Book cover of Happening

Book description

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Happening as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

A friend who attended Honor Moore's event with me suggested a very different take on illegal abortion in the 2000 memoir, HAPPENING, by Nobel-prize-winner Annie Ernaux. Like Moore, Ernaux revisits an event from decades before, when she was 23 and abortion was illegal in France. (It's recently become a right enshrined in the French constitution!) It's a searing slip of book--76 spare pages--that packs a powerful punch. Shifting from the events of those days to her thoughts about them now, presented in parentheses, it's another indictment of barbaric laws that force women to seek dangerous help for procedures that should…

If you love Happening...

Book cover of The Rosewood Penny

The Rosewood Penny by J.S. Fields,

2023 Queer Indie Award Nominee!

The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.

On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…

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Memory's Eyes is a contemporary New York Oedipus novel. It is written for readers who enjoy playing with concepts and storylines, here namely the classical Oedipus myth, Sophocles' three Theban plays, the psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex, and its pop-cultural adaptations in movies, cartoons, and jokes.

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