Our July book pick is PINK SLIME by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary. It’s a deeply moving novel about what it means to survive ... a mysterious plague.
❤️ 🦠 ❤️ 🦠
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.
An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, PINK SLIME is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.
Get your copy of PINK SLIME ❤️ out tomorrow ❤️ @bookshop_org ... Enter TeaTimeJuly for 15% off when you check out. Code expires July 31. Link in bio.
Our June book pick is WE WERE THE UNIVERSE by Kimberly King Parsons. It’s a beautiful novel about Texas, motherhood, and psychedelics.
⭐️🩷⭐️🩷
The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit’s best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They’ll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and — most heartbreaking of all — her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.
When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine — long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother’s phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit’s mind, she’s reminiscing about the band she used to be in — and how they’d go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She’s imagining an impossible threesome with her kid’s pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?
Get your copy of WE WERE THE UNIVERSE @bookshop_org ... Enter TeaTimeJune for 15% off when you check out. Code expires June 30. Link in bio ⭐️
Our May book pick is CINEMA LOVE by Jiaming Tang. It’s a sweeping and tender novel about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them.
🩵🩵🩵
For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meager existence in New York City’s Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented the Workers’ Cinema: a theater where gay men cruised for love.
While classic war films played, Old Second and his countrymen found intimacy in the screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men, guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But when Old Second’s passion for his male lover is revealed, a series of haunting events unfold, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.
Pre-order your copy of CINEMA LOVE ✨officially out May 7✨ @bookshop_org ... Enter TeaTimeMay for 15% off when you check out. Code expires 5/31. Link in bio.
Our April book pick is THE HEARING TEST by Eliza Barry Callahan. It’s a novel about a woman who must reorient her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness.
☁️☁️☁️
When an artist in her late twenties awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with sudden deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year - a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned - while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.
Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters - with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers - making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.
Get your copy of THE HEARING TEST @bookshop_org …Enter TeaTimeApril for 15% off when you check out. Link in bio 🤍
☁️☁️☁️
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