Recommendations based on "Reservoir Bitches"

One Hundred Years of Solitude

From the bestselling author of the National Book Award Finalist The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School comes a revenge story told with nuance, heart, and the possibility of healing. An ideal next read for fans of Laurie Halse Anderson. Ariana Ruiz wants to be noticed. But as an autistic girl who never talks, she goes largely ignored by her peers--despite her bold fashion choices. So when cute, popular Luis starts to pay attention to her, Ari finally feels seen. Luis's attention soon turns to something more, and they have sex at a party--while Ari didn't say no, she definitely didn't say yes. Before she has a chance to process what happened and decide if she even has the right to be mad at Luis, the rumor mill begins churning--thanks, she's sure, to Luis's ex-girlfriend, Shawni. Boys at school now see Ari as an easy target, someone who won't say no. Then Ari finds a mysterious note in her locker that eventually leads her to a group of students determined to expose Luis for the predator he is. To her surprise, she finds genuine friendship among the group, including her growing feelings for the very last girl she expected to fall for. But in order to take Luis down, she'll have to come to terms with the truth of what he did to her that night--and risk everything to see justice done.

Part memoir, part lies, this imaginative tale is a story about loving a woman made of paper, about the wounds made by first love and sharp objects.

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small publisher, magical style, and setting in a remote Caribbean village were hardly the usual ingredients for success in the literary marketplace. Yet today it ranks among the best-selling books of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it continues to enter the lives of new readers around the world. How did One Hundred Years of Solitude achieve this unlikely success? And what does its trajectory tell us about how a work of art becomes a classic? Ascent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, from the moment García Márquez first had the idea for the novel to its global consecration. Using new documents from the author’s archives, Álvaro Santana-Acuña shows how García Márquez wrote the novel, going beyond the many legends that surround it. He unveils the literary ideas and networks that made possible the book’s creation and initial success. Santana-Acuña then follows this novel’s path in more than seventy countries on five continents and explains how thousands of people and organizations have helped it to become a global classic. Shedding new light on the novel’s imagination, production, and reception, Ascent to Glory is an eye-opening book for cultural sociologists and literary historians as well as for fans of García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“Offers hope in the face of desperate odds” – ELLE Magazine, ELLE’s Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020“[D]isturbing and unforgettable memoir…This wrenching story brings to vivid life the plight of the many families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.” – Publisher’s Weekly, STARRED REVIEW“[The] haunting and eloquent…narrative of a Guatemalan woman's desperate search for a better life." -Kirkus, STARRED ReviewPEOPLE Magazine Best Books of Summer 2020TIME Magazine Best Books of Summer 2020PARADE Best Books of Summer 2020Compelling and urgently important, The Book of Rosy is the unforgettable story of one brave mother and her fight to save her family.When Rosayra “Rosy” Pablo Cruz made the agonizing decision to seek asylum in the United States with two of her children, she knew the journey would be arduous, dangerous, and quite possibly deadly. But she had no choice: violence—from gangs, from crime, from spiraling chaos—was making daily life hell. Rosy knew her family’s one chance at survival was to flee Guatemala and go north.After a brutal journey that left them dehydrated, exhausted, and nearly starved, Rosy and her two little boys arrived at the Arizona border. Almost immediately they were seized and forcibly separated by government officials under the Department of Homeland Security’s new “zero tolerance” policy. To her horror Rosy discovered that her flight to safety had only just begun.In The Book of Rosy, with an unprecedented level of sharp detail and soulful intimacy, Rosy tells her story, aided by Julie Schwietert Collazo, founder of Immigrant Families Together, the grassroots organization that reunites mothers and children. She reveals the cruelty of the detention facilities, the excruciating pain of feeling her children ripped from her arms, the abiding faith that staved off despair—and the enduring friendship with Julie, which helped her navigate the darkness and the bottomless Orwellian bureaucracy.A gripping account of the human cost of inhumane policies, The Book of Rosy is also a paean to the unbreakable will of people united by true love, a sense of justice, and hope for a better future.

