Books Are My People 11/7
out today, paperback releases and more!
Happy November!
We spent last weekend in Chicago at a hockey tournament. Although both kids played, my almost-eighteen-year-old stayed an hour south with my husband, while I stayed with my fourteen-year-old. As a phobic flyer, I like to introduce myself to the flight attendants. On the flight over, Andrea insisted that I come with her to meet the Captains. I felt like I was four-years-old.
They gave me wings, had me pose for a photo and even let me get on the PA system and give a shout out to my kids, which they loved! (Just kidding, they were mortally embarrassed.) As I was holding the intercom I kept thinking about that scene in Bridesmaids when they are on the plane and all of the inappropriate things I could have said. With our crazy playing schedule, there wasn’t a ton of time to do much else but hockey, hockey hockey! We did get one lovely day in the city visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, playing mini-golf in the park and eating good food. And in between games, I got a lot of reading done, which was satisfying because my Winter Reading list is long! And some parts of the country are lucky to experience fall. I was so taken by the colorful trees! I hope you who experience colorful trees know how lucky you are!
Books Are My People: A Podcast Companion Newsletter
(click here to listen to the most recent episode of my book recommendation podcast.)
The best way you can support this show is to click on the books below and purchase them through my Bookshop.org affiliate store. A portion of your spending goes to independent bookstores! A win-win-win! (You win, I win, indie bookstores win!)
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I'm Jennifer Caloyeras and I love books. And I love sharing books! I even love writing books. And making books! And teaching people how to write books!
I had my dream guest on Books Are My People this week: Edward Carrey! Click here to be taken to the episode where we discuss what it’s like to be part of a writing couple as well as his latest novel, Edith Holler.
Out Today! (I told you November was gonna be big!)
The bestselling, award-winning author of The Power delivers a dazzling tour de force where a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.
key words: dark, satire, Orwellian, heist
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.
key words: parrot, college student, unlikely friendships
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present--loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media.
key words: Squid Games meets Gravity’s Rainbow, workplace novel, Korea, alternate history
A Grandmother Begins The Story by Michelle Porter
An enchanting and original story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Métis women and the land and bison that surround them.
key words: family, Metis women, bison
Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do.
key words: abstract art, memoir
At the height of the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk and Sungho are arranged to be married. The couple soon moves to San Jose, California, with an infant and Sungho's overbearing mother-in-law. Adrift in a new country, Insuk grieves the loss of her past and her divided homeland, finding herself drawn into an illicit relationship that sets into motion a dramatic saga and echoes for generations to come.
key words: South Korea, San Jose, immigration, Korean reparation
My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment.
key words: memoir, 992 pages!
Bathhouse And Other Tanka by Tatsuhiko Ishii
For many decades now, Ishii has turned the classical poetic form of the tanka into its own innovative contemporary tradition. What was originally a five line 5-7-5-7-7-syllable verse form, Ishii writes in one line, constructing his poems out of sequential one-line tankas, as if Basho and Lorca bathed together under the moon.
key words: poetry
The Sisterhood: How A Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture by Courtney Thorsson
The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Drawing on original interviews with Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, and readings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group's everyday collaboration and profound legacy.
key words: Black women writers, literary legends, feminism
Paperback Releases:
*We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman
Truly the funniest book about a woman whose best friend is dying. The prefect balance of humor and pathos that I crave. And it’s a quick read as well.
Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald
In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self.
In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters--a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.
A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley
In 1850s Gold Rush California two young prostitutes, best friends Eliza and Jean, attempt to find their way in a lawless town on the fringes of the Wild West--a bewitching combination of beauty and danger--as what will become the Civil War looms on the horizon.
The bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs returns with a brilliant new gothic suspense set at an Italian villa with a dark history.
No time for art this week. Just another fall in Chicago photo:
Miss anything?
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For people who already subscribe to my Substack, you will now receive one extra email from me a week - a newsletter each Tuesday, on new book release day, with all the books out that I'm looking forward to reading!
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Until next time, I hope you have a wonderfully bookish week!
