23 Recent Books By Women You Should Read ASAP
Women published
some pretty outstanding books in the past year.
Here are 23 of the most unforgettable books by women that we
read recently:
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
“It’s a quick read that’ll leave you in a sweat, if not a panic.
If you like your endings happy, or at least conclusive, the journey will be
futile. But Fever Dream is worth reading for its inventiveness
alone. Schweblin gives us memorable characters and a haunting parable, all in
fewer than 200 short pages.”
The Girls by Emma Cline
“As full as the book is of clearly articulated notions,
paragraph-long observations on the paradox of feminine power and girlish
powerlessness, it’s not a creed; Cline carefully treads along a well-paced
plot, drawing characters with heart along the way. She manages to reflect on
the tension between the selves we perform and the selves we feel we are —
“affected” is a favorite alternative to “said” — without getting mired in
commentary. The result is a book as fast-moving as a van on the run, as dark
and atmospheric as the smog it cuts through.”
Little Nothing by Marisa
Silver
“Silver’s book is magical and parabolic, but it doesn’t
have the stark, curious language of a fairy tale. Instead, she adorns her fable
with earthy imagery, crafting a rich setting and lovable characters.”
Virgin and Other Stories by April Ayers Lawson
“A refreshing take on desires both taboo and repressed, Virgin
and Other Stories is a promising debut.”
The Mothers by Britt Bennett
“At 17, Nadia Turner and Aubrey Evans worried about the
usual teenage concerns: which Kanye West song to put on, which tight-fitting
dress to wear out, which guys were worth their time, which childhood secrets
were too taboo to reveal. But beneath the veneer of youthful ease, each
harbored her own private pain, hoping that time, eventually, would bury it.
That’s the sad beauty of Brit Bennett’s debut novel The
Mothers. The characters’ pasts and deeper desires may be obfuscated by
time, like sheets of translucent ice, but eventually they resurface, painfully
fracturing the lives that’ve been built up around them.”
Intimations by Alexandra Kleeman
“In her first short story collection, Kleeman’s breadth as a
writer is on display. She writes surreal scenes that are emotionally resonant
and realistic stories that are affecting in their strangeness.”
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
“The unpleasant, even grotesque behaviors of her characters seem
amplified thanks to Moshfegh’s cool, matter-of-fact prose. [...] In much
fiction, writers draw us in by painting the relatable, lovable vulnerabilities
within even their most nominally unsympathetic characters, complicating our
impulse to divide the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ Moshfegh’s stories do the
reverse, confronting readers with the squicky, selfish, and sociopathic inner
selves of even outwardly decent people.”
Human Acts by Han Kang
“Human Acts [...] isn’t a book about forsaking
or repairing violence; it’s about the inescapability and deathlessness of
violence in humanity. Every effort to paper over the horrors of what these
protesters suffered, at the hands of their own nation’s soldiers, whether
through time or literary censorship or personal forgetting, fails. The violence
of the past rises up again; it was never really past.”
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
“In Idaho, a literary novel about a horrific and
baffling crime, the tension between what author Emily Ruskovich will reveal and
what readers long to know can be excruciating. Told from the perspectives of
Ann, the loving younger wife of a man who tragically lost his family; Jenny,
his ex-wife; and Jenny’s cellmate, Idaho obsesses obliquely
over the horrifying moment that tore apart Jenny and Wade’s family.”
Whatever Happened to Interracial
Love? by Kathleen Collins
“Nearly 30 years after her too-early passing, this author’s
powerful debut collection manages to perfectly embody the existential torment
of her country. The lingering question of whether we really understand each
other and what’s happening around us, or whether we’re getting it
catastrophically wrong, looms over Whatever Happened to Interracial
Love? ― and it’s a question we’re likely to continue grappling with
for many years to come.”
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
“In a first-person twist on her buoyant, bustling London
narratives, Smith examines the trouble of combining the personal and political,
and captures the thrills of girlhood, dance, and first friendship.”
Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin
“Until the 19th and 20th centuries, women didn’t typically go on
walks in urban areas, and those who did were presumed to be ‘street walkers.’
