The Masters Review Book Review Series
The Masters Review conducts a book review series that analyzes, discusses, and reviews debut novels and short story collections. We are particularly interested in books from small and independent presses, graphic novels, experimental forms, and any texts that have something new to say. We do review established writers, but the bulk of our reviews are of authors who have published no more than two novel-length books.
We prefer book reviews on forthcoming titles, though we will occasionally make exceptions for books published in the previous four months. Submit your completed book reviews through Submittable. Reviews should include quotes, comparisons to other texts, and are typically between 700 – 1200 words. We are unfortunately unable to offer compensation for book reviews at the moment.
If you would like your book reviewed by The Masters Review, please either e-mail a digital ARC to cole [at] mastersreview.com with BOOK REVIEW included the subject line, OR, mail a physical copy to the address below. Although we’d love to review everyone’s book, our publishing calendar is limited.
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Thank you and enjoy!
Here in the Night
In the final pages of Here in the Night, Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, out now from Black Lawrence Press, a character remarks: “The world is a weird place.” It’s a comment that seems to speak to every story in this haunting collection. Over thirteen stories (a number picked not accidentally, I’m sure), Turkewitz explores the weird, the unusual, the unsettling: creatures, specters, things that go bump in the night. Breakups and bullies and the deep dark fears of both children and adults.
And Then He Sang a Lullaby
Set in the backdrop of a radically anti-gay Nigeria, And Then He Sang a Lullaby by Ani Kayode Somtochukwu—the inaugural title from Roxane Gay Books—follows the story of two young men in university in Enugu City, simply trying to survive. August, a first-year student-athlete with low exam scores, whose overbearing sisters have all but raised him after his mother died in childbirth, has internalized his God-fearing tendencies to the point that he has repressed his homosexuality.
The Late Americans
With The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor returns to a space he has a talent for exploring: the minutiae of life on a college campus and in a college town.
The Late Americans concerns a carousel of characters, each revealing more about the others as they take their turns in the spotlight. The book begins with Seamus, a poet suffering through a workshop he perceives as full of people who only want validation from their peers, and who has not been able to submit his own work to the class all semester.
Small Animals Caught in Traps
True tragedy holds us with its prose, making it safe to fall in love with the characters even when we know their fate. We discover the personalities within ourselves, so in a way, they live on. Tragedy, according to Nietzsche, describes the genre as catharsis: joy seeping from walls of pain. Small Animals Caught in Traps by C. B. Bernard, published in April of 2023 by Blackstone Publishing, is a toothed, unrelenting story that holds and doesn’t let go: a tragedy in the purest sense.
House of Cotton
“‘Mama Brown died.’ Those words falling from my lips make me feel like I’m speaking in tongues. Those words make me wish I believed in ghosts. Haunt me, Mama. Even if you a tiny puff of smoke…Haunt me like you ain’t ever left me at all.”
This paragraph from the early pages of House of Cotton captures a love so enormous and a grief so loud that the protagonist, a nineteen-year-old Black woman named Magnolia, has no choice but to be haunted by it—setting into motion the tragedies and rebirths that follow.
Sea Change
In her debut novel, Gina Chung explores how a young woman working in an aquarium, grappling with loss and heartbreak, finds solace in a giant pacific octopus named Dolores. The protagonist Aurora, who goes by Ro, is in her thirties. She is the only child of Korean immigrants and is stuck in life. Her marine biologist father disappeared under mysterious circumstances during a research expedition at Bering Vortex—where he discovered Dolores, fifteen years ago. Isolated in life, Ro finds solace in her menial job at the aquarium (her favorite parts, she states, are gazing at the intelligent sea creatures and feeding the animals), binge drinking and waking up with hangovers.
Chlorine
“You are not here of your own free will. You are here because I desired you first.” So begins Chlorine, a darkly imaginative debut by artist and writer Jade Song. This coming-of-age novel follows Ren, a competitive high school swimmer whose life revolves around the pool. Outwardly, she is a high-achieving student, a dedicated athlete under the tutelage of her problematic coach, and a close friend to her loyal teammate Cathy.
Bark On
From its first line, Bark On draws you into the world of the most intense physical endurance sport: the triathlon, consisting of swimming, cycling, and long distance running. Athletes are prepared to do anything to build their endurance, so they attract the type of coach who can get them there. In Bark On, Benji Newton is such a coach for Erza, the novel’s protagonist.
The Survivalists
The Survivalists by Kashana Cauley ruthlessly interrogates what it means to be successful as a Black woman, a Millennial, and a liberal living in an urban center. Protagonist Aretha has it all—a so-called “good job” at a corporate law firm, a best friend, Nia, who is a well-off private practice therapist, and an active dating life, but she still craves more.
Collateral Damage: 48 Stories
Published by Snake Nation Press in October 2022, Nancy Ludmerer’s debut collection of short stories in Collateral Damage: 48 Stories is a lesson in economy, a master class in saying just enough—about both damage by others and at our own hands, as well as the subsequent attempts to repair, though the fault lines along which damage stops and repair begins are never clearly marked.
Aesthetica
Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica is ruthless from start to finish—sharply interrogating Instagram culture, influencers, the world of eating disorders and much more in this new novel from Soho Press. Rowbottom doesn’t hold back: name dropping, calling out celebrities, and conceptualizing a world which feels all too familiar. Aesthetica is full of dark cynicism, but also bright light—it shines on the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, the way we handle (or avoid) grief, and the great lengths we will go to feel beautiful, even when it means losing ourselves along the way.
You Have Reached Your Destination
The twelve stories in Louise Marburg’s third collection, You Have Reached Your Destination, are about arrivals, but not the ones planned or expected. Instead, each story weaves female characters who reject what is given knowing a deeper expression of feminine identity lies under the surface. Unwilling to fit into tropes of passivity or vanity, the women in Marburg’s stories cannot traverse the paths the world that is given to them. They go their own way.
I Have Her Memories Now
There’s something comforting about returning, years later, to a familiar story. This rereading transports you, now a different person than you were when you first encountered the story, to somewhere new but recognizable. The details you notice in this new read may not be the same details that captured you back when, but the thrill of being caught off guard all over again in a new way is unmatchable.
Tell Us When To Go
Tell Us When To Go begins with Isaac Moss reflecting on the time his good friend and sometimes roommate, Cole Gallegos, asked him to join in running away following the latter’s decision to drop out of college. The book explores their friendship which is rooted in a shared experience: the two are college baseball teammates who bond over a love of music. Cole is destined for major league greatness, while Isaac is happy to warm the bench and bide his time until after college, when he hopes for a career that doesn’t come.
How We Disappear
The mapmaker’s hand is always visible. The sketch of the person outlined in the drawings, marking the mapmaker’s own journey, to connect the reader to the land the way the mapmaker saw it. “Come with me,” the map whispers. How We Disappear, is a book composed of short stories and a novella written by Tara Lynn Masih. Published by Press 53 in September 2022, this is Masih’s third book, and it could just as well be described as a sketched map. Maps don’t need words for meaning to shine through. All you need is a key. Masih is working with the same type of silences that maps do.
Is That All There Is
Published by Awst Press, the stories in Marcelle Heath’s new short story collection Is That All There Is? come in three distinct flavors.
The first of these are the dream-like narratives of stories like “The Bluff,” where a woman named Mattie recalls the ghostly visage of a young girl and her terrier on the edge of a grassy cliff, or “Origin,” where a woman brushes her boss’ daughter’s hair only to find a small owl living it.
