Sadie Stein Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Sadie Stein

In general, the novel’s greatest pleasures — genuine twists aside — reside in the specific intersection of outsider and native, and particularly the former’s determined need to idealize, to claim, to tint whole rivers green — “a bad case of allurement.”

Sadie Stein

If you feel like reading about family dynamics, the idylls of Burgundian country living and one of the greatest love letters ever written to a mother, you need to seek out the series of sketches MY MOTHER’S HOUSE (1922) and the indelible short portrait SIDO (1929).

Sadie Stein

I will take any excuse to talk about one of my favorite novels, Iris Murdoch’s “The Sea, the Sea” — a Booker-winning philosophical fever dream that is by turns weird, lurid, slow, confounding, clumsy and beautiful…

Sadie Stein

It goes without saying that there are entire careers composed of sandy family sagas, but if you’re looking for something off the beaten shoreline, what about John Banville’s elegiac “The Sea?”

Sadie Stein

This book-length essay is, in a sense, the postmodern inquiry into the state of melancholy that the title suggests. But it’s far more; Gass expounds on the history and linguistics of the color, its mythological and artistic significance, and … well, blue stuff.

Sadie Stein

Short, propulsive, action-packed and sexy... The cast of characters ... is unforgettable, and Renée is a great feminist heroine: honest, fearless, sometimes self-destructive and always charismatic

Sadie Stein

As fun as the books are ... readers looking for a cheap thrill would have found themselves seeing the world through fresh eyes: those of a young woman eager for freedom and empowerment, exploring queer sexuality and challenging perceived norms of ambition and comportment.

Sadie Stein

It’s a must-read for Ashbery enthusiasts, but you don’t need to love or even like poetry to appreciate this story of growing up in an era when artistic potential felt limitless and the life of the mind was as vivid (almost) as that of Greenwich Village evenings.

Sadie Stein

Margarita Carrillo Arronte’s Mexico: The Cookbook is an instant classic, both for its prose and its utility, but lately my escapism has taken the form of her latest, The Mexican Vegetarian Cookbook, which will usher in spring either in spirit or fact. Even the cover is a breath of fresh air.

Sadie Stein

José Maria de Eça de Queirós was prolific, and all of his work is characterized by a keen eye for human folly and material detail — but this novel is undoubtedly my favorite. Long? Yes, but it’s a page-turner.