Manpreet's bookshelf: all

Manpreet's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 02 May 2025 07:13:55 -0700 60 Manpreet's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity]]> 16076785 Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year. The author of The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.]]> 1094 Steven Pinker 0141034645 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.26 2010 The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

author: Steven Pinker
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/02
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]]> Serious Face: Essays 58885713 From the discovery of the author's face in a century-old photograph to a triple-amputee hospice director working at the border of life and death, here are thirteen hopeful, heartbreaking, and profound essays from "one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and curious authors working today" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--Lit Hub

Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion--a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections. He investigates the collapse of a multimillion-dollar bird-breeding scam run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, intimately narrates a harrowing escape from California's deadliest wildfire, visits an eccentric Frenchman building a town at what he claims is the center of the world, shadows a man through his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison, and more--all with a deep conviction that it's our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us.

Mooallem's powers of perception have established him as one of the most distinctive, empathic, and clear-sighted narrative journalists working today. The Wall Street Journal has called his writing "as much art as it is journalism," and Jia Tolentino has praised his "grace and command." In Serious Face, Mooallem brings to life the desperate hopes and urgent fears of the people he meets, telling their stories with empathy, humor, insight, and kindness. These elegant, moving essays form an idiosyncratic tapestry of human experience: our audacity and fallibility, our bumbling and goodwill. In moments of calamity and within the extreme absurdity of everyday life, can we learn to love the people we really are, behind the serious faces we show the world?]]> 320 Jon Mooallem 0525509941 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.15 2022 Serious Face: Essays

author: Jon Mooallem
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI]]> 127282778 Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
Named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly.

A riveting story of what it means to be human in a world changed by artificial intelligence, revealing the perils and inequities of our growing reliance on automated decision-making

On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.

AI has already infiltrated our day-to-day, through language-generating chatbots like ChatGPT and social media. But it’s also affecting us in more insidious ways. It touches everything from our interpersonal relationships, to our kids�� education, work, finances, public services, and even our human rights.

By highlighting the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from the cozy enclave of Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often-exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Murgia exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency, and shatter our illusion of free will.

The ways in which algorithms and their effects are governed over the coming years will profoundly impact us all. Yet we can’t agree on a common path forward. We cannot decide what preferences and morals we want to encode in these entities—or what controls we may want to impose on them. And thus, we are collectively relinquishing our moral authority to machines.

In Code Dependent, Murgia not only sheds light on this chilling phenomenon, but also charts a path of resistance. AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small, and Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.]]> 320 Madhumita Murgia 1250867398 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.07 2024 Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

author: Madhumita Murgia
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It]]> 75293505
“The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon��us. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.”—John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood

Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a��face��and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public.��Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and��offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the��world.
�Ă�Ă�Ă�Ă��
Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.
�Ă�Ă�Ă��
Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”]]> 352 Kashmir Hill 0593448561 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.13 2023 Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

author: Kashmir Hill
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> Grass 41940333 This true story of a Korean comfort woman documents how the atrocity of war devastates women’s lives

Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War—a disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history.

Beginning in Lee’s childhood, Grass shows the lead-up to the war from a child’s vulnerable perspective, detailing how one person experienced the Japanese occupation and the widespread suffering it entailed for ordinary Koreans. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim emphasizes Lee’s strength in overcoming the many forms of adversity she experienced. Grass is painted in a black ink that flows with lavish details of the beautiful fields and farmland of Korea and uses heavy brushwork on the somber interiors of Lee’s memories.

The cartoonist Gendry-Kim’s interviews with Lee become an integral part of Grass, forming the heart and architecture of this powerful nonfiction graphic novel and offering a holistic view of how Lee’s wartime suffering changed her. Grass is a landmark graphic novel that makes personal the desperate cost of war and the importance of peace.]]> 480 Keum Suk Gendry-Kim 1770463623 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.46 2017 Grass

author: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> <![CDATA[All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today]]> 158649729 The fascinating history of women’s health as it’s never been told before.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women’s healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by women’s own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences. The result is a cultural and societal legacy that continues to shape the (mis)treatment and care of women.

While the modern age has seen significant advancements in the medical field, the notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on—as do the pervasive societal stigmas and lingering ignorance that shape women’s health and relationships with their own bodies.

Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Dr. Elizabeth Comen peels back the curtain on the collective medical history of women to reintroduce us to our whole bodies—how they work, the actual doctors and patients whose perspectives and experiences laid the foundation for today’s medical thought, and the many oversights that still remain unaddressed. With a physician’s knowledge and empathy, Dr. Comen follows the road map of the eleven organ systems to share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own experience treating thousands of women.

Empowering women to better understand ourselves and advocate for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives—for us and generations to come��All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of women’s medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of women’s history and bodies.]]> 368 Elizabeth Comen 0063293013 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.36 2024 All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

author: Elizabeth Comen
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite]]> 20685373
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.

Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues - evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. She is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. To them, everything in North Korea is the best, the tallest, the most delicious, the envy of all nations. Still, she cannot help but love them - their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished.

As the weeks pass, she begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own - at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. The students in turn offer Suki tantalizing glimpses into their lives, from their thoughts on how to impress girls to their disappointment that soccer games are only televised when the North Korean team wins. Then Kim Jong-il dies, leaving the students devastated, and leading Suki to question whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.

Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."]]> 291 Suki Kim 0307720659 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.92 2014 Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

author: Suki Kim
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster]]> 11233289 319 Jon Krakauer 1447200187 Manpreet 0 to-read, nonfic 4.43 1997

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster

author: Jon Krakauer
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read, nonfic
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]]> <![CDATA[The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century]]> 56347680 The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity��its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power��we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.]]> 241 Amia Srinivasan 0374721033 Manpreet 0 currently-reading 4.27 2021 The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

author: Amia Srinivasan
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Temporary 52570046 In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”��

This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

]]> 208 Hilary Leichter 156689574X Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.71 2020 Temporary

author: Hilary Leichter
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Several People Are Typing 54468020
Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from . . . wherever he says he is.

Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape, and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes.

Meanwhile, Gerald’s colleagues have PR catastrophes of their own to handle in the real world. Their biggest client, a high-end dog food company, is in the midst of recalling a bad batch of food that’s allegedly poisoning Pomeranians nationwide. And their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture. And if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can’t everyone? Is true love possible between two people, when one is just a line of text in an app? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean?

In a time when office paranoia and politics have followed us home, Calvin Kasulke is here to capture the surprising, absurd, and fully-relatable factors attacking our collective sanity…and give us hope that we can still find a human connection.]]> 256 Calvin Kasulke Manpreet 0 to-read 3.63 2021 Several People Are Typing

author: Calvin Kasulke
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/08
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]]> Banal Nightmare 199927666 A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, the “definitive work of millennial literature�� (The New Yorker)

Margaret Anne (“Moddie��) Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.

So begins Halle Butler's sadistically precise and hilarious Banal Nightmare, which follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her Midwestern hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they, all suddenly tipping toward middle age, go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, and dream of wild triumphs and elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.

