February arrives after a difficult January for Los Angeles and its surroundings; If you haven't read much, it's understandable. Maybe some of the titles on this month list encourage you to take a break if you can and explore different places.
Some of them, like Manhattan from the beginning of the 20th century, are animated. Others, like the contemporary Baltimore, feel a little lonely, while the Ballet studios of the Soviet era are competitive and redolent of sweat and tobacco smoke. The Seattle in which a computer genius has grown in contrast to the coastal forest city in a television masterpiece of a great director. Happy reading!
FICTION
Psycho Victorian: a novel
By Virginia Made
Book: 208 pages, $ 25
(February 4)
Winifred Noty arrives in Ensor House as a governess with a secret, which would be enough for many novels taking place in Victorian England. However, Winifred immediately tells us that in three months, “everyone in this household will be dead”, which includes his accusations, Drusilla and Andrew. Winifred could be the most intelligent, most spiritual and brutal psychopath to adorn the pages of a comedy in manners which is transformed into a horror spectacle – all in a rigorous time with repression.
Mutual interest: a novel
By Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
Bloomsbury: 336 pages, $ 29
(February 4)
When Vivian Lesperance, who knows that she is queer, decides to marry Oscar Schmidt, who is still in clasp, she does so knowing that she and Oscar can transform the concern of the manufacture of soap from her family into large companies – and that they can also have an unconventional cleaning which allows them to love them at the same time. As their business develops, Oscar's love for their colleague Squire Clancey; Finally, everyone will have to recognize the limits.
Brother Brontë: a novel
By Fernando A. Flores
MCD: 352 pages, $ 28
(February 11)
Despite its title which dates back to the fiction of the 19th century, this new Novel by Flores takes place in a quasi-filure dystopia and continues its wonderfully crazy style. We are in 2038 in Three Rivers, Texas, and the mayor Pablo Henry Crick intends to enlarge his neocon program, having already prohibited reading (he distributes books of books to young people unhappy of the city). When two of the last literacy inhabitants increase, chaos ensues. Thank God.
Three days in June: a novel
by Anne Tyler
Knopf: 176 pages, $ 27
(February 11)
The bad news: Anne Tyler cannot write forever. The good news: her latest novel proves that she is always inimitable and always offers new perspectives on ordinary people whose life can be silent but that you have surprises. Here, an unsatisfied private school teacher, Gail Baines, faces her daughter's wedding, her ex-husband and a rescue cat. At the end of this deeply compassionate and very full -minded novel, several lives will have changed.
Maya and Natasha: a novel
By Elyse Durham
Mariner Books: 384 pages, $ 30
(February 18)
Twin sisters born at the same time as the Soviet Union both follow a dance training at the Feeder school for the Great Kirov Ballet. However, a single family member is authorized to participate in visits outside the iron curtain, and when Maya and Natasha realize that they will be separated, one betrays the other and causes a schism that resonates in the rest of their lives. Durham's prudent writing on the dualities looks like a delicate choreography.
Non-fiction
Bibliophobia: a memoir
By Sarah Chihaya
Random house: 240 pages, $ 29
(February 4)
Some books, says the author Chihaya, are “ruins of life”, by which she means that they open our perspectives received and make us question everything, our families of origin to our dreams for the future. Nevertheless, she built a life on books and criticism and teaching in a university of Ivy League. When a nervous breakdown led to hospitalization, the author noted that she could no longer read his own life. His account offers an urgent look at mental health and intellect.
Source code: my beginnings
By Bill Gates
Knopf: 335 pages, $ 30
(February 4)
Warning reader, especially if you are a reader who wants to read only on the story of Microsoft: the subtitle is there to remind us that this book covers the childhood, education and secondary education of Bill Gates. It ends just when he decides to leave Harvard and start Microsoft. He plans to write two other memories, so that these Microsoft-History stans should be satisfied. But first, it is worth reading your challenges as well as its endless curiosity.
David Lynch's Dreamscape American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema
By Mike Miley
Bloomsbury Academic: 288 pages, $ 34
(February 6)
David Lynch, a real author who died on January 15 at 78, leaves a rich and varied heritage explored in this volume. Star works include “Blue Velvet”, “Twin Peaks” and various collaborations. Miley, a cinema researcher, examines these works and many others as they affect (and are affected by) other great classics of American culture, literature (“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman) to mixtapes in the city of Los Angeles herself.
Disposable: the contempt of America for the subclass
By Sarah Jones
Avid Reader Press: 304 pages, $ 30
(February 18)
The world pandemic resulted in so much death, and many of them came from groups left to the virus due to age, working state or physical challenges. The journalist Jones shows how much poverty and systemic inequalities regularly put first -line caregivers and their patients in damage, revealing in a coherent way the true attitudes of our country towards social justice. It pleads for a new path to follow, but clearly sees the sad reality.
Song so wild and blue: a life with the music of Joni Mitchell
By Paul Lisicky
Harperone: 272 pages, $ 28
(February 25)
Lisicky, noted for his prose in novels and memories, beautifully delimits how artists of different types influence each other by tracing his discovery and his passion for the work of the singer-songwriter Mitchell. When Lisicky was a gay teenager, this work also provided him with comfort by attention to loneliness and struggle, almost always put on hope. By paying tribute to his lady of the canyon, Lisicky proves that he also contains music.
