Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood

In 1840s Toronto, a woman named Grace Marks, just shy of 16 years old, escapes with a man after one or both of them murder their employer and his housekeeper-turned-mistress.

The Internet of Garbage

Sarah Jeong

Jeong calls bullshit on the predominant stance that online harassment is an unsolveable problem.

Can’t and Won’t

Lydia Davis

Critical and flippant, funny and devastating, calming and maddening.

On Booze

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This hurried collection of short works by Fitzgerald from New Directions purports to be about booze but is really more steeped in it.

The Girl in the Road

Monica Byrne

In a near future marked by rising sea level, two girls embark on ambitious ventures.

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald’s book is part memoir of grief, part close literary study, and somehow also a tale of rewilding—not of the landscape, but of the author herself.

Prelude to Bruise

Saeed Jones

Thirsty and fierce. There are lines in here that absoultely floored me.

The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander

“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it,” writes Michelle Alexander, in her damning history of mass incarceration.

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

A planet named Urras is host to a habitable moon known as Anarres. Some seven generations ago, a group of communist settlers left Urras to build a colony on the moon, after which the communication between the colonists and the planet all but ceased.

The Real World of Technology

Ursula M. Franklin

A criticism of technology that puts the needs of humans ahead of the needs of technology.