Banal Nightmare is filled with complicated characters who will dazzle you in their rendering just as often as they will infuriate you with their decisions. Halle Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.]]> 336 Halle Butler 0593730356 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.43 2024 Banal Nightmare

author: Halle Butler
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/20
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]]> Highway Thirteen: Stories 195791203
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims�� families, but its impact travels even into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway Thirteen , Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia, McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places comes a captivating account of loss and its extended echoes in individual lives.]]> 272 Fiona McFarlane 0374606269 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.67 2024 Highway Thirteen: Stories

author: Fiona McFarlane
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Most 201626978
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most is an epic story in one single day, masterly breaching the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.]]> 144 Jessica Anthony 0316576379 Manpreet 3 3.30 2024 The Most

author: Jessica Anthony
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/14
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]]> The Rachel Incident 206305523 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593469445 Manpreet 4 4.01 2023

author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> <![CDATA[It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over]]> 209622883 It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love.]]> 132 Anne de Marcken 1804270741 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.84 2024

author: Anne de Marcken
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/18
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]]> The Centre 68005500 A darkly comic, boundary-pushing debut following an adrift Pakistani translator in London who attends a mysterious language school which boasts complete fluency in just ten days, but at a secret, sinister cost.

Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of ‘great works of literature��, but instead mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood films in her flat in London while living off her parents�� generous allowance and discussing the ‘underside of life�� with her best friend, Naima. Then she meets Adam, who has successfully leveraged his savant-level aptitude for languages into an enviable career. At first, this only adds to her sense of inadequacy, but when Adam learns to speak Urdu with native fluency practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret.

Adam tells Anisa about the Centre, an elite, invite-only program that guarantees absolute fluency in any language in just ten days. Sceptical but intrigued, Anisa enrols. Stripped of her belongings and all contact with the outside world, she undergoes the Centre's strange and rigorous processes. But as she enmeshes herself further within the organisation, seduced by all that it’s made possible, she soon realizes the disturbing, hidden cost of its services.

By turns dark, funny, and surreal, and with twists page-turning and shocking, The Centre takes the reader on a journey through Karachi, London, and New Delhi, interrogating the sticky politics of language, translation, and appropriation with biting specificity, and ultimately asking: what price would you be willing to pay for success?]]> 288 Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi Manpreet 0 to-read 3.37 2023 The Centre

author: Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/15
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]]> Cockfight 52030591
In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.]]> 94 María Fernanda Ampuero 1936932830 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.86 2018

author: María Fernanda Ampuero
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/10
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]]> <![CDATA[A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories]]> 202352660 What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a profit and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment.

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.]]> 224 Ali Smith 1646222636 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.16 A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories

author: Ali Smith
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.16
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/06
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]]> Clean 205435919 NTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER!

From a global star and International Booker Prize finalist, a razor-sharp, unforgettable novel about a maid who’s seen too much and a family at a breaking point

A young girl has died and the family’s maid is being interrogated. She must tell the whole story before arriving at the girl’s death.

Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid: “smart appearance, full time,�� their ad said. She wanted to make enough money to support her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the señor gave the señora; she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter’s rebellion as she grew up, the mother’s coldness, the father’s distance. She saw it all.

After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela stops speaking, breaking her silence only now, to tell the story of how it all fell apart. Is this a story of revenge or a confession? Class warfare or a cautionary tale? Building tension with every page, Clean is a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the height of her powers.]]> 272 Alia Trabucco Zerán 0593850513 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.55 2022 Clean

author: Alia Trabucco Zerán
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/06
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]]> Private Rites 199313102 From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting novel of three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.

There’s no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded
It is a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else

It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.

Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.

As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Something sinister seems to be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always been unusually interested in their lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperilled world.]]> 327 Julia Armfield Manpreet 0 to-read 3.85 2024 Private Rites

author: Julia Armfield
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Undiscovered Self (Routledge Great Minds)]]> 21081295 104 C.G. Jung 0415854741 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.07 1961

The Undiscovered Self (Routledge Great Minds)

author: C.G. Jung
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Edge Case 55782263 New York Times Editors' Choice

When her husband suddenly disappears, a young woman must uncover where he went—and who she might be without him—in this striking debut of immigration, identity, and marriage.

After another taxing day as the sole female employee at her New York City tech startup, Edwina comes home to find that her husband, Marlin, has packed up a suitcase and left. The only question now is why. Did he give up on their increasingly hopeless quest to secure their green cards and decide to return to Malaysia? Was it the death of his father that sent him into a tailspin? Or has his strange, sudden change in personality finally made Marlin and Edwina strangers to each other?

As Edwina searches the city for traces of her husband, she simultaneously sifts through memories of their relationship, hoping to discover the moment when something went wrong. All the while, a coworker is making increasingly uncomfortable advances toward her. And she can’t hide the truth about Marlin’s disappearance from her overbearing, eccentric mother for much longer. Soon Edwina will have to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to stay in her marriage and in America.

Poignant and darkly funny, Edge Case is a searing meditation on intimacy, estrangement, and the fractured nature of identity. In this moving debut, YZ Chin explores the imperfect yet enduring relationships we hold to country and family.]]> 320 YZ Chin 0063030683 Manpreet 0 currently-reading 3.33 2021 Edge Case

author: YZ Chin
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Coiled Serpent 148180135 In Grudova's unforgettably surreal style, these stories conjure a singular, startling strangeness that proves the deft skill of a writer at the top of her game.]]> 208 Camilla Grudova 1838956379 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.59 2023 The Coiled Serpent

author: Camilla Grudova
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Where I End 62695355
At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her.

Through our thin shared wall, I can hear the makings of my mother gurgle through her body just like the water in the walls of the house...

Teenage Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is a wreckage, the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about.

Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Sarah and her young child move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love.

A horror story about being bound by the blood knot of family.]]> 232 Sophie White 191529004X Manpreet 0 to-read 4.06 2022 Where I End

author: Sophie White
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Touch of Jen 61237047
"Um, holy shit...This novel will be the most fun you'll have this summer."��—Emily Temple, Literary Hub

Remy and Alicia, a couple of insecure�� service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart.

Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt.

As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies.�� Is this what “self-actualization�� looks like?

Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.]]> 320 Beth Morgan 031670427X Manpreet 0 currently-reading 3.18 2021

author: Beth Morgan
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Bellies 63028672 I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But��shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny��as the cast of characters it centers,����is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.]]> 368 Nicola Dinan 1335490884 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.02 2023 Bellies

author: Nicola Dinan
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Manpreet 4 3.84 2023 Yellowface

author: R.F. Kuang
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/09
date added: 2023/10/09
shelves:
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]]> Everything You Ever Wanted 49095695
Then you hear about�� Life on Nyx , a programme that offers the chance to move to another planet and start a new, meaningful way of life. But there's a if you go, you can never come back.]]> 272 Luiza Sauma 024136356X Manpreet 4 weird 3.76 2019 Everything You Ever Wanted

author: Luiza Sauma
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/27
date added: 2023/09/27
shelves: weird
review:

]]> Disorientation 195702449
29-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet, Xiao-Wen Chou, and never read about “Chinese-y�� things again. But after four years of painstaking research, she has nothing but anxiety and stomach pain to show for her efforts. When she accidentally stumbles upon a strange and curious note in the Chou archives, she convinces herself it’s her ticket out of academic hell.

