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Powell's Staff: New Literature in Translation: November 2023 (0 comment)
Here we are, with our final literature in translation round-up of 2023! And what a year it’s been, full of great books from around the world, all enthusiastically recommended by Powell’s booksellers. We’ll be back with a new post in January 2024, but until then, we hope you enjoy these eight new titles, released in November. On this list...
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  • Powell's Staff: Best Books of 2023: Fiction (0 comment)
  • Powell's Staff: Best Books of 2023: Nonfiction (3 comments)

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Luster

by Raven Leilani
Luster

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780374194321
ISBN10: 0374194327
Condition: Like New


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Powell's Picks of the Month

Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.


Staff Pick

A dark, literary, funny, impossible-to-put-down book, Luster is centered on 23-year-old Edie. The novel covers a period of her life intersecting with a much older lover, his wife, and their adopted teenage daughter. In phenomenal prose (Edie's descriptions and observations about the world are impeccable), Raven Leilani has captured complex, intimate ways that people help and hurt each other, the drudgery of modern workplaces and the gig economy, twisting paths of finding creative passions, the pains of IBS, and so much more. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

No one wants what no one wants.

And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we’re ready to take it?

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties — sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage — with rules.

As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren’t hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric’s home — though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.

Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani’s Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life — her hunger, her anger — in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

Review

“...Luster is absolutely captivating. I didn’t so much read it, as gulp it down. There’s so much to learn here, so much to admire. Leilani is an irreverent, impeccable stylist — a voice we need right now.” Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

Review

“Raven Leilani's sentences pulse and writhe and shimmer and gut-punch. Above all they tell the truth, even when it hurts.” Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House

Review

“Raven Leilani crafts a beautiful, bighearted story about intimacy and art that will astound and wound you. I couldn’t put this one down.” Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers

About the Author

Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Narrative, Yale Review, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. She won Narrative’s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest and the Matt Clark Editor’s Choice Prize, as well as short fiction prizes from Bat City Review and Blue Earth Review. Luster is her first novel.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780374194321
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
08/04/2020
Publisher:
FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX
Pages:
240
Author:
Raven Leilani

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This title in other editions

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