A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All tagged New York City
Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022) is a novel that plays with various texts as it scaffolds a story across genre: a novel, two memoirs (although one reads more like an incomplete autobiography), and a diary. Broken into four sections authored by four different characters, Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel constructs a layered tale about a New York City financial mogul and his wife during the 1920s and 30s.
Since the publication of her 2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (or for some even before then), readers have recognized the understated brilliance of American novelist Elizabeth Strout. Something in her sparse writing makes readers feel seen; their life experience, or the life experience of those they have loved looms large, mirrored through her written word. There is unquestionably a magic at work here. I recently read Strout’s Lucy Barton novels, which begin with My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and includes Oh William! (2021) and Lucy By The Sea (2022).
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of one girl’s coming of age in the 19teens. Set, as the title suggests, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this rich novel focuses on the story of Francie Nolan. It is also, however, the story of her parents and their love, her aunts and grandmother, her neighborhood at large. Ultimately this moving coming-of-age novel explores the American promise that poor American kids, the grandkids of immigrants perhaps, might realize and the magic of that promise.
Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.
