eliza’s staff picks
WHAT KINGDOM by Fine Gråbøl
What Kingdom tells of a community of young people in a mental health ward one summer in Copenhagen through brief, gauzy, spell-like passages. While it could be easy to compare it to any number of entries in the canon of mental illness literature or squeeze it into the auto-fiction box according to the author’s life experience, this book evades easy categorization. Posing questions about care and community, of wellness and sickness, this book will speak to anyone who’s felt the glass bell jar suspended above their heads – “the past is nothing more than light.”
MATING by Norman Rush
Girls: who among us hasn’t ever been crushing so hard on a man 20 years their senior that they’ve walked for days across the southern African desert to surprise him at his remote feminist utopian village? Not you? Me neither, but this unnamed narrator’s portrayal of love is wholly relatable. I envy anyone who gets to read this book for the first time.
CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING by Dorothy Baker
This is something of a comfort book, but what does it say about me if my idea of a comfort book includes (but is not limited to): drunk dads, dead moms, repressed homosexuality, a stilted graduate thesis, a suicide attempt, narcissism and individuation, and the most horrific of all, a sock slipping down in your shoe while you’re walking?
A LINE IN THE WORLD by Dorothe Nors
I am not sure why I picked up this book, knowing virtually nothing about the author, the place it’s about, or whether I will ever even go there, but I was happy to find it was much more than the book of travel essays shown at first glance. Border politics, climate change, personal and regional identities, the phases of the moon and many cups of coffee help to sketch out this sweeping map of the North Sea coast.
LOVE ME TENDER by Constance Debré
“Family is the place for madness,” posits Debré in this brutal piece of autofiction about a woman whose custody of her son is withheld after she gets a divorce, forgoes her career as a powerful lawyer for writing, and starts seeing women. This book questions the stifling conditions of unconditional love and the violent conventions of conventional family.
KICK THE LATCH by Kathryn Scanlan
Imagine you’re sitting in a dimly lit dive bar in a small town out West and can’t help but eavesdrop on an older woman at the end of the bar, telling stories in hushed tones to the bartender all night. If that sounds compelling to you (or if you’re a former horse girl), I recommend spending your next couple hours with this book. (It’s short!) The stories she tells will stick with you.