My monthly recommendation post filled with books and other literary things you might want to try.
New Releases
Experience the propulsive love story of two Greek gods—Hades and Persephone—brought to life with lavish artwork and an irresistible contemporary voice.
Scandalous gossip, wild parties, and forbidden love—witness what the gods do after dark in this stylish and contemporary reimagining of one of mythology's most well-known stories from creator Rachel Smythe. Featuring a brand-new, exclusive short story, Smythe's original Eisner-nominated web-comic Lore Olympus brings the Greek Pantheon into the modern age with this sharply perceptive and romantic graphic novel.
Absurd, lyrical, and heartfelt, Melissa Lozada-Oliva's Dreaming of You is a genre-bending novel in verse that examines questions of death, love, celebrity, and queer identity.
Melissa, a young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache, brings Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as Melissa journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell. An eerie, sometimes gruesome, yet moving love story, and an interrogation of Latinidad, womanhood, obsession, and disillusionment, Dreaming of You grapples with the cost of being seen for your truest self.
Jasmine Tran has landed herself behind bars - maple bars that is. With no boyfriend or job prospects, Jasmine returns home to work at her parents' donut shop. Jasmine quickly loses herself in a cyclical routine of donuts, Netflix, and sleep. She wants to break free from her daily grind, but when a hike in rent threatens the survival of their shop, her parents rely on her more than ever.
Help comes in the form of an old college crush, Alex Lai. Not only is he successful and easy on the eyes, to her parents' delight, he's also Chinese. He's everything she should wish for, until a disastrous dinner reveals Alex isn't as perfect as she thinks. Worse, he doesn't think she's perfect either.
With both sets of parents against their relationship, a family legacy about to shut down, and the reappearance of an old high school flame, Jasmine must scheme to find a solution that satisfies her family's expectations and can get her out of the donut trap once and for all.
Not so new Releases
Let's not only talk about new books! Here are three 'older' books I liked this month that sound real cool:
Recommended by Carmen Maria Machado in her memoir
In the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, For Your Own Good breaks silence. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator's survival of domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the magic that is at the heart of transformation and survival.
These poems are acutely painful, rooted in singular and firsthand experiences. But Horlick also draws from a legacy of feminist, Jewish and lesbian writers against violence: epigraphs from the works of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt act as touchstones alongside references to contemporary writers, such as Daphne Gottlieb and Michelle Tea.
Found on a list of new horror that pushes the genre to its limits.
New York City, 1990: When you slip through the cracks, no one is there to catch you. Monique learns that the hard way after her girlfriend Donna vanishes without a trace.
Only after the disappearances of several other impoverished women does Monique hear the rumors. A taloned monster stalks the city's underground and snatches victims into the dark.
Donna isn't missing. She was taken.
To save the woman she loves, Monique must descend deeper than the known underground, into a subterranean world of enigmatic cultists and shadowy creatures. But what she finds looms beyond her wildest fears—a darkness that stretches from the dawn of time and across the stars.
You had me at the unnecessary long title
In this ingenious horror story set in colonial New England, a woman goes missing. Or not missing–perhaps she has fled, abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.
On a journey that will take her through a wolf-haunted wood, down a deep well, and onto a living ship made of human bones, our heroine is forced to confront her past and may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.
Currently Reading
I jumped on the T.J. Klune wagon just like everyone else and Under the Whispering Door is not as cute as The House in the Cerulean Sea, but it does give me that cuteness hit I needed. All flawed characters who are also lovely while dealing with difficult stuff. In this case being dead. So far it's an interesting view on the afterlife and I'm pretty sure the end is going to be heartbreaking.
I felt like reading something completely different, so I decided to go for essays by the most verbose author whose work I own and I'm definitely getting something different! It's a collection of essays and articles by David Foster Wallace and even though I'm annoyed with the tiny print and many many asides, his love for footnotes might be rubbing off on me...
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