Kat is a New Hampshire native with a passion for music, dark humor, and taking long drives to nowhere. These are her current favorites.
Before Watsky hit the Billboard 200 chart with his album X Infinity, he was just a scrawny kid from San Francisco with big dreams and a smart mouth. This collection of essays, both sentimental and comic, gives snapshots of the poet, actor, musician, and rapper’s life, through his awkward middle school existence, Alaskan fishing trips, rickety old tour busses, and even his ramshackle Boston apartment (and the other people who lived there). Equal parts hilarious and heartfelt, Watsky proves that he’s not just a clever musician, but a talented writer and thoughtful artist.
Mona Awad tells a harrowing story of a writer trying to overcome her writer’s block while simultaneously refusing to look deeper into herself or acknowledge her own needs or desires. This lack of self-knowledge leads her to a friendship with a group of young MFA students who are always ‘workshopping’...with disastrous consequences. The writing feels cinematic at times, moody and illustrative. Home, identity, love (both romantic and platonic), inner (and outer) demons, and academic elitism all play a part in this spectacle of creation and destruction. Awad creates a kind of magic that changes with the wind, a contemporary Prometheus tale.
As a child, Mia Corvere vowed to avenge her family, wrongfully taken from her, and set her heart on becoming a Blade of the Red Church, an assassin devoted to the Darkness. Now grown, Mia is on a mission to end three of the most powerful men in her country and in the process, find out who--or what--she really is. Kristoff’s story has something for everyone--love, vengeance, murder, rivalry, comedy, swordfighting, ancient magic--and be sure, gentlefriends, Nevernight does not disappoint.
At the height of the London Blitz, Emmeline Lake is 22 years old and idealistic with dreams of becoming a lady war correspondent, Doing Her Bit in the fight against the Axis Powers. Instead, she lands a job as a typist for a formidable advice columnist named Mrs. Bird. Emmeline is deeply sympathetic to the plight of the ladies who write in, but her boss refuses to answer any mail that is the slightest bit “improper”, so Emmeline decides to take matters into her own hands. A small peek into the upheaval in Western society that the war brought around for women, Dear Mrs. Bird is an affectionate tale of doing the right thing, even when it’s not convenient.
Oksana is her Ukranian family’s “little idiot”, a nickname which defines her she grows older, always trying hard to do right but constantly getting into trouble. Her world is populated by her outlandish family members--her hot-headed, sexy grandmother, her gentle and giving father, her neurotic and loving mother--and a revolving door of people who, intentionally or not, change Oksana as she grows up from idealistic little girl to thoughtful young woman who, like the rest of us, is trying to find meaning in an absurd world at the start of the millenium. Not quite American, but also not quite part of the Ukranian and Russian cultures she comes from, Oksana desperately seeks something that feels like home, which feels….deeply relatable, actually. After all, aren't we all trying to get home?
It’s 1988 and a girls night spent skinny-dipping goes horribly wrong. High school sophomores Gretchen and Abby find themselves in deep over their heads when strange and inexplicable things start happening all around them...and sometimes to them. They’ve been friends since the fourth grade, so what is Abby to do when she’s suddenly all alone fighting a demonic possession? All the campiness of a well-loved 80’s girl gang movie with the most unsettling of horrors found in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist are well-married in this horror-comedy from Grady Hendrix (Horrorstor, Paperbacks from Hell, We Sold Our Souls). Nostalgic, fast paced, and wholly absurd, this coming-of-age tale lends importance to the power of friendship to give us the strength to change our lives or to make things right for those we love best.