The Two Lives of Sara
In The Two Lives of Sara, Catherine Adel West relates the powerful story of a young single mother in Memphis while threading through Black history and freedom. The novel weaves through grief and oppression in a sharp and elegant way, graceful as it shows the life in 1960s Memphis, a time when the city was still segregated. Sara, the book’s narrator, is a young Black woman, keeping inside her a painful past and carrying her child with her to a new state, for a new life.
Mourning Light
In Mourning Light, Richard Goodkin seamlessly ties parts of healing from grief to living in a life without your beloved. Drawing from Goodkin’s own experience working at Yale University, and then moving to Wisconsin, Reb, the novel’s narrator, is a man believing he would never be loved, a man who had accepted his fate long before he met his lover, Anthony.
Live Caught
R. Cathey Daniels grew up in Western North Carolina where her debut novel, Live Caught, is set; a novel welling from the heart. I sense truth in her landscapes, movement of river currents and the hot still air of a North Carolina summer. And behind this truth lies a terrifying darkness.
From the first perplexing paragraph, it was me who was caught, and by the time that page had finished, I had visions of Hogarth’s etchings and Picasso’s Guernica, scenes in which everyone’s got something bad happening, and if they don’t, it’s coming anyway.
Fred: An Unbecoming Woman
Fred: An Unbecoming Woman seamlessly ties themes of coming out, accepting one’s queerness, and first loves into a neat package that is full of tongue-in-cheek humor and humility. A debut memoir from Annie Krabbenschmidt, Fred addresses issues of love and anxiety with tenderness and pop culture references ranging from Twilight to Mean Girls, jumping from Krabbenschmidt’s own family history to their time as a college student at Duke University, and everything in between.
Time is a Mother
Ocean Vuong runs his fingers through time as if it is water in his new book Time Is a Mother. And, upon contemplation, time does have similar properties to water: in the way it wavers; in the way it melts; in the way it stands, a thick mist before us. In the end, time, like water, has been here all along, it is that which we share.
The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach
I flew through The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach in the days leading up to being induced for the birth of my first child. I highlighted the book in a frenzy. I’m writing the review on the other side, sleeping four-week-old by my side. I’ve reread the book. I’ve highlighted different passages, found different lines and paragraphs that resonate. I love and hate the two central mothers in equal measure, as I see myself in both of them.
The Sons of the Santorelli
As we get to know the Santorelli family in Tony Taddei’s linked collection The Sons of the Santorelli, watch them try and fail, succeed and fall into disrepair, we learn to love and care for the brothers and their extended family as if they were our own. Because the stories are linked, we get many different perspectives on each brother. Each story serves as an entry point to one particular moment in time, which creates an overall picture of the family as a first-generation brotherhood simply trying to survive.
JERKS
The desire that permeates the stories in Sara Lippmann’s Jerks is darkly, delightfully messy. What she renders best is the kind of desire that seems baseless. Why do I want the small random things that I do on a daily basis? I don’t know, simply because I do. And the characters here are much the same. They want, they ache, they reach for, they get, and it doesn’t really matter why they do any of this, it simply matters that they have.
Myth of Pterygium
In the same way that a person tries to wink the remnants of a hangover out of their eyes the first thing in the morning, Diego Gerard Morrison’s debut novel, Myth of Pterygium, opens with a morse-code like awakening. Published by Autumn House Press, the book opens with chapters which are only blinking at first, structured in small bursts as the narrator describes to the reader the encroaching of the eponymous pterygium on the surface of their eye, the conjunctivitis threatening to cloud his vision if not seen to soon.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation
Recently, I’ve been struggling with what it means for a piece of writing to have literary merit. The book that has me so vexed is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, by Mo Xian Tong Xiu, which is newly available in English in an uncensored form.
You Never Get It Back
This debut story collection follows all the rules, hits all the right notes, and touches on issues of interest to all young women. The issues are the bonds between mother and daughter, older and younger sister, college roommate and best friend, and the man who is a date, lover, suitor, and fiancé. The stories seem to be drawn from the author’s life, and the chronological series suggests a coming-of-age novel or a memoir. Kate Bishop is the heroine. Kate stands for Cara, and the reader naturally confounds the two.
Shapeshifting
“Who is at the center of the stories we tell about pregnancy?” I asked myself while reading “Shapeshifting,” the titular story of Michelle Ross’s second collection of stories. The protagonist was contemplating the title Rosemary’s Baby: “I can’t decide whether that wording makes the baby or Rosemary the subject of the film.” Her husband decides it’s obviously Rosemary who is the subject, the baby just a possession. I wasn’t so sure.
Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed: 15 Voices from the Latinx Diaspora
The stories we tell ourselves are formed by the people and experiences that shape us, like a river rock worn smooth after so many years of water. But what happens when we ask, “Why are these my stories, and what do I want to say?” In Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, a collection of essays and poems edited by Saraciea J. Fennel, fifteen Latin American writers interrogate topics ranging from identity and colorism to autonomy and family ties. This is an anthology that is as raw as it is refined, one that speaks to each writer’s truth and sheds light on the realities of the Latin American diaspora.
Assembly
In Natasha Brown’s short novel, Assembly, there is a literal plot—a financially successful woman who has just found out she has cancer must go to her boyfriend’s parents’ anniversary party—and also a metaphoric plot, one that circles around issues of class, social mobility, race and uncertainty, always uncertainty. The book is told from a first person narration and is similar to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
The Light of Luna Park
As probably many would be, I was drawn to The Light of Luna Park by the novel’s source of inspiration—its historical model of Luna Park, the amusement park in Coney Island, New York. The site witnessed the controversial invention and exhibition of incubators that saved thousands of premature babies in the early 20th century. Considered a “freak show” by the mainstream medical practice, this place was the only institution that saw premature babies as lives worth saving at the time. However ridiculous this might sound to us today, it was the status quo that the majority did not question.
The Root of Everything and Lightning
Scott Alexander Hess’s two novellas are hauntingly emotional, written with elegantly simple sentences that unfold layers of complication in emotion, theme, metaphor. Characters live, grow, and die alongside generational trauma, unkept promises, forbidden love, violence, and haunting, beautiful landscapes. But, beneath that, there is a persistence of hope. The Root of Everything follows three generations of a family as they build their lives in America across slowly converging timelines.
Living Dolls and Other Women
S. Montana Katz’s mid-80s New York art scene is rendered in a fast-paced blur of POV shifting complexity, populated with the intricacies of women—their lives, relationships, desires, dreams. She creates her New York with a precise eye for detail, laying out its crowded streets, traffic, and people in a style that edges towards claustrophobic in a way to those familiar with the bustle of a city. Living Dolls is at once a romance novel, a crime drama, and a tragedy, twining together its characters stories with an insidious string of violence and activism carried out among the New York streets.
The Actual True Story of Ahmed & Zarga
Many today experience a strong disconnect between their daily lives and the natural world which surrounds them. In The Actual True Story of Ahmed & Zarga, Mauritanian author Mohamedou Ould Slahi—with editorial assistance from Larry Siems—offers a fablelike perspective on humans’ relationships with the environment through a journey into West African Bedouin culture. Well-known for his Guantánamo Diary, which documented his experience being held in the military prison without charge, this is Slahi’s debut novel.
Semiotic Love
In Semiotic Love, Brian Phillip Whalen employs his own dazzling array of storytelling methods with a lyrical turn of phrase to entrance the reader.
The book has an intriguing structure. It is in three parts: the first has eleven small stories, and the last, ten, while the middle only features one story (eponymously named “Semiotic Love”). All follow a diverse ensemble of characters navigating love and family relationships. These characters are largely unnamed, giving a sense of their emotional unity through their anonymity.
