Best Books I Read in:
January:
February:
March:
April:
May:
Tag: Small Press
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Why There Are Words (WTAW) launches its Betty imprint, dedicated to publishing books by women for everyone, today. Read more about it here.
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Independent booksellers took the floor during the AWP Bookfair, held this year at the Seattle Convention Center.
Just a sample of the publishers represented:
It takes courage to be in the book business. Help support these independent publishers by going online and exploring their catalogues! Here are the list of publishers:
- Calyx Books
- Miami University Press
- Potomac Review
- Saturnalia Books
- Stoneboat Journal
- Tinfish Press
- War, Literature & the Arts
Posting for Six Word Saturday.
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It appears self’s books have been available on kindle for a few years. She never knew!
Two of the four:
The cover of The Lost Language is a detail of a painting by the late, great Filipino artist Santiago Bose.
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Pulled the old switcheroo because she couldn’t endure being terrorized by The Terror, especially since EVERYONE ON THE EXPEDITION DIES. This is not a spoiler since, unless you’ve had your head under a rock, all you have to do is google the main characters and you can learn all about their fates on Wikipedia.
Her current read is Fuentes’ short story collection Are We Ever Our Own.
There were babies born without surnames, and girls who walked unimpeded into the ocean, their white nightgowns floating in the waves.
— “The Burial of Fidelia Armando Cassell”, Story # 2 in Are We Ever Our Own
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K: A Novel, by Ted O’Connell (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2020)
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
Like Water and Other Stories, by Olga Zilberbourg (WTAW Press, 2019)
Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, by John Weir (Red Hen Press, 2022)
The Accomplice, by Joseph Kanon (Atria Books, 2019)
How High We Go In the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow, 2022)
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Self will aim to read 38 books.
Her 2022 Reading Challenge was 37 books, and she overshot that by a mile. Well, just by 11 books. But it is only November.
Here are her five-star reads, so far 2022:
- K: A Novel, by Ted O’Connell
- Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
- Circe, by Madeline Miller
- Like Water and Other Stories, by Olga Zilberbourg
- Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me: Stories, by John Weir
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Is everyone addicted to extremes? How do people stay married? Surely they reach a compromise between infatuated and withholding. I never thought of Marc as a boyfriend. Boyfriends were people who fled. Marc stuck around. I was his boyfriend; he wasn’t mine.
— John weir’s “katherine mansfield,” in the collection your nostalgia is killing me -
Phil, who has a girlfriend, brings the narrator, who has a boyfriend, back to his family’s for Christmas Day (Is it weird that self has not spent Christmas with anyone, not even when son was living in the Bay Area, not since maybe 2014? She can’t even remember what she did last year. Most every year, she manages to be abroad on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. So probably that’s what she should keep doing, for her sanity). Anyhoo, this part of the story is very funny:
- Throughout dinner, Phil’s stepdad told gay jokes, not the fun kind, and Phil grinned and ignored me. Anybody could tell we were sleeping together because of how we never touched. I was a signifier for what couldn’t be said. Phil’s family was too absorbed in their compulsory heterosexuality to see that they had at least one gay man at the table. Or maybe that was how they noticed change, by pretending it wasn’t there. Maybe they thought fag jokes were what queers liked. I’m addicted to boyfriends with a hostile entourage.
Let me just tell ya, passages like the above had self rolling on the floor.
Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 