Shelfology Book Pairing

Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

by Maxine Hong Kingston

'A brilliant memoir . . . it is about being Chinese in the way A Portrait of the Artist is about being Irish; it is an investigation of soul, not landscape, its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire; its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it . . . Maxine Hong Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts'ai Yen, who sang her sad, angry songs of China to the barbarians. It is as fierce as a warrior's voice, and as eloquent as any artist's' Jane Kramer, New York Times Book Review 'This is a delightful book . . . tells more than I ever imagined about the strangeness of being Chinese and a woman; it also gives a superb account of what it's like simply to be alive' Victoria Radin, New Society 'A strange, enchanting book . . . As a manual of self-discovery through the channels and terrors of one's own rejected communal memory, it is unbeatable' Clancy Sigal, Guardian 'As a dream - of the "female avenger" - it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword . . . reimagining the past with such dark beauty, such precision and anger that you feel you have saddled the Tao dragon and see all through the fiery eye of God' John Leonard, New York Times 'A book of fierce clarity and originality' Newsweek

Introduction by Colm Tóibín

by James Baldwin

Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is "a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction" (The Atlantic). • With an Introduction by Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of The Master. David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni's Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.