Feeding My Six-Books-a-Month Addiction

[queerbychoice]

I'm going used-book shopping online again and I need more recommendations because I get free shipping if I spend $50 and I'm not up to $50 yet. I already looked through all the books previously recommended by people on my friends list, but lots of you weren't around last time I asked and anyway, I need more suggestions now so please recommend stuff.

As a guide to my literary tastes: authors listed on my LiveJournal interests list include: Alice Walker, Allen Ginsberg, Anchee Min, Arundhati Roy, Audre Lorde, Banana Yoshimoto, Bertha Harris, Caryl Churchill, Christopher Isherwood, Don DeLillo, e. e. cummings, Edmund White, Edwidge Danticat, Emily Dickinson, Gayl Jones, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, Haruki Murakami, James Baldwin, Jeanette Winterson, Joanna Russ, Julia Alvarez, Kate Millett, Kobo Abe, Langston Hughes, Leo Tolstoy, Leslie Feinberg, Li Yu, Milan Kundera, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Pablo Neruda, Quentin Crisp, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and Tony Kushner.

But don't recommend any of those because obviously I've already read them.

Also, recommend mostly fiction because if you recommend nonfiction I probably won't be in the mood to buy it right now. Though if anyone here has read Jonathan Ned Katz's The Invention of Heterosexuality, which I've been putting off buying for a couple of years now, I'd love to hear that one reviewed.

P.S. to Raven: Don't worry, Stranger in a Strange Land is already in my shopping cart.

Comments

[illscientist.livejournal.com]

Aimee Bender: the girl in the flammable skirt. I was in love with her after like one sentence; this one's a collection of short stories. She's at the front of this "new American Magical Realism," or something, but that kinda fills your head with things she's not- she's just really good at knocking you off kilter then poking you in the exposed emotions. Or at least she's good at doing that to me.

an invisible sign of my own is her novel, and it's also very, very good, but I'd recommend the short stories, first.

Amy Bloom: I don't know what exactly to say about her, and I can't remember the titles of her short story collections, but both were fucking amazing; she's got this way of expressing the whole world in one non-obvious word. Her novel, love invents us, was pretty good- I mean, i read it in a day, and I seldom do that- but the story collections are better.

Also? Junot Diaz, Drown, if you haven't read it. More short stories. Worth the price of the book, just for the story "Aurora." (I think that's what it's called.)

Look at me, I'm captain short story. Hurrah! There you go.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention Aimee Bender; I actually just bought The Girl in the Flammable Skirt last month. I haven't even finished it yet but I did read several of the stories in it and yeah, she's definitely good. And apparently Wynn on LJ is a friend of a friend of Aimee Bender's.

Generally I prefer novels over short stories, but I do like short stories on occasion. If you haven't read it already, check out Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes.