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Staff Recommendations
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A listing of staff proclivities, recommended by both past and present bookstore and publishing employees. Check back for new recommendations each month as we bring you the best of what we're reading or have read. Browse by title, author or staff member!
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Afropessimism
Frank B. Wilderson III
In an eloquent mix of memoir, philosophy, and critical theory, Frank Wilderson unsparingly explains how humanity defines itself through anti-Blackness and racism.
--recommended by Stacey
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Hurricane Season
A Novel
Fernanda Melchor
Admirers of Juan Rulfo, Amparo Davila, and Jose Revueltas will recognize the writing of Fernanda Melchor as continuing in a tradition of writers from Mexico whose themes are people living on the outskirts of urban life. Hurricane Season is a frightening and impossible book to put down.
--recommended by Josiah
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Ornamental
Juan Cárdenas
Columbian writer Juan Cardenas first book to be translated into English is a moral and pharmaceutical fable for our times centered around a powerful and intoxicating drug that only affects women.
Note; translator Lizzie Davis has done a masterful translation of Cardenas sparse beautiful prose.
--recommended by Josiah
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BORDERLAND APOCRYPHA
!HIJOLE! but theres something in the ground in Fresno that grows amazing Chicanx poets…..
And now here comes Anthony Cody.
Cody does nothing less than unearth our history and decolonizes the poem on the page,
reforming it into a powerful timeline of Mexican Lynchings in the U.S and deeply felt family memories.
--recommended by Josiah
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LUSTER
An electrifying slow-burn charted by a young Black woman The narrative shines with dark humor as the protagonist wrestles with IBS, paints still lifes of cadavers, cosplays for Comic Con, and navigates an increasingly complex relationship with a married white man, his white wife, and their adopted Black daughter.
---recommended by Anna
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Tokyo Ueno Station
A Novel
Miri Yu
Like flashes of scenery framed by the window of an express train, Zainichi Korean writer Yu Miri depicts the lives of the most vulnerable in present-day Japan with snapshots of deftness and feeling. A poetic, elegant condemnation of the imperial system as seen through the eyes of a ghostly observer
--recommended by Anna
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FASCINATION ' MEMOIRS
the devil is hungry / the devil is sweet / if you are Soft then you will shiver.
---Ryan
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BEAUTIFUL ALIENS ' STEVE ABBOTT READER
early essential queer writing;New narrative father and co-originator, Steve Abbott continues to twinkle and inflame our senses long after his death. Transcending divine illuminations and oblique views, Jamie Townsend has ardently composed the proper altar for a pure San Francisco seraph
---Ryan
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BLACK LEOPARD RED WOLF
Spilling copious amounts of fresh warm blood, Marlon James' new fantasy dips into African Folklore and myth to breathe new life into a genre in danger of stagnation.
-Daven
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KAFKA IN A SKIRT
Stories From The Wall
Deeply rooted in Chicano culture as expressed through a modern Latinx view, these stories will make you laugh at what's not funny and recognize the unfamiliarity of our evolving culture in the modern details of this 21st century vida loca of ours.
---Josiah
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MINOR DETAIL
Examining those allowed and not allowed to walk freely under occupation in Palestine, Shibli constructs a choreography of violence's movement through time. A document of truth buried beneath genocidal rubble, the precision of this translation speaks to the urgency and importance of the written word. I am still thinking about this book.
---Ryan
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Braiding Sweetgrass
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer
"Kimmerer, Ph.D. and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, provides an invaluable look at where we are, what damaging, normalized practices got us here, and how we can heal ourselves and the Earth." - Recommended by Anna
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Stranger Faces
Namwali Serpell
"Wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging."—The New York Times
"Serpell's vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
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The Dead Are Arising
The Life of Malcolm X
Les Payne, Tamara Payne
An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author's interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative.
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