To read in 2019

Books I’m excited to read this year:

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
This was one of last year’s big fiction books I kept hearing about.

Outline by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk also keeps coming up as someone I should read, both for her themes and style. This is the first in a trilogy, the third of which was published last year.

A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell
I read a fragment of Powell’s diaries (excerpted in The New Yorker and was intrigued). She seems to have fallen into obscurity, though was a friend of Hemingway’s and Edmund White’s and published several novels. This one is about NYC before and during WWII.

Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
A non-fiction account of five New York School women painters (Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell) and their time. Published last year, big and fat, which is exciting in a biography, sounds really good.

Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro
A memoir/meditation on marriage, recommended by a friend whose taste I trust.

I just noticed I don’t actually own any of these, which means there is still a big pile of unread books at home I should put on this list, as well…