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At age five, I was reading under the blankets with a flashlight far past my bedtime. It’s an often told story of how I believed I was getting away with something while my makeshift tent, held up by my head, was lit up like a snowglobe. By age eleven, when I picked up my aunt’s book, I discovered romance novels. I was hooked. I’ve read thousands of romance novels in the almost four decades that have since passed, and I’ve learned that each person who reads a book takes something different from it, and I hope these five books that gave so much to me, might do the same for you.
Bryce suffered a spinal cord injury that caused him to completely reconstruct his life and rebuild his dreams. Can you imagine what that must be like? Reading this book enabled me to do just that. There are three reasons this book stuck out for me. One, it made me cry. Two, as an author of books depicting mental illness, representation is hugely important to me. Last, this couple! They are imperfect, but perfect for each other—even when it’s difficult, even when life doesn’t live up to their expectations, and even when they can’t come through for each other or themselves the way they wish they could. This story lives in my heart.
From bestselling author Kristen Granata comes a touching forced proximity grumpy sunshine romance about healing and taking chances...
Charly Johnson created a bucket list when cancer left her mother with less than a year to live. They didn’t make it all the way through the list before she died, but she made Charly promise to finish it and live her life to the fullest.
Spending the summer in a coastal mountain city in Maine is next on her list. The scenic town is perfect for finding adventure, and the quirky inn owner makes her feel right at home in the…
At age five, I was reading under the blankets with a flashlight far past my bedtime. It’s an often told story of how I believed I was getting away with something while my makeshift tent, held up by my head, was lit up like a snowglobe. By age eleven, when I picked up my aunt’s book, I discovered romance novels. I was hooked. I’ve read thousands of romance novels in the almost four decades that have since passed, and I’ve learned that each person who reads a book takes something different from it, and I hope these five books that gave so much to me, might do the same for you.
The boundaryless love we give in childhood no longer exists once our heart picks up some mileage. But what if, years later, you met up once again with your childhood best friend and fell in love? In love with the one from whom your heart built no boundaries? The fear, the joy, the euphoria…imagine the agony of abandonment when adult problems and life’s complications intervene. This book hurt because it reminded me of the fragility of love and the necessity of regaining that boundaryless faith and trust when it’s time to rebuild.
The fiercely protective boy who always caught me when I fell.
Until I moved away.
Now, ten years later, Logan Miller is a gorgeous, Grammy-winning DJ and a dedicated single dad—and hotter than any hit on the Billboards!
When our paths cross again, fantasies of him turn into reality.
I moved back to Austin to build a life outside the safety net of my wonderful, albeit overbearing, Indian family. Preferring the company of my old dog, my online games, and reruns of Marvel movies, I’m nowhere close to the type of woman who can handle…
At age five, I was reading under the blankets with a flashlight far past my bedtime. It’s an often told story of how I believed I was getting away with something while my makeshift tent, held up by my head, was lit up like a snowglobe. By age eleven, when I picked up my aunt’s book, I discovered romance novels. I was hooked. I’ve read thousands of romance novels in the almost four decades that have since passed, and I’ve learned that each person who reads a book takes something different from it, and I hope these five books that gave so much to me, might do the same for you.
I loved the entire series for which this book is the fourth, but this book ensured that I can never go back and read the series again; it hurt that much. Still. I loved it. The characters in this series are family in the deepest, most loving and loyal sense of the word, and it is that sense of family that drives the storyline of this book. This series is sexy and taboo, and yet the biggest thing I took from it was the love and trust that pulsed between them. I wondered, often, if there could not have been a different way, if the author could not have chosen a different storyline, but it is in the difficulties that we sometimes find the stunning. And this story was stunningly beautiful.
At age five, I was reading under the blankets with a flashlight far past my bedtime. It’s an often told story of how I believed I was getting away with something while my makeshift tent, held up by my head, was lit up like a snowglobe. By age eleven, when I picked up my aunt’s book, I discovered romance novels. I was hooked. I’ve read thousands of romance novels in the almost four decades that have since passed, and I’ve learned that each person who reads a book takes something different from it, and I hope these five books that gave so much to me, might do the same for you.
This story treated my heart like a yo-yo. Jess is hot, Emma is a hot mess. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and more than once I struggled to read with tears streaming down my face. It’s a story about love and loyalty and what happens when it battles fear and betrayal. Though I did empathize with Jess’s situation, it was Emma who slayed me. Her social awkwardness and lack of filter pinned her heart firmly on the outside of her chest. There it sat, vulnerable and unprotected, alongside mine as I hopped on for the ride. It was her innocence, and the moment that was lost, that killed me. When the jolt hit Emma’s heart, it sent shockwaves through my own. But, by the final chapter, I fell in love with both of them, and what better way for a story to end?