Site Fidelity
In the first pages of Site Fidelity, Claire Boyles’s character, Norah, comments on her father’s speech. After having a stroke, he mistakenly calls her “Vera.” The speech pathologist has put up a chart on their fridge. Boyles writes, “I could see the whole consonant chart—the nasals and the alveolars, the voiced and the voiceless.” Boyles’s book, a collection of stories about people interacting with western landscapes, can be summed up in this opposition: the voiced and the voiceless. Site Fidelity is, at its heart, stories about speaking humans and the non-speaking, non-human world that surrounds them.
My Heart
Good literature is always universal. My Heart is Semezdin Mehmedinović’s new novel published in English and translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth. My Heart is an autobiographical account that reflects the polyhedral nature of America, and one of its infinite faces. Mehmedinović switches back and forward between the years of his exile in Washington D.C. (where he also worked as journalist) and his life back in Sarajevo during and before the war. He has that unique talent of swinging harmoniously between those worlds permeated by pain and melancholy. It is a pleasure to discover his brilliant thoughts in every attempt to comprehend and amalgamate that capsized and ruptured world in the same paragraph.
Dawg Towne
Published by word west, Alice Kaltman’s Dawg Towne opens with the enigmatic line: “You wouldn’t know me now, if you knew me then.”
In the context of the opening passage, this is the eponymous town introducing itself to the reader. A comment on how much this settlement has changed since the arrival of its humans. After its vegetation has been harvested and its land built upon. Not that the town seems to mind too much. It is instead wrapped by curiosity for its human infestation – particularly about their relationship with dogs. But once the story starts and we get to know the inhabitants of this town called Towne, it becomes clear that this innocent opening statement has much more to say.
Girl A
By the time Girl A, Abigail Dean’s debut novel, begins, the crime motivating its plot has already been solved. Alexandria Gracie has escaped her parents, who have been shot dead after keeping Lex and her siblings in abusive captivity. But Girl A is not a book about the act that triggered trauma, it is a study of the aftermath, carried out with a meticulous eye for the needs of its survivors. Our narrator, Lex, has no time for an audience’s emotions in the relation of her story. Her delivery of memories concerning the abuse is deliberately flat, often unsettling for its frankness, and utterly heartbreaking. For Lex, the relation of traumatic acts is simply reality.
Milk Blood Heat
“Real gods require blood.” Dantiel W. Moniz’s Milk Blood Heat opens with this haunting epigraph from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Moniz’s stories require just that. Blood. Life. The people and the world she creates on the page are alive, beating and thriving and demanding to be met on their own terms. Two young girls play at all the ways they can die, just as they are coming into their own bodies. Zey devours every word offered to her, creating a world from their many syllables as she self-destructs. A man vacillates between rage and pain as he mourns his dying wife. In all of these stories: mortality. The beauty and fragility of life set against characters equally delicate.
Spilt Milk
In her debut collection of personal essays, Spilt Milk, out today from McSweeney’s Books, Courtney Zoffness examines her childhood through the prism of her motherhood. Fears, loves, doubts, and desires garner fuller significance through highly self-aware, highly intricate modes of retrospection and introspection. With heart and skill, Zoffness is also able to extend the topic of conversation well beyond the domestic, framing her own daily struggles with global concerns. Even amidst worldwide instability, each essay steadfastly relies upon a kind of paradoxical bedrock of uncertainty, honesty, and vulnerability.
48 Blitz
When Brett Biebel’s “Big Red Nation” came through our queue, one of our volunteer readers commented that she didn’t care at all about football but was still enthralled by the story. It’s a fine line that Biebel walks in so much of his debut collection, 48 Blitz, out next week from Split Lip Press. The 48 stories, almost all flash fiction, are set across the state of Nebraska and feature characters any Midwesterner would find familiar: the high school football heroes and the family farmers and the folks drinking Miller High Life on the football field in a late fall frost.
Death, Desire and Other Destinations
If there’s a more perfect title for Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection, Death, Desire and Other Destinations, I would be shocked. Death abounds in this collection of fifty flash stories, only equaled or outmatched by the undercurrent of female desire that is laced through nearly every story.
Seconds and Inches
Within the frenetic tempo of Carly Israel’s memoir, there are letters of gratitude for things one would expect—doctors, family members—and some they would not—bullies, cruel teachers. These letters act as the sinew of the book, connecting vignettes; brief moments that echo the disjointed rhythm of two lives lived second to second. First: her own, growing up an addict. Then: her child’s, born with a rare, potentially fatal disease.
The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing
In a world shaped by quarantine, with those who currently grieve for loved ones taken away too soon, Joseph Fasano’s The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing shows the complex changes a person can make when having to confront loss in complete isolation. At the center of the story is an unnamed character who travels deep into the wilderness with his son after his wife’s sudden death. Together they track and hunt the ever-elusive mountain lion.
Collective Gravities
Aptly named, Chloe N. Clark’s Collective Gravities propels us into invented universes, uncanny in their likeness to our own, and sets them into orbit. Diving into this collection is like emptying a bag of marbles and watching them spin. Each feels suspended by its own gravitational pull. And while many occupy speculative spaces or the aftermaths of outer space voyages, I’m reluctant to pigeonhole them into the sci-fi genre (though they take plenty of cues from it).
Other People's Pets
R.L. Maizes begins her debut novel, Other People’s Pets, with a near-tragedy. While ice-skating with her inattentive mother, La La has fallen through the lake’s surface: “Her snowsuit inhales icy water and clings to her, weighing her down and threatening to pull her under.” Then her mother disappears, and La La is saved by a dog black as night. (The dark irony of the dog’s color—black, the color of death, not life—pervades the entire novel.)
Instances of Head-Switching
In Teresa Milbrodt’s Instances of Head-Switching, the fantastical marries with the familiar, the magical with the mundane. The Greek gods roam the streets seeking new PR campaigns, taking stances on whaling, and of course playing the field. Snow White settles into domesticity after she and her Prince (turned king, turned commoner) lose their throne. A pack of unicorns is sought out for a soap commercial; a sphinx acts as one part guard dog, one part therapy animal. There are heads for switching and marbles to eat and fathers trying to float away.
Trust Me
Speak to someone who works political campaigns, and it isn’t long before they start sounding like a roadie listing their tours: Doug Jones, Alabama senate, 2018; John Edwards for President, 2008; Karen Bass, California congress, 2013. They hardly ever sign year-long leases, and seldom own what can’t be moved in a car. It’s hard for us laypeople to fathom just how much of electoral politics are built on the campaign version of an adrenaline junkie. The line between political corruption and rational action is a lot thinner than we like to think, and Richard Z. Santos’s Trust Me whiplashes through it.
Ceremonials
Katharine Coldiron’s Ceremonials is a novel inspired by the Florence + The Machine album by the same name. I knew that going in, but until I dove into its pages, I had no idea what to expect—would it be readable? Would it be derivative? Would it rely too heavily on Florence Welch’s words?
Thankfully, the novel is wonderfully readable and unique. The prose itself is highly lyrical in nature, so it does justice to the album even without directly quoting the songs. Personally, I know a lot of Florence + The Machine music well, but I don’t know this album as well as others, so I’m sure there are references in the text that went over my head.
Fade
There is a careful subtlety to the emotional stakes in Fade. Depression lurks in every facet of the novel. Michael, a divorced father of two, struggles to find meaning in a life surrounded by unwashed clothes, regimented pills, and constant drinking. After Anna commits suicide, her mother, Mandy, haunts her daughter’s bedroom, keeping Anna’s phone in hopes of talking to her old friends. When Michael proposes the impossible, that he will bring Anna back to life, he threatens to upend what little closure Mandy has found. She cannot see Anna’s ghost, and the devastation at hand should Michael fail, builds each time they interact, until it’s almost impossible to ignore.