But Ingrid’s in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note’s message lead to an explosive discovery, one that upends her entire life and the lives of those around her. With her trusty friend Eunice Kim by her side and her rival Vivian Vo hot on her tail, together they set off a rollercoaster of mishaps and misadventures, from campus protests and OTC drug hallucinations, to book burnings and a movement that stinks of “Yellow Peril�� propaganda.

In the aftermath, nothing looks quite the same to Ingrid—including her gentle and doting fiancé, Stephen Greene. When he embarks on a book tour with the “super kawaii�� Japanese author he’s translated, doubts and insecurities creep in. At the same time, she finds herself drawn to the cool and aloof Alex Kim (even though she swears he’s not her type). As the events Ingrid instigated keep spiraling, she’ll have to confront her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and most of all, herself.

An uproarious and bighearted satire, alive with sharp edges, immense warmth, and a cast of unforgettable characters, Disorientation is both a blistering send-up of white supremacy in academia, and a profound reckoning of a Taiwanese American woman’s complicity and unspoken rage. In this electrifying debut novel from a provocative new voice, Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves.]]> 401 Elaine Hsieh Chou Manpreet 4 3.85 2022 Disorientation

author: Elaine Hsieh Chou
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/24
date added: 2023/09/24
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review:

]]> Carnality 59723969 In this latest novel from the award-winning author of The Polyglot Lovers, a writer searching for inspiration in Spain goes on a darkly comic, delightfully absurd journey through an underground society.

Awarded a three-month stipend to travel and work, a Swedish writer flies to Madrid, where in a bar she meets a man with an extraordinary story to tell. In exchange for somewhere to sleep and to hide out for a few days, he is willing to tell her the whole astonishing tale. What follows is an account of fantastic proportions and ingredients: the existence of a shadowy Internet TV show with a certain morality clause, a threat to the storyteller’s life, a diabolical nun, and the story of a girl with a missing left thumb. The tale is also the precursor to a meeting between the writer and the infernal miracle worker, Lucia—a meeting that ultimately forces the writer to make a fateful decision about her own inner essence.

Carnality is a novel about the universal need for spirituality and truth—not to mention a good story—set in the seemingly unspiritual grimy underbelly of society.]]> 384 Lina Wolff 1635420741 Manpreet 3 weird 3.65 2019

author: Lina Wolff
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/18
date added: 2023/09/18
shelves: weird
review:
Good level of weird, ending felt a little rushed and too neat
]]> The Hole 51283868 ��
One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole—a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.]]> 92 Hiroko Oyamada 0811228878 Manpreet 3 3.47 2013 The Hole

author: Hiroko Oyamada
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]> The Employees 61340209 The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.]]> 144 Olga Ravn 0811234827 Manpreet 5 weird 3.73 2018

author: Olga Ravn
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/27
date added: 2023/08/27
shelves: weird
review:

]]> Tender Is the Flesh 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.�� Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.75 2017 Tender Is the Flesh

author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/23
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Me Talk Pretty One Day 4137 272 David Sedaris 0349113912 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.01 2000

author: David Sedaris
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 41087256
Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate �� dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 �� My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 1784707422 Manpreet 4 3.63 2018

author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/24
date added: 2023/08/18
shelves:
review:

]]> The Sluts 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 Manpreet 4 weird 3.79 2004

author: Dennis Cooper
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/10
date added: 2023/08/18
shelves: weird
review:

]]> Our Wives Under the Sea 58659343
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X Manpreet 4 weird 3.75 2022 Our Wives Under the Sea

author: Julia Armfield
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/09
date added: 2023/08/18
shelves: weird
review:

]]> Bunny (Bunny, #1) 53285047 We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library]]> 305 Mona Awad 0525559752 Manpreet 3 3.43 2019 Bunny (Bunny, #1)

author: Mona Awad
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/18
date added: 2023/08/18
shelves:
review:

]]> My Husband 63017297 In this suspenseful and darkly funny debut novel, a sophisticated French woman spends her life obsessing over her perfect husband--but can their marriage survive her passionate love?

At forty years old, she has an enviable life: a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and most importantly, an ideal husband. After fifteen years together, she is still besotted with him. But she's never quite sure that her passion is reciprocated. After all, would a truly infatuated man ever let go of his wife's hand when they're sitting on the couch together?

Determined to keep their relationship perfect, she meticulously prepares for every encounter they have, always taking care to make her actions seem effortless. She watches him attentively, charting every mistake and punishing him accordingly to help him improve. And she tests him--setting traps to make sure that he still loves her just as much as he did when they first met.

Until one day she realizes she may have gone too far . . .

The winner of France's First Novel Prize in 2021, My Husband builds on the premise of hits like Gone Girl and Fates and Furies--how well can you really know your spouse?--and adds the tension and creepy obsession of You. The result is an irresistible read--compelling, tense, and engaging, infused with sly subversive humor, and told in an utterly original voice that makes it unforgettable.

Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan]]> 272 Maud Ventura 0063274825 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.67 2021 My Husband

author: Maud Ventura
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Human Sacrifices 75599182 An undocumented woman answers a job posting only to find herself held hostage, a group of outcasts obsess over boys drowned while surfing, and an unhappy couple finds themselves trapped in a terrifying maze. With scalpel-like precision, Ampuero considers the price paid by those on the margins so that the elite might lounge comfortably, considering themselves safe in their homes.
Simultaneously terrifying and exquisite, Human Sacrifices is "tropical gothic" at its finest--decay and oppression underlie our humid and hostile world, where working-class women and children are consistently the weakest links in a capitalist economy. Against this backdrop of corrosion and rot, these twelves stories contemplate the nature of exploitation and abuse, illuminating the realities of those society consumes for its own pitiless ends.]]> 144 María Fernanda Ampuero Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.83 2021 Human Sacrifices

author: María Fernanda Ampuero
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Self Portrait in Green 56664938
Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia.

Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning Marie NDiaye’s brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.]]> 87 Marie NDiaye 1910312894 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.38 2005 Self Portrait in Green

author: Marie NDiaye
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> The Dolls 56605286
In the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by unexplained illnesses, boils, paralysis, and frostbite. A big sister descends into a basement. Another sister denies her younger brother. A third sister with memory loss is on the run, seeking shelter at Notpla. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with their late mother in a cofﬁn. They each have a different version of their mother’s story. In Scavenius’s chilling and excruciatingly seductive universe, nothing can be said to be true anymore. After all, anything can be propaganda today.]]> 128 Ursula Scavenius 1999992849 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.15 The Dolls

author: Ursula Scavenius
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.15
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Last Words from Montmartre 18465930 Last Words from Montmartre. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.

