68 Books For Every Person On Your Holiday List - BuzzFeed News
68 Books For Every Person On Your Holiday List - BuzzFeed News |
| 68 Books For Every Person On Your Holiday List - BuzzFeed News Posted: 27 Nov 2019 12:11 PM PST 
Maybe you're an aspiring TV writer, or maybe you're just a TV fan who binge-watched all of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's brilliant Emmy award–winning dark comedy Fleabag. If that's the case, Fleabag: The Scriptures is just for you; it contains all filming scripts for the show's two seasons, plus behind-the-scenes commentary from Waller-Bridge. Speaking of iconic TV shows, Sex and the City fans might want to consider We Should All Be Mirandas: Life Lessons from Sex and the City's Most Underrated Character. Written by Chelsea Fairless and Lauren Garroni, the creators of the hit Instagram account @everyoutfitonsatc, We Should is a tongue-in-cheek appraisal of the famous redhead, complete with fun illustrations and how-to guides on how to be a boss like Miranda. But perhaps you're more of a Friends fanatic, unfazed by recent divisive (but ultimately correct) retrospectives. In that case, Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era by pop culture historian Saul Austerlitz should hit the spot; it features new interviews with the show's creators and tells the story of how this sitcom came to be. If you'd rather see glossy pictures with your Friends trivia, consider Friends Forever: The One About the Episodes by Gary Susman, Jeannine Dillon, and Bryan Cairns, which not only offers behind-the-scenes info (did you know Marta Kauffman and David Crane wrote Monica Geller for Janeane Garofalo?), but also has tons of photographs and will look pretty sitting on your coffee table. Maybe you really just want some irreverent commentary on some of the biggest movies of the past 25 years. If so, you should seek out Shea Serrano's Movies (And Other Things), an illustrated compendium that asks the tough questions like: Is this movie better, the same, or worse with the Rock in it? And which race was white-saviored the best by Kevin Costner? Or perhaps you like your pop culture talk a little more highbrow and academic. Lauren Michele Jackson's White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue...and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, a look at how black culture has been appropriated by everyone from the Kardashians to Christina Aguilera, is well worth a read.
The poets behind the popular astrology Twitter account @poetastrologers, Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky, have finally written a book, Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac, perfect for both novices (it comes with definitions of basic terms) and experts who will revel in all the intra–sun sign snark: ("Arguably, the number-one reason people want to learn about astrology is because they have been in love with a Scorpio."). Ugh, guilty. If your woo-woo tendencies run a little more reflective, check out Mira Ptacin's The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna, an engaging first-person account of the time the author spent at a remote Maine camp where people commune with the dead. (Read an excerpt here; also, the book's cover glows in the dark!) Initiated: Memoirs of a Witch by Amanda Yates Garcia looks at how the author has found solace in witchcraft. And Leila Taylor's Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul is a personal reflection on the black American goth. If you're searching for some good old-fashioned horror, Stephen King's latest, The Institute, should do the trick with its timely theme of children being detained. We'd also be remiss if we didn't name-check Shaun Hamill's A Cosmology of Monsters (King-endorsed!) and Jeanette Winterson's Frankissstein, an intriguingly queer reenvisioning of the famous Mary Shelley novel.
Frustrated with the mundane homogeneity of life in their DC suburb, Dan Kois, a senior editor for Slate and his lawyer wife, Aliya, decided to take their two adolescent daughters on a sabbatical of sorts, living in three different countries over the course of a year. The result is How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together, an account of what that year was like, perfect for stressed-out parents who daydream of doing the same thing. If poetry is more your speed, you can't go wrong with Matthew Zapruder's meditative Father's Day, a collection of poems that explore parenting with equal parts wonder and grace. Then there's Nathan Englander's Kaddish.com, an irreverent look at what sons owe their fathers, and fathers their sons, in an Orthodox Jewish community. And if the dads in your life prefer explanatory nonfiction, there's always Malcolm Gladwell, patron saint of the dad book, with his latest tome: Talking to Strangers.
James Beard Award–winning food writer Toni Tipton-Martin really put her foot into Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking, which includes 100 recipes, from buttermilk fried biscuits to coconut lemon layer cake (yum!). Along with the its gorgeous photography, Tipton-Martin gives incredibly informative historical context for each recipe. A worthy addition to any home cook's bookshelf. Alison Roman, food columnist for the New York Times, just published her second cookbook, Nothing Fancy: Unfussy Food for Having People Over, which is as useful as it sounds. If you're very into sushi, you might want to preorder Stuff Every Sushi Lover Should Know, a charmingly illustrated pocket guide by Marc Luber and Brett Cohen. It's brave for two white men to write about sushi from a place of authority in 2019, but fortunately these guys appear to have done their homework. If you like beautiful writing about food, consider purchasing Iliana Regan's Burn This Place; the first memoir by a chef to be long-listed for a National Book Award, it's a moving account of Regan's ascent from Midwestern farm child to owner of the Michelin-starred Chicago restaurant Elizabeth. Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food From 31 Celebrated Writers is another great get in this regard, featuring searing personal essays from writers as disparate as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Claire Messud. Plus, it comes with recipes! (Read an excerpt here.)
