Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
10 best books like Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Brian Blanchfield): Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, A Bestiary, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays, Don't Call Us Dead, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Bluets, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
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...
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
| Author | Esmé Weijun Wang |
| ISBN | 1555978274 |
An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members...
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
| Author | Toni Morrison |
| ISBN | 0525521038 |
Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style,...
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
| Author | Jia Tolentino |
| ISBN | 0525510540 |
Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes...
| Author | Lily Hoang |
| ISBN | 0996316744 |
* Winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition, Selected by Wayne Koestenbaum *
“Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary. This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments,...
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,...
| Author | Danez Smith |
| ISBN | 1555977855 |
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten...
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
| Author | Ross Gay |
| ISBN | 0822963310 |
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death,...
| Author | Maggie Nelson |
| ISBN | 1933517409 |
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...
A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant...
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
| Author | Virginia Eubanks |
| ISBN | 1250074312 |
A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination—and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity
The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets...
| 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...
I’m honestly a 25 year old undergrad student who has pursued a degree in social work on and off for the last 7 years and that just recently changed her major to English. With this background I certainly don't trust my ability to review this book and I'm not sure why anyone else would either, but it has given...
Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair
In the eloquent tradition of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, an award-winning leader in the movement to end mass incarceration takes on the vexing problem of violent crime
Although over half the people incarcerated in America today have committed violent offenses, the focus of reformers...
Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights
| Author | Molly Smith |
| ISBN | 1786633604 |
You hear that selling sex is degrading; you hear that no one would ever choose to do it; you hear that it's dangerous; that women get abused and killed. You often hear, "There should be a law against it!" Or, perhaps just against the buyers. What do sex workers want? That's not something you hear asked very...
| Author | Ada Limon |
| ISBN | 1571315128 |
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the...
