MADreads

Morgan Parker, poet author of the explosive collection There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, leaves the title open to interpretation, but with one exception: She isn’t suggesting that Beyoncé isn’t beautiful, because Beyoncé is beautiful. Like the rest of us, Parker is clearly a fan. She is however suggesting that her muse -- the “flawless” Queen Bey -- might not actually be the be-all, end-all for American popular culture or Black womanhood.  

Eve Babitz is a woman who will not be pigeonholed. A fixture of the 1970s Los Angeles scene, she was an infamous party girl and muse. She was also an intellectual, artist, journalist, and novelist, whose talent was often overshadowed by her buxom stature and a hedonistic appetite for men, booze, and food. Now an elderly recluse, Babitz is receiving a righteous rediscovering, with a steady reissuing of her works over the last few years.

It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that Michelle Zauner, a musician who goes by Japanese Breakfast, has an interest in food. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It might however be a surprise that Zauner has written such a thoroughly lovely and reflective memoir, called Crying in H Mart, that celebrates Korean food among the sometimes strained bonds of family and cultural identity, in light of her mother’s unexpected cancer death.

Hurricane Season, a novel about the unexplained murder of a "witch” in a bottomed-out Mexican village, as told by several unreliable narrators, does not have paragraphs. If this is a deal breaker, move it along. Author Fernanda Melchor did not come to coddle, she came to slay.