Book cover of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Book description

A New York Times Notable Book

A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate.com, and Time

In Venice, at the Biennale, a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist named Jeff Atman meets a beautiful woman and they embark on a passionate affair.

In Varanasi, an unnamed…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Geoff Dyer has a funny, trenchant persona in his writing on travel and art, and this novel delivers those pithy insights through two fictional alter egos. This book does so many things I love, giving me fresh ways to see places, books, and ideas I know but never thought of this way, including new ways of thinking about the self.

The book’s first part tells of a middle-aged Brit called Jeff at the Venice Biennale; in the other, an unnamed middle-aged Brit relates an ill-fated voyage to one of India’s holiest—and most polluted—sites. The title is an obvious play on…

From Padma's list on doubling.

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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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