Carrie Brownstein's Reading List

"Baldwin is one of my favorite writers and cultural critics. His work always feels both relevant and revelatory. This book-long essay on film and moviegoing is part memoir, part homage to cinema, and also an exploration of the ways corrosive ideas seep into the collective imagination."

"A dizzying, almost surreal bildungsroman about a search for a familial love that is just shy of non-existent."

"A seminal book of essays. A meditation on the mythologies of the West and on America itself. Trenchant, prescient, timeless."

"Brownstein spoke with Gordon on the release of her memoir. Watch here ."

"Katharine Hepburn wrote an amazing memoir just called Me , which is such a great title."

"On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes’ (‘For Sidney Bechet’). Such spare and soaring prose to examine stunted, anxious lives."

"The most outlandish people can be a stimulus for love.’ A Southern Gothic novella on the eccentricities and vicissitudes of the heart."

"Moore is one of the best short story writers of all time. She is a strange, wondrous and occasionally unmerciful storyteller while also being incredibly profound."

"Such an amazing book. What I liked about it was the form, you know? It starts out very theoretical, like it’s just this ontological exploration, very polemical, and you can feel that it’s kind of brittle up top, and dense. And like, as she is changing—this is why it’s like a poem—it starts to just open, the narrative, it’s like you can feel the air in the pages, and the whole story starts to loosen, and she’s kind of loosening from this place of just being, you know, in her head. I thought it..."

"Her writing has always seemed to transcend her music. It exists in the same world, but it also can be divorced from it and you can just read her books and think, Who is this fascinating writer ?"

"Ruminations on family, brotherhood, and the ways we are simultaneously — sometimes devastatingly — both different and similar to our kin."

"One of my favorite history books. It’s a story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and of an epistolary and academic friendship between two men, one of whom (unbeknownst to the other) was an inmate at an insane asylum."

"An impressionistic, experimental novel that is filled with an immense and delicate beauty. Told in soliloquies, the book explores a vast and tender interior landscape."