1. 2. & 3. Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence, Some Tame Gazelle, Barbara Pym

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• 41. Between You and Me, by Scott Nadelson

  So this is silly but I burst into tears on page three of Between You and Me, a new novel from Portland author Scott Nadelson, at the totally ordinary moment when protagonist Paul Haberman meets the woman he’s going to marry, a divorced mother of two. Paul is a single man living in Manhattan in […]

• 38. Death in Spring, by Merce Rodoreda

  Well, Death in Spring is the most fabulously gruesome and disturbing book I’ve read in a while. It’s the last novel by Spanish writer Merce Rodoreda, originally published in 1986 in the Catalan language, translated into English in 2009 and published by Open Letter books.  The book is an allegory for life in Spain under […]

• 30. The Imago Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler

  I have just completed my fourth re-reading of Lilith’s Brood by Octavia E. Butler, also known as the Imago Trilogy or the Xenogenesis Trilogy, one of my all-time favorite works of science fiction, an eye-popping, queasy, deeply uncomfortable imagining of the issues that would arise if the human race were sexually absorbed by aliens. The […]

• 14. Things I Like About America, by Poe Ballantine

  There was a desperately unhappy and bored time in my life when I learned to draw the map of America freehand, all the states named, in the right places, mostly in the right shape; the line of the Mississippi helping to define the erratic edge of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana; the jigsaw of the […]

• 7. Testo Junkie, by Beatriz Preciado

  This book, translated from the French, is a “voluntary intoxication protocol,” in which Spanish drag-king activist and cultural theorist Beatriz Preciado takes testosterone off-label for 200-something days, as a strategy of resistance towards the involuntary intoxication of what she calls the “pharmacopornographic” regime. It’s a memoir, a terrifying and brilliant work of cultural deconstruction, and […]