Aimee Bender has a knack for finding the surreal in mundane, everyday life. Following the success of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender continues to explore our deep, psychological attachment to the sights, smells, sounds, and treasured keepsakes of our childhoods. (Why do we continue to hang on to dried roses and beetle carcasses?) A fascinating rumination on memory, mental illness, and how we associate people and emotions with "stuff," The Butterfly Lampshade is sure to fill readers with a sweet-and-sour sense of nostalgia.
We often use the word "cancer" as a metaphor for society's greatest ills, for deep-seated perils invisible to the naked eye. But what of cancer itself? If you know where to look, so-called "cancer clusters" are as pervasive and permeative in vulnerable populations as the tumors of poverty, classism, environmental injustice, racism, corruption, etc...The evils are cumulative, just like the toxins that are silently spreading into our watersheds, ecosystems, food chains, blood streams, and bloodlines. In this long-overdue biopsy, Arsenault blends investigative journalism, personal narrative, memoir, history, scientific research, and political commentary in a haunting diagnosis of our malignant future.
Each day is a gift composed of twenty-four hours. How many do you spend thinking about what other people think of you? What if you stopped? If your life was free from the tedium of social convention and self-judgment, could you fill it like a jewelry box? In Madeleine Ryan's debut novel, the reader enters the captivating mind of a young woman as she embarks on an epic journey--to a house party. As a woman living with autism, Ryan's narrator perceives the world with documentary clarity. She wastes nothing and savors everything (including her ritual "post-party suppers"). A tantalizing, bingeworthy read, A Room Called Earth is the literary equivalent of sitting inside of a kaleidoscope.