Elkin celebrates the historical exceptions, such as George Sand,
who found freedom from societal expectations by cross-dressing. She also
devotes a chapter of her book to protest, an act made more radical by its
oppressive history.”
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
“Kitamura [...] gives us a book that’s worth reading for
its inventive cadences alone. And there’s more to it than that: surprising
turns and honest thoughts on the complexity of loss.”
O Fallen Angel by Kate Zambreno
“SUVs, red meat, Jesus. If a dissenter’s view of Middle America
were turned into a Bingo card, Kate Zambreno’s debut novel O Fallen
Angel ― recently reissued by Harper Perennial ― would win the game a
few pages in.”
Pull Me Under by Kelly Luce
“No one at Chizuru Akitani’s school saw it coming. Quiet,
bookish, the butt of bully jokes, her coping mechanisms were the usual methods
of disenfranchised 12-year-olds. She sought solace in her teacher, Miss Danny;
she turned inward, binge-eating sweets after class.
[...] She’s picked on, particularly by her classmate Tomoya
Yu. Until, once day ― shortly after she learns that her mother has committed
suicide ― she stabs him in the neck with a letter opener, landing her in a
juvenile detention center for the next eight years.”
The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky
“Leah does not like to fight. In fact, not fighting is one
of the few firm stances she’s able to take in Marcy Dermansky’s new novel The
Red Car, a spare and funny story about regaining your footing after coping
with grief.
The character will look familiar to fans of Sheila Heti, Vendela Vida or
Lena Dunham; she’s an intelligent young woman who’s navigating a budding life
of art-making and unfulfilling relationships with men.”
The Art of Waiting by Belle Boggs
“The Art of Waiting explores negative
portrayals of childless women and families in popular culture (as sinister,
resentful). It manages also to delve deeply into the scientific and political
processes of IVF, a treatment that’s much more accessible to some communities
than it is to others. Boggs gracefully touches on her own brush with
infertility, and by sharing stories of those in her support group, she shows
that the experience of yearning for children is multifaceted, not so easily
whittled down to a harsh stereotype.”
South and West by Joan Didion
“With an anthropologist’s detachment and precision, Didion took
notes on the South that, while lyrical and often funny, do little to empathize
with the region. Still, the writer reinforces the paradoxes of Southern warmth,
and exposes contradictory beliefs about race and religion.”
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
“The latest of Hogarth’s retellings of Shakespearean plays by eminent
authors is a match made in dystopian heaven. (If such a thing could exist.)
Margaret Atwood, the author behind great ecological speculative
fiction like the chilling MaddAddam trilogy, meets William Shakespeare’s most
climate-obsessed drama: ‘The Tempest.’”
Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua
“Venturing across boundaries both tangible and imperceptible,
legal and emotional, can carry tremendous weight in Deceit and Other
Possibilities. Throughout Hua’s collection, written over the course of over
10 years, she tells the stories of people who have crossed borders despite all
that they must leave behind in the process, or who choose to cross back despite
all that they’ve gained in their new world.”
Land of Enchantment by Leigh Stein
“Stein’s memoir Land of Enchantment, published
earlier this year, is about many things: abusive relationships, grief, chronic
depression, adolescent alienation. Or maybe, to put it another way, it’s about
one thing: how much of ourselves we store in each other.”
Trainwreck by Sady Doyle
“In Sady Doyle’s sharp new book Trainwreck: The Women We
Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why, she examines the particular pleasure
our society has taken, for centuries, in tearing down publicly visible women.”
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride
“Not often does a novel so expertly seduce its readers into an
alternate state of consciousness that it mimics an actual dream state, where
everything solid is hazily just beyond reach. Eimear McBride, with her
deployment of modernist technique reminiscent of James Joyce, elicits such a
mental state throughout her new novel, The Lesser Bohemians ―
really, it’s the only way to read it.”
.
·
Claire Fallon Culture
Writer, The Huffington Post
·
Maddie Crum Culture
Writer, The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/23-recent-books-by-women-you-should-read-asap_us_58cc3aa7e4b0be71dcf4bede
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