Staff Picks: Matthew Sciarappa’s Favorites

Set to the backdrop of a production of Beckett’s Happy Days, The Performance by Claire Thomas is a blissfully metatextual, tenderly queer, deliciously interior novel. So much about this book felt tailor made for me—the playful interpretations of Beckett especially. But Claire Thomas’s writing is brisk and wry, often tickling my exact sense of humor. She inserts cutting observations with elegance and weaves metaphors with economy. The crafting of this book is clever in the most satisfying way.

I spent a lovely week with this 1000+ page tome and savored every page—constantly surprised and completely delighted by how engrossed I was. If the length of this biography intimidates you, know that it is steadfast, illuminating, and entertaining from preface to postscript. It entwines literary criticism with biographical narrative to draw a fully-fleshed, utterly demystified portrait of Sylvia Plath. It is thorough, yet easy to follow. Pure wizardry.

Stereo(TYPE) by Jonah Mixon-Webster will shatter your expectations of poetry and rebuild them in a more tactile, visual, and aural way. In these bold and mischievous pages, you will find a chronicling of the devastation in Flint, MI, a violently scribbled self-portrait, a cacophony of Ss that form a chain link, a new mythology, a salvo of slang, and more. Mixon-Webster crashes into the page with a fiery but malleable voice, exploring a multitude of forms both traditional and new. This collection is a full-bodied performance piece captured at once.

With Teeth is a lesbian Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf baked in the Florida sun without SPF. It is a domestic fever dream. It’s a heart-warming horror novel. It’s messy and wicked and brilliant and funny and mean. Kristen Arnett writes with a comically detached, acutely observational voice—occasionally sculpting in textures of psychological thriller to amplify the real life fears of raising a child and finding stability in life. From the first page you won’t know whether to laugh, shudder, or cry. The deliberate, palpable dissonance in every moment is an utter treat to read.