I absolutely love twisted scenarios, and Maria Haushofer’s book presents us with a simple yet terrifying premise: What if you were trapped, alone, for the rest of your natural life?
While staying at her family’s countryside lodge, the protagonist wakes up to find an invisible barrier separating her small patch of land from the rest of the world. Thanks to some exploration and a pair of binoculars, she can see that everyone beyond the wall is dead, apparently turned to stone.
The entire story follows the sole character’s isolation and struggle to survive. Well, I should say sole human character because Haushofer does an incredible job of bringing her non-human personas to life via a dog, cow, bull, several cats, and even an albino crow.
This is a strange and fascinating novel, and I promise you’ll never read another like it.
“I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead…” writes the heroine of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a quite ordinary, unnamed middle-aged woman who awakens to find she is the last living human being. Surmising her solitude is the result of a too successful military experiment, she begins the terrifying work of not only survival, but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple and moving talk — of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the…
There’s no such thing as "the great millennial novel," but if there were, this book would be a strong contender. Nowhere else have I felt my own generation’s tone, habits, and vices encapsulated quite so well than this odd story about…
Actually, what is this story about? Online personas? Playing with identity? The struggles of moving to another country? I’m not actually sure, but I don’t mind that at all. The narrative voice was so thick with irony, humor, and insight that I enjoyed every paragraph of it.
Not to mention that I’ve lived in Berlin for over 13 years now, and Oyler’s description of the city in the late Tens vividly brings to life events and places long dear to me. Anyway, read it!
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE * A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"An invigorating work, deadly precise in its skewering of people, places and things . . . Stylish, despairing and very funny, Fake Accounts . . . adroitly maps the dwindling gap between the individual and the world." —Katie Kitamura, The New York Times Book Review
A woman in a tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this “absolutely brilliant take on the bizarre and despicable ways the internet has warped our perception of reality”…
Surprise, it’s a nonfiction book! Almost all my recommendations have been for novels, but they’re actually not all I read (I promise!). Now, it’s so secret that I’m a big old nonbinary person, but there’s so much more to nonbinary thinking than sexuality and gender identity.
This book details all the ways in which we limit ourselves by thinking of the world in simplistic binary terms, and it does so in a friendly and informative style.
Challenging binary thought patterns has a much wider scope that I can truly cover here, and it’s hard to convey just how much of our culture is based on an either/or mentality. This is a book that can help expand anyone’s perspective, whatever their identity happens to be.
'The book we all need for this moment in time.' CN LESTER 'An absolute must read' FOX FISHER 'A genius book' LIBRARY JOURNAL REVIEW
Much of society's thinking operates in a highly rigid and binary manner; something is good or bad, right or wrong, a success or a failure, and so on. Challenging this limited way of thinking, this ground-breaking book looks at how non-binary methods of thought can be applied to all aspects of life, and offer new and greater ways of understanding ourselves and how we relate to others.
Using bisexual and non-binary gender experiences as a starting…
This book breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia, presenting an ambitopian vision of the world’s first gay state. A glittering metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenagers William and Gareth, but is there a place for them in the deeply divided city?
Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering high rises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district, not until she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.
Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, this book questions how much we must sacrifice to find identity and community.
