Anna Jastrzembski, NYC
Anna Jastrzembski, NYC
By The Bookstore at the End of the World
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Alexandra Kleeman
$19.99Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel is wonderfully creepy, ponderous, and strange. A young woman known as “A” lives with her roommate, “B” in an unidentifiable city. The line between the two women starts to blur as B begins to dress and act like A, who can’t be bothered to care. A goes through the motions of her days — putting on makeup, watching endless hours of television, and eating nothing save for a chemical sweet known as a Kandy Kake. Nothing can shake her from her habits, that is until B disappears. Part ghost story, part missing person tale, and part cult narrative, Kleeman presents a world drained of color; where people are numbed by commercials and reality television and their need to consume and consume as a substitute for feeling.
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
Lucia Berlin
$20.00 $18.60This exceptional collection of short stories from the brilliant brain of Lucia Berlin is sure to keep you rapt and entertained with each page. Berlin has a knack for finding the miraculous in the mundane. A trip to the dentist’s office reads like a harrowing fever dream. A laundromat crackles in the Southwest sun. Cleaning women, emergency care workers, and drunks all come to life through her vivid prose as each story illuminates the underclass that keeps America afloat.
Priestdaddy: A Memoir
Patricia Lockwood
$18.00Priestdaddy is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read — no small feat considering it’s subject matter. Lockwood wrote the book after she and her husband had to move back in with her parents, owing to a surprise illness and subsequent financial loss. Needless to say, her father (the eponymous Priestdaddy) is not an easy roommate. Lockwood’s way with words is nothing short of miraculous, and it will come as no surprise that she was known as a poet before writing her memoir. Whether she’s writing about the Catholic Church, the early days of the internet, or getting drunk with an Italian priest on Christmas Eve, her wit and originality shines through.
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Carmen Maria Machado
$17.00 $15.81Playing with horror and ghost story tropes, this collection by Carmen Maria Machado subverts our expectations at every turn. A dress shop filled with ghosts, a claustrophobic writer’s retreat in the wilderness, a re-imagining of Law and Order SVU, are all fodder for Machado’s genre bending tales. Taken as a whole the collections seems to ask, how do women survive in a world that dictates how they should look, think, feel? What is the embodied cost of that gendered psychological and physical violence? Isn’t that its own kind of horror story?
The Idiot
Elif Batuman
$18.00 $16.74The droll narrator of The Idiot is a delight to spend time with, and I could’ve lived inside her head forever. Selin Karadağ is a freshman at Harvard in the early 2000s, a time when the internet was still new and email offered a radical new form of communication. She meets and falls for an older student named Ivan, and the two begin a nebulous courtship both on and offline. Batuman perfectly captures the beautiful but stuffy atmosphere of an Ivy League campus, where the excitement of learning mixes with the mundanity of days spent between the dining hall and the classroom. Selin and Ivan’s inability to articulate their true feelings for each will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever had a crush on someone they feel is their intellectual superior.
Swing Time
Zadie Smith
$18.00 $16.74Smith has the ability to create characters who feel remarkably human in their joys, their sorrows, their triumphs and their failures. She knows the importance of history and culture in shaping our identities, how trauma can be inherited through generations, and how class plays an enormous role in our lives. In Swing Time, she balances these themes on the shoulders of two girls who meet at a tap dance class in London. The story follows the girls as they grow up and grow apart, their lives unfolding in divergent paths across England, Africa, and America. As a coming-of-age-tale, Swing Time is an incisive portrait of the bonds of friendship and the importance these formative relationships have in our lives.
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
Warsan Shire
$8.05Warsan Shire’s collection of poetry is a beautiful and painful meditation on what it means to be a woman, a refugee, a mother, a daughter, and person who has to fight for their right to exist. Shire immerses the reader in a world that is being ripped apart, where thousands of people are displaced and forced to flee in order to survive. She then zooms in on individual experiences of those in migration, acknowledging their bodies, their sexuality, their desires and wants. Although it exposes the brutal realities of racism, systematic oppression, and violence, Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth is ultimately a portrayal of resilience, it is a voice that claims its right to be heard.
Anna Jastrzembski is a former bookseller and current playwright living in New York City. She can be found on Instagram (@ajastrze) and Twitter (@annajaster).