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ALSO A POET

One of our recommended books is Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun

A staggering memoir from New York Times-bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet

When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier.

As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove,

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ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING

One of our recommended books is Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen

A searching, sharply observed debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time.

How do we take stock of a life—by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. Meanwhile, she becomes the caretaker for her aging stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia.

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ART OF PROTEST

One of our recommended books is Art of Protest by De Nichols

From the psychedelic typography used in “Make Love Not War” posters of the ’60s to the solitary raised fist, some of the most memorable and striking protest artwork from across the world and throughout history deserves a long, hard look. Readers can explore each piece of art to understand how color, symbolism, technique, and typography play an important role in communication. Guided by activist, lecturer, and speaker De Nichols’s powerful narrative and stunningly illustrated by a collaboration of young artists, this volume also has plenty of tips and ideas for creating your own revolutionary designs. This is a fully comprehensive look at the art of protest.

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THE BALLERINAS

One of our recommended books is The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Dare Me meets Black Swan and Luckiest Girl Alive in a captivating, voice-driven debut novel about a trio of ballerinas who meet as students at the Paris Opera Ballet School.

Thirteen years ago, Delphine abandoned her prestigious soloist spot at the Paris Opera Ballet for a new life in St. Petersburg––taking with her a secret that could upend the lives of her best friends, fellow dancers Lindsay and Margaux. Now 36 years old, Delphine has returned to her former home and to the legendary Palais Garnier Opera House, to choreograph the ballet that will kickstart the next phase of her career––and,

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THE STOLEN LADY

One of our recommended books is The Stolen Lady by Laura Morelli

From the acclaimed author of The Night Portrait comes a stunning historical novel about two women, separated by five hundred years, who each hide Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—with unintended consequences.

France, 1939

At the dawn of World War II, Anne Guichard, a young archivist employed at the Louvre, arrives home to find her brother missing. While she works to discover his whereabouts, refugees begin flooding into Paris and German artillery fire rattles the city. Once they reach the city, the Nazis will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Louvre’s art collection.

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THE GIRL WHO TROD ON A LOAF

One of our recommended books is The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

In Kathryn Davis’s second novel, Frances Thorn, waitress and single parent of twins, finds herself transformed by the dazzling magnetism of Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer of operas. At the heart of what binds them is “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a prideful girl who, in order to spare her new shoes, uses the loaf of bread intended as a gift for her parents as a stepping-stone, and ends up sinking to the bottom of a bog. Helle’s final opera, based on this tale and unfinished at the time of her death,

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