A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

9 best books like A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Anne Boyer): Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Deaf Republic: Poems, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, When My Brother Was an Aztec, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays, A Sand Book, Motherhood, Calamities, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Author	Andrea Lawlor
ISBN	0986086991

It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from...

Deaf Republic: Poems

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1555978312

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political...

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Author	Jenny Odell
ISBN	1612197493

This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, shows us a new way to connect with our environment and reveals all that we’ve been too distracted to see about our selves and our world.

When the technologies we use every day collapse...

When My Brother Was an Aztec

Author

Natalie Díaz

"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone,...

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

Author	Alexander Chee
ISBN	1328764524

From the author of The Queen of the Night, an essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist—and how we form our identities in life and in art.

As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary” by the New York Times,...

A Sand Book

Author	Ariana Reines
ISBN	0986437360

A Sand Book is a poetry collection in nine parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness...

Motherhood

Author	Sheila Heti
ISBN	1627790772

From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children.

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman...

Calamities

Author	Renee Gladman
ISBN	1940696275

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes." —Eileen Myles

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original...

Proxies: Essays Near Knowing

Author	Brian Blanchfield
ISBN	1937658457

A go-for-broke essay collection that blends cultural close reading and dicey autobiography

Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting,...