. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting, farming, trading, and forgetting the contours of what was once a normal life. But her quiet... Read more »

The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon.

At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina.... Read more »

The Haunting of Hill House

“The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is THE book to read if you want to feel like you're losing it bit by bit with every page you turn. Eleanor is a fantastically unreliable narrator and I loved how Hill House served as both the villain and the love interest.”

Emma, Quail Ridge Books