Aesop’s Perfect Books to Read Before Bedtime
Whether boasting soothing prose or quietly compelling ideas, the following titles — as selected by Aesop’s resident bibliophiles — are at once captivating and calming, making them ideal companions in the moments before sleep.
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Add to BookshelfRecitatif
by Toni Morrison
In this 1983 short story—the only short story Morrison ever wrote—we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other’s throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Recitatif keeps Twyla’s and Roberta’s races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality.
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$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
by Warsan Shire
With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Black Is King, introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. In Shire’s hands, lives spring into fullness. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Time Is a Mother
by Ocean Vuong
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
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$25.00Buy from Other Retailers:
