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Friday Reads: January 2016

January 15, 2016 Reviews

By DIDI JACKSON, MICHELLE ROSS, JENNIFER ACKER, ALEKSANDRA BURSHTEYN, BEN SHATTUCK, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

We’re charging into the new year reading slim volumes with grand ambitions. These books and their authors look to visual art, science, medicine, and history to pull literature—and with it the reader—in a new direction. We’re reading deeply in order to carve and reclaim human stories from disease, politics, the simplifying narratives of recorded history, and a monolithic literary canon. In 2016, read to embrace the “exquisite ache” of complexity with us!

Recommended:

I Watched You Disappear by Anya Krugovoy Silver, Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya, High Dive by Jonathan Lee, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes

Friday Reads: December 2015

December 4, 2015 Reviews

By AURELIA WILLS, ALI ROHDE, SCOTT GEIGER, DWYER MURPHY, JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN

Join our recommenders this month for a little formal experimentation—a collection of works that suck you in with lists, collages, instructions. Here we have a “novel of voices”; a “pointillist portrayal” of a family through vignettes; a work of ekphrastic metafiction; a “madcap” novel that begins with a catalog of ailments and their cures; a book of assurances and instructions to a reader on the cusp of a momentous change. These are books that will break you down into your component parts, rearrange you, and put you back together.

Recommended:

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell, 10:04 by Ben Lerner, The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya, Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood by Anne Enright

Friday Reads: October 2015

October 9, 2015 Reviews

By KELLY FORDON, JULIA LICHTBLAU, ALEKSANDRA BURSHTEYN, ZEINA HASHEM BECK, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This month our recommenders are turning to new takes on timeless themes—from the catharsis of fairy tales to ancient theater, from religious traditions to the search for home. If you’re beginning to feel like you’ve seen it all, crack open one of these volumes and let these authors show you a new, even shocking path through the familiar.

Recommended:

Einstein’s Beach House by Jacob M. Appel, All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen, Antigonick by Anne Carson, Diaspo/Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Deema K. Shehabi

Friday Reads: July 2015

July 17, 2015 Reviews

By KURT CASWELL, SARAH WHELAN, SAHIBA GILL, PAOLA PERONI, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

Are you up for a challenge? This month we’re reading books that test us as they enlighten us, seeking to explain the world on a grand scale—warts and all. We’re held rapt by catalogs of world travel, remembered across decades; the brutal pageantry of crisis erupting through daily rituals; the history of poverty and injustice; the intricacies of mental illness, personal and societal. Don’t turn to these titles for escape—we’re here to focus the lens of the human experience and find something as irascible as it is beautiful.

Friday Reads: June 2015

June 12, 2015 Reviews

By JACQUELYN POPE, NINA MCCONIGLEY, JANE CAMPBELL, LORI OSTLUND, DIANA BABINEAU, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

Photography, science, geo-politics, instruction manuals, and a good Springsteen song—this month we’re reading works of literature with foundations in other art forms. We’re also recommending a memoir, flash fiction, linked short stories, a novel, and a poetry collection—the greatest genre spread of any Friday Reads installment since the feature’s inception. So this June, as we move into summer at last, join us at The Common in trying something new, something varied, something complex. Spice up your reading list and genre-bend your life!

Recommended:

Hold Still by Sally Mann, A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, The Spark and the Drive by Wayne Harrison, Barefoot Dogs by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Itself by Rae Armantrout.

Friday Reads: May 2015

May 8, 2015 Reviews

Friday Reads: April 2015

April 3, 2015 Reviews

By JULIA LICHTBLAU, CYNTHIA HOGUE, KELLY FORDON, ILAN STAVANS, HELEN HOOPER, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This month’s books are full of surprises, for their characters and their readers. Whether it’s a world of whimsy, fantasy, or magic(al realism), or else a microcosm of grief either private (a family home) or public (a busy airport), we’re along for the ride as imagined worlds both playful and harrowing rise and fall on these pages.

Recommended:

Play for Me by Céline Keating, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog by Alicia Ostriker, Munich Airport by Greg Baxter, Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann

Friday Reads: March 2015

March 13, 2015 Reviews

By CATE MCLAUGHLIN, DIANA BABINEAU, GREGORY CURTIS, TERESE SVOBODA, KELLY FORDON, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

With the arrival of spring we’re leaping bravely into unfamiliar worlds—safe in the hands of experts, of course. An eerie peripheral dreamscape; quotidian life viewed from upside down or inside out, never as expected; the dark bureaucracy of the criminal underground; messages ferried to and from ghosts—these are unmapped terrains, and what better companions than these authors, their first cartographers? Expand your world(s) this month with these suggestions from our contributors and staff.

Recommended:

Bone Map: Poems by Sara Eliza Johnson, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins, Blood and Money by Thomas Thompson, Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye, Elegies for the Brokenhearted: A Novel by Christie Hodgen.

Friday Reads: February 2015

February 20, 2015 Reviews

By ANDREW WILLIS, TYLER SAGE, JONATHAN MOODY, MARIAN CROTTY, ELEANOR STANFORD, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This month we’re playing in the borderlands, exploring the spaces between categories. Intercontinental love stories; strangers in strange lands; the struggle to remain constant in a world of transience. These books bend genre and their subjects navigate the passages between success and failure, present and past, public and private life—between where they are and where they have in mind.

Recommended:

Middle Men by Jim Gavin, The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger, Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Ben Greenman, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks.

Friday Reads: January 2015

January 16, 2015 Reviews

By ZEINA HASHEM BECK, MELODY NIXON, FRANCESCA MARCIANO, STEPHEN O’CONNOR, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

As we begin 2015, our recommenders are heading into the wilderness. These books range widely through time and space, each embracing its own unique heart of contradiction—exile and home; passion and failure; reason and chaos; doubt and confidence. Heavy with both fictional biography and memoir, we bring you familiar faces from the dark woods of alienation and obsession. Dive into the new year with these five maps by which to recognize yourself and find a path through the forest.

Recommended:

The Same Roads Back by Frank Dullaghan, The Season of Migration by Nellie Hermann, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson