Here are 4 books that Trick Mirror fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a storyteller. I’ve told stories through journalism, theater, film, and comics. When I was the editor of a film magazine, Scenario: “The Magazine of the Art of Screenwriting” I interviewed filmmakers about the craft of telling a great story. As a journalist, I love original sources and voices, for the way they tell a personal version of history. They say history is told by the winners. I prefer the reverse angle—history told, not by the “losers” but by true, strong, authentic voices. I somehow want to read, reveal, recommend, and illuminate marginalized voices.
This book is quietly hilarious. I loved being “inside” Patricia Lockwood’s mind. As a fellow lapsed Catholic, I resonated with her upbringing and living in the strange shadow of religion. Lockwood weaves a contradictory coming-of-age story with profound wit and lyricism.
She also explores the complexities of what she calls “The Portal”—the internet of things that boggle the mind even as they bring solace. I loved how Lockwood used “the portal” to understand her conservative upbringing and eventually find her own irreverent path in the world.
The book led me to follow her online presence too, and helped me learn new ways to “be” online. As Lockwood writes in Priestdaddy: “Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?”
'Glorious' Sunday Times 'Laugh-out-loud funny' The Times 'Extraordinary' Observer 'Exceptional' Telegraph 'Electric' New York Times 'Snort-out-loud' Financial Times 'Dazzling' Guardian 'Do yourself a favour and read this memoir!' BookPage
The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed' The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas' by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing,…
As a writer and editor, I spend a lot of time thinking about what prose—especially first-person nonfiction, which is mostly what I edit—does, and how it sets out to accomplish its project. Across forms, I tend to think humor is largely underused! No matter how serious the subject, there’s always a place for it to sharpen the critique. My book engages with topics like systemic discrimination and inequity, but throughout, I always stay attuned to the comic absurdity of my subject—both as a way to give more pleasure to the reader, and as a way to cut to the heart of what I want to express.
I love the boldness of putting “comedy” right there in the subtitle, and Pyae Moe Thet War absolutely delivers. This memoir-in-essays, about being a millennial woman in Myanmar, has one of the strongest voices I’ve encountered in recent essay collections. She writes back against the expectation that racialized and minoritized writers perform their trauma for the reader, or must be restricted to certain topics and tones. You’ve Changedsets a precedent I know other writers will feel empowered to follow.
In this electric debut essay collection, a Myanmar millennial playfully challenges us to examine the knots and complications of immigration status, eating habits, Western feminism in an Asian home, and more, guiding us toward an expansive idea of what it means to be a Myanmar woman today
What does it mean to be a Myanmar person—a baker, swimmer, writer and woman—on your own terms rather than those of the colonizer? These irreverent yet vulnerable essays ask that question by tracing the journey of a woman who spent her young adulthood in the US and UK before returning to her hometown…
As a writer and editor, I spend a lot of time thinking about what prose—especially first-person nonfiction, which is mostly what I edit—does, and how it sets out to accomplish its project. Across forms, I tend to think humor is largely underused! No matter how serious the subject, there’s always a place for it to sharpen the critique. My book engages with topics like systemic discrimination and inequity, but throughout, I always stay attuned to the comic absurdity of my subject—both as a way to give more pleasure to the reader, and as a way to cut to the heart of what I want to express.
Whether in her book or her writing for BuzzFeed, Koul’s voice and humor are always instantly recognizable. Their distinctive tone is right there in the title. In her debut collection, Koul explores growing up as a South Asian woman in Canada, braiding her personal narrative with deft cultural critique. Essay collections rarely have such a strong sense of characters as this one does—Koul’s parents, especially, are deeply felt and sharply rendered figures who appear across the essays as sources of humor, pathos, and exasperation.
A DEBUT COLLECTION OF FIERCE, FUNNY ESSAYS ABOUT GROWING UP THE DAUGHTER OF INDIAN IMMIGRANTS IN WESTERN CULTURE, ADDRESSING SEXISM, STEREOTYPES, AND THE UNIVERSAL MISERIES OF LIFE
In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming…
I am an author who also penned a novel during the pandemic, with a timeline that stretched into the first six months of the pandemic–against the advice of my agent and the publishing industry at large. I know many authors choose not to write about intense political and social happenings, but that “life will never be the same again” feeling was something I couldn’t avoid. The pandemic threw people together and kept us apart at the same time. I was intensely interested in its incubator effect as well as the silo aspect quarantining had on all of our lives.
The opening of this book knocked me out, and I was hooked.
I usually veer toward literary, slower, familial dramas, but this book combined what I love in literary family dynamics with the frightening premise of an inexplicable disaster occurring in the outside world. The suspicion we were quick to possess about others during the early days of the pandemic is heightened to a new level with two couples pitted against each other, one preoccupied with the welfare and antics of their children.
I loved the construct that had even spouses second-guessing each other. The intensity of the situation brought out the worst and eventually the better sides of all the characters, a phenomenon that resonated as I read this book during the first year of the pandemic, at the same time rioters invaded our nation’s capital.