Auntie Encarna's House Is The Queerest Boarding House In The World. For Camila, Who Grew Up As A Boy In A Small Town In Argentina, But Now Lives As A Woman, It Is Home. The Queens Around Her Are Her Family: Auntie Encarna, Who Is 178 Years Old; Maria, Who Can't Speak, And Has Feathers Growing Out Of Her Back; And A Host Of Other Glittering Characters. At Night, They Head Together To Sarmiento Park, In The Heart Of The City, A Large Green Lung With A Zoo And A Theme Park. Potential Johns Cruise By In Their Cars, Slowing Down To Inspect The Group Before Selecting One With The Wave Of An Arm. The Chosen Woman Answers Their Call. Night After Night, Nothing Changes. Until, One Freezing Night, Auntie Encarna Hears Crying Coming From The Bushes. A Baby Boy, Lost And Alone. Auntie Encarna Puts Him In Her Handbag And Brings Him Home, Determined To Protect Him. To Be A Mother. But The Forces Of Oppression, Prejudice And Fear Surround The Family And Their Foundling - And Soon The Happiness They Clutched At Begins To Seem Like An Impossible Fairy Tale. -- Source Other Than Library Of Congress.

“A deeply reported, razor smart, up-close account of the Great Drug War . . . Absolutely courageous in its fairness and search for answers.” —William Booth, Washington Post Bureau Chief for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean   The city of Juárez is ground zero for the drug war that is raging across Mexico and has claimed close to 60,000 lives since 2007. Almost a quarter of the federal forces that former President Felipe Calderón deployed in the war were sent to Juárez, and nearly twenty percent of the country’s drug-related executions have taken place in the city, a city that can be as unforgiving as the hardest places on earth. It is here that the Mexican government came to turn the tide. Whatever happens in Juárez will have lasting repercussions for both Mexico and the United States.   Ricardo Ainslie went to Juárez to try to understand what was taking place behind the headlines of cartel executions and other acts of horrific brutality. In The Fight to Save Juárez, he takes us into the heart of Mexico’s bloodiest city through the lives of four people who experienced the drug war from very different perspectives—Mayor José Reyes Ferriz, a mid-level cartel player’s mistress, a human rights activist, and a photojournalist. Ainslie also interviewed top Mexican government strategists, including members of Calderón’s security cabinet, as well as individuals within US law enforcement. The dual perspective of life on the ground in the drug war and the “big picture” views of officials who are responsible for the war’s strategy, creates a powerful, intimate portrait of an embattled city, its people, and the efforts to rescue Juárez from the abyss.

From the bestselling author of The Shadow of the Wind comes the intriguing mystery that started it all..."We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine."Fifteen-year-old Oscar Drai meets the strange Marina while he's exploring an old quarter of Barcelona. She leads Oscar to a cemetery, where they watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the last Sunday of each month. At exactly ten o'clock in the morning, a woman shrouded in a black velvet cloak descends from her carriage to place a single rose on an unmarked grave. When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her, they begin a journey that transports them to a forgotten postwar Barcelona--a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons--an reveals a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets. Carlos Ruiz Zafon's haunting Marina has long been a cult classic in Spain and is now an international bestseller.

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes’ novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría’s popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes’ masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel’s major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual’s dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that world mesh with his desires.

The intellectual autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.From its origins, the liberal doctrine has represented the most advanced forms of democratic culture, and it is what has most defended us from the inextinguishable “call of the tribe.” This book hopes to make a modest contribution to that indispensable project.In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel laureate, “tireless in his quest to probe the nature of the human animal” (Marie Arana, The Washington Post), maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and his alienation from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.The works of Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel helped the author enormously during those uneasy years. They showed him another school of thought, one that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class, or party and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa’s engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal ideology.