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Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell

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Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell
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The long-awaited follow-up to Sorry to Disrupt the Peace has surpassed my wildest hopes! “Bernardian” gets tossed around a lot but Cottrell has truly earned the comparison, blending heaviness with lightness, darkness with pure radiance, in a way that feels pretty miraculous to me. An existential noir about suffering, suicide, family, and self, and equally about seeking and living one’s truth, whatever the cost. Life-affirming, funny, touching: if true humor kisses grief, this is a makeout sesh.

Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell, (List Price: $27.99, Ecco, 9780063435063, April 2026)

Reviewed by Kristen, Thank You Books in Birmingham, AL

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Wickerwork by Christian Lehnert

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Wickerwork by Christian Lehnert
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Marvelous nature poems, sentences that ground you in the world of growth, life, and abundance. Read these outside, with your lungs full of fresh air and your ears full of birdsong.

Wickerwork by Christian Lehnert, (List Price: $18, Archipelago, 9781962770248, April 2026)

Reviewed by Emily, Thank You Books in Birmingham, AL

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On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle

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On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle
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Another perfect installment of this astonishing series! Tara Selter discovers that she’s not alone inside her eternal November 18th, and the implications are deeply moving and endlessly exciting. Balle has unlocked a level of narrative that I scarcely knew was possible. Translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell deserve a lot of credit, too, for how pleasurable the work is to read.

On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, (List Price: $15.95, New Directions, 9780811238397, November 2025)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers

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The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers
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Somers’s suburban realism is sharp enough to cut glass, with more humor on a single page than most entire novels could ever hope to contain. Here, the marriage plot is replaced by the adultery plot, so innovatively executed that it results in two equally gripping storylines. Not since “Choose Your Own Adventure” has the reader been able to have it both ways! At its heart, this is a book about desire, refreshingly unmoralizing and dauntless at uncovering its sad and funny peculiarities. Smart, sexy, and ferociously readable.

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers, (List Price: $28, Simon & Schuster, 9781668081440, October 2025)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai

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A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai
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A prayer, a spiritual exercise, a meditation on the nature of time, with long, winding sentences that evoke the ploddingness of existence and the labyrinthine endlessness of the search for meaning and enlightenment. I loved the way this one made my brain feel—an alert sort of hypnosis, reminded me of some Calvino and Borges. Especially memorable was the section on how papyrus for sacred scrolls was made!

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai, (List Price: $15.95, New Directions, 9780811234474, November 2022)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck
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Jenny Erpenbeck knows exactly where to apply pressure for maximal effect. This collection is an astounding demonstration of intellect shot through with wisdom, insights gathered over a lifetime of deep engagement with art, country, family, and the vagaries of time. Those moments of clarity that are always absconding? Erpenbeck has gathered them all here, made the impermanent permanent with her words (stunningly translated by Kurt Beals).

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, (List Price: $15.95, New Directions, 9780811238113, October 2025)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

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Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
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A transcendent work that I’ll be thinking about forever. A book about living–applying precision to life’s formless mysteries, chiseling them out–much more than a book about grief. An act of generosity and courage, undertaken with breathtaking intelligence.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li, (List Price: $26, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 9780374617318, May 2025)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya

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Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya
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A powerful, singular work that made me contemplate my reading life anew. Chihaya’s thorny embrace of reading as a creative act–despite the risk to herself–opens the door for a new kind of vulnerability, one that places this memoir closer to scholarship. A bracing, pleasurable, moving, and gorgeously wrought account of the sublimities and liabilities of a life in books, of what happens when the life of the mind has a mind of its own.

Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya, (List Price: $29, Random House, 9780593594728, February 2025)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

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Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson
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In Kevin Wilson’s latest, we have a different kind of sibling drama–one in which the siblings in question don’t even know the others exist. That is, until they’re thrown together in a PT Cruiser on a road trip to ambush–er, confront–the father who abandoned them all. When Madeline “Mad” Hill, a farmer in rural Coalfield, Tennessee, meets her older half-brother Rube, a mystery writer, the quiet life she’s built for herself is turned on its head. Likewise, when the two of them leave Coalfield together to seek out their younger half-sister Pepper, they disrupt a propulsive college basketball season. And it doesn’t stop there. As they collect still more siblings, more lives are interrupted, more trajectories diverted. But as the siblings get to know each other and themselves, they find that maybe the thing that was missing from each of their lives was each other. Traveling west, this group of just-introduced siblings follows the path and pieces together the puzzle of their shared, absent father–a man who methodically tried on different identities and shed them as he sought his own happiness, forsaking theirs. With heart, humor, and empathy, Kevin Wilson explores the divide between the family we’re born with and the family we choose, and what happens when they intersect.

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson, (List Price: $28.99, Ecco, 9780063317512, May 2025)

Reviewed by Joyce McKinnon, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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Ecstasy: Poems by Alex Dimitrov

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Ecstasy: Poems by Alex Dimitrov
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Ecstasy reads like a film, shot on an iPhone, bone-crushing and mesmerizing. Dimitrov is THE contemporary poet, and his work is unforgettably original.

Ecstasy: Poems by Alex Dimitrov, (List Price: $29, Knopf, 9780593802922, April 2025)

Reviewed by Emily Tarr, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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Wrong Norma by Anne Carson

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Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
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Anne Carson’s finest book yet, in a genre all its own. These pieces have Carson’s iconic flair for classical motifs and absurdity, mingling with several heart-wrenching stories. If you’ve never read Anne Carson, I feel that of all her books, this is the place to start. If you’re a verifiable Carson-iac, you’ll be astounded, moved, and deeply in love with these stunningly original and brilliant stories & poems.

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson, (List Price: $17.95, New Directions, 9780811230346, February 2024)

Reviewed by Emily Tarr, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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The Antidote by Karen Russell

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The Antidote by Karen Russell
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A master class in character development and working with multiple perspectives. Karen Russell in top form. I really needed a novel about how to piece together a future when it seems like the world is damaged beyond repair.

The Antidote by Karen Russell, (List Price: $30, Knopf, 9780593802250, March 2025)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Goodrich, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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Black in Blues by Imani Perry

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Black in Blues by Imani Perry
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A stunning, kaleidoscopic work of intense research and imagination, spanning centuries, disciplines, and profoundly moving possibilities, from one of our most innovative thinkers. Perry’s writing deserves its own rich shade of blue. I was totally transported by this book, and the depth of love and feeling that created it.

Black in Blues by Imani Perry, (List Price: $28.99, Ecco, 9780062977397, January 2025)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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We Do Not Part by Han Kang

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We Do Not Part by Han Kang
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Devastating, gorgeously written and translated. I will be thinking about this book, about Kyungha and Inseon, the snow and the trees, the birds Ama and Ami, and the generations of spirits brought to life in these painful, breathtaking pages. Reading Han Kang’s work feels like a precious honor, and in the incredible wake of her Nobel win, We Do Not Part is an astounding introduction for many new readers.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, (List Price: $28, Hogarth, 9780593595459, January 2025)

Reviewed by Emily Tarr, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck

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The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck
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It’s hard to think about Holocaust literature without the words of Adorno in my head–“to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”– but the discussion is too important, and the correctives too far-ranging. I physically ached while reading this book, and did, finally, cry–while reading Tuck’s acknowledgments. The care she has taken here to give voice to a young Catholic girl who would otherwise remain a number is evident both from the considerable research and the unflinching tone. The story that emerges feels piercingly, viscerally true, and alive. I won’t soon forget Czeslawa and her very real, youthful humanity, a girl in full bloom, afraid of her father, curious about boys, comforted by stories and prayer and the vastness of her imagination before it was starved to death. The insights into Poland’s history before and during the war, as well as the glimpses into the lives of various (real) notorious figures, create a haunting scaffolding for Czeslawa’s story. A heartbreaking novel whose integrity can’t be impugned.

The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck, (List Price: $24.99, Liveright, 9781324095729, December 2024)

Reviewed by Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama

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