The case for ending mass incarceration continues to pick up steam throughout the country. In Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, Emily Bazelon, a New York Times Magazine staff writer and a lawyer by training, reveals how the criminal justice system is weighted in favor of the prosecutor. For a more immediate yet lyrical look at the effects of mass incarceration, consider Reginald Dwayne Betts's poetry collection Felon. If you need to motivate the people in your life to take climate change more seriously Greta Thunberg's No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, a collection of the Swedish activist's speeches is a great gift for anyone looking to get galvanized. If you're the kind of person who jokes about the downfall of capitalism all the time, consider preordering Why You Should Be a Socialist by Current Affairs Editor-in-Chief Nathan J. Robinson, a helpful primer on what socialism actually means.
Always Be My Maybe star and stand-up comic Ali Wong has written Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life, a book addressed to her two young daughters. The gag is, they are way too young to read this delightfully raunchy memoir that begins with an explicit description of how Wong's "White Walker" hands made guys' penises go soft. If you're looking for something a little more genteel, consider comic Josh Gondelman's Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results. (Read an excerpt here.) For a more ruminative and eccentric read, pick up Jenny Slate's Little Weirds, which is just like the name — an eclectic mix of observations filtered through Slate's distinct narrative voice.
Mira Jacob's Good Talk is an illustrated memoir that focuses on conversations she has with her young son, who is of both Indian and Jewish heritage. Jacob intersperses the conversations with scenes from her own life; the result is an engaging look at a modern American family. Liana Finck's Excuse Me: Cartoons, Complaints, and Notes to Self is a fun collection of doodles the New Yorker cartoonist. And former BuzzFeeder Nathan W. Pyle's Strange Planet is a perfect match for anyone who likes their comics weird and extraterrestrial.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement is a stunning feat of investigative journalism that documents how the two New York Times reporters were able to unearth the Harvey Weinstein story. If you're going to read that, you might as well get Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow, who was equally responsible for unearthing a lot of the initial explosive #MeToo reporting. Ben Westhoff's Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic offers a comprehensive account of how fentanyl went from being cooked up in a science lab in 1959 to becoming one of the most lethal street drugs out there. If you like to keep on international affairs, consider former BuzzFeed News reporter Mike Giglio's Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate, which is based on his reporting in the Middle East and tracks the rise of ISIS. (Read an excerpt here.) And for a case of chilling intrigue, buy From Russia With Blood: The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West by BuzzFeed News' global investigations editor, Heidi Blake, based on BuzzFeed News' 2017 reporting about the mysterious deaths of Russians on British soil that nabbed a 2018 Pulitzer nom. (Read an excerpt here.)
Before Prince died, he anointed journalist Dan Piepenbring as the official chronicler of his life story. The Beautiful Ones is the end result, and it's as revealing, heartwarming, and genuinely strange as the artist himself was — full of never-before-seen family photos, handwritten notes and lyrics, and stories of Prince's sui generis genius. A must-have for fans of the Purple One. For a memoir of a different tack, try Tegan and Sara's High School. The identical twin duo have mined their formative high school years in Calgary, Alberta, for this unorthodox memoir, which comes on the heels of a new album of remixed songs they wrote in high school. (Check out our review here.) For '70s rock fans, you can't go wrong with Debbie Harry's autobiography, Face It, which offers a front-row seat into the life of the pioneering Blondie lead singer. And then there's Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, considered the definitive biography of the rocker. If you're a hip-hop head, you've got to get Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest; — it's a beautiful meditation on the pioneering rap group and one of the rare books about hip-hop to be long-listed for a National Book Award. Kathy Iandoli's God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop is another hip-hop must — chronicling the oft-overlooked contributions of women MCs like Roxanne Shanté and Missy Elliott to, yes, Nicki Minaj and Azealia Banks.
In Akwaeke Emezi's Pet, an allegorical YA debut that was long-listed for a National Book Award, monsters aren't supposed to exist in the city of Lucille — but when one appears, a young trans girl named Jam has to figure out how to get rid of it. Also on that National Book Award list: Jason Reynolds' Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, a collection of short stories, each centering around a different kid in middle school. If you like YA romance, then you'll want to cop Mary H.K. Choi's Permanent Record, about a debt-riddled college dropout who works at a bodega and ends up falling for a social media influencer. David Yoon's Frankly in Love is another great get on the romance front. When Frank Li falls in love with a white girl, he concocts a hilarious scheme to fool his conservative Korean parents. (Read an excerpt here.)