I'm an idiot. Everyone knows that in a fake relationship, you keep it platonic. I knew it too, but I kissed her anyway.
From the first moment I met Emma Caldwell, I knew she was going to be trouble. Hot, adorable, complicated trouble.
So when she propositioned me—and not the sexy kind of proposition—I refused. Because the painfully awkward woman next door wanted lessons in love. I don’t do relationships, and I sure as hell don’t do love—the whole town knows that. But after what happened with my ex-fiancée, they’ve been eager to see me happily settled down.
I am the author of ten collections of microfiction and poetry. I came to microfiction after having written several novels and short story collections. I just felt that I was saying more than I wanted to say. Microfiction has allowed me to completely distill my stories to the essence of what makes them tick. Of the 26 books I have written, the microfiction collections are my favorites because every word and idea is carefully measured. I am presently working on my next collection of microfiction and have no immediate plans to return to writing at longer lengths. Oddly, writing small has freed me up so I can experiment with various genres, structures, and ideas. I honestly feel microfiction has made me a much better writer.
After wading through and translating the verbosity of Proust, she challenged herself to write very tiny stories. She is a pioneer in contemporary American literature and her work deals largely with the experiences of women, particularly those in domestic situations. Her work is sharp and pointed, often poetic and resonant. Her use of language really makes you interrogate how many words you truthfully need to tell a good story. This collection combines several of her earlier collections.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis.
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013.
'Big rejoicing: Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize. Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch. Best of all, a new audience will read her now and find her wit, her vigour and rigour, her funniness, her thoughtfulness, and the precision of form, which mark Davis out as unique.
Daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic [she] reminds you, in a world that likes to bandy its words…
I used to write a food blog because I love stories about food, be they fiction or non-fiction. Food has the power to bring joy, healing, love, anger, sadness, etc.—you name the emotion and food can evoke it or remedy it. I’ve suffered from depression most of my life and the kitchen makes me feel better. Hearing that my chocolate cookies are amazing heals my heart a little at a time. Food and emotion go together like peanut butter and jelly, and I’m the first to pick up a book that skillfully employs both.
For years, I couldn’t get yeast to cooperate. I just wasn’t patient enough and it was too darn temperamental. One day, the yeast worked. I made a lovely brioche dough and turned that into the stickiest, sweetest, yummiest cinnamon rolls known to man.
I might not have stuck with my fussy yeast if it were of the variety in Sourdough. The starter that’s given to the main character sings, hums, and sometimes glows. It’s alive. I know that all yeast is alive, but this yeast is sentient.
All that being said, the thing I love most about the book is that it is weird. I love weird people and things. I love weird books. What I don’t love about a lot of weird books is that they aren’t as immensely readable as Sourdough. Especially the ones that dance through genres as vastly different as science fiction and romance. But…
From Robin Sloan, the New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, comes Sourdough, "a perfect parable for our times" (San Francisco Magazine): a delicious and funny novel about an overworked and under-socialized software engineer discovering a calling and a community as a baker.
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Southern Living
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the…
As a native Oregonian of Polish descent, I was born in the small town of Sweet Home, Oregon. After finishing high school, I moved to Portland where I graduated from Lewis and Clark College with a Master’s degree in psychology. I spent twelve years as a psychotherapist, publishing over a dozen articles. After joining a writing group and trying my hand at fiction, my stories, articles, and poems have been published in magazines and newspapers—including Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Oregonian, Catholic Sentinel, Dziennik Związkowy, and The Polish American Journal. My debut novel, Victoria’s War, won CIBA’s Hemingway Award for 20th Century Wartime Fiction and was #1 Best Seller on Amazon Kindle Unlimited in German Historical Fiction.
An interesting thing about reading this book is that I had read a novel about Dorothea Lange only months earlier. But when Darznik’s publicist reached out and asked me to read it, I couldn’t resist! Why? Because I love Dorothea and can’t get enough of her.
Dorothea is exactly the kind of woman I want to be BFFs with. But whose story would give me the intimate connection I was looking for? Jasmin Darznik, in her enchanting new novel, The Bohemians, that’s who.
On page one, I stepped into the relationship of two daring and talented women who seem different as night and day. Dorothea, a blond from New York and Caroline Lee, a black-haired Chinese American, raised in an orphanage.
