Books by Sarah Chihaya
Bibliophobia: A Memoir
“A must for the obsessive reader.”—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot
A “soul-baring, witty, and slyly provocative” (Whiting Foundation) memoir about reading, writing, and depression
Books can seduce you.They can annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books, Sarah Chihaya thinks, has had this kind of unsettling literary encounter. She calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners.”
Chihaya’s Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school,andits electrifying treatment of race exposed her deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. Transformed, Chihaya knew she’d build her life around books, searching for another Life Ruiner that could show her how to live. But a lifelong struggle with depression thwarted the resolution to every plot, and when she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, the world became an unreadable blank page.
Alternately searing and darkly humorous, Bibliophobia is a story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, and many other texts, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.
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$29.00
The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Literature Now)
by Merve Emre, Sarah Chihaya, Katherine Hill, Juno Jill Richards
Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together.
In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.
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