how to talk to girls

JOYCE YARROW, Zahara and the Lost Books of Light

Warning. There is so much brilliance radiating from this book that sunglasses may be required. Michael Hickey will capture your heart by pleading to be your rescue dog, only to turn around and destroy your complacency with images of carnage from the Vietnam War. A master of the unexpected, he invites us to commiserate with a dwarf planet or make plans to socialize with a placenta. Hickey has a gift for writing from unusual points of view, whether it be a letter from the pleasure center of a woman’s brain, a fetus waxing nostalgic for the uterus, or a pilot pulling the ripcord and plummeting 10,000 feet. Worlds within worlds will open as you read. Embrace them.  

KELLI RUSSELL AGODON, Dialogues with Rising Tides

Michael G. Hickey’s How to Talk to Girls: (and other urban myths) moves between memoir and the imagined, from the only item you have left from your father’s estate being thrown onstage at a Billy Joel concert to Marilyn Manson sauntering over to Pablo Neruda’s table. With each turn of the page, we move through this imperfect world full of assorted experiences, observational delights, and the personal struggles of sobriety, grief, and our own histories. How To Talk To Girls not only continually entertains and engages the reader, but it takes risks and is unafraid to explore any topic—vulnerable, emotional, and honest, Hickey shows the difficulty of being human and our humanness as we stumble, fail, thrive, and survive with an open ability to laugh at ourselves through all of it.