I Am Here to Make Friends
I recently read an interview with Alice McDermott (in the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” No. 244) in which she advised writers to “be sure your stories aren’t too much about what they’re about.” I thought of this quote often while reading the nine fabulous stories in Robert Long Foreman’s I Am Here to Make Friends, in which narrators approach their interior stories from an angle, often a bizarre one, and in which their deadpan engagement in a madcap world underscores their own “thwarted longing,” as writer Maureen Stanton has described it, as much as it reveals the underbelly of life’s absurdities.
You've Got Something Coming
Lenny “Trucks” Babineaux is just the flawed, dogged down-and-outer readers love in fight fiction. The hero of Jonathan Starke’s debut novel You’ve Got Something Coming will stop at nothing for a final chance to forge a respectable life with his young daughter, even when this puts their safety at considerable risk. Starke’s novel is a statement of love enduring through hard times, a gritty road story wherein the prospects often seem as bleak as the Badlands hills the pugilist and his daughter traverse.
Hear My Voice
In David Vaughan’s Hear My Voice, a young (Czech- and German-speaking) man travels from England to Prague to interpret for the British politician Edgar Young. The man, the novel’s narrator, arrives in Prague at the end of 1937 in the middle of the diplomatic crisis between Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany about the status of the border region known as the Sudetenland. When the narrator arrives, the crisis has drastically intensified because of the Anschluss, or unification, of Nazi Germany with Austria. The novel’s plot traces the political developments of 1938 as Nazi pressure on Czechoslovakia increases and the allied powers—England and France—back down in the face of Hitler’s demands, isolating and ultimately dooming the Czechoslovak state.
Exhalation
“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” the first story in Ted Chiang’s luminous new collection Exhalation, opens with a benediction: “O mighty caliph and commander of the faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence.” Our narrator, Fuwaad ibn Abbas, informs us that he was born “here in Baghdad, City of Peace,” and that he has spent his life as a “purveyor of fine fabrics…silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold.” Now, he stands in attendance before the caliph “without a single dirham in my purse,” but with a strange and winding story to tell. “If it pleases your Majesty,” he offers, “I will recount it here.”
Who Killed My Father?
For reasons I cannot quite discern, the reception to French author, Édouard Louis’ new book Who Killed My Father, out March 26th from New Directions, has been rapturous, but almost entirely insubstantial. The book—a straightforward memoir as opposed to his previous novels which, though broadly autobiographical, were still treated as novels—speaks love and rage directly to his father, sifting through the past to both vindicate and vilify him. It is a book that likely comes as no surprise to those who have known Louis since he penned his first book, or read his explosive op-ed in 2017 in the New York Times about why he understood that his father voted for the racist, far-right French politician Marine Le Pen.
Fierce Pretty Things
“Everything [is] linked together in funny, sad way.” This comes from “The Magnificents,” the narrator describing a magic act by a neighborhood kid. But it’s an accurate description of Tom Howard’s Fierce Pretty Things, winner of Indiana Review’s 2018 Blue Light Books Prize, too. This collection, sardonic from cover to cover, is as funny as it is sad. The characters that occupy the pages of Fierce Pretty Things are remarkably human. They make mistakes; their lives are undesirable. Howard doesn’t shy away from them toward compromising situations, their missteps often leading to disaster. But still, in almost every situation, they find humor. They keep the light on, keep pushing forward. “Hey,” Hildy tells her brother in the dystopian “Hildy”, “you can eat me if you got to.”
The Heavens
In an essay adapted from a lecture delivered at the New York Public Library in December 2008, Zadie Smith once wrote an impassioned defense of Barack Obama’s seemingly equivocating nature by invoking, rather peculiarly, William Shakespeare. “For reasons that are obscure to me,” she wrote, “those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians…The apogee of this is, of course, Shakespeare: even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing; he is black and white, male and female—he is everyman.” Like Shakespeare, Smith argued, Obama had done what people often must: equivocate. And for Smith, that is necessary to really see contradiction, “to speak truth plurally.”
Tonic and Balm
A hundred years on, it’s hard to summarize what the demise of vaudeville meant to entertainers, audiences, and early 20th century pop culture. Many vaudevillians, Keaton and Chaplin among them transitioned into silent pictures; others vanished as if they had never been. Part of vaudeville’s freedom was its impermanence: the show is in town for three nights and that’s it. But vaudeville troupes were also nomadic, roaming from town to town, picking up acts in one town and dropping them in another. Freedom via restless performing.
Mouthful of Birds
Samanta Schweblin is a writer of impatient stories. Mere seconds into “Headlights”, the first story in her new collection, we meet a woman in her wedding dress, learn that she has just been abandoned by her groom at a restroom by the side of the highway because she took too long, and while we are still processing that, we meet a second abandoned woman who demands to know whether the bride will wait for her man to return. “Look,” this second woman says, when the first woman, still reeling, doesn’t answer, “I’ll make this short because there’s really not much to it. They get tired of waiting and they leave you.”
This Mournable Body
This is a hard book. Maybe I shouldn’t start that way, but it’s the first thing I can think to say about This Mournable Body. This book is a stunning, intricately crafted work of art by a writer who possesses insight into the human condition that rivals Hemingway’s, but it is also a dense, difficult piece of literature, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise.
A Zimbabwean author who writes in English, Tsitsi Dangarembga is a highly versatile and well-lauded artist. She has directed and written multiple films, and she is the founder of both the Women’s Film Festival of Harare and the International Images Film Festival.
The Blurry Years
If you’re a reader, you can run, and you can hide, but you can’t escape the coming-of-age story. It’s everywhere, a part of every era, a constant of literature as immovable as Hemingway himself. The only new ground is generational: the story varies depending upon the age of the person telling it. For Millennials, the variation arrives (at last) in the storyteller. Women, queer people, and people of color are telling their stories at last, which means that the coming-of-age genre has some new life in it for the first time in decades.
The Great Believers
The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai’s magnificent new novel, opens at a funeral. More specifically, it opens at a funeral party. The actual funeral, for a young man named Nico Marcus, is unfolding concurrently twenty miles north: it’s 1985, and Nico is dead from AIDS, and his family has made it abundantly clear that his lover and tight-knit circle of friends are unwelcome at the church where he is being laid to rest.
Night Beast
I was first introduced to Ruth Joffre’s work as an assistant fiction editor at Nashville Review, when we published her story “Some of the Lies I Tell My Children,” in 2016. I was excited to see where her writing would take her, and her debut story collection, Night Beast and Other Stories, does not disappoint. It’s a mysterious and dark book, unafraid of confronting just how bleak life can be. In the title story, the narrator thinks, “…I had the experience not of dread but of knowing that something dreadful was coming and that I’d have to be ready for it.” The same could be said for the reader. A sense of foreboding threads through these stories, and reading them is like walking through unlit woods, unsure of just what you’ll find. Joffre frequently writes about women who are in trouble, or just a step away from it. Read more.
A Lucky Man
In the age of the #MeToo Movement and the worldwide cultural shift, at least in awareness, to the ways in which gender and sexuality inform our experience of living in the world, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, A Lucky Man, comprised of tenderly poignant narratives of boys becoming men, of fractured intimacy, of masculinity as learned performance, is vital and necessary.
