Jia Tolentino's Book Recommendations

"I read Minor Feelings in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways - and Minor Feelings serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality."

"The Longing for Less, a new book by the journalist and critic Kyle Chayka, arrives not as an addition to the minimalist canon but as a corrective to it. Chayka aims to find something deeper within the tradition than an Instagram-friendly aesthetic and the “saccharine and pre-digested” advice of self-help literature. Writing in search of the things that popular minimalism sweeps out of the frame—the void, transience, messiness, uncertainty—he surveys minimalist figures in art, music, and philosophy, searching for a minimalism of ideas rather than things."

"Was so essential for me."

"This book by Emma Eisenberg, whose reporting on the Sage Smith case was so essential for me, is a really beautiful study in subverted expectations: true crime, coming-of-age, West Virginia, the arcs of each story unexpectedly kinked"

"If anyone is looking for a good book about the border, migration, humanity in the face of dehumanization."

"If anyone is looking for a good book about the border, migration, humanity in the face of dehumanization, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s beautiful memoir comes out next week, there are many passages in it that I’ve found unforgettable"

"EVERYONE BUY IT."

"I have yet to read a better book than Uncanny Valley since I read Uncanny Valley last summer & I think it'll be awhile until I do. EVERYONE BUY IT"

"A little universe (rainy Armenia, love triangles, wrestlers on the road, scheming guerrillas!) & it is so, so good."

"Happy book bday to @chris_mccorm, a writer with an extraordinary sensitivity to love & place & history, also the #1 reason I had fun in grad school. This novel is a little universe (rainy Armenia, love triangles, wrestlers on the road, scheming guerrillas!) & it is so, so good"

"This book (a rec from @the_jennitaur!) has fucked me up so bad. Recommended if you are struggling, and who isn’t, with capitalism’s ability to appropriate the act of sharing, the fact of creativity, resistance, collaboration, everything at all"

"Fucked me up so bad."

"Hope it’s required reading in HS & colleges."

"I read this book cover to cover on Saturday & it stunned me: Chanel Miller is such a lushly talented writer, with such beautiful instincts, that she does the nearly impossible by making this book easily surmount its origin point. Hope it’s required reading in HS & colleges"

"The book may surprise readers who wondered, when the sequel was announced, whether Atwood was making a mistake in returning to her earlier work. It seems to have another aim as well: to help us see more clearly the kinds of complicity required for constructing a world like the one she had already imagined, and the world we fear our own might become."

"I'm in awe of this book and the way it combines a 19th-century novel's powers of submersion with a blazingly contemporary sense of ethics. I was basically gasping as I read this saga of an ethnically Korean family in Japan - desperate to know what happened next, overwhelmed with love and sorrow."