Staff Picks: Emily Leopold’s Favorites
I’m the Foreign Subrights Coordinator for Riverhead, Viking, and Penguin Press titles, which means I help sell books from these imprints to international publishers for translation. I gravitate towards visceral literary fiction, trippy speculative fiction, and narrative nonfiction that explores gender, social consciousness, and addiction/ obsession through dark humor. All I ever want are words that mess me up, and I’ve included a few of my favorites below. For more, you can find my latest infatuations at @toobookdrunk on Instagram.
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Add to BookshelfBlack Light
by Kimberly King Parsons
“There’s another world underneath this one, easy enough to get to. ‘It’s like we’re lifting the—what is it?’ Jill said. ‘Is scrim a word?’ You could slip right out of your life”
In an interview with Write or Die Tribe, Kimberly describes one of the song she listened to during writing breaks as “fuzzy and full of heat… [capturing] such soft, perpetual longing.” And that nails it. So if you want to know exactly what it feels like to read this short story collection, listen to “Pleasure,” by Pure X.
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$15.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Real Life
by Brandon Taylor
“…when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth as if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgement.”
This novel is claustrophobic in the best possible way. It makes you feel what it’s trying to convey instead of explaining it. And my favorite way of describing it is that it’s like Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, but with science people instead of word people.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Fever Dream
by Samanta Schweblin
“They’re like worms. What kind of worms? Like worms all over.”
This is quite possibly my favorite opening line ever. Samanta does nightmares like no one else. Everyone I know who’s read it has a slightly different take on what actually happens, and after reading this trippy novella and learning what “rescue distance” is, you’ll never be able to think about anyone you love the same way again.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Priestdaddy
by Patricia Lockwood
“Why on earth do you need to know about furries?”“Because people will confess to me about them. Someone will confess to me ‘I am a furry,’ and I need to know what that is.”“It almost makes me want to turn Catholic again…”
On an online poetry forum in the early 00’s, teenage Tricia unknowingly befriended a person who was most likely the only feminist man on the internet at the time, a man who would become her husband. And if that doesn’t explain how iconic both she and this memoir are, nothing will. Once you fall in love with her too, keep an eye out for her novel coming out this spring, No One is Talking About This, which includes the most gorgeous literary internet speak I’ve ever experienced.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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My Meteorite
by Harry Dodge
“Gradients, those that happen while two thought-objects swing into simple proximity, become gooey, exciting events that actually provide ecstatic ballast. Mattering happens anyway; the universe has something oblique to say.”
“Mattering happens anyway.” Matter as in the verb, matter as in the noun. Words are perpetually dynamic to Harry. And this fluidity oozes all over this memoir-esque work. Harry’s also married to Maggie Nelson and any exposure to the brains of this genre-bending duo feels sacred.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