The Comedown
I always have a good feeling about a book that opens with a family tree. Something about the promised sprawl, the delicious intrigue captured in those many dates, arrows, question marks, and crisscrossing lines. Rebekah Frumkin’s debut novel does not disappoint on this front. The Comedown is sprawling, and it is full of intrigue: a vanished father figure, a suitcase full of drug money, a pair of vindictive half-brothers, lots of ill-advised sex. Though the overarching plot can be hard to track, the book delights at the sentence level, where Frumkin masterfully assembles the small details that illustrate two families’ capacities for ruthlessness and love.
Beyond Measure & Empty Set
Quick: how many apps on your phone do you use to organize your day? Alarms help you fall asleep and wake up on time; step counters ensure you hit your daily fitness goal; Venmo pays a friend back for lunch—at a place you chose for its five-star Yelp reviews. For most of us, there is no part of our daily routine that doesn’t have a corresponding app to analyze our behavior and guarantee our time is spent efficiently. The irony of all this is just how much time we spend on our phones, counting and comparing: by some estimates, more than 120 hours each month.
Animals Eat Each Other
In the single-page prologue to Elle Nash’s debut novel, Animals Eat Each Other, we meet our unnamed narrator in the midst of a sexual encounter, a knife held to her face while she’s tied to a coffee table. Though initially ambiguous, it soon becomes clear that the startling scene is not a coercion of any kind: “I wanted to be validated, the way everyone does,” she tells us. This will be her obsession throughout the book: a search for affirmation, tangled up in her own complicated desires.
The Natashas
What story is told by The Natashas, Yelena Moskovich’s rich, bizarre, spellbinding first novel? In short: a young woman grows up, becomes beautiful, and is harassed by nearly every male person she encounters; finally, something terrible happens to her. At the same time, a young man grows up, moves away from home, tries to become an actor, and possibly loses his mind due to the stress of various symbolic masks he must wear. But neither story is resolved. We don’t know exactly what happens to the young woman, Béatrice, and we don’t know whether the young man, César, gets the TV role he wants or becomes the killer toward which his delusions push him. Between these two characters are degrees of connection and notes of resonance, but no specific similarities. Read more.
Self-Portrait with Boy
“I’ll tell you how it started. With a simple, tragic accident. The click of a shutter and a grown man’s beast-like howl.” With these opening lines, Rachel Lyon pulls us into a fast-paced and haunting narrative that dramatizes the friction between professional success and personal loyalty. When does art become exploitative? To what does the emerging artist owe her allegiance? To community? To love? To her own aspirations, and nothing else?
Everything Here is Beautiful
Classifying Mira T. Lee’s energetic debut novel, Everything Here Is Beautiful, as a story about sisterhood is inadequate at best and misleading at worst. The novel involves a sisterly relationship, certainly, as two of the narrating characters are sisters, but the fabric of the novel isn’t primarily of one color. It weaves in several Big Themes: immigration in America, mental illness, romantic love, motherhood. However, in practice, it’s a satisfying, surprising, multifaceted novel, not easily summed up by its themes.
Catapult
Emily Fridlund’s collection Catapult, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, burrows under the skin to reveal what hurts the most. It shines a light on the ugly truths in relationships, discovers all the ways in which its characters aren’t quite compatible with one another and forces them into (often quiet) confrontations. This collection is as intelligent as it is incisive. I was continually impressed by the depth of Fridlund’s emotional well; it seemed as though every other sentence was another bit of wisdom, and the sentences in between only added further depth.
The Graybar Hotel
Curtis Dawkins’ debut collection of short stories, The Graybar Hotel, gives readers an intriguing glimpse into the emotions and tedium of life as a prisoner in America. After being imprisoned for a drug-related homicide in 2005, Dawkins started writing because it gave him hope. Before his drug addiction, Dawkins earned his MFA from Western Michigan University. Throughout this collection, Dawkins’ stories feature characters that, although imprisoned for serious offenses, are easily empathized with by readers. He does this by focusing on the central themes that vein these stories: loneliness, longing, and claustrophobia. Many of the narrators’ crimes are not discussed in detail. More.
Daddy Issues
Alex McElroy’s chapbook, Daddy Issues, consists of seven short fiction pieces, and each story tackles the role that boys and men play in their families and in the world, paying particular attention to the relationship between fathers and sons. By opening the chapbook with a story in the form of a flowchart, McElroy expands our notion of what fiction is and what it can do. “The Death of Your Son: A Flowchart” is—perhaps unsurprisingly—heartbreakingly sad but it is also very funny, with unexpected twists and turns. Some of the best moments occur when, instead of the standard “yes” or “no” flowchart box, the character responding to the flowchart provides their own answer, occasionally in the form of a question or a rebuke. More
What We Lose
Much of What We Lose, an innovative and engaging debut novel by Zinzi Clemmons, is about being stuck in the in-between. The protagonist, Thandi, is of mixed-race, with an American father and a South African mother. Although Thandi is brought up in Philadelphia, her mother’s ties to her home country are strong, and the family visits most summers. Over the course of the book, Thandi matures from a teenager to a young woman. And then Thandi’s mother dies from cancer, and she is a daughter without a mother before becoming a mother to a son. In all these instances, she interrogates each binary as well as the space in between as she tries to figure out who she is and how to move forward.
Stephen Florida
Gabe Habash’s confident debut, Stephen Florida, explores the single-minded intensity behind the pursuit of your goals. The result is a fast-paced novel about sacrifice and dedication, as it follows college senior and wrestling national championship hopeful Stephen Florida in his attempt to win the 133lb weight class.
American War
The year is 2075. The United States, its shorelines eaten away by mega-hurricanes and rising seas, has splintered apart. Mexico has reclaimed large swathes of the southwest. The capital has relocated from Washington DC to Columbus, Ohio. And the states of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, enraged by a governmental ban on fossil fuels, have seceded into a Free Southern State.
The Idiot
Elif Batuman tweets under the handle BananaKarenina—a humorous nod toward a great Russian novelist’s depiction of a woman’s dangerous tangle with love. How fitting, then, that Batuman’s strikingly funny, precisely observed first novel, The Idiot, shares its title with the work of another great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Rabbit Cake
Ecosystems perpetually hang in delicate balance, as much with humans as any other species. This is perhaps one thesis of Annie Hartnett’s ebullient Rabbit Cake, a novel loaded with dark humor and self-diagnosed moroseness, but also one that bursts forth with optimism at every turn. Hartnett’s work is interested in classification to say the least, and offers genuine consideration of family dynamics that span the animal kingdom at large.
The Expense of a View
Our current political conversation often revolves around the financial disparities rampant in American culture. Polly Buckingham’s recent story collection, The Expense of a View, hones in on the lives most impacted by the inequalities this gaping imbalance engenders. Buckingham tells the stories of the system’s most vulnerable—the ill, the partnerless, the parentless, the addicted, the poor, the isolated—exploring what it means to try to be a “healthy” adult when life has always lacked a major component of stability. The Expense of a View won the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction, and was released this past fall from the University of North Texas Press.
The Babysitter at Rest
In the first story of Jen George’s debut collection The Babysitter at Rest, a nameless genderless Guide climbs through the window of the narrator’s apartment to usher her into adulthood. “Despite your lack of intuition,” they tell her, “you may have become aware of the following changes that signal the onset of adulthood: listening to others, doubting everything you think, health problems, understanding of the limitations of time and/or life/living/the individual experience…” the list goes on. Such mounting neuroses are experienced by not only our first narrator, but by all of the female protagonists that populate George’s stories. Read more.
Our Dreams Might Align
Each story in Dana Diehl’s debut collection Our Dreams Might Align starts with a small bullet.
