If your book group is not reading Miranda July's All Fours, what is it even doing? July's novel is about a first-person narrator who resembles July: an experimental and semi-famous artist who enters middle-age chafing against the roles of wife and mother. From this autobiographical jumping off point, July constructs a world in which the narrator contrives an elaborate plan to drive cross country to NYC, splurge on a stay at the Carlyle, and enjoy outings with friends. Her meticulous planning is suddenly channeled into a parallel project when the narrator stops for gas 30 minutes from her home, locks eyes with the hot guy who washes her windshield, and books a room in the local motel which she transforms to lavish Carlyle-level standards as the scene of their quasi-adulterous affair. Quasi-adulterous because, as all horny teens know, "everything but" includes everything else. July's writing about sex is full of surprises: it is as smart as it is heartfelt and as probing and restless as the narrator. There are so few literary representations of fully sexual women who are also mothers, alive to their queerness, desire, and their motherhood. July explores the struggle Virginia Woolf once described as the "heat and violence of the poet's heart when it is caught and tangled in a woman's body" (A Room of One's Own). July enters the territory via a narrator who knows herself and her gifts, and is willing to take the risks an artist must.
The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life
“A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect….the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.”—Vogue
“A novel that presses into that tender bruise about the anxiety of aging, of what it means to have a female body that is aging, and wanting the freedom to live a fuller life…Deeply funny and achingly true.” —LA Times
If you've read Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you'll remember that of all the relationships Huck has -- with his violent father, the wretched con men who hijack his and Jim's escape, and the malignant fantasist and bully Tom Sawyer -- only the one with Jim is rooted in care, as fragile and compromised as it. Percival Everett re-enters the world of Twain's hallmark novel and tells the story from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi on an improvised raft. Both are escaping circumstances Everett carefully describes, setting up for a surprise he springs at the end of the novel. Twain's great American novel is noteworthy for its spectacularly dismal view of white Americans. Everett builds his novel around this presentation in order to show it from the perspective of the enslaved. The first step of critical distance Everett takes is to reveal that the dialect of the enslaved in Twain is protective camouflage the enslaved must learn in order to present to white people the version of Black Americans they demand. As Jim and Huck travel the river, encountering the characters and scenes from Twain's novel, another world emerges within it, the world of the enslaved. Jim is not only a fleshed out version of Twain's character, he is fully realized as an archetypal figure in literature: a courageous hero who survives to tell the tale: not only of what he saw, but of who he is.
'Truly extraordinary books are rare, and this is one of them' - Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
James by Percival Everett is a profound and ferociously funny meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love, which reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From the author of The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction.
The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new…
Sally Rooney's fourth novel, Intermezzo, focuses on the reverberating shockwaves of one recent loss and multiple past traumas. The novel opens at the funeral for Peter and Ivan Koubek's father where a rift is widening between the brothers: suave older Peter, a lawyer in Dublin, and awkward younger Ivan, a chess-player who has recently stalled in his rise in the rankings. They are furious with each other and frustrated with their lives. As the three women with whom their lives intersect romantically keep reminding them, they are also grieving. Ivan begins a relationship with Margaret, who is older, divorced, and still affected by the violence of her marriage and the shame of divorce. Yet they form a tender bond rooted in honest communication and an erotics of consent. Naomi is Peter's sort-of girlfriend. Like Ivan and Margaret, there is an age gap between Peter and Naomi and both are wary of the motives of the other. Bridging the gap between present and past and connecting the brothers is Sylvia, Peter's former girlfriend and current friend, who was injured in a terrible accident and struggles with episodes of severe pain. She broke up with him after the accident and he has struggled to find a way forward. The five characters begin to move about the chessboard of their shared and separate lives, checking each other, eluding capture, and ultimately arriving at a new form of coupling and family.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family―but especially love―from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties―successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women―his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?
Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism—storytelling in the service of social change—elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: uniting millions of separate accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.
Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how “reading like a survivor” provides resources for activism.
