#fsgbooks

[rynreads91]

absolution by jeff vandermeer review

I want to thank @fsgbooks and NetGalley for the ARC of Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer to read before it's released!

I rated this five stars, and honestly, it's almost a six star read for me. But jesus, Lowry, what the actual fuck? (Spoilers below)

I loved Old Jim's POV. I loved his heartbreak and how angry he was at the replacement Cass, who he does come to love. I loved Cass, too, or the fake one anyway, for not really pushing Jim to love her but just to work with her. Just to adhere to their mission from Central. Fuck Jack and Jackie, though, like jesus christ. I loved his thoughts on the OG expedition of biologists into the Forgotten Coast/Dead Town. I loved the descriptions of everything; as usual, VanderMeer has a way with words.

And then...then we get to Lowry. And fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. I???? Hate this guy. Hated him with every fiber of my being, but for some reason, kept hearing my friend Brandon's voice in my head as I read his POV. And I love my friend Brandon, he's like a brother to me. I...the cannibalism...I read that section at like midnight and was so incredibly grossed out, but not grossed out enough to put it down and finish it later. It just kind of spurred me on.

I was SO GLAD to see Karen/Cass back at the end and then she kills Lowry which I was like "THANK FUCK". But it was so good. I enjoyed this. It felt like an ending to the series. So. If you liked the first three, I think you might enjoy this one. It might not be a five star for you, might not even be a four star, but I think it sheds light on the before times, on the early Southern Reach, and that was interesting to me.

[the-page-ladies]

*******👍🥳CONGRATULATIONS🥳👍****** Congratulations Raven Leilani for winning the VCU Cabell First Novelist award for her book Luster!!! LUSTER is the story of Edie, a young black woman and aspiring author, who after losing her job finds herself living with her older lover, his wife and their adopted daughter. Full article link https://news.vcu.edu/article/Raven_Leilani_wins_the_VCU_Cabell_First_Novelist_Award_for_Luster #contemporarybook #fsgbooks #fictionbook #adultfiction #ravenleilani #bookaward #romancebook #lusterbyravenleilani (at Cleveland, Ohio) https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ2o3ycDFhP/?utm_medium=tumblr

[loynosca]

[joeyart]

Sneak peek of a new book I illustrated, written by #MarisaPolansky. The book is called “hello my name is... how adorabilis got his name”. Coming out may 8th. Preorder available on amazon! And yes, it’s about a tiny #octopus Hello My Name Is . . .: How Adorabilis Got His Name https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374305064/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_nBM1Ab4RTHW4K #joeychou #joeychouart #adorabilis #fsgbooks #macmillan #clownfish #jellyfish #ocean

[fsgbooks]

A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.

Joan Didion (from her interview with the Paris Review)

[grolierpoetry]

10 Books to Read by the Fire

1. Don’t call us Dead, Danez Smith, (Graywolf Press, 2017)   poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. . . . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech.”—The New Yorker“

Smith activates a spectrum of emotions in material that could justifiably remain tragic, bringing pathos and several senses of humor.”—The Nation 2. Half Life Collected Poems 1965-2016, Frank Bidart, (FSG, 2017) “Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and re framed, restless line by restless line.” _Amazon

3. A Handful of Blue Earth, Venus Khoury-Ghata, (Liverpool Press, 2017) In her preface the distinguished American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker describes the poems included here as 'exploded narratives, re-assembled in a mosaic or labyrinth in which the reader, like Ariadne, finds a connecting thread'. Khoury-Ghata's book, published in her eighty-first year, is testimony to this Lebanese poet's enduring brilliance. Earlier translations by Hacker were described by Alica Ostriker as emerging 'from the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God'. In two moving sequences, we find Khoury-Ghata's voice retuning to familiar themes of death, intimacy, enforced silence and the surreal horror of war. Rendered faithfully and exquisitely by Hacker's concise eye, the poems mark an important contribution to world poetry in translation.   4. Whereas, Layli Long Soldier, (Graywolf Press, 2017) “WHEREAS is an excavation, reorganization and documentation of a structure of language that has talked the United States through its many acts of violence. . . . She has built a poetics that refuses . . . boundaries. . . . Long Soldier's poems are radical in structure and constraint. . . . WHEREAS challenges the making and maintenance of an empire by transforming the page to withstand the tension of an occupied body, country and, specifically an occupied language. . . . Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Using elliptical prose, blank spaces, crossed-out text, and Lakota words, Long Soldier articulates both her identity and her literary undertaking.”—The New Yorker 5. Olio, Tyhembia Jess, (Wave Books, 2016)