“It’s been two days since we were swallowed by the loneliest whale in the world,” begins one story.
“The woman with 43 children is dying,” starts another.
Words pile on in fragile rhythms. Sentences are constructed out of negative space. The unsaid lingers. Fragments dominate. Each story exists only for a short time, breaking off suddenly. An atmosphere of absence seeps into each one, the fear of being left behind.
The Grand Tour
Richard Lazar, the protagonist of Adam O’Fallon Price’s debut novel The Grand Tour, is a washed-up, mid-list writer—divorced, overweight, often drunk, with most of his books out of print, and barely in contact with his grown daughter. But unexpected success arrives with the publication of his sixth book, a memoir about his service (and eventual desertion) during the Vietnam War. To capitalize on the book’s momentum, Lazar’s publishing house sends him on a book tour. The disastrous consequences of the book tour are chronicled with humorous precision and deep feeling by Price, transforming The Grand Tour from a comedic road trip novel into a meditation on the relationship between creation, desperation, and hope.
One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist
Knife pushers, diggers, painters, can pickers, snake mimes, fire chasers, thieves and ice-cream men populate the stories in Dustin M. Hoffman’s One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, his debut collection from University of Nebraska Press and the winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. The stories here feature men (and they are largely men) who live by their hands, who work in subdivisions, who build cookie-cutter houses. They are defined by their work, by toil and back-break. They live hardscrabble lives and are either aiming higher or sinking slowly down.
Behold the Dreamers
Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian family as they immigrate to the United States in the years before the financial collapse of 2008. This debut novel explores the complicated relationships between where we’re from and where we end up living, between love and family, sacrifice and reward.
You Are Having a Good Time
While the title of Amie Barrodale’s debut story collection, You Are Having a Good Time, is taken from its epigraph, it also seems a directive from Barrodale to the reader. And, indeed, you will have a good time reading this collection, but you will have an even better time on your second or third read. The flatness of the prose and the disconnection between characters can initially create a distance between the reader and the stories. As you continue reading, though, the echoes within and between the stories build and grow. The sense of surprise—of never knowing where a story is heading—is embedded in every story, and the characters—who are so truly drawn that they seem like people we know or perhaps are even stark reflections of our inner selves—begin to haunt the reader and stay with us long after we have finished reading. Read more.
The Girls
Drawing on the events of the late sixties, author Emma Cline reimagines the summer of 1969 in a coming-of-age novel that bumps up against the ideals of the time and a young girl’s involvement in a deadly California commune. The Girls debuted in June to big fan fare. The first of a reported seven figure, three-book deal, Cline proved her merits as an emerging writer by winning The Paris Review’s 2014 Plimpton Prize. Before The Girls hit shelves—which Cline wrote in approximately three months—the novel was a success among reviewers, who applauded the young writer for her work on the sentence level. Even the difficult-to-please James Wood referred to Cline in the The New Yorker as, “a talented stylist.” He writes: “At her frequent best, Cline sees the world exactly and generously.”
Home Field
Home Field by Hannah Gersen, out yesterday from HarperCollins, is a book about recovery. It is a book about the ways people rebound from injury, from heartache, from death. This debut novel follows its characters as they learn the limits of their bodies and struggle to entrust themselves to those around them. Gersen’s bold debut is dark and hopeful and begs us to question how depression and suicide are treated in society.
Allegheny Front
In Allegheny Front, Matthew Neill Null’s first story collection and the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, the author returns to the West Virginia territory he mined so beautifully in his thrilling first novel, Honey from the Lion. “The bolderfields, the spaces empty of people—a lonesomeness city-dwellers could never comprehend,” he writes of the setting. “Sometimes it seems you know animals more intimately than people.” In these nine stories, Null continues the work he began in his first book of unpacking the complicated relationship between man and the natural world. He approaches from alternately sympathetic, adversarial, and prophetic angles the slippery morality that arises when people are forced into the roles of predator and prey. Read more.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings is a novel by Stephen O’Connor, released April 5th by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin. It is a lengthy book with an experimental format, containing excerpts from essays, dream-like sequences, diaries, and factual information situated amidst the primary story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. O’Connor deftly fills in “the gaps between facts,” imagining the nuances of a relationship that, save a few hundred words, is almost completely absent from primary sources on Jefferson. At turns playful and poignant, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings is an in-depth look at what the literal process of a life of cognitive dissonance entails, about the repeated, daily failure to reconcile one of the most glaring hypocrisies in the history of the United States. Read more.
Daughters of Monsters
Like the opening shot of a late-night, science-fiction horror flick, Melissa Goodrich’s debut short story collection Daughters of Monsters crash-lands into our planet from a universe not quite like our own. Pairing hypersaturated sentences with high-concept surrealism, Goodrich has managed to tweak the parameters of our reality to present a world transformed. This idea of constant change hums through each story in the collection—the ways we morph and adjust in our unsteady universe, and the ways we try to hold on.
Tuesday Nights in 1980
Molly Prentiss’s debut novel, Tuesday Nights in 1980, focuses on the soul of the art community in the New York City of decades ago. Prentiss refuses to hold punches, finding the spot that bleeds emotion and holding it open for all she can take. The book shifts between the perspectives of three characters: a synesthetic art critic, James Bennett; an orphaned Argentinian painter, Raul Engales; and a small town girl new to the big city, Lucy Olliason. The narrative builds on itself as these three characters’ lives weave together, united by their love of art and culture. When you come down to it, that is what much of this novel is about: the lasting effect that one life can have upon another.
Private Citizens
Tony Tulathimutte’s superb first novel, Private Citizens, is a razor-sharp satire of millennial culture, focusing on themes of class and technology. Set in the San Francisco Bay area in 2007, the novel is populated by a generation of misguided and occasionally misanthropic men and women drifting into their thirties. The book is ultimately compassionate in its ribbing, reminiscent of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which, among other things, turned a much-needed comic eye on young Americans and their foibles. Wise and funny, at times uncomfortable, the novel’s tone suggests Philip Roth’s frank and often delightfully transgressive depictions of sex and neuroses; in ambition and narrative deftness, one might think of Jonathan Franzen.
Youngblood
Matt Gallagher’s novel Youngblood was published last month by the Atria Books imprint of Simon & Schuster. Gallagher is the author of the popular and highly controversial blog-to-book Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, which chronicles his time as a soldier in 2007 and 2008. Youngblood, Gallagher’s first novel, is primarily about a soldier named Jack Porter, and his time as a lieutenant as the US occupation of Iraq is slowly drawing to a close. The novel hovers around several subjects: Porter’s experiences with his platoon; the dynamic between him and his mercurial sergeant, Chambers; and Porter’s attempts to make sense of the relationship between a local sheikh’s daughter and an enigmatic soldier named Eli Rios who passed away in 2006. Read more.
The Farmacist
The Farmacist, Ashley Farmer’s first novella, was published this month by Jellyfish Highway Press. The book focuses on Farm Town, a Facebook game that was a precursor to the more well known Farmville. It consists of sixty-one chapters, probably better described as meditations: they are coherent in themselves, but still connect to the novella more broadly. Indeed, Farmer’s experience with flash fiction and poetry is fairly obvious here: the chapters, occasionally abstract and inching toward fantastical, are powerful demonstrations of her ability to get a point across economically. The fractured, disjointed format helps to illuminate a number of disconnects that Farmer seems to be working with: the distance between our real selves and our online selves, the disintegration of the American dream, and perhaps most of all, the lack a clear distinction between the rural and the urban. Read more.
Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan
Rosie Forrest’s Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan, winner of the Rose Metal Press 9th Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest, is as dark as its characters are vulnerable. Forrest has built a world here in her debut collection, a world we recognize and wish we didn’t, a world we grew up in, one we hope our kids don’t grow up in. Her stories are finely wrought, expertly crafted little things that speak volumes about what it’s like to be an adolescent in suburban America. Read more.
Honey from the Lion
Matthew Neill Null’s debut novel, Honey from the Lion, is an extraordinary and powerful examination of the steady decimation of ten thousand acres of the West Virginia Allegheny forest. The novel moves with the assured pace of a thriller, while sentence by sentence Null plays with the language of place, of longing, and of violence. Within the book are echoes of Edward P. Jones’ The Known World in its scope and generous spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity. The encompassing omniscient narration and deliberate, masterful plotting brings to mind Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. Frankly no first novel has the right to be this good—and yet, Null succeeds. He announces himself as a fully formed novelist.
Music for Wartime
Rebecca Makkai’s Music for Wartime is a masterful collection of short stories, the author’s intelligence and wit shining through in beautiful and insightful prose. Written over a period of twelve years, most of these stories have been published elsewhere, including four stories chosen for Best American Short Stories. Makkai is primarily interested in searching for meaning, creating connections and investigating causality. The stories consider and question their subjects from many different angles; the best stories in this collection leave those questions unanswered. These are the stories that ask to be read multiple times, stories that resonate and haunt.
The Sympathizer
With The Sympathizer, available now from Grove Press, debut author Viet Thanh Nguyen demonstrates his prowess as a writer by creating a narrator who we shouldn’t trust but do anyway. This confidence is established in the book’s opening lines. Nguyen’s narrator, who remains nameless for the novel’s entirety, starts by saying, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” He is a mole, a self-described snoop, a character we know to be well-versed in establishing trust only to take advantage of it later, but in his confession—and that’s really what the narrative is: a confession written in isolation to a man known only as “Commandant”—we become his confidants. We are taken under his spell and held captive until the novel’s finale.
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor
Debut novelist Julie Iromuanya holds a long list of accolades: published by The Kenyon Review and the Tampa Review, among others; shortlisted for several prizes, including ones from our Portland publishing comrade Glimmer Train; earned a Ph.D. and was a Presidential Fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln—the list goes on. She clearly comes at novel writing from a sophisticated and measured perspective, and the craft shown within her debut novel, Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, is evidence of that.
How to Carry Bigfoot Home
Chris Tarry has crafted a wonderful collection of stories in How to Carry Bigfoot Home. With direct and approachable language, Tarry covers experimental writing, flash fiction, fantasy, and coming-of-age in a collection that is contemplative and warm; each of his stories is laced with humor and heart. In the opening story, “Here Be Dragons,” an out-of-work dragon slayer faces the boredom and responsibility of everyday life. In “Nennorluk Goes Down Deep” a down-and-out deckhand tries to turn his life around by taking a job on a ship that is searching for a sea monster. Tarry writes: “Sunday mornings come down hard on Sammy. The Employment Insurance money never makes it to Sunday. Especially with Saturday night parked neatly in the way.” Not all of Tarry’s stories have fantastic creatures or take place in faraway lands, but they all examine dissatisfaction. Read more.
Find Me
Celebrated short story writer and author, Laura van den Berg’s debut novel Find Me contemplates memory, loss, and identity in the same stunning prose we’ve come to know and value in her previous two collections. In the hospital where Joy Jones was abandoned as a child, the nurses grew tired of a nameless baby so they named her Joy. Van den Berg writes: “The symmetry of the name has never suited me.” As an adult, Joy lives in a windowless basement apartment and works the overnight shift at a grocery store, numbing it all away by drinking cherry-flavored cough syrup. But joylessness isn’t the only paradox clinging to Joy. She is immune to a deadly epidemic that has swept the nation. One that begins with silver blisters on the skin and ends in memory loss and death. Read more.
Get in Trouble
Kelly Link’s stories have been published in literary magazines such as McSweeney’s and A Public Space and the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of The Year and Hauntings, to name a few. They have been described as “creepy little wonders” and “ . . . a beguiling and eerie blend of fairy tale, fantasy, Ray Bradbury, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and categorized as “[floating] eerily in a midpoint between cool realism and dark science fiction” and “post-strange.” But what they are, first and foremost, are quality short stories—they take advantage of fiction’s ability to create new worlds and honor this power with depth and detail. Get in Trouble, Link’s fourth collection, shows us all that the short story can accomplish.
Satin Island
The book jacket for Tom McCarthy’s new novel Satin Island contains several subtitles—treatise, essay, report, manifesto, confession—all of which are crossed out in favor of “a novel.” It’s an appropriate conceit, because the book is at once all of these things and none of them. Satin Island is the first-person narrative of U., an anthropologist working for a nameless corporation. U. has been commissioned by his boss to write “the Great Report,” an all-encompassing document: “the Book, the fucking Book, that was to name our era, sum it up.” He is given an office in the basement where, engulfed by the vibrations of the building’s ventilation system, he is to complete this Great Work, this book-to-end-all-books.
Ugly Girls
Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter was released in November, but readers should consider this late 2014 title a spring-reading essential. Hunter’s debut novel follows best friends Perry and Baby Girl as they navigate the tricky landscape of adolescence. Perry’s mother is an alcoholic who spends her days nursing hangovers in the trailer park where they live, too often missing work and endangering her marriage to Perry’s stepfather, a decent man and local prison guard. Baby Girl lives with her uncle and brain-damaged older brother, who was once a popular neighborhood bad boy. Ugly Girls tracks the girls through a complicated friendship: they steal cars, skip school, and sneak out at night, testing the boundaries of the barely-there rules imposed on them, and the degree to which they care about themselves and each other. Read more.
Almost Famous Women
Megan Mayhew Bergman, known for Birds of a Lesser Paradise, her first book of short stories, has written a new collection that was published by Scribner this month. Almost Famous Women tells the fictionalized stories of historical women on the fringes of fame. Bergman writes their lives into a larger existence than the footnotes to which they have been relegated.
The Wilds
Many of the stories in Julia Elliott’s debut collection The Wilds illustrate strange realities. A grandmother levitates while describing the Rapture. A nursing home outfits its patients with strap-on robotic limbs and embeds tracking devices in their arms. Packs of feral dogs roam the landscape. A robot is programmed to love. Though these premises may seem bizarre, the stories don’t feel remote. They don’t take place in imagined futures. Rather, these stories feel like universes that exist right alongside our own—tiny pockets of possibility. It’s as though, at any moment, you could stumble and find yourself within one of Julia Elliott’s tactile and grotesque tales.
The World Split Open
In celebration of the thirty-year anniversary of Portland’s Literary Arts, Tin House Books has put together this collection to honor the nonprofit literary center’s storied lecture series. It collects speeches given by ten well-known authors on literature and craft, with warm words of introduction from Jon Raymond. Though I preferred the speeches that felt playful and biographical, as opposed to theory-heavy, the quality level is uniformly high. Dare I suggest that the unpublished majority find something vaguely aspirational in the very act of reading these essays? It felt like research, the fun kind; you’re combining trade tips and techniques with reading, which I imagine is the favorite activity of most writers.
Loitering
Loitering got to me. I’ve read Charles D’Ambrosio’s short stories in the New Yorker, so I’d nod knowingly when a friend or colleague raved about his collections. What really excited those same friends and colleagues though, what lowered their tones, made them more conspiratorial, were his essays. In their attempts to describe them, I kept getting caught up in the settings: a Pentecostal “hell house,” a Russian orphanage, the cold Pacific waters of Neah Bay. I imagined a great writer could put us in those situations and wring a terrific story out of them. But what I didn’t get until I finished dogearing this book, was what D’Ambrosio brings to these subjects. Read more.
