"Children Are Bored on Sunday" by Jean Stafford (1948)

"Children Are Bored on Sunday" didn't exactly sweep us off our feet. But the more we talked, the more we found ourselves grudgingly nodding along.  Stafford's protagonist is a woman adrift in New York, paralyzed by the particular shame of feeling intellectually and socially outclassed—and somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we both had to admit: we've been her. That specific cocktail of self-consciousness and fraudulence, the exhausting performance of belonging somewhere you're not sure you do. Stafford renders it so precisely it starts to feel a little exposing. We didn't fall in love, but we left with a lot more respect than we arrived with, and maybe a little more self-knowledge than we bargained for. Get the book: Support your local bookstore or grab it through Bookshop.org link