The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda)

Agnès Varda, a Belgian-born filmmaker, is sometimes referred to as the “Godmother of the French New Wave”. Her films are often personal and always innovative. The Beaches of Agnes is an autobiographical reflection on art, life, and the movies. Taking the beach as her point of departure, she weaves together photographs, vintage footage, film clips, and present-day sequences. It is a singular trip played out against the exciting context of the postwar explosion of cultural expression in France. It’s also just very fun to watch.

Saint Omer (Alice Diop)

Saint Omer is a powerful, intensive courtroom drama. A pregnant writer attends the trial of a young Senegalese woman accused of killing her infant daughter. As the trial unfolds, the writer is drawn into the defendant’s story, triggering a quiet reckoning with her own fears about motherhood, identity, and inheritance. Inspired by a real-life case, Saint Omer blends emotional intimacy with stark procedural detail.

The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier)

Set in contemporary Oslo, this sharp quasi-romantic comedy follows an impulsive woman in her thirties as she ricochets between careers, lovers, and existential doubts. With bursts of surreal humor and emotional honesty, her search for meaning becomes both chaotic and painfully relatable. Trier’s latest film, Sentimental Value, was recently nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards—and there is still time to catch it at Amherst Cinema.

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

Perfect Days is a slow portrait of the good life. In it, a public-toilet cleaner in Tokyo is satisfied with his rich inner world, which is gradually revealed through his small exchanges with those around him, the music he chooses, and with the city itself. It’s a pretty perfect reflection on the beauty of the world around us.

E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea (Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub)

In 1929, Irish designer Eileen Gray created E.1027, a modernist masterpiece on the sun-soaked Côte d'Azur. This bold and hidden gem of avant-garde architecture was meant to be a personal refuge, but when the legendary architect Le Corbusier stumbled upon it, fascination turned to obsession. He covered its walls with his murals, in a violent act of destruction against modernism's most significant female architect.

Jane Alison wrote a novel about the same subject (Villa E). It’s zippy, scenic, and can be read in about a day. I recommend the combo of Villa E + E.1027, which form an interesting conversation with one another.

As always, if you have any questions on how to access Kanopy or any other online resource, give us a call at GPL or contact us online.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa.

This is an elegant, impactful little novel about a math professor with a peculiar problem: he can only remember things for 80 minutes. An astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, is hired to care for him. Every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. They talk math and life and baseball; it’s all very sweet without becoming over saccharine. Ogawa is, in my opinion, one of our best contemporary novelists.

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

In truth, I recommend all of Savaş’s novels. Unusually incisive and intellectual, reading her work often feels having a conversation with your smartest friend. In The Anthropologists, we meet Asya and Manu who are looking at apartments and envisioning their future in a foreign city. What rituals will structure their days? Will they find close friends? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, Savaş’s latest is a soulful examination of homebuilding and community.

Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek

In this short novel—just 122 pages—Polek writes about individual awakening to faith while exploring existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta Becket’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.

My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman

This might be my favorite work of the year. Written as an interview that spans many years and weaves into and out of memory and fiction, the book chronicles the author’s-or “author’s”-project to explore the genre of lesbian romance as both a reader and a writer. The result is a playfully philosophical take on beauty and romance and art and life. Like with Savaş, I could recommend Gladman to any reader wanting to read novels that think about form and thought.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

Whereabouts is Lahiri’s third novel, originally written in Italian and then self-translated into English. It’s equal parts lovely, smart, and whimsical. An unnamed narrator travels around an unnamed European city, contemplating her solitude. She glides between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties

Below are a few recommendations of book + podcast combinations to get you talking and listening.

The Book: The Book of Records: a novel by Madeleine Thien. In The Book of Records, Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China. Memory, political revolution, generational change, and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina’s illuminating conversations with her fellows in the Sea: how we come to believe what we believe, and how every person is an irreplaceable, unique vessel of history.

The Podcast: You can listen to Thien discuss her novel on the podcast Between the Covers. Between the covers is a literary radio show and podcast hosted by David Naimon, brought to you by Tin House. These long-form in-depth conversations have been singled out by the Guardian, Book Riot, the Financial Times, and BuzzFeed as one of the most notable book podcasts for writers and readers around.

The Book: Ordinary girls : a memoir by Jaquira Díaz. Jaquira Díaz’s debut memoir is beautiful and touching. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Diaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism.

The Podcast: You can listen to Díaz discuss her memoir on the podcast First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing. First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a literary podcast produced and hosted by Mitzi Rapkin–its one the best out there. Each week the podcast features an in-depth interview with a fiction, non-fiction, essay, or poetry writer. The show is equal parts investigation into the craft of writing and conversation about the topics of an author’s work.

The Book: Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo. After experiencing a mysterious heart-related health scare, the narrator, a young writer in Philadelphia, has spent the past year alone in self-imposed exile, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos. However, this New Year’s Eve, the narrator breaks his expulsion from everyday life by accepting an invitation to the home of a former philosophy professor for a reunion with his cohort, one decade after graduating. Taking place in a single evening, Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, education, and philosophy.

The Podcast: You can listen to Castillo discuss his novel on the Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour. Hosted by Editor-in-Chief Medaya Ocher and Editors-at-Large Kate Wolf and Eric Newman, Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour is a weekly show featuring interviews, readings, and discussions about all things literary.

Bonus Podcast: Plan on joining GPL for our bi-monthly non fiction book discussion on Tuesday, November 18, where we’ll discuss Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This? If so, consider listening to his interview on Between the Covers from earlier this year.

The Greenfield Public Library and CWMARS have many of The Collection’s best, including the below recommended by GPL Library Assistant, Danielle.

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel) is just about perfect. The world that director Martel builds is as realistic as it is beautiful. What you hear offscreen is just as important as what appears on. It’s a visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships. You might have to wait to get it, though, as it’s probably playing at my house as you read this.

Close-up (Abbas Kiarostam). There are many Kiarostami films to love! This one is special because of its playfulness. The arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated a well-known filmmaker is the basis for this stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence. Real people from the cast play themselves, adding to the metanarrative blend of documentary and fiction.

All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia) follows three different women working at the same hospital–Prabha, Anu, and Parvathy. Each contends with personal and material struggles amid a modernizing India riven by gentrification and rising Hindu nationalism. When Parvathy is evicted and forced to move back to her childhood village, Prabha and Anu travel with her to the seaside, where they shake loose their remaining secrets and in one otherworldly sequence a lingering ghost. It’s a splendid film about choice and agency and love.

One Night In Miami (Regina King) is King’s feature film directorial debut, which was adapted from a play by Kemp Powers, and it’s powerful. A fictional account of a true event: one amazing night where icons Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown gathered discussing their roles in the Civil Rights Movement and cultural turmoil of the ‘60s. The dialogue is profound and the acting remarkable. The music, set locations, and wardrobe are also worth paying special attention to.

12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet). This is perhaps the best courtroom drama ever made. It really is just 12 angry dudes in a room, talking. The rhythm of dialogue and deep character-acting make this a film to endlessly revisit, even my young adult students are able to overlook the film’s black and white and settle into the drama.