Sara Rauch

Right after the Weather, Carol Anshaw’s fifth book, opens in a warehouse in Chicago, where Cate, a forty-something set designer, searches for the perfect desk to “pump up the visuals” of the play she’s currently working on, a play that, in her colleague’s words, “sucks.” This moment sets the scene for what plays out over the course of the novel. Cate is good at her job, and has stayed in the profession as her “cohort of theater friends… came and went along”—getting married and having children and acquiring steady jobs. She has a nice-enough apartment, though her ex-husband is currently camped […]

Patsy, the title character in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s exemplary second novel, yearns for one thing in the book’s opening pages: an American visa. Her best friend and lover, Cicely, long ago disappeared there, resurfacing in letters that promise a new life, a fresh start, and freedom. And though Patsy is a mother to a little girl, Tru, she desires nothing more than to escape the stifling life of Pennyfield, Jamaica, alone. But the American dream that Cicely speaks of is far from the reality Patsy finds when she arrives in New York City on a temporary visa. Cicely has not exactly […]

Set in the late 1990s in the Bay Area, Hilary Zaid’s debut novel, Paper Is White, follows Ellen Margolis, assistant curator at the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory, as she navigates the choppy waters of history, kicked up by two very intense and very important personal involvements. The novel opens with an Indian tale in the place of an epigraph,  about a woman who knows a story and a song, but refuses to give voice to either. The story and song tire of never being let out, and so betray the woman by shifting shape into men’s shoes and […]

Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s new novel, The Evolution of Love, brims with energy. In the opening scene, our protagonist, Lily Jones, walks west toward the San Francisco Bay Area, after flying in to Sacramento from Nebraska, in search of her older sister, Vicky. There’s been a devastating earthquake, and the region has been evacuated, but not everyone has left, and Lily, sweet, stable, dependable Lily, is hellbent on rescuing her sister, even if she has no idea if she’s still alive, even against her husband’s wishes. As she navigates the broken freeway, she comes across two abandoned pit bulls eating the […]

Block an afternoon out of your schedule, grab a copy of Camille Perri’s new novel, When Katie Met Cassidy, and get ready to laugh, cry, and rediscover your faith in romance. This romantic comedy follows twenty-something Katie—a born and bred Kentuckian now living in New York City whose hipster fiancé has just left her for her closest friend—and Cassidy, a suave native New Yorker—as they meet, resist each other, and eventually, succumb to love’s spell. Here’s the catch: Katie is straight (or is she?) Katie and Cassidy are both attorneys, and they meet as opposing counsel during a closing, but […]

What if the world had ended in 1999? How would the story of your life have changed? In Michelle Tea’s newest book, Black Wave, this is the case: as 1999 progresses, the state of the declining world moves rapidly toward decimation. The narrator, Michelle—a hard-partying, drink and drug-loving, San Franciscan lesbian writer—decides it’s time to get out of dodge, and announces her plan to move to Los Angeles. Her friends don’t believe her, but Michelle lives up to her promise—after a few more binges and a few more kisses— convincing a lover to rent a U-haul and drive her south. […]

Welcome to 10th Street, Greenwich Village, 1958. This is New York City on the cusp of a new modernity: marketing, brands, and television are ushering in the commercial age, and Sarah Schulman’s latest novel, The Cosmopolitans, is set right in the thick of it. The Cosmopolitans opens with Bette, a white secretary exiled from her Midwestern family, watching the world outside her second-story apartment the way others do movies. Life teems below, and Bette—single, in her 50s, nurturing a longstanding unrequited love—is keen to it all, creating stories to fit upon her neighbors and passersby. As Bette watches, she waits […]