The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s �پ��é��, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.]]> 176 Qiu Miaojin 1590177258 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.90 1996

author: Qiu Miaojin
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Glow 62802760
“A satire both cutting and careful in its approach, The Glow is a triumph.”�� Elle (Best New Books to Read in Summer 2023)

Jane Dorner has two PR Jane, twenty-five, chummy, and eager to sell you a feminist vibrator or a self-care/bereavement subscription box; and Actual Jane, twenty-nine, drifting through mediocre workdays and lackluster dates while paralyzed by her crushing mountain of overdue medical bills. When her job performance is called into question, Jane’s last-ditch effort to preserve her livelihood and pay off her debt is to land a white whale of a client.

Enter the impossibly gorgeous Cass—whom Jane discovers scrolling through Instagram—and her unassuming husband, Tom—proprietors of a “wellness retreat�� based out of a ramshackle country house that may or may not be giving off cult vibes. Suddenly Jane realizes she might have found the one ladder she can climb—if she can convince them that transforming Cass herself into a high-end wellness brand is the key to all three of their futures. Magnetic yet mysterious, Cass is primed to be an She speaks in a mix of inspirational quotes and Zen koans, eats only zucchini (the most spiritually nourishing vegetable), and has baby-perfect skin. Despite Tom’s reticence about selling out, Jane sets out to mold Cass into the kind of guru who can offer inner peace and make your skin glow—all at a hefty price, of course. As Jane reckons with her own long-dormant ambitions, she Can a person really “do good�� for others while profiting off them? And what parts of our selves do we lose when we trade power, influence, and beauty?

Sparklingly plotted, deliciously deadpan, and irresistibly entertaining, The Glow is a razor-sharp sendup of an industry built on the peculiar intersection of money and wellness, where health is a commodity and self-care a luxury.]]> 320 Jessie Gaynor 0593447875 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.17 2023 The Glow

author: Jessie Gaynor
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Self Care 53475617
The female cofounders of a wellness start-up struggle to find balance between being good people and doing good business, while trying to stay BFFs.

Maren Gelb is on a company-imposed digital detox. She tweeted something terrible about the President’s daughter, and as the COO of Richual, “the most inclusive online community platform for women to cultivate the practice of self-care and change the world by changing ourselves,�� it’s a PR nightmare. Not only is CEO Devin Avery counting on Maren to be fully present for their next round of funding, but indispensable employee Khadijah Walker has been keeping a secret that will reveal just how feminist Richual’s values actually are, and former Bachelorette contestant and Richual board member Evan Wiley is about to be embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal that destroy the company forever.

Have you ever scrolled through Instagram and seen countless influencers who seem like experts at caring for themselves—from their yoga crop tops to their well-lit clean meals to their serumed skin and erudite-but-color-coded reading stack? Self Care delves into the lives and psyches of people working in the wellness industry and exposes the world behind the filter.

RUNNING TIME �� 6hrs.

©2020 Leigh Stein (P)2020 Penguin Audio]]> 7 Leigh Stein Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 2.85 2020 Self Care

author: Leigh Stein
name: Manpreet
average rating: 2.85
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Natural Beauty 61420120 Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.]]> 272 Ling Ling Huang 0593472926 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.79 2023

author: Ling Ling Huang
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Factory 44550589
Told in three alternating first-person narratives, The Factory casts a vivid—if sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of modern life. With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, Hiroko Oyamada is one of the boldest writers of her generation.
��ձ�> 128 Hiroko Oyamada 081122886X Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.17 2010 The Factory

author: Hiroko Oyamada
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/02
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.90 2018

author: Ling Ma
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/02
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Convenience Store Woman 49802501 159 Sayaka Murata 1783785578 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.62 2016

author: Sayaka Murata
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/02
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Finna (LitenVerse, #1) 44081573 Finna is a rambunctious, touching story that blends all the horrors the multiverse has to offer with the everyday awfulness of low-wage work. It explores queer relationships and queer feelings, capitalism and accountability, labor and love, all with a bouncing sense of humor and a commitment to the strange.

When an elderly customer at a big box furniture store slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but those two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.

To find the missing granny, Ava and Jules will brave carnivorous furniture, swarms of identical furniture spokespeople, and the deep resentment simmering between them. Can friendship blossom from the ashes of their relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.]]> 103 Nino Cipri 1250245729 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.64 2020 Finna (LitenVerse, #1)

author: Nino Cipri
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/02
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Pure Colour 60434287 Heartbreaking, exciting, a short epic that reimagines what the novel can do

The world is failing to remain a world. It is coming apart. The ice cubes are melting. Species are dying. People, too - of different things. But what if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed?

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal - to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she's left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the terrific (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.]]> 218 Sheila Heti 1473591325 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.22 2022 Pure Colour

author: Sheila Heti
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/02
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Tomb of Sand 59317110
At the older woman's insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.

Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.]]> 733 Geetanjali Shree Manpreet 0 to-read 3.89 2018 Tomb of Sand

author: Geetanjali Shree
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Goddess Effect 59785728 All she wants is to be her best self. Is she ready? Absolutely. Does she know what to expect? Absolutely not.

Anita is over her life in New York: her dead-end job, tiny studio apartment, self-obsessed friends, and overbearing mom. So she moves west to Los Angeles in search of a new career, enlightenment, and that nebulous target…wellness.

She discovers an elite workout class called The Goddess Effect, run by a lifestyle guru named Venus who’s the very definition of #goals. One look at her Lululemon-clad acolytes sweating out their demons while dripping with confidence and Anita’s all in. When one of the class regulars takes Anita under her wing, Anita’s sure she’s found her people.

But Anita’s not so smitten that she doesn’t wonder about a few things: an inexplicable invitation to a Goddess Effect retreat, a strange tradition of secret sharing, and whispers about “enhancements�� that only Venus can provide. Anita is awakening to a terrifying epiphany: The Goddess Effect isn’t quite what it seems, and it may turn her world—and that of everyone around her—upside down.]]> 288 Sheila Yasmin Marikar 1542039576 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.27 2022

author: Sheila Yasmin Marikar
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Listeners 61362912 Fans of The Power will love this addictive novel�� Stylist

A masterful speculative novel exploring the fine lines between faith, conspiracy, and mania in contemporary America.

While lying in bed next to her husband one night, Claire Devon hears a low hum that he cannot. And, it seems, no one else can either. This innocuous noise begins causing Claire headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia, gradually upsetting the balance of her life, though no obvious source or medical cause can be found. When she discovers that a student of hers can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours who also perceive the sound. What starts as a neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something far more extreme and with far-reaching, devastating consequences.

The Listeners is an exhilarating and erotic novel exploring the seduction of the wild and unknowable, the human search for the transcendent, the rise of conspiracy culture in the West, and the desire for community and connection in our increasingly polarised times.

��ձ�> 304 Jordan Tannahill 0008445435 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.62 2021 The Listeners

author: Jordan Tannahill
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Salt Slow 52702543
Teenagers develop ungodly appetites, a city becomes insomniac overnight, and bodies are diligently picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sleepy sea-side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to its inhabitants. Blurring the mythic and the gothic with the everyday, Salt Slow considers characters in motion �� turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new entirely.

Winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018, Armfield is a writer of sharp, lyrical prose and tilting dark humour �� Salt Slow marks the arrival of an ambitious and singular new voice.]]> 193 Julia Armfield 1529012597 Manpreet 0 currently-reading, weird 3.91 2019

author: Julia Armfield
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: currently-reading, weird
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You Will Never Be Forgotten: Stories]]> 45892249
An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter's birth defect. A content moderator for "the world's biggest search engine," who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child.

In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction--one that could only belong to Mary South.]]> 256 Mary South 0374538360 Manpreet 0 currently-reading, weird 3.59 2020 You Will Never Be Forgotten: Stories

author: Mary South
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: currently-reading, weird
review:

]]> A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray 58458873
It’s a Sunday in early September and a woman leaves muggy Paris to visit her sister in the western suburbs of the city. Ville-d’Avray is less than an hour away, but it seems like another world with its secluded streets and set-back houses.

The sisters�� relationship is ambiguous. Jane’s visits to Ville-d’Avray leave her discomfited; for all Claire Marie’s seeming provincial passivity, she knows exactly how to get under Jane’s skin.

As they settle into the torpor of the afternoon, Claire Marie describes a curious encounter from her past. Sundays are when she thinks about life �� whether she expected something more from it, and whether she is still waiting for it to begin.

Sharply observed and wryly funny, A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray is a haunting novel about half-shared truths and desires that can never fully be expressed.

‘It is a story both simple and familiar but which, in this telling, is beguiling and immensely enjoyable because of the beautifully observed details.�� Irish Times

‘A study of desire and contentment, time and expectation, this slim novel raises alluring questions about paths not taken.�� Publishers Weekly]]> 152 Dominique Barbéris 1911547968 Manpreet 3 weird 3.46 2019 A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray

author: Dominique Barbéris
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/07/31
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: weird
review:
3.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ A little gem - I liked the atmosphere-driven narrative and the anecdotal storytelling
]]> Out There 61203462
'The literary love child of Kafka and Camus and Bradbury penning episodes of Black Mirror' Chang-Rae Lee

'Disturbing, alluring, dazzling and creepy, Out There is a riveting collection that keeps you enthralled with every page' Claire North

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A fleet of fake men called 'blots' is unleashed onto the dating apps of San Francisco, intent upon conning vulnerable women out of their data, in the exquisite title story Out There. Companion story Big Sur focuses on the reality of the blots' personal experiences.

A sculptor, trapped in a skyscraper restaurant when a violent coup erupts below, creates a perfect model of the town as it is destroyed, in A Scale Model of Gull Point

A ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the scene of a perilous love triangle, in The Bone Ward
A house possesses gigantic human organs that consume the overworked graduate students renting its rooms, in The House's Beating Heart

A curtain of void obliterates the world at a steady pace, leaving one woman to decide whom she wants to spend eternity with, in The Void Wife

And many more that form Kate Folk's debut collection Out There deftly combines elements of science fiction, horror, and psychological realism to create implicitly political and feminist stories. A darkly comic exploration of our lives in the digital age, the collection depicts a landscape that is eminently of-the-moment, and Folk magnifies the ephemera of living with a healthy slice of absurdity.

The thematic pair - Out There and Big Sur - that bookend the collection have since been optioned as a TV series by Hulu, with Kate serving as executive producer and co-writer with Sharon Horgan ( Catastrophe ).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

'Kate Folk's stories inhabit otherworldly realms where exquisite language and beguiling characters excavate the very nature of love and existence' Adam Johnson

'A literary swordsmith of feline dexterity, very dark and very funny' Lisa Locascio

'The stories in this stunning debut are funny, fearless, and moving... Folk's imagination is uncanny and arresting' Alex McElroy]]> 240 Kate Folk 1529372631 Manpreet 5 weird 4.04 2022 Out There

author: Kate Folk
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/28
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: weird
review:

]]> Boy Parts 49083140
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention��

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Eliza Clark 1910312649 Manpreet 3 weird 3.74 2020 Boy Parts

author: Eliza Clark
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: weird
review:

]]> The Membranes 55825321
First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes--heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies--into a sensitive portrait of one young woman's quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader's own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation brings Chi's hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.]]> 168 Chi Ta-wei 0231195710 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 4.00 1995 The Membranes

author: Chi Ta-wei
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> One's Company 58999184
For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad, this fearless debut chronicles one woman’s escape into a world of obsessive imagination. Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the ghosts of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three’s Company . When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision―to completely shuck off her own troublesome identity―takes shape. She plans a drastic move to an isolated mountain retreat where she can re-create the iconic apartment set of Three’s Company and slip into the lives of its main characters: no-nonsense Janet Wood, pleasantly airheaded Chrissy Snow, and confident Jack Tripper. While her best friend, Krystal, tries to drag her back to her old life, Bonnie is determined to transcend pain, trauma, and the baggage of her past by immersing herself in the ultimate binge-watch.]]> 272 Ashley Hutson 0393866645 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.76 2022 One's Company

author: Ashley Hutson
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories]]> 55459040 96 Guadalupe Nettel 0995580723 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.67 2008

author: Guadalupe Nettel
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> My Annihilation 60235703
Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life.

With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime.

Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogates the unspeakable thoughts all humans share that can be monstrous when brought to life, revealing with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer.]]> 257 Fuminori Nakamura 1641293632 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.46 2016 My Annihilation

author: Fuminori Nakamura
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Comfort Me with Apples 56179382
It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze...

But everything is perfect. Isn't it?]]> 103 Catherynne M. Valente 1250816211 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.57 2021 Comfort Me with Apples

author: Catherynne M. Valente
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Foe 50841409 ��
You think you know everything about your life.
��
Long-married couple Junior and Henrietta live a quiet, solitary life on their farm, where they work at the local feed mill and raise chickens. Their lives are simple, straightforward, uncomplicated.

Until everything you think you know collapses.

Until the day a stranger arrives at their door with alarming Junior has been chosen to take an extraordinary journey, a journey across both time and distance,��while Hen remains at home. Junior will be gone for years. But Hen won't be left alone.

Who can you trust if you can't even trust yourself?
��
As the time for his departure draws nearer, Junior finds himself questioning everything about his life - even whether it's really his life at all.

��An eerily entrancing page-turner, Foe�� churns with unease and suspense from the first words to its shocking finale. Perfect for fans of Humans, Westworld and Black Mirror , Foe is a book you will never forget.

