Reading List Winter–Spring 2023: New fiction, short stories, poetry, and a memoir by actor Geena Davis (CFA’79, Hon.’99)
Reading List Winter–Spring 2023
New fiction, short stories, poetry, and a memoir by actor Geena Davis (CFA’79, Hon.’99)
About Face
Liveright, 2022
By William Giraldi (GRS’04)
Giraldi, a CAS Writing Program master lecturer, examines celebrity culture in a Boston-set novel about a journalist profiling a self-help guru with a messianic following.
Animal Truth and Other Stories
University of New Orleans Press, 2022
By Sharona Muir (GRS’80)
Playful and haunting ecofabulist short stories about extinction and loneliness, motherhood and mermaids.
The Archivists
TriQuarterly Books, 2023
By Daphne Kalotay (GRS’94, UNI’98)
Kalotay’s story collection won the 2021 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, with characters facing the 2008 economic collapse, the pandemic lockdown, and more personal crises.
Briefly, a Delicious Life
Scribner, 2022
By Nell Stevens (GRS’13)
A ghost narrates this first novel—a tale of desire and discovery set in 1838 and focused on the composer Frédéric Chopin and the writer known as George Sand—by the author of the memoir Bleaker House.
The Clearing
Black Lawrence Press, 2022
By Lisa Hiton (COM’09, GRS’11)
This poetry collection couches sometimes dark thoughts in a visceral exploration of the pastoral.
The Cold Hard Light
Blackstone Publishing, 2022
By Chris Amenta (GRS’13)
Another Boston-set novel, this one about a troubled man obsessed
with his sister’s assailant, recently paroled from prison.
Common Grace
Beacon Press, 2022
By Aaron Caycedo-Kimura (GRS’20)
The first full poetry collection from an award-winning student of Robert Pinsky, BU’s William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a CAS professor of English and of creative writing. It explores the inherited trauma within his Japanese American family, his life as an artist, and his marriage.
Creep: A Love Story
Clarion Books, 2022
By Lygia Day Peñaflor (Wheelock’95)
The story of Holy Family High School’s cutest couple and the stalker who will do anything—anything—to keep them together.
Dying of Politeness: A Memoir
HarperOne, 2022
By Geena Davis (CFA’79, Hon.’99)
The actor’s memoir reveals how she became a “badass” over time and a leader in the fight for gender parity in Hollywood.
The Hero of This Book
Ecco, 2022
By Elizabeth McCracken (CAS’88, GRS’88)
A novel about a writer’s relationship with her late mother, who shares a name and more with McCracken’s own mother, a former editor of Bostonia.
The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land
Random House, 2022
By Omer Friedlander (GRS’20)
A sometimes whimsical story collection from a debut writer details real-life and strange connections around the Middle East, from Jerusalem to Jaffa to Beirut.
The Mean$
(Mariner, 2022)
By Amy Fusselman (GRS’89)
This satirical novel looks at real estate lust and what a second home in the Hamptons really means.
The Mother I Never Had
Hadleigh House, 2022
By Gary Goldstein (COM’78)
Nate mourns the father who raised him—and soon meets a woman who says his personal history may not be what it seemed.
This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You
W. W. Norton & Company, 2022
By Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas (GRS’09)
Rogers is both a cognitive neuroscientist and a spectacularly successful record producer now teaching at Berklee. Ogas has a degree in computational neuroscience from BU. Together they explain why your favorite songs work for you.
The West Wing and Beyond: What I Saw Inside the Presidency
Voracious, 2022
By Pete Souza (COM’76)
Yet another book of beautiful and often meaningful photos from inside the White House, Air Force One, and beyond by the former chief official White House photographer.
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