A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka
As a Jewish family in the Soviet Union, Lev’s family suffered under an oppressive and anti-Semitic regime. Lev was bullied and beaten at school; his sister was barred from attending medical school; and his father was threatened by the KGB. When news came that the United States was closing its border, and all immigrants had to be registered in Vienna by December 31st, 1989, his mother knew that it was time to leave. Six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lev and his family board a bus out of the country, headed toward Vienna, where there is only a simple rumor of help for refugees. Read more.
The Ploughmen
The Ploughmen, now available through publisher Henry Holt, is the perfect book to read this autumn. Kim Zupan weaves a story that is equal parts discomfiting and beautiful, desolate and richly imagined. Set in the wilds of rural Montana, The Ploughmen follows the complicated relationship between a rookie deputy and the serial killer caged in his jailhouse. The novel explores the essence of friendship and morality. Valentine Millimaki is the cop who searches for those lost in the unyielding wilderness, and lately all he’s been able to find are the dead. It has been too long since he’s rescued someone; the string of those he was unable to help stretches out behind him, following his footsteps. When he’s assigned to the night shift at the jail, he’s already haunted—both by his work and his failing marriage. Read more.
Our Secret Life in the Movies
Out of a set of unique constraints, Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree have written a strange and wonderful little book of fiction. Our Secret Life in the Movies does not follow any obvious narrative path, depending instead on a set of prompts to lead the way. The authors, former university classmates, decided to watch the entire Criterion Collection and write stories based on each film. This slim volume of short fiction is the result, a work of experimental writing that offers mainstream readers cinematic references as ballast.
Doll Palace
Sara Lippmann’s debut collection Doll Palace, out this September from Dock Street Press, is a sparse but intimate portrait of lives unmoored. Set upon by failed pregnancies, lost innocence, a child’s terminal illness, and a pill-popping babysitter, Doll Palace explores characters who are seeking conviction beyond the circumstances of their everyday lives. In “Starter Home” a woman’s new apartment becomes overrun with expensive building construction, and rather than run from the problem she becomes one with it. In “Babydollz” two strippers ponder love over a waxing table. “Jew” artfully contemplates a sick baby, and in “Queen of Hearts” a father feels sympathy for his flawed yet potentially dangerous babysitter.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel Station Eleven recently made the National Book Award’s shortlist for fiction. This ambitious story tackles a post-apocalyptic world in which a super flu has wiped out the majority of the population. Examining themes of celebrity and memory, Mandel explores how our world would change in the face of a major collapse. The book begins with a stage play of King Lear. Arthur Leander is an A-list celebrity who drops dead during the performance, an event that might otherwise dominate a fame-obsessed culture. However, this night marks the beginning of a super-flu outbreak that begins in Toronto and explodes “like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth.”
How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales
No contemporary author knows more about the fairy tale than Kate Bernheimer. Her scholarship and fiction both work to promote public understanding of this often-misrepresented genre. Bernheimer is a professor at the University of Arizona, and founder of the Fairy Tale Review. She has edited several anthologies of fiction and criticism in which major contemporary authors contemplate and reimagine classic tales. Bernheimer has done more than anyone to give these timeless stories a voice, and to examine the contemporary way we relate to them.
Thrown
Kerry Howley’s Thrown is an ecstatic gutshot of literary journalism that has shaken me in more ways than one. At its core, Howley’s debut is a candid profile of two separate mixed martial artists in the Midwest. Though she never explicitly uses the author’s name, Kit is presumably Thrown’s author Kerry Howley, an MFA writer and journalist with bylines in many major publications. Her story begins while at a dreary phenomenology conference, where she sneaks away to explore a Mixed Martial Arts tournament being held in the same hotel. It’s a spectacle that floors and energizes the writer—“I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin”—and propels her to spend the next few years documenting the MMA scene in this masterwork of social investigation.
Women
Published by Short Drive/Long Flight Books, Women is the thickness of my index finger and nearly the height of my (rather small) hand. It’s not often that I can palm a book like a basketball. But for all its brevity, Chloe Caldwell’s debut novella packs a serious gut-punch. It’s about falling in love with a woman for the first time, about the crisis of identity that comes with it, about female friendship, the female body, and learning to accept yourself. It’s largely about rushing love and crushing heartbreak, but it is also pretty damn funny.
In Case of Emergency
Courtney Moreno’s debut novel is a study in trauma: how we experience and process it, and how it affects our relationships with the world and other people. Piper Gallagher is a 28-year-old rookie EMT, coming to the profession after a bad breakup and a series of dead-end jobs. She just wants to do something with her life, and if that means she gets trained by a badass EMT years younger than her, so be it. As she goes through training, Piper fumbles through taking vitals, filling out paperwork, navigating the streets of South Central L.A., and handling calls regarding chest pain to one man who can only say, “I can’t function.”
Good House
Though it is set at the close of our present century, Peyton Marshall’s debut novel Goodhouse offers a dreary vision of a future that is as much a conceivable alternate history as it is a dystopian nightmare. It’s a morally complex literary thriller closer in pedigree to The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go than the Young Adult series—Hunger Games, Divergent, etc.—that have come to define the genre in the last ten years. Goodhouse takes place eighty-odd years in the future, when America has worked to curb crime through the compulsory genetic testing of boys. It has been discovered that a certain set of biometric markers determine whether a child will be predisposed to criminal thoughts and actions. Boys who test positive are sent to the Goodhouse system, where they are raised as wards of the state in prison-like boarding schools rife with chronic abuse. Read more.
Wallflowers
Eliza Robertson has collected quite a trophy case in her short career–she’s won three national fiction contests in Canada, been a finalist for the Journey Prize and the CBC Short Story Prize, and recently won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her first collection of short stories, Wallflowers, is out on September 16th from Bloomsbury. It’s telling that the book is about three hundred pages and will be released in hardcover: Bloomsbury believes in this new writer, and is willing to put resources behind her. With that in mind, I had high expectations when I began reading Wallflowers. I am pleased to say that I was not disappointed.
Wolf in White Van
“Does it freak you out, my fucked-up face?”
A shotgun blast destroyed most of Sean Phillips’s face when he was seventeen. In one of my favorite scenes from John Darnielle’s Wolf In White Van, a pair of metalhead teenagers drinking beers in a parking lot have asked to see his reconstructed visage up close. He informs the reader that no one ever asks if they can look; mostly they stare, disgusted, horrified. It doesn’t scare the teen outcasts; they’re fascinated by it, thrilled by the walking gore before them. They high-five him, blowing smoke away from him in deference. “I felt like the sun had just risen inside me.” He has been disfigured in what we come to find out was a botched suicide attempt. Read more.
Bad Feminist
There aren’t really adequate words for me to describe how much I love this book. This is the book about feminism and culture that I’ve been waiting years for. And no one can do it quite like Roxane Gay.
I’ll be honest—I’m probably not the most impartial reviewer. I’ve been reading Gay’s work for a while now, on The Rumpus, mostly, but also on Buzzfeed and Jezebel and other sites where her name pops up. I’d search her out because I knew I’d be getting concise, emotive writing and incisive cultural critique. In fact, I’d read some of the essays in this book before, and yet, rereading them in the context of the collection was another experience altogether. In short, I knew I was going to love this book, and it still surpassed my expectations. Read more.
How to Catch a Coyote
Christy Crutchfield’s How To Catