Cara M. Staff Picks
This novella is a shot of pure adrenaline. Seriously, I naively opened it on the morning of a busy and important day, then spent every spare second of the next ten hours blazing through it. It's weird, it's touching, it's surreal, it's rock n' roll.
This story already exists deep in everyone's veins, but Richard Powers' acute perception bleeds it straight into the consciousness. I have not been so head-over-heels in love with a book since Near to the Wild Heart.
Wolf herself is such a fascinating subject, so of course her writing is as well. This short but dense novel is a haunting portrayal of the body in crisis and its impact on the self. Philosophical, political, literary--simultaneously the stuff of life and dreams.
This is a beautiful study of love and life in a world of crisis. The political vista within which Saeed and Nadia struggle to maintain a day-to-day existence is a timely illustration of the political vista threatening to envelop our country today; a world where borders are created and destroyed, security and stability are upended in an instant, and the value of a human life is weighed in increasingly untenable terms.
-- Cara
I have no words to describe the beauty and importance of this book. Roxane Gay bravely and honestly writes her story, a story that resonates on the deepest, densest, most human part of our souls. Please read this.
-- Cara
It's like a 360 degree panoramic view of the classic Clytemnestra story, including x-ray vision into the tale's most morally conflicted souls. As a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, I'm obsessed with Graham's powerful retelling from the titular woman's perspective, so I could not be happier to see that trend continued here, with Toibin's first section written from Clytemnestra's point of view.
I'm not usually a fan of "list five [insert subject] that changed your life," but this book is my exception. It has become a flower- and thorn-laden vine growing wild near my own heart.
Forget walking a tightrope between wacky/serious, frivolous/insightful. This collection of aphorism-like short stories manages to fully embody each pair of opposites simultaneously. Every five seconds a single sentence has me both in throes of laughter and paroxysms of heartbreak.
-- Cara
This is early Margaret Atwood at her best. Each short story fiercely probes the nucleus of a woman's psychology. Not a single word is wasted; every mundane detail takes on a sacred significance, accumulating by the end of each story into the entire world encapsulated in a mere twenty pages.
-- Cara
This book is just the most beautiful literary meditation on art and nature that I could imagine. Even in translation, there's a potency to the wonderfully evocative language that really resonates somewhere deep within. I definitely experienced visceral heart-wrenches at multiple passages.
-- Cara
Gombrowicz is such a riveting writer. He creates this nebulous, atmospheric prose that alternates between hard-boiled fiction and a metaphysical stream-of-consciousness. Then, every once in a while, he pierces through the cloud with a perfect expression that just shatters your heart. And the translation from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt is so creatively thought through. I really really recommend this one!
-- Cara
The daily horrors of living inside Ceausescu's Romania are recorded here in a story that is both blunt and poetic, real and mysterious. The boundary between the outer and inner landscapes has melted away..
All of Herta Muller's books have such lucid, haunting prose, and this latest translation is no exception. I could get lost in her beautiful, broken, Post-WW2 Romania forever.
