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Last year I made a haft-seen for a book display and blog post. I received immense support from staff and customers. It made me so happy watching people take photos of the table and asking me about it. So this year it was a no-brainer to make another one.
Now it holds more weight with the crisis occurring in Iran.
Unmoored by the loss of her first love, Poe Blythe has created deadly armor to protect the Outposts last dredge as it sets sail to pan for gold. Led by a man known only as The Admiral, Poe's grief and anger serves a purpose. But when her ship is attacked by drifters downriver, Poe's faith is tested. Why do the drifters hate the dredge?
Poe's survival depends on more than her engineering skills, but who can she trust?
Rabih Alameddine is the author of An Unnecessary Woman, a staff favorite here and a 2014 National Book Award finalist. If that book was blackly funny and melancholic, this (his newest) is as angry and beautiful as a lit match. Flirtatious, ribald Satan and severe Death try to sway Jacob, a gay Yemeni-born poet who's tormented by memories, to their respective rhetorical positions over the course of one night spent in a San Francisco psychiatric clinic. Satan wants Jacob to remember every painful moment from his life, and Death thinks Jacob should forget them. As Jacob revisits his past while considering each argument's merits, the novel brings its intense focus to bear on political and social issues--the 80s AIDS crisis, tech industry-fueled gentrification, the ongoing US-armed Saudi Arabian bombings in Yemen--that are urgently relevant to the present. It's ambitious, spellbinding, and related in a lyrical style that's easy to sink into.
In a house, haunted by fascism, two girls hurt each other in an irrevocable way, and another never leaves. The ghost of Morrissey eyelessly lurks behind you. A child is groomed by incels online. A Bluebeard-like character brings home countless women and girls who disappear into his workshop. Time is loose and layered in Alison Rumfitt's debut novel, an incredibly queer exploration of the way fascism rots us from the inside.
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