“Intense situations plumbed with candor and a finely focused attentiveness to nuance…You Should Pity Us Instead is an authoritative debut.”
–Rosellen Brown, award-winning author of Before and After and Tender Mercies

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Gustine excels at dramatizing the cunning of the human animal—a creature renowned for its skill at self-sabotage—as well as celebrating the freakish grace that can sometimes strike an ordinary life. You Should Pity Us Instead is a devastating, funny, and astonishingly frank collection.

–Karen Russell, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of Swamplandia!

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The Accidental by Ali Smith

by | Feb 5, 2015 | Recommended Reading

In this marvelous novel a troubled British family vacationing outside London in the summer has their lives invaded by a young woman each thinks has been invited by someone else in the family.  Smith’s inventive use of form to relate a simple plot is the...

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

by | Dec 28, 2014 | Recommended Reading

The Georgia Flu causes a worldwide pandemic; in a matter of weeks 99% of humans are dead. Over the next twenty years pockets of individuals form towns of 50-100 people, but the world is without electricity, without gas, without most of everything around which we live...

The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson

by | Nov 12, 2014 | Recommended Reading

Despite the sensationalist premise–a male ballet dancer is abducted by three women, sexually violated and tortured–this novel eschews the gruesome, the voyeuristic and the easy.  A subtle, precisely-written meditation on trauma, gender roles and fate,...