2 Books Like The Runaway Restaurant

Lieberman continues his blithe defiance of norms, categories, genres, and all other stylistic straitjackets in this satisfyingly complex memoir. I’ve come to know and love this author’s talent for weaving, with wisdom and wryness and the incisive rigour of a philosophically trained mind, a dizzying welter of topics and themes into an everything’s-connected-to-everything narrative—one which is about being trans while mostly being about everything else. The book promisees that every person who reads it becomes trans, and that trans is “a flexible beginning” for which “you can pick your own secret suffix”. Once you’ve read it, I suspect you, like me, will be in the happy position of getting to wonder what suffix we’ll pick.

These six linked sci-fi stories are finely wrought in every sense: the language, the characters, the plot, the world, you name it. I greatly enjoyed the sense of delivering myself as a reader into the hands of a sophisticated and conscientious storyteller. If you love Ursula Le Guin, you’re in for a treat as Whitcher builds her society through a sociological lens, focusing especially on the oblilgations and responsibilities the characters have to one another. These are beautiful stories which do not lean away from darkness; their strong ethical core and poetic execution make this collection a standout.