10 Books to Read This March – Chicago Review of Books


March is always one of our favorite months of the year for books, and this year is no exception! We’re especially excited to see so many great books are out this month from independent presses. Here are some of the books we’re most looking forward to this month.

Recollections of My Nonexistence
By Rebecca Solnit
Viking

“In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer–books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.”

The God Child
By Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Bloomsbury

“Maya is the only child of an expat Ghanaian couple based in Germany, where as the sole African girl in her school, the pressure is on her to succeed. While her father is taciturn and reserved, her mother–heir to a crumbling dynasty in Ghana–is glamorous and charismatic. Maya is both in awe of and intimidated by her overbearing beauty and her ability to command a room, especially with tales of the family’s former glory that seem so far removed from Maya’s reality. But when Maya’s mother adopts her god child, Kojo, his mission to heal their story begins to bring to Maya the sense of possibility and purpose she has longed for.”

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
By Paul Lisicky
Graywolf Press

“When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia?”

My Morningless Mornings
By Stefany Anne Golberg
Unnamed Press

“In a ranch house in a Vegas suburb, Golberg’s peculiar brand of insomnia lives alongside an ailing father, a professor on permanent leave from the local university. Her mother has moved out, her older brother has gone to college, and she is alone with the night, resisting the fundamental unit by which we measure our lives: the next day itself.”

Lake Like a Mirror
By Ho Sok Fong; Translated by Natascha Bruce
Two Lines Press

“In precise and disquieting prose, Ho Sok Fong draws her readers into a richly atmospheric world of naked sleepwalkers in a rehabilitation center for wayward Muslims, mysterious wooden boxes, gossip in unlicensed hairdressers, hotels with amnesiac guests, and poetry classes with accidentally charged politics—a world that is peopled with the ghosts of unsaid words, unmanaged desires and uncertain statuses, surreal and utterly true.”

Days Of Distraction
By Alexandra Chang
Ecco

“The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why–she doesn’t know yet. So begins a journey for the twenty-four-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, she reports on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires and start-up bros while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager. And when her longtime boyfriend, J, decides to move to a quiet upstate New York town for grad school, she sees an excuse to cut and run. Moving is supposed to be a grand gesture of her commitment to J and a way to reshape her sense of self. But in the process, she finds herself facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. Captivated by the stories of her ancestors and other Asian Americans in history, she must confront a question at the core of her identity: What does it mean to exist in a society that does not notice or understand you?”

Thin Places: Essays From in Between
By Jordan Kisner
FSG

“Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author’s past and present preoccupations.”

The Last Taxi Driver
By Lee Durkee
Tin House Books

“Written by a former cabbie, The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a middle-aged hackie’s daylong descent into madness, heartbreak, and murder. Lou–a lapsed novelist and UFO aficionado–drives 70-hour weeks for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a north Mississippi college town among the trailer parks and housing projects. With Uber moving into town and his way of life fast vanishing, his girlfriend moving out on him, and his archenemy-dispatcher suddenly returning to the state on the lam, Lou must keep driving his way through a bedlam shift even when that means aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his Town Car.”

Like Flies From Afar
By K. Ferrari; Translated by Adrian Nathan West
FSG

“Mr. Luis Machi is an unforgettably loathsome and hilarious Argentinian oligarch who made his fortune collaborating with the worst elements of society–parasites, pushers, and secret policemen. He has a cocaine habit, a collection of three hundred ties, ten million dollars in the bank, and a bloody corpse in the trunk of his BMW…but as far as the body goes, he’s completely innocent. He has no idea who the victim could be, or who among his many, many enemies might be trying to frame him for murder, and he doesn’t have much time to find out…”

Sharks in the Time of Saviors
By Kawai Strong Washburn
MCD

“Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a groundbreaking debut novel that folds the legends of Hawai’ian gods into an engrossing family saga; a story of exile and the pursuit of salvation from Kawai Strong Washburn.”



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