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August 6, 2019
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week - August 6, 2019
In the weekly Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week, the Montreal bookstore recommends several new works of fiction, art books, periodicals, and comics.
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly is one of Montreal's premiere independent bookstores.
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-delusion by Jia Tolentino
This debut collection of original essays by beloved cultural critic and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino is one of this year’s most hotly-anticipated nonfiction titles. Hailed as the millennial Susan Sontag or internet-age Joan Didion, Tolentino has written a book about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. She considers (among other things) the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; and the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.
Laguardia by Nnedi Okorafor
Laguardia is the debut original comic from Hugo and Nebula award- winning author and the writer of Marvel's Shuri, Nnedi Okorafor! In an alternate world where aliens have integrated with society, pregnant Nigerian-American doctor Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka has just smuggled an illegal alien plant named Letme Live through LaGuardia International and Interstellar Airport...and that's not the only thing she's hiding. She and Letme become part of a community of human and alien immigrants; but as their crusade for equality continues and the birth of her child nears, Future--and her entire world--begins to change.
Berta Isla by Javier Marias
The latest novel from prolific, award-winning Spanish master Javier Marias is a gripping story of intrigue and missed chances--at once a spy story, murder mystery, cerebral caper, and a profound examination of a marriage founded on secrets and lies. When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson--the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. But when Tomás returns to Madrid from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned.
Jacob’s Ladder by Ludmila Ulitskaya
Jacob’s Ladder is a family saga spanning a century of recent Russian history from one of Russia’s most renowned literary figures (and Man Booker International Prize nominee) Ludmila Ulitskaya. Perhaps her final novel, it represents the summation of the author’s career, devoted to sharing the absurd and tragic tales of twentieth-century life in her nation. With a scale worthy of Tolstoy, Ulitskaya’s story spans from the seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day in a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory.
Valerie by Sara Stridsberg
Originally published in Sweden in 2006 (and now longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize), Valerie is a strangely funny, entirely unconventional novel that conjures the life, mind, and art of Valerie Solanas—the writer, radical feminist, author of the SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol. A leading feminist in Sweden and one of the most acclaimed writers in Scandinavia, Sara Stridsberg here blurs the boundaries between history and fiction, self-making and storytelling, madness and art, reconstructing this most intriguing and enigmatic of women.
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other Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly new comics and graphic novel highlights)
Book Notes (authors create music playlists for their book)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Short Cuts (writers pair a song with their short story or essay)
WORD Bookstores Books of the Week (weekly new book highlights)
