November Staff Pick: A Minor Chorus

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (W. W. Norton & Company), picked by Assistant Manager Allison

From November 2022: The first thing we ask when we meet a new bookseller is: What are you reading and recommending?

Allison Rand, our new assistant manager, hit her answer out of the park, offering up this month’s featured staff pick, A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Read her review below.

Allison is an experienced bookseller, having worked at RJ Julia in Madison, CT, The Harvard Coop in Cambridge, MA, and Collected Works in Santa Fe, NM.

Her favorite genre is literary fiction. She recently read Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout and The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, and is currently reading Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux.

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A gorgeously written debut novel that poses the question, how can I write a novel, how can I expose myself to life and love through the lens of queer indigenous authenticity.

Growing up Cree in Northern Alberta, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s narrator knows he has to leave the rez. Now, living in Edmonton as a grad student and meeting men on Tinder, he starts slipping into a depression.  He begins to ask, what of love, of excess, of finding the loudness, the bigness of one’s own voice and expression?  He poses these questions and more to his people from the past and academic present. 

In a stream of conversations, Belcourt uses the language of academia and literature to find a path to the heart. If you loved Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous, and Tomasz Jedrowski’s Swimming in the Dark, you won’t want to miss A Minor Chorus. 

~ Allison, Assistant Manager