*** Praise for FOE ***
��
‘I couldn’t put it down.�� It infected my dreams . A creepy and brilliant book’�� Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People

'The narrative is so eerie and disturbing �� fuelling the reader’s unease; Reid pulls off a wonderful twist in the tail ’�� Guardian
��
‘From the opening page, you’ll have an uneasy feeling as you settle into Iain Reid’s brilliant new novel.. A masterful and breathtakingly unique read. I can’t stop thinking about it ‘�� Amy Stuart, author of Still Mine and Still Water
��
�� Spare, consuming, unforgettable .�� Foe is a dark arrow from a truly original mind .�� Page by eerie page, Iain Reid pulls the unknown world out from under you, and leaves you trapped inside a marriage’s most haunting can I be replaced? This is a book that seeps into your bloodstream �� and crowns Iain Reid the king of deadpan, philosophical horror’�� Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker

‘Movie producers are simply confirming what the literary community already Iain Reid just might be the most exciting and excitingly unclassifiable author working in Canadian fiction today’��- The Globe and Mail (Canada)

‘Foe reads like a house on fire, and is almost impossible not to finish in one sitting ...an otherworldly hothouse of introversion and fantasy�� The Toronto Star
��ձ�> 272 Iain Reid 147117798X Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.81 2018 Foe

author: Iain Reid
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Children of the New World 29243630 AN EXTRAORDINARILY RESONANT AND PROPHETIC COLLECTION OF SPECULATIVE SHORT FICTION FOR OUR TECH-SAVVY ERA BY DEBUT AUTHOR ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN

Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.

In “The Cartographers,�� the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,�� the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become.

Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.]]> 229 Alexander Weinstein 1250099005 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.74 2016 Children of the New World

author: Alexander Weinstein
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Bliss Montage 60243188 A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages

What happens when fantasy tears through the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar.]]> 228 Ling Ma 0374293511 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.91 2022 Bliss Montage

author: Ling Ma
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> The Dinner 17878613
But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened... Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents.

As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.]]> 310 Herman Koch Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.18 2009 The Dinner

author: Herman Koch
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Case Study 57539677 “I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.��

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.

In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling �� and often wickedly humorous �� meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.]]> 278 Graeme Macrae Burnet 1913393194 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.58 2021 Case Study

author: Graeme Macrae Burnet
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Adorable 56468901
Adorable is a haunting, transmundane portrait of a young family told in four parts, in Copenhagen and London. The love between B and Q is tender but worn. When their daughter Æ is born, the everyday lights up in a new way. In its second part, the dead are animated in B’s brain. When B’s father dies, the news is delivered to her by phone and an essayistic, collagist meditation on death and transmission ensues. And then, it’s finally Friday. B and Q descend below the living room floor and wander through a cracked and skittish underworld.

In Ida Marie Hede’s porous world, which is our world too, grime, bacteria, and even death are intimately bound up with health and renewal. Fusing the commonplace and the profound, the material and the spiritual, the elegiac and the conceptual, Adorable powerfully insists that it is impossible to tell where death and life begin or end.]]> 146 Ida Marie Hede Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.32 2017

author: Ida Marie Hede
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Jackdaw 60467008
As he become consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures.

This short, bold piece of fiction, explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist.]]> 176 Tade Thompson 1800811659 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.52 2022 Jackdaw

author: Tade Thompson
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sylvia Plath Watches Us Sleep... But We Don’t Mind]]> 132440424 A Jewish woman has been having unnatural thoughts about the softness of another woman's skin. A feminist arranges to meet her online troll. A woman worries, under her duvet, whether she should sit content in a marriage that has turned comfortable...that is, until she falls in love with a tree... Short stories of midnight musings, of women itching to be heard and of delightful insanities.

“If there is a better way to spend an evening than curled up on an armchair with this beautiful book, then I don’t know about it and I don’t want to. Richards is a master storyteller and a generous god �� always tempting you further into the myriad worlds she creates. These are stories which demand to be read and then read again. They are stories which stay with you long after you’ve had to put the book down and get up from the chair. They are stories about love and womanhood and faith and loss and longing; about drowning and breathing; about being alive and what we can do about it.��
- Amelia Loulli, Poet

"These eerie short stories themed around mental health, grief, and dysfunctional relationships are a strange delight to read. Victoria Richards' prose is artful, ethereal, and thrilling.��
- Golnoosh Nour

About the Author
Victoria Richards is a journalist, writer and poet. She has worked for BBC News, The Times and The Independent, has appeared on Newsnight, BBC World and ITV News and she is the Voices editor at The Independent.

In 2017/18 she was shortlisted in the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize 2018, was highly commended in the Bridport Prize, came third in The London Magazine short story competition and second in the TSS flash fiction competition. She was also longlisted in the Bath Short Story Award 2017 and the National Poetry Competition.

She lives in London where she is working variously on a novel, a short story collection, poetry, flash fiction and books for children.

She is also a co-founder of The Second Source, a group of female journalists tackling sexual harassment in the media.]]> 123 Victoria Richards 1915789133 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.55 Sylvia Plath Watches Us Sleep... But We Don’t Mind

Sylvia Plath Watches Us Sleep... But We Don’t Mind

author: Victoria Richards
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.55
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> The Dreamers 624641
Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed world of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.

The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in ints imagery, The Dreamers (now a film by Bernardo Bertolucci) belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.]]> 208 Gilbert Adair 0571216269 Manpreet 0 to-read, weird 3.66 1988 The Dreamers

author: Gilbert Adair
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: to-read, weird
review:

]]> Everything I Know About Love 46041465
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else�� realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones�� Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.]]> 368 Dolly Alderton 0062968785 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.98 2018

author: Dolly Alderton
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/03
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]]> Post-Traumatic 58684299 In this “deeply original�� (Elif Batuman) and “violently funny�� (Myriam Gurba) story, a young lawyer finally confronts her dark past so she can live in a more peaceful future.

To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story—a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood—compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.

For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?

A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.]]> 320 Chantal V. Johnson 0316264237 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.71 2022 Post-Traumatic

author: Chantal V. Johnson
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/03
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding]]> 49933298 ‘I mean who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.��

The body frequently escapes her, but is always very much present in these compellingly vivid, clear-eyed essays on an embodied self in flight through the world, from the brilliant young writer Ellena Savage.

In Portuguese police stations and Portland college campuses, in suburban Melbourne libraries and wintry Berlin apartments, Savage shows bodies in pain and in love, bodies at work and at rest.

She circles back to scenes of crimes or near-crimes, to lovers or near-lovers, to turn over the stones, reread the paperwork, check the deeds, approach from another angle altogether. These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Blueberries is ripe with acid, promise, and sweetness.]]> 256 Ellena Savage 1912854678 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.52 2020 Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding

Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding

author: Ellena Savage
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/03
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]]> Supper Club 42584178 A sharply intelligent and intimate debut novel about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites--and their physical spaces--that posits the question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?

Roberta spends her life trying not to take up space. At almost thirty, she is adrift and alienated from life. Stuck in a mindless job and reluctant to pursue her passion for food, she suppresses her appetite and recedes to the corners of rooms. But when she meets Stevie, a spirited and effervescent artist, their intense friendship sparks a change in Roberta, a shift in her desire for more. Together, they invent the Supper Club, a transgressive and joyous collective of women who gather to celebrate, rather than admonish, their hungers. They gather after dark and feast until they are sick; they break into private buildings and leave carnage in their wake; they embrace their changing bodies; they stop apologizing. For these women, each extraordinary yet unfulfilled, the club is a way to explore, discover, and push the boundaries of the space they take up in the world. Yet as the club expands, growing both in size and rebellion, Roberta is forced to reconcile herself to the desire and vulnerabilities of the body--and the past she has worked so hard to repress. Devastatingly perceptive and savagely funny, Supper Club is an essential coming-of-age story for our times.]]> 294 Lara Williams 0525539581 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.45 2019

author: Lara Williams
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Everything I Need I Get from You]]> 58772737 A thrilling dive into the world of superfandom and the fangirls who shaped the social internet.

