The Self Unstable
10 best books like The Self Unstable (Elisa Gabbert): The Swallows, The Need, The Body in Question, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, The Word for World is Forest, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Sing to It: New Stories, The Balloonists, Bluets
| Author | Lisa Lutz |
| ISBN | 1984818236 |
A new teacher at a New England prep school ignites a gender war--with deadly consequences--in a provocative novel from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Spellman Files series.
What do you love? What do you hate? What do you want?
It starts with this simple writing prompt...
| Author | Helen Phillips |
| ISBN | 1982113162 |
When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows.
But...
5 hours, 26 minutes
From the author of Heroic Measures (“Smart and funny and completely surprising . . . I loved every page” —Ann Patchett), Act of God (“A feat of literary magic”—Booklist) and, with Amy Hempel, The Hand That Feeds You (“An unnerving, elegant page-turner”...
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.
“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.”—Celeste...
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...
The Word for World is Forest
Centuries in the future, Terrans have established a logging colony & military base named "New Tahiti" on a tree-covered planet whose small, green-furred, big-eyed inhabitants have a culture centered on lucid dreaming. Terran greed spirals around native innocence & wisdom, overturning...
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...
| Author | Amy Hempel |
| ISBN | 1982109114 |
“All the tawdry details I’m dying for are in these stories, but they’re given out like old sweaters—without shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way—hiding, alone, obsessed—and that’s ok.” —Miranda...
| Author | Eula Biss |
| ISBN | 1931236070 |
Poetry. "Eula Biss writes in spare brushstrokes that evoke an emotional universe, by turns funny, scary, dreamlike, haunting. These prose poems are shards of gleaming observation, fragments of intimacy and illusion. Here we find our families and ourselves, our words and our silences"-Martin Espada....
| 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...
| Author | Jenny Boully |
| ISBN | 0979118921 |
Cultural Writing. Poetry. Essays. Comprised of footnotes to a non-existent text, THE BODY: AN ESSAY is a meditation on absence, loss and disappearance that offers a guarded "narrative" of what may or may not be a love letter, a dream, a spiritual autobiography, a memoir, a scholarly digression, a treatise...
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
| Author | Claudia Rankine |
| ISBN | 1555974074 |
In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century.
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the...
| Author | Daniel Gumbiner |
| ISBN | 1944211551 |
At 28 years old, Eli "Berg" Koenigsberg has never encountered a challenge he couldn't push through, until a head injury leaves him with lingering headaches and a weakness for opiates. Berg moves to a remote Northern California town, seeking space and time to recover, but soon finds himself breaking...
