Angie Cruz’s Guide Suggestions

Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, during which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether or not you’re on the hunt for a e book to console you, transfer you profoundly, or make you chuckle, contemplate a suggestion from the writers in our collection, who, such as you (because you’re right here), love books. Maybe one in every of their favourite titles will grow to be one in every of yours, too.

How To not Drown in a Glass of Water

How To not Drown in a Glass of Water

Angie Cruz was learning to be a designer at FIT and dealing at a Madison Avenue cashmere retailer when she switched to English literature, ultimately getting her MFA at NYU. (Edwidge Danticat was her teacher). She simply launched her fourth novel, How To not Drown in a Glass of Water (Flatiron Books), which she labored on in Google docs on her telephone throughout commutes. Her final e book, 2019’s Dominicana, which took a decade to put in writing and 4 years to promote, was shortlisted for the Girls’s Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, and GMA Guide Membership’s inaugural decide.

Born, raised, and primarily based within the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York, Cruz can also be the founder and editor of literary and humanities journal Aster(ix), an affiliate professor of English on the College of Pittsburgh, and creator of @dominicanasnyc on Instagram, a digital archive that includes Dominicans in New York.

Cruz was a visible arts main at LaGuardia Excessive Faculty, interned as an assistant photograph archivist on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, thought of getting a PhD in historical past, taught in Texas and Chile, has completed one thing inventive to assist her writing (portray, cooking, taking singing classes on YouTube), collects wood and ceramic dolls from her travels; and offered at Brooklyn Group Faculty, the place her single mom (who impressed Dominicana) studied accounting at night time and labored in a lamp manufacturing unit through the day to boost two kids.

Likes: The NYC subway, doing analysis, taking pictures, rain, tequila and darkish chocolate. Dislikes: Tenting.

The e book that:



…helped me by means of a breakup:

Abandon Me by Melissa Febos helped me breathe after I was stuffed with ache, feeling a lot despair. She writes fantastically and truthfully a couple of long-distance love affair and all of the methods she misplaced herself in it. I completed the e book and skim it once more. It was drugs.

…made me miss a prepare cease:

Why Didn’t You Inform Me? by Carmen Rita Wong. She’s an exquisite storyteller, and I instantly discovered myself invested within the household drama. It’s an essential story that explores being raised Chinese language and being Afro-Latinx, complicating the methods we take into consideration identification.


…I like to recommend over and over:

I discover myself recommending Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement on a regular basis. It’s the right present for anybody who loves Basquiat, but in addition for anybody who’s considering hybrid memoir and nice literature. I additionally suggest her novel Prayers for The Stolen, particularly to college students due to the financial system in her sentences.


…presently sits on my nightstand:

Sleeping Alone: Tales by Ru Freeman and the memoir Voice of The Fish by Lars Horn. I’m very excited to get to those.


…made me chuckle out loud:

One night time I learn When We Make It by Elisabet Velasquez to my niece across the kitchen desk and we laughed so laborious as a result of the story of Sara rising up in Bushwick, Brooklyn was painfully acquainted. What’s it that folks say? Reir para no llorar?


…I’d like became a Netflix present:

Dealing in Desires by Lilliam Rivera would make an excellent Netflix dystopic collection about Las Mal Criadas, a lady crew who’ve to determine the way to survive the Mega Metropolis imply streets.


…I final purchased:

Neruda On The Park by Cleyvis Natera and Girl of Gentle by Kali Fajardo Anstine. Each about robust ladies in not possible conditions taking issues into their very own fingers.


…has the very best title
 and …has the very best opening line…:

I like this title: The Man Who Might Transfer Clouds, A Memoir by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

And the primary line: “They are saying the accident that left me with short-term amnesia is my inheritance. No home or piece of land or chest of letters, only a few weeks of oblivion.”


…has the best ending:

From Infinite Nation by Patricia Engel: “When a cumbia got here on, he requested our mom to bop, and we watched our dad and mom sway, discovering one another’s rhythm as in the event that they’d by no means fallen out of step, as if the previous fifteen years have been solely a dance interrupted ready for the following music to play. I puzzled in regards to the matrix of separation and dislocation, our years sure to the phantom ache of a misplaced homeland, as a result of now that we’re collectively once more that exact harm and sensation that one thing is lacking has pale. And possibly there isn’t any nation or citizenry; they’re simply territories mapped instead of household, instead of love, the infinite nation.”

…options the best e book jacket:

Chinelo Okparanta’s Harry Sylvestor Hen.


…has a intercourse scene that can make you blush:

Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis is so pleasure-centered and sensual about 5 Uruguayan queer ladies discovering sanctuary within the intimacies of their relationships whereas residing below an oppressive dictatorship.

…made me weep uncontrollably:

I learn Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin whereas a resident at La Napoule Artwork Basis within the south of France. I learn the final 30 pages out loud to the ocean and cried and cried.

…needs to be on each faculty syllabus:

My Damaged Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes is an excellent storyteller. Hudes’s emergence from taking part in music to doing theater to scripting this memoir is inspiring and helpful to anybody who remains to be making an attempt to determine their life out. It’s proof that in a single life loads can occur.

…I contemplate literary consolation meals:

The Odd Girl and the Metropolis: A Memoir by Vivían Gornick. I typically carry this e book round as a result of after I learn it I need to write. I like how she tells a narrative and in addition how she writes about New York.

…sealed a friendship:

The Professor’s Daughter by Emily Raboteau. I fell laborious for the best way she writes and requested her out to inform her how a lot I liked it. We’ve got been good buddies since. I can’t wait till her new e book, Classes For Survival, comes out in 2023 about local weather emergency and motherhood.

…that holds the recipe to a favourite dish:

Loves You by Sarah Gambito is a e book of poems that additionally teaches us one thing about cooking, consuming, and being in group. It was whereas studying it that I used to be launched to one in every of my favourite dishes: Rooster adobo. Right here’s a poem by Gambito to learn, to cook dinner, then eat.

Learn Cruz’s Picks:

Why Did not You Inform Me?

Now 18% Off

When We Make It

Now 40% Off

Dealing in Desires

Now 47% Off

Neruda on the Park

Now 37% Off

Girl of Gentle

Now 29% Off

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