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

6. February Poems, Ben Mazer, (ILora Press, 2017)

“What we have noticed in Ben Mazer’s collection is that there is in him a strong feeling that unless we bring our world to a state of wonder once more nothing we do will ever matter.  Of course difficulties do remain in the way of our summoning this sense of wonder.  For instance, there are issues having to do with the overload of our various sensibilities; the tensions arising from misaligned engagements resulting from the various anxieties which feed on doubts.” - Ifeanyi Menkiti

7. Shallcross, C.D. Wright, (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) C.D. Wright characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet. - Cooper Canyon Press 

8. Little Kisses, Lloyd Schwartz, (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

“Called “the master of the poetic one-liner” by the New York Times, acclaimed poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz takes his characteristic tragicomic view of life to some unexpected and disturbing places in this, his fourth book of poetry. Here are poignant and comic poems about personal loss—the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, his mother’s failing memory, a precious gold ring gone missing—along with uneasy love poems and poems about family, identity, travel, and art with all of its potentially recuperative power. Humane, deeply moving, and curiously hopeful, these poems are distinguished by their unsentimental but heartbreaking tenderness, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, formal surprises, and exuberant sense of humor.” _ University of Chicago Press

9. Reading Across Languages Aibach/Celan, Donald Wellman, (Annex Press, 2016)

“Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. "My desire is to erase boundaries, ' says Wellman, and in many ways, this book is an exploration of how language can aid that project. Based in consideration of translation, Wellman's musings pass through the lens of critical theory and continental philosophy, a lens that gathers diverse approaches and focuses them into a single, illuminating beam. At once erudite and intimate, autobiographical and analytical, Wellman effectively erases the distinction between text and translation, between writer and translator-and with a particularly graceful momentum that comes through in both his prose and his poetry." --Cole Swensen 

10.Fast, Jorie Graham, (Ecco Press, 2017) Graham’s great body of work has more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing. . . . She is to post-1980 poetry what Bob Dylan is to post-1960 rock: she changed her art form, moved it forward, made it able to absorb and express more than it could before. It permanently bears her mark.” —New York Times In her first new collection in five years—her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive to date—Graham explores the limits of the human and the uneasy seductions of the post-human. Conjuring an array of voices and perspectives—from bots, to the holy shroud, to the ocean floor, to a medium transmitting from beyond the grave—these poems give urgent form to the ever-increasing pace of transformation of our planet and ourselves. As it navigates cyber life, 3D-printed “life,” life after death, biologically, chemically, and electronically modified life, Fast lights up the border of our new condition as individuals and as a species on the brink.

[fsgbooks]

SWEEPSTAKES! Attention Joan Didion fans: Enter to win a set of these beautiful Didion reissues by clicking the photo above to head to our Instagram account. All you have to do is follow @fsgbooks on Instagram and tag a friend in a comment on the Instagram post. We will send a set to you and to your friend. 📚📚Sorry, US residents only. Sweepstakes ends Dec 13.

(Full sweepstakes rules: https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2017/11/joan-didion-sweepstakes/)

[fsgbooks]

Attention all readers! We're grateful for your interest in FSG and our books and authors. Take this survey to tell us about your reading habits and enter for a chance to win a $100 Visa gift card.