Queen Elizabeth's personal dresser, Angela Kelly, has written a memoir, The Other Side of the Coin: The Queen, the Dresser and the Wardrobe about her 25-year relationship with Her Majesty that comes with never-before-seen photos of the Queen and some of her more memorable outfits. Anglophiles, unite! If you prefer a more fantastical, romantic bent to your Anglophilia, get Jasmine Guillory's Royal Holiday, which tells the story of a woman falling in love with the Queen's private secretary. If you watch The Crown but wish it were 10,000% gayer, cop Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue, in which the son of an American president and the son of a British royal have a will-they-won't-they affair.
Burnout is real, y'all. In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, art critic Jenny Odell encourages us to radically reconsider our attitudes toward work and demonstrates how capitalism intentionally alienates us from each other and perpetuates overworking. If you're more on a mental health tip, check out The More or Less Definitive Guide to Self-Care, by former BuzzFeeder Anna Borges.' It's an alphabetical guide that doles out advice on everything from how to set proper boundaries to how to find a therapist. Molly Burford's The No Worries Workbook is a good get too, with 124 different prompts for dealing with anxiety — including an adult coloring book section if that's your jam.
Helen Hoang, whose 2018 novel The Kiss Quotient was a breakout hit, is back with The Bride Test, about a young Vietnamese American man who has trouble expressing his emotions and the mixed-race Vietnamese woman who's determined to help him love again. James Gregor's Going Dutch is another fun romp, a very millennial take on modern dating for a young gay grad student named Richard living in New York. For a slightly grimmer portrayal of the dating scene — we're talking postdivorce and middle-aged — check out Taffy Brodesser-Akner's biting, hilarious Fleishman Is in Trouble. And if you loved last year's Conversations With Friends, you'll love Sally Rooney's latest novel, Normal People, (also set to be a series on Hulu) about two childhood friends, Marianne and Connell, who end up at the prestigious Trinity College in Dublin and are clearly into each other, though hijinks ensue.
Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift is an epic page-turner that fuses magical realism and sci-fi together for an utterly engrossing, centuries-spanning Zambian epic. Other solid page-turners: Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale sequel, The Testaments, and Ta-Nehisi Coates's debut novel, The Water Dancer. And if you want to win, like, an Olympic medal for long reads, check out Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, which clocks in at a whopping 1,000 pages and has been dubbed the Infinite Jest of our age.
The good folks at Canadian-based publisher Biblioasis have whipped up some adorably cute classic Christmas ghost stories with signature illustrations. Read Daphne du Maurier's The Apple Tree or Elizabeth Gaskell's The Old Nurse's Story as if they're brand new. Morgan Parker's Magical Negro is another good buy. Her funny, moving poems are a wonderful ode to black womanhood. Also to consider: Imani Perry's Breathe: A Letter to My Sons — a great addition to the epistolary memoir. Changing tacks, somewhat, you might also want to get Avidly Reads Board Games by Eric Thurm, a short little ditty put out by New York University Press that looks at the history of board games. And Mary Gaitskill's novella, This Is Pleasure — a trenchant, nuanced take on #MeToo that was first published in the New Yorker — is worth acquiring too.
Illustrations by Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News  |
| Stefan Dziemianowicz Reviews Growing Things by Paul Tremblay - Locus Online Posted: 24 Nov 2019 08:30 AM PST
Growing Things is Paul Tremblay's latest short fiction collection, after Compositions for the Young and Old and In the Meantime, some of whose contents it shares. It's also his first book after a trio of novels – A Head Full of Ghosts, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, and The Cabin at the End of the World – that have placed him at the forefront of distinguished writers of contemporary horror fiction. It's impossible not to detect resonances between the book's 19 stories (two original to the volume), written over the past 15 years, and the novels written both after and around them, and it's safe to say that readers who enjoy Tremblay's novels are going to appreciate the dynamic the short stories share with them. The tales that bookend the collection are outtakes of sorts from A Headful of Ghosts, both cast in the form of the freaky stories that Marjorie, the self-consciously tragic (and psychologically unbalanced) protagonist of that novel, tells her younger sister, Merry, its narrator. "The Thirteenth Temple", the book's closer, is a parable about inscrutable community rituals and insular social relationships that evokes the outsider themes of the fiction of Shirley Jackson, a strong influence on Tremblay's novel. "Growing Things" is different – a story that incorporates Marjorie, Merry, and their mostly absent father into an apocalyptic scenario that may be occurring just beyond their front door. It's one of several tales which foregrounds an intimate domestic drama against a vaguely suggested backdrop of widespread catastrophe – alluded to by a character in the story "_________" as "the world just ended, everyone disappeared or died or whatever, and all that's left is us" (a reference that seems as good as touchstone as any for the plot of The Cabin at the End of the World). In "Swim Wants to Know if It's as Bad as Swim Thinks", this dynamic takes the form of the experiences of an emotionally distressed mother who abducts her child from custody to a refuge secure from an onslaught of rampaging monsters overrunning the landscape – all of which could be just be a figment of her delusional imagination. Tremblay's most powerful story in this vein is "It's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks", a poignant, child's-eye view of a pleasant family outing whose tenor changes drastically when something calamitous happens in the world beyond the vacation cottage and the parents have to put on perfect poker faces to shield their children from its enormity. For several of the stories, Tremblay breaks the "fourth wall" of the narrative, drawing the reader intimately and ineluctably as a participant into the events by the tale's end. In "Something About Birds", the viewpoint character, a young enthusiast of horror fiction, interviews a reclusive writer and asks for a specific interpretation of the cryptic funeral procession that concludes his famous story of the same name. When the young man returns by invitation to a social gathering at the writer's residence, he is unwittingly indoctrinated into a mysterious ritual that appears to bear out the darker implications of that funeral procession. "Nineteen Snapshots of Denisport" is related as a sequence of numbered captions for a series of photographs, each of whose images the story's narrator describes for the reader's benefit. As the images grow more and more portentous, the narrator scrambles the sequencing of one, eventually revealing that his is not an omniscient narrative voice, but rather one being addressed to a specific someone, whom he implicates in the story revealed by the photos, and whom he has called to account for them. This story also shows Tremblay's facility with segmented narratives. A number of the book's selections are built from chapters or fragments that invite the reader to apply his or her own worst imaginings as the glue that stitches their pieces together. Tremblay presents this as subtly as the events in "The Teacher", in which a beloved high school teacher exposes his students to images of pain and death from beyond the classroom walls and whose impact is gauged from degree of dysfunction and behavioral problems it breeds in those who view them, and as self-consciously as in "A Haunted House is a Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken", a clever interactive tour of a multiply haunted house which gives the reader the option to skip certain rooms and their ghosts, but with no chance of mitigating the story's final horror. Tremblay pursues this approach to perfection in "Notes from the Dog Walkers", presented as a series of notes left over a four-month span by a rotation of employees from a dog-walking service intended to reassure the owner of their fulfillment of their daily duties. The notes make up an amusing collage that gradually show each walker's personality and the degree of his or her dedication–or ineptitude – at the job. One walker, though, who signs himself "KB," is different: an individual who begins prying into the owner's life through assumptions they make based on effects observed in the owner's home, and whose insinuations imply that if said owner is not Paul Tremblay, then he's a reasonable facsimile thereof, and that the walker feels astute enough a critic of literature, genre fiction, and the dog-owner's own oeuvre, that he can teach him a thing or two about horror – whether he wants to learn it or not. It's a tour-de-force of a fourth-wall breaking story, and KB's cranky rants about genre writing and popular appraisals of horror fiction show the same critical insight that compelled Marjorie, in A Head Full of Ghosts, to subject her unwitting family to a nightmare experience distilled out of her personal familiarity with decades of contemporary horror fiction. "Notes for 'The Barn in the Wild"' – which appears to take its cue from Into the Wild, John Krakauer's similarly titled non-fiction fiction book – is a magnificently eerie tale about an adventure writer (like Krakauer) researching the life of a young man who died under horrible circumstances in the wilderness (like Krakauer's subject, Christopher McCandless) and who, in stumbling upon notes jotted by the young man about his experiences, seems on the verge of being seduced by the same cosmic forces that appear to have led the young man to his death. Tremblay wrote it for an anthology tribute to the fiction of fellow horror writer, Laird Barron, and it is one of several such stories selected from thematically specific anthologies to which he contributed, among them "Where We All Will Be" (for a tribute to the work of Thomas Ligotti), "Questions for the Somnambulist" (for a tribute to the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and "Her Red Right Hand" (for a tribute to Mike Mignola's comic Hellboy). Tremblay's willingness to work in the creative universes of other artists as well as his own, and to do it so well, says more about his versatility and fearlessness as a writer than any of the foregoing commentary can. Stefan Dziemianowicz, Contributing Editor, is author of The Annotated Guide to Unknown and Unknown Worlds and a collection of re-told urban legends, Bloody Mary and Other Tales for a Dark Night, and editor (with S.T. Joshi) of three-volume reference work Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia and of more than thirty anthologies including Bram Stoker Award-winning Horrors: 365 Scary Stories, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories. Between 1991 and 1999, he edited critical magazine Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction. His critical work on horror and fantasy fiction has appeared in Washington Post Book World, Lovecraft Studies, and other publications, and he is a regular contributor to Publishers Weekly. This review and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.
 |
| You are subscribed to email updates from "famous short story,short stories for high school" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
Comments
Post a Comment