Books That Saved My Life

This week’s recommendations come from Javiera Benavente at Food For Thought Books, a not-for-profit workers’ collective located in Amherst, MA since 1976.  The bookstore “specializes in author readings, community events, hand-picked books and all manner of nourishment for the heart and mind.”

Photo courtesey of Food For Thought Books

Little, Big

John Crowley’s masterful “Little, Big” is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood–not found on any map–to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.

Authobiography of Red

Anne Carson offers us Geryon, a red winged monster of mythological proportions that is at once quintessentially human. Delicious and provocative, this novel written in verse will move you to tears and inspire you to fly.

The Arrival

Stunning, powerful, gripping, moving– this allegory of the immigrant experience is meticulously thought out and perfectly wrought. The story alternately displays Shaun Tan’s heartfelt understanding of the dislocated existence of immigrants and his robustly imagined fantasy setting. It is a story of determination, of survival in hopeless times, of unexpected kindnesses, and always, always of love. An poignant & magical work of art.

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

From the author of Fun Home — the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others. For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form. Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends — academics, social workers, bookstore clerks — fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents. Bechdel fuses high and low culture — from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory — in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”  *Also check out samples of Bechdel’s work at the NYT online.  Everybody loves free samples.