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,�� Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.�� But what seemed niche to Styles was actually a signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternate universe: stan culture.

In Everything I Need I Get from You, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members' allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today. “Before most people were using the internet for anything,�� Tiffany writes, “fans were using it for everything.��

With humor, empathy, and an insider’s eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From alarming, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany’s book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the internet forever.]]> 304 Kaitlyn Tiffany 0374539189 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.56 2022 Everything I Need I Get from You

author: Kaitlyn Tiffany
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/22
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]]> Fruiting Bodies: Stories 58999220 Fruiting Bodies ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters—mostly queer, mostly women—on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.

In “The Changeling,�� two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In “Endangered Animals,�� Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,�� a queer woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in “Fiddler, Fool, Pair,�� an anthropologist is drawn into a magical—and dangerous—gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes’s body—until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.

Audacious, striking, and wholly original, Fruiting Bodies offers stories about knowledge in a world on the verge of collapse, knowledge that alternately empowers or devastates. Pulling beautifully, brazenly, from a variety of literary traditions, Kathryn Harlan firmly establishes herself as a thrilling new voice in fiction.]]> 256 Kathryn Harlan 1324021225 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.16 2022 Fruiting Bodies: Stories

author: Kathryn Harlan
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/22
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]]> Red X 56703017 A hunted community. A haunted author. A horror that spans centuries.

Men are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.

Woven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.

A bold, terrifying new novel from the award-winning author of The Bone Mother.]]> 280 David Demchuk 0771025017 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.73 2021 Red X

author: David Demchuk
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/21
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]]> The Swimmers 59425645
‘Darkly funny, desperately sad, brilliantly written. I absolutely loved it�� Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

This book is spectacular. A perfect blend of devastating humour and sadness�� Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead

A sharp, quirky story of love and loss from a bold New Zealand talent.

When an affair ends badly and her career in the arts implodes, 26-year-old Erin returns to lie low at the family farm with her chronically ill mother, and her aunt-turned-carer. She learns shortly before her arrival that her mother has decided to take matters into her own hands and end her life �� the following Tuesday.

Erin finds herself navigating an eccentric neighbourhood and her complicated family, as she prepares for the loss of a fiery, independent woman.

A former competitive swimmer like her mother and aunt, Erin must find the strength to honour her mother’s final wishes and to reconcile their difficult relationship in the days they have left.]]> 224 Chloe Lane 1913547310 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.86 2022 The Swimmers

author: Chloe Lane
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Termush 62678428 Introduced by Jeff VanderMeer, welcome to a luxury hotel at the end of the world in this post-apocalyptic 1967 dystopia ...

The day we came up from the shelters four people were found dead on the steps of the hotel.

Welcome to Termush: a luxury coastal resort like no other. All the wealthy guests are survivors: preppers who reserved rooms long before the Disaster. Inside, they embrace exclusive radiation shelters, ambient music and lavish provisions; outside, radioactive dust falls on the sculpture park, security men step over dead birds, and a reconnaissance party embarks.

Despite weathering a nuclear apocalypse, their problems are only just beginning. Soon, the Management begins censoring news; disruptive guests are sedated; initial generosity towards Strangers ceases as fears of contamination and limited resources grow. But as the numbers - and desperation - of external survivors increase, they must decide what it means to forge a new moral code at the end (or beginning?) of the world ...]]> 119 Sven Holm 057137915X Manpreet 3 3.27 1967 Termush

author: Sven Holm
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.27
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/19
date added: 2023/05/19
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]]> Lemon 56773168
Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those who knew and loved Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she's lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened.

Told at different points in time from the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on's classmates, Lemon loosely follows the structure of a detective novel. But finding the perpetrator is not the main objective here. Instead, the work explores grief and trauma, raising important questions about guilt, retribution, and the meaning of death and life.]]> 176 Kwon Yeo-Sun Manpreet 0 to-read 3.24 2019 Lemon

author: Kwon Yeo-Sun
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Is Mother Dead 60059857 Will and Testament

'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.]]> 330 Vigdis Hjorth 1839764317 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.96 2020 Is Mother Dead

author: Vigdis Hjorth
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/02
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]]> Goddess of Filth 55370887 “Five of us sat in a circle doing our best to emulate the girls in The Craft, hoping to unleash some power to take us all away from our home to the place of our dreams. But we weren’t witches. We were five Chicanas living in San Antonio, Texas, one year out of high school.��

One hot summer night, best friends Lourdes, Fernanda, Ana, Perla, and Pauline hold a séance. It’s all fun and games at first, but their tipsy laughter turns to terror when the flames burn straight through their prayer candles and Fernanda starts crawling toward her friends and chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors.

Over the next few weeks, shy, modest Fernanda starts acting strangely—smearing herself in black makeup, shredding her hands on rose thorns, sucking sin out of the mouths of the guilty. The local priest is convinced it's a demon, but Lourdes begins to suspect it’s something else—something far more ancient and powerful.

As Father Moreno's obsession with Fernanda grows, Lourdes enlists the help of her “bruja Craft crew�� and a professor, Dr. Camacho, to understand what is happening to her friend in this unholy tale of possession-gone-right.]]> 156 V. Castro 1951971035 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.60 2021 Goddess of Filth

author: V. Castro
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/02
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The View from the Ground: Peacetime Dispatches,1936-87]]> 33821094 First published in 1959, but now offered in a revised and expanded edition, The View from the Ground presents over six decades of Gellhorn's ruminations on political, civil, and social issues and crises, from a lynching in the American South in the 1930s through a recent visit to Cuba to see what is new and what remains the same in a country that is still off limits to most Americans. Gellhorn's ability to get to the truth of a situation heard makes her writing transcend the short shelf life of most reportage.]]> 352 Martha Gellhorn 1780601042 Manpreet 0 to-read, purchased, nonfic 4.40 1988 The View from the Ground: Peacetime Dispatches,1936-87

The View from the Ground: Peacetime Dispatches,1936-87

author: Martha Gellhorn
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/02
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]]> Nevada 59795882
After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip.

Along the way she stops in Reno, Nevada, and meets James, a young man who works in the local Wal-Mart. Maria recognizes elements of her younger self in James and the pair quickly form an unlikely but powerful connection, one that will have big implications for them both.

Nevada is a hilarious, groundbreaking cult classic from Imogen Binnie that inspired a whole literary movement, and is now published in the UK for the very first time.

Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.]]> 304 Imogen Binnie 152909206X Manpreet 3 3.84 2013 Nevada

author: Imogen Binnie
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2022/08/02
date added: 2023/05/01
shelves:
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]]> Empire Of Enchantment 40814614
This heavily illustrated book tells the extraordinary, untold story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Drawing on ancient religious texts, early travelers' accounts, colonial records, modern visual sources, and magicians' own testimony, Empire of Enchantment is a vibrant narrative of India's magical traditions, from Vedic times to the present day.
]]> 288 John Zubrzycki 1849049440 Manpreet 0 to-read 0.0

author: John Zubrzycki
name: Manpreet
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/22
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]]> Nightbitch 60093251
One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...

