2 good books (and a movie!)
Shark Heart | Housemates | Big Night
📚 Shark Heart by Emily Habeck (2023)
Soon after Lewis and Wren get married, Lewis is diagnosed with a rare mutation. He’s turning into a shark and will eventually need to be released into the wild.
Shark Heart is fantastical in its premise but also precise in its description of how a human slowly transforms into an animal, acquiring the impulses of a beast while retaining the consciousness of a man. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful story of caring for wild things and the staying power of love as life changes, loves are lost, and we’re forced to move on and remember.
This was a recommendation from friend and subscriber, Rebecca. If you have a book that really knocked your socks off recently, please let us know about it in the comments.
📚 Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg (2024)
Not long after Bernie responds to Leah’s ad for a new housemate in West Philadelphia does Leah offer to join her on a road trip to pick up an unwanted inheritance from a disgraced former photography professor.
To give the trip some structure, they lean into their creative gifts, photography and writing, to try to capture and make sense of the people of Pennsylvania, and America. As they put more miles on their borrowed station wagon, the two start to reveal their creative and romantic ambitions and anxieties to one another and become entwined in a way that won’t be easy to untangle when they get home.
🍿 Big Night by Stanley Tucci (1996)
I don’t usually recommend movies, but if you’re anything like me, you’re also always in need of one good recommendation to free you from the ignominy of scrolling through the newly-released slop on Netflix and its contemporaries. This is another recommendation, from my mother, that really scratched the itch recently.
Big Night stars Stanley Tucci (Secondo) and Tony Shalhoub (Primo) as Italian immigrant brothers trying to keep their restaurant afloat in America. As bills pile up, the business-minded Secondo plans a big party for the Italian-American singer Louis Prima and his band, hoping that some star power will lead to good press and a reprieve from the bank. Primo, the head chef and a believer that the customer can’t be right at the expense of the food, reluctantly agrees to the plan, and devises a menu fit for either the renaissance or the grand finale of the Paradise restaurant.
Note: Available for free if you’re OK with ads (Pluto TV), but I think it’s worth the $3.99 to rent (Apple or Amazon).