It’s a lovely day (I don’t honestly know, I’m writing this over the weekend), so let’s take this opportunity to draw our collective attention to some great books and/or articles by men and women who, for whatever reason (a damn good one) are in our hearts and minds right now. Let’s start, and let’s try to focus on their writing and accomplishments. You can signal boost anyone’s work you want.
1. Porochista Khakpour
Khakpour is a super-talented Iranian-American writer whose first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice pick, and got her compared to “a young Philip Roth,” which for me is actually a plus, but only when the writer in question is a woman, because there are plenty of young dudes who think they are Philip Roth wandering around busily. Her NEW novel, The Last Illusion, is tearing it UP, and I have purchased it and am incredibly excited by it. Oh, and she also guest-edited Guernica‘s all Iranian-American issue a few years back, you can read that too:
I wanted geographic diversity (West and East coasts, plus the Southwest, with writers submitting from Tehran to London), an array of generations (our youngest writer is thirty; our oldest, sixty-five), and a range of experience, from lesser-known up-and-comers to heavily championed veterans (from zero books to six books). I wanted the recognition of legacy (Nahid Rachlin, our first Iranian-American published fiction writer who held Stanford’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction before the Revolution) and a subversion of expectations (Hooman Majd, a celebrated nonfiction writer whose excellent reportage and commentary have deservedly landed him many talk-show-pundit stints, here writes in a genre he has rarely published in, which agents and editors originally steered him away from: his first love, fiction). I wanted aesthetic eclecticism, from Amir Parsa’s genre-defying, acrobatic prose to Azadeh Moaveni’s intensely observant narrative nonfiction. I wanted comedy (Iraj Isaac Rahmim’s rollicking fantasies in modern-day Tehran) and tragedy (Sholeh Wolpé’s poignant coming-of-age fairy tale gone awry). I wanted a range in their very Iranianness and Americanness: Sayrafiezadeh’s and Fathi’s pieces show no traces of their Iranian roots, while over a third of the others go back entirely to Iran. I wanted the mythic Iran of Roger Sedarat’s ghost horses set against the more familiar, gritty realism of life in the country today. I wanted to capture the extraordinary scope that defines this young-diaspora-with-an-ancient-culture’s literature.
SO, you know, pretty cool woman, really.
2. Emily Gould
Emily Gould! Man, I like Emily Gould. First of all, Emily Gould is my complete opposite in terms of expressing how she feels about things directly and having great confidence in her own taste and judgment, and I am frequently wrong about things she’s correct about. Like my addiction to buying things via Amazon, for example, which I am shamed by whenever I get the latest installment from Emily Books, which is a doughty little company she runs with her friend Ruth Curry selling e-books that are selected with unbelievable care, and are always completely wonderful. We’ve talked about a bunch of them on the site, and would talk about them more if I wasn’t a lot lazier than Emily.
Emily has also written a YA novel called Hex Education that you can probably find if you look hard enough, it is from The Long Long Ago, a collection of personal essays called And The Heart Says Whatever, which is how I met Emily, because I thought it was great and moving and sent her an email about it before I blogged or knew anyone or was a person of any kind. And, as of this year, her novel Friendship, which I read immediately and really enjoyed. It’s about money and the relationships between women and that sense of not being where you thought you should be, which are likely familiar ideas and emotions to you, and I really do think you should read it. It is also a book whose debut week got FUCKED UP by some straight nonsense, and Emily wrote about that here.
You may be mainly familiar with Emily from hearing her described as a “controversial blogger,” which she has not been in some time, but remains “controversial” largely as a result of saying shit forcefully in public when she needs to and once having posed in bed with her laptop for a magazine.
3. Rachel Fershleiser
I have never heard anyone (okay, one person) say a bad word against Rachel Fershleiser, who represents for books on the internet like an avenging angel who is also very nice. So nice, in fact, that when I asked her what I could signal boost, she just gave me a list of books she loves:
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, After Birth by Elisa Albert, The Girls From Corona Del Mar by Rufi Thorpe, So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman, Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill, Nina MacLaughlin and her forthcoming book Hammer Head, Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
She also loves Meg Wolitzer, Maile Meloy, Helen Oyeyemi, Tana French, Rainbow Rowell, Emily Gould, Edan Lepucki, Elizabeth McCracken, Emma Straub, Roxane Gay, Jennifer Close, Katie Coyle, and Julie Buntin.
She runs lit stuff at Tumblr including the Reblog Book Club, which is the greatest, and her other recent-ish stuff is Stock Tips: A Zine about Soup and talking about The Bookternet:
4. J. Robert Lennon
Lennon has a collection of short stories coming out in early November, See You in Paradise, which is getting GREAT early buzz, and you might also enjoy his novel Familiar (he has written SEVEN novels, and a previous collection of short fiction, Pieces for the Left Hand, which I think is an unnecessary amount of writing to have accomplished and makes me feel a crippling sense of personal inadequacy.)
Oh, and one of his novels got yanked and had to be serialized out of concerns that Big Doll, a lesser-known cousin of Big Pharma, might sue. How fascinating!
5. Elyssa East
I know what you nerds like, and it’s non-fiction accounts of creepy New England ghost towns known for grisly murders. Right? Well, then you’ll enjoy Dogtown. You may also become moderately obsessed with the ghost town in question:
Q. Dogtown became a creepy no man’s land after the 1984 murder of a woman named Anne Natti. Do outsiders visit?
A. Dogtown’s dark time is over, thanks to the community’s efforts to clean it up after Natti’s murder. It’s something of a miracle that the area has remained a safe, peaceful wilderness where people can go to escape everyday life, but that happened because enough Cape Ann people wanted the area to stay that way. More people started visiting Dogtown after the publication of Anita Diamant’s novel The Last Days of Dogtown [in 2005], but it isn’t necessarily “on the map.” Dogtown remains a “shadow” [of Gloucester] for introspection and peace because it’s the opposite of the city and the coast and their more vibrant energies.
RIGHT? It’s spooky, Halloween is coming, I’m not going to tell you what to do.
6. Michele Filgate
Michele does a whole bunch of things (here’s her newest essay in Brooklyn Quarterly, “Navigating Fear,” by the way), and is, like Rachel, relentless about promoting the work of female writers and booksellers, and I bet you would enjoy following her on Twitter. If you live in or near Brooklyn, you should consider acquiring the fine books we’ve discussed today via her Community Bookstore.
Awesome, I recently put The Last Illusion on my to-read list so I’m glad it’s as good as it sounds.
Yep, planning to read The Last Illusion as soon as possible! Really looking forward to it.
I was in someone’s home this weekend and he owned at least 50 fiction books (nearly entirely ‘literature’, which is a concept I already don’t like), and two of them were not by white men. One was One Hundred Years of Solitude, because of course, and the other was Celebrations (by Maya Angelou). Two books out of at least 50. His nonfiction was very nearly as bad.
What I’m saying is, thank you for celebrating non-male and non-white authors.
Geez, thats terrible.
Who the fuck only owns fifty books?
Meh. I was just thinking about this issue the other day. I have a much smaller collection than some friends and was feeling like I don’t measure up in intellectual enthusiasm. (admittedly i do binge watch too much TV) I have more than 50 but most purchased for school. I grew up in a family that read many books but owned few because my mother was a children’s librarian and for several years I spent more days of the week than not at the library.
I am starting to buy more books because I want to support writers, particularly female and minority writers, but I still feel a little guilty spending that money instead of putting it into savings/paying off debt and heading to the library.
And I am fairly comfortable financially. There are plenty of people who simply cannot afford to have 50 books. You can judge me for buying a bottle of wine instead of a book but I wouldn’t throw this out as a general judgment.
People who only keep the books they feel the need to press urgently into willing hands
People who are enthusiastic library patrons
People who have had bedbugs
People who have moved to another continent
People who mostly read on electronic devices
People who seek a minimalist lifestyle
People who have survived a fire in their home
People who have been so hard up they had to sell their books
I probably own more than 50, or maybe even more than 200 books, but I aspire to own fewer things. I just don’t want to spend money on things I can get easily at the library.
That Celeste Ng book is great and original and a lovely voice, so I will trust all the rest of Rachel F’s suggestions and blow a wad buying books today. Great start to a week.
I just made a note this a.m. to buy Celeste Ng’s book, w/o having seen The Toast. Am delighted that fate is at least attempting to look out for me. Or my reading, anyhow.
Rachel Fershleiser’s impeccable taste in eyewear makes me trust that every book she recommends must be fantastic.
Her umbrella dress in the video is also amazing.
According to me that Whole video was amazing and I think it should be on Youtube.
Oh man J. Robert Lennon wrote Mailman (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/233927.Mailman), which is a book I found sitting on the shelves of a short-term apartment for visiting scholars in Berlin (along with Jenga and a copy of Fodor’s Germany that was 10 years out of date), and read in one sitting. I passed it on to a friend who was passing through, and it remains one of the strangest and most emotionally intense books I ever read. I sometimes forget that I didn’t just make it up.
He also wrote The Funnies, which is a wonderful and also intense book about a family that grew up as the subject of a Family Circus like cartoon, and what happens after the father/cartoonist dies.
He’s also in this band: https://www.facebook.com/TheStarryMountainSweethe…
GHOST TOWN NON-FICTION!
It warms my cynical black heart that you linked to indiebound instead of amazon! That being said, everyone please stop recommending so many awesome-looking books, I am so far behind and I need to catch up, auuuuggghhhhh I want to read everything.
Very cool. I will definitely be reading Friendship and The Last Illusion.
I’ve got Friendship on my hold list at the library. 🙂
J Robert Lennon! I read his novel The Funnies ten years ago after picking it up by chance. I loved it. I am just saying.
So much good stuff here!
Your signal-boost reasoning is sound, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. This continues to be a safe and good space, and that continues to be a rare and needed thing. Also: Good memories of people freaking out about the serialization of Lennon’s story when I was a bookstore scullery. I still want to read that!
Looks like you can get it as a kindle book. http://www.amazon.com/Happyland-John-Lennon-ebook…
(if anyone knows a non-Amazon way to buy this book, please do let me know)
If you’re ANYWHERE near Ithaca, Buffalo Street Books is great and Lennon’s books hang out there.
Ok, look, you’re fucking with my “buy every book the Toast recommends” commitment, because this is too many books to buy at once in light of my attempts at personal finance hygiene.
I DID just get The Little World of Liz Climo and it is soooooo adorable and kind of a nice counterpoint to the darker shit I look at in the morning while I drink coffee.
Well, three books ordered. Good work, Toast! <3 <3 <3
This is so useful and awesome. I like it when the Toast tells me what to read. It’s the best, really.
Rachel Fershleiser is a fucking baller and it’s true – all 800 contributors DID get books.
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