One of the hottest new books this month is Lena Dunham’s “Not That Kind of Girl.”

While you’re waiting to read it – or if you just finished and loved it – try these other books by brilliant and funny women making their own way as they navigate work, relationships, glass ceilings and personal identity:

 

How To be A Woman
by Caitlin Moran

Moran’s musings on why, although they have the vote and the Pill and haven’t been burned as witches since 1727, life isn’t exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them?

 

 

BossyPants
by Tina Fey

On her way to becoming an award-winning superstar, Tina Fey struggled through some questionable haircuts, some after-school jobs, the rise of nachos as a cultural phenomenon, a normal childhood, a happy marriage and joyful motherhood. Now she can reflect on what she’s learned: you’re no one until someone calls you bossy.

 

 

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (and other concerns)
by Mindy Kaling

Kaling shares her observations, fears, and opinions about a wide-ranging list of the topics she thinks about the most. From her favorite types of guys to life in the “The Office” writers’ room, her book is full of personal stories and laugh-out-loud philosophies.

 

 

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee
by Sarah Silverman

Comedian Silverman’s memoir that mixes showbiz moments with the more serious subject of her teenage bout with depression as well as stories of her childhood and adolescence.

 

 

 

My Salinger Year
by Joanna Rakoff

In the late 90s Rakoff flees graduate school for New York City and tries to make ends meet by working as a temp at a literary agency. The agency, frozen in the time of chain-smoking bosses and Selectric typewriters, represents a long list of celebrated clients, including J.D. Salinger. Rakoff finds herself swimming in his fan mail, typing responses on the reclusive writer’s behalf, and trying to navigate her equally strange personal life.

 

 

I Was Told There’d be Cake
by Sloane Crosley

These essays create a startlingly funny and revealing portrait of a complex yet utterly recognizable character who aims for the stars but hits the ceiling: From despoiling an exhibit at the Natural History Museum to provoking the ire of her first boss to siccing the cops on her mysterious neighbor, Crosley can do no right despite the best of intentions–or perhaps because of them.

 

 

And one bonus fiction:

Citizen Girl: a Novel
by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

Fresh out of college, 24-year-old Girl is ready to jump into the work force. When she finds the job of her dreams, she leaps at the chance to make big money. But she’s having a hard time figuring out just what her job is.

 

 

Everybody’s excited to read Sarah Waters’ latest novel.

While you’re waiting to read it – or if you just finished and loved it – try one of these older books, which also involve issues of social class and European culture in conflict:

 

Life Mask
by Emma Donoghue

A fictionalized account of the true 16-year courtship of Lord Edward Derby, the richest and ugliest man in the House of Lords, and England’s queen of comedy, Eliza Farren, and Eliza’s friendship with Anne Damer, a widow, sculptress and rumored Sapphist.

 

 

Atonement
by Ian McEwan

Imaginative thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, misinterpreting a scene between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, later accuses Robbie of a crime she has no proof he committed and spends years trying to atone for her actions. Covers the period from 1935 to 1940 and goes forward to the Tallis family reunion in 1999.

 

 

Maisie Dobbs
by Jacqueline Winspear

Private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.

 

 

 

Tulip Fever
by Deborah Moggach

In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy.

 

 

Aimee and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943
by Erica Fischer

Aimee was a housewife, mother of four, married to a Nazi officer. Jaguar was a Jewish woman living underground in Berlin during World War II. Based on interviews, diary excerpts, letters, poems and the recollections of friends and family, this is Aimee’s remembrance of their unlikely romance.

 

 

If you’re waiting to get your hands on Tana French’s latest novel, give one of these other literary, psychological thrillers a try:

 

Case Histories
by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie, a private investigator and former police detective, is quietly contemplating life as a divorced father when he is flung into the midst of three resurrected old crimes: a young child who mysteriously disappeared from a tent in her back garden; An unidentified man in a yellow jumper who marched into an office and slashed a young girl through the throat; and a young woman found by the police sitting in her kitchen next to the body of her husband, an axe buried in his head.

 

 

In the Shadow of Gotham
by Stefanie Pintoff

Detective Simon Ziele lost his fiancée in the wreck of the General Slocum and shortly thereafter headed to Westchester County to escape the violence of the city. But just a few months into his tenure, he catches the worst homicide of his career: a young woman is brutally murdered in her own bedroom in the middle of a winter afternoon.

 

 

 

13 Steps Down
by Ruth Rendell

This stand-alone suspense story featured two London houses. One has just been torn down, and the novel’s murderous young man sees this as an irreparable loss because it was in this house that a serial killer (whom he greatly admires) lured young women under the guise of performing illegal abortions. The second house, in which the young man rooms (and commits his first murder), is owned by a Miss Havisham-like recluse with her own connection to the historic murderer’s home.

 

 

Little Face
by Sophie Hannah

When Alice leaves her infant daughter at home with her husband David for the first time since becoming a new mother, she returns to a horrifying sight: her daughter, Florence, has been swapped with another baby. No one… not even David… believes her.

 

 

 

The Expats
by Chris Pavone

When Dexter Moore, a financial systems security expert in Washington, D.C., receives a lucrative offer to work for a bank in Luxembourg, his wife, Kate, resigns her position as a CIA operative–a job her husband knows nothing about–and vows to recreate herself as a devoted wife and mother to their two boys. But Kate soon discovers that computer geek Dexter has been living a secret life as well, and that he may be a thief being investigated by the FBI and Interpol who’s stolen millions of euros in online banking transactions.

 

 

Check Out Our Magazines!

Titles like Transworld Skateboarding can be checked out from the Glencarlyn Branch Library (as well as Columbia Pike, Westover and Central), or read online with your library card.

 

Find more magazines and newspapers at the Library.

 

Since there are currently 149 holds on the print version of Lane Moriarty’s “Big Little Lies,” bide your time with these other books about complicated family relationships:

 

The Slap
by Christos Tsiolkas

At a festive barbecue in the Melbourne suburb a man slaps the child of another couple, triggering a court case and a variety of confrontations within the lives of the the families and friends present.

 

 

 

We Were the Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates

The Mulvaneys, at first a close and very lucky family, drift apart over the years, until the youngest son, Judd, discovers the secret of their downfall and sets out to help reunite the family.

 

 

 

You Should Have Known
by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted. But weeks before her first book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations.

 

 

The Abstinence Teacher
by Tom Perrotta

Ruth is the human sexuality teacher at the local high school. Her daughter’s soccer coach, Tom, is a former bad boy who hit rock bottom, was saved, and is now a member of the local evangelical Christian church that targets Ruth’s sex ed classes as immoral. But when controversy on the soccer field forces them to actually talk to each other, an uneasy friendship begins to develop.

 

 

Summer House with Swimming Pool
by Herman Koch

Marc and his family spend a week at an extravagant summer home on the Mediterranean with two other families. But when a violent incident disrupts the idyll, dark motivations are revealed, and suddenly no one can be trusted.

 

 

Get more suggestions about what to read next.