An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.

As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical A Mythical Ethnography , and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem.

An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.]]> 256 Rachel Yoder 0593312147 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.48 2021

author: Rachel Yoder
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/26
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]]> Milk Fed 57335967 This darkly hilarious and “delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food�� (The Boston Globe) from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today is a “precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache�� (BuzzFeed).

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

“A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture�� (Glamour) Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is “riotously funny and perfectly profane�� (Refinery 29) from “a wild, wicked mind�� (Los Angeles Times).]]> 320 Melissa Broder 1982142502 Manpreet 0 to-read 3.63 2021

author: Melissa Broder
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 36609308 270 Olga Tokarczuk 1910695718 Manpreet 0 to-read 4.15 2009

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Americana (And The Act Of Getting Over It.)]]> 44511764
This intimate, engaging autobiographical work from an Irish visitor to the United States recounts the author's own attempt to walk the length of the USA's west coast. Healy's life-changing journey weaves in and out of often humorous reflections on his experiences in America and his development as an artist, navigating both the trail itself and the unique culture of the people who attempt to complete it. For fans of Cheryl Strayed's Wild.]]> 336 Luke Healy 1910620610 Manpreet 3 nonfic 4.23 2019 Americana (And The Act Of Getting Over It.)

Americana (And The Act Of Getting Over It.)

author: Luke Healy
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2022/11/05
date added: 2022/11/05
shelves: nonfic
review:

]]> Becoming 38746485
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.]]> 426 Michelle Obama 1524763136 Manpreet 5 nonfic 4.42 2018

author: Michelle Obama
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/31
date added: 2022/11/05
shelves: nonfic
review:

]]> Maximum City 895983 600 Suketu Mehta 0144001594 Manpreet 0 to-read, nonfic 3.92 2004

author: Suketu Mehta
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/05
shelves: to-read, nonfic
review:

]]> Know My Name 50196744
Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words. It was the perfect case, in many ways–there were eyewitnesses, Turner ran away, physical evidence was immediately secured. But her struggles with isolation and shame during the aftermath and the trial reveal the oppression victims face in even the best-case scenarios. Her story illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicts a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shines with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life.

Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. It also introduces readers to an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. Entwining pain, resilience, and humor, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.]]> 384 Chanel Miller 0735223718 Manpreet 0 to-read, purchased, nonfic 4.69 2019 Know My Name

author: Chanel Miller
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/05
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review:

]]> Burn the Place: A Memoir 40916358 A singular, powerfully expressive debut memoir that traces one chef’s struggle to find her place and what happens once she does.

Burn the Place is a galvanizing memoir that chronicles Iliana Regan’s journey from foraging on the family farm to running her Michelin-starred restaurant, Elizabeth. Her story is raw like that first bite of wild onion, alive with startling imagery, and told with uncommon emotional power.

Regan grew up the youngest of four headstrong girls on a small farm in Northwest Indiana. While gathering raspberries as a toddler, Regan preternaturally understood to pick just the ripe fruit and leave the rest for another day. In the family’s leaf-strewn fields, the orange flutes of chanterelles beckoned her while they eluded others.

Regan has had this intense, almost otherworldly connection with food and the earth it comes from since her childhood, but connecting with people has always been more difficult. She was a little girl who longed to be a boy, gay in an intolerant community, an alcoholic before she turned twenty, and a woman in an industry dominated by men—she often felt she “wasn’t made for this world,�� and as far as she could tell, the world tended to agree. But as she learned to cook in her childhood farmhouse, got her first restaurant job at age fifteen, taught herself cutting-edge cuisine while running a “new gatherer�� underground supper club, and worked her way from front-of-house staff to running her own kitchen, Regan found that food could help her navigate the strangeness of the world around her.

Regan cooks with instinct, memory, and an emotional connection to her ingredients that can’t be taught. Written from that same place of instinct and emotion, Burn the Place tells Regan’s story in raw and vivid prose and brings readers into a world—from the Indiana woods to elite Chicago kitchens—that is entirely original and unforgettable.]]> 250 Iliana Regan 1572842679 Manpreet 0 to-read, nonfic 3.60 2019 Burn the Place: A Memoir

author: Iliana Regan
name: Manpreet
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/05
shelves: to-read, nonfic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet]]> 54897741 Mark O'Connell, author of To Be A Machine

'Excellent ... I felt both seen and like I could see more after reading' Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun

'Spectacular ... lion-hearted in its honesty, and insightful to the point of brilliance' - Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies

We all live online now: the line between the internet and IRL has become porous to the point of being meaningless.

Roisin Kiberd knows this better than anyone. She has worked for tech startups and as the online voice of a cheese brand; she's witnessed the bloated excesses of tech conferences and explored the strangest communities on the web. She has traced the ripples these hidden worlds have sent through our culture and politics, and experienced the disorienting effects on her own life.

In these interlinked essays, she illuminates the subject with fierce clarity, revealing the ways we are more connected than ever before, and the disconnect this breeds. From the lure of the endless scroll, to the glamour of self-optimisation; from the cult of Energy Drinks to the nostalgic world of Vaporwave music; and from silicon town centres to dating tech bros, Kiberd explores the strange worlds, habits and people that have grown with the internet. She asks what we have gained, what we have lost, and what we have given willingly away in exchange for this connected life.]]> 304 Róisín Kiberd 1788165772 Manpreet 0 to-read, purchased, nonfic 4.10 2021 The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet

The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet

author: Róisín Kiberd
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/05
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]]> My Body 59849414
Emily Ratajkowski is an acclaimed model and actress, an engaged political progressive, a formidable entrepreneur, a global social media phenomenon, and now, a writer. Rocketing to world fame at age twenty-one, Ratajkowski sparked both praise and furor with the provocative display of her body as an unapologetic statement of feminist empowerment. The subsequent evolution in her thinking about our culture’s commodification of women is the subject of this book.

My Body is a profoundly personal exploration of feminism, sexuality, and power, of men's treatment of women and women's rationalizations for accepting that treatment. These essays chronicle moments from Ratajkowski’s life while investigating the culture’s fetishization of girls and female beauty, its obsession with and contempt for women’s sexuality, the perverse dynamics of the fashion and film industries, and the gray area between consent and abuse. Nuanced, fierce, and incisive, My Body marks the debut of a writer brimming with courage and intelligence.]]> 239 Emily Ratajkowski 152941590X Manpreet 3 nonfic 4.03 2021 My Body

author: Emily Ratajkowski
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/25
date added: 2022/11/05
shelves: nonfic
review:

]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band �� and meeting the man who would become her husband �� her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 Manpreet 5 nonfic 4.25 2021

author: Michelle Zauner
name: Manpreet
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/05
date added: 2022/11/05
shelves: nonfic
review:

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