A dazzling novel of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, Dorothea Lange, exploring the wild years in San Francisco that awakened her career-defining grit, compassion, and daring.
“Jasmin Darznik expertly delivers an intriguing glimpse into the woman behind those unforgettable photographs of the Great Depression, and their impact on humanity.”—Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things
In this novel of the glittering and gritty Jazz Age, a young aspiring photographer named Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco in 1918. As a newcomer—and naïve one at that—Dorothea is grateful for the fast friendship of Caroline Lee, a vivacious,…
From the moment my grandmother told me that books were not created by magic, but that real people write books (I was five years old) I knew that I wanted to become a writer—as surely as did Anne in Anne of Green Gables. Themes of the joy, the complexity, and responsibility of friendship and family, of working together despite great challenges to overcome obstacles for purposes beyond ourselves, and of doing that while sometimes working through stages of grief all resonate with me, are all part of my life. The books I’ve recommended, as well as the books I’ve written, contain those themes.
The Words We Lost is a powerful portrayal of the surprising gift of kindred spirits, of the trust required to grow deep friendships, and of the intense emotions when friendships are interrupted by death—all things I’ve been dealing with in the recent loss of a dear friend.
This book is a beautiful study of the long and complicated, individual journey of grief, and of the persistence needed to restore broken trusts. Trust, friendship, betrayal, grief, and the journey to restoration of trust and friendship are all themes close to my heart—themes beautifully portrayed in the contemporary story of The Words We Lost.
Three friends. Two broken promises. One missing manuscript.
As a senior acquisitions editor for Fog Harbor Books in San Francisco, Ingrid Erikson has rejected many a manuscript for lack of defined conflict and dramatic irony--two elements her current life possesses in spades. In the months following the death of her childhood best friend and international bestselling author Cecelia Campbell, Ingrid has not only lost her ability to escape into fiction due to a rare trauma response, but she's also desperate to find the closure she's convinced will come with Cecelia's missing final manuscript.
A good puzzle will draw me in every time, and I’ve always loved mysteries. When I was a kid, Trixie Belden was my favorite sleuth. In junior high, I tried my hand at writing a few mystery stories. I also discovered logic puzzles about this time. In a mystery, you have to locate the clues and put them together in a logical manner to solve the riddle. Now I’m the author of 100 published books. Many of them are mysteries, and most of the ones that aren’t have elements of mystery within the story.
I love historical mysteries, and this series set in nineteenth-century San Francisco delivers the goods. I really like the main character, Annie Fuller. She’s been left on her own, and she excels at her ventures as a boardinghouse owner and a financial advisor. When she learns she has sleuthing talents as well, there’s no stopping her. In this book, she goes undercover as a housemaid to solve a mystery.
It's the summer of 1879, and Annie Fuller, a young San Francisco widow, is in trouble. Annie's husband squandered her fortune before committing suicide five years earlier, and one of his creditors is now threatening to take the boardinghouse she owns to pay off a debt. Annie Fuller also has a secret. She supplements her income by giving domestic and business advice as Madam Sibyl, one of San Francisco's most exclusive clairvoyants, and one of Madam Sibyl's clients, Matthew Voss, has died. The police believe his death was suicide brought upon by bankruptcy, but Annie believes Voss has been murdered…
I am a literary and cultural historian who has been studying death for three decades. But I am, first and foremost, a human who has suffered the loss of loved ones and grief and found my immediate culture an inhospitable place to experience, transform, and share those emotions. We have an urgent need to “re-imagine” the way we prepare for our own deaths, as well as experience the deaths of others. I hope my work, both as a scholar and a public citizen, will inspire people to form communities of conversation and action that will reshape the way we think about death, dying, and grief.
I am in absolute awe of this essential American writer. This book made me cry, laugh, and shout in pleasure at the same time. I could hear, taste, and feel myself present in this book of poems, which explore loss and grief, but also tradition and legacy, our connection to the beloved dead through traditions.
Black food, music, and religious traditions are strongly present, but so is Wilco and Gram Parsons’ “Grievous Angel,” and we are immersed in one human’s attempt to sort out his place. Along with Heather Cahoon’s Horsefly Dress, which explores grief in the context of a Montana tribe, this book taught me how to think both beyond and more deeply within my own sense of “legacy.”
Delivered in Young’s classic bluesy tone, this powerful collection of poems about the American family, smoky Southern food, and the losses that time inevitably brings “bristles with life, nerve and, best of all, wit” (San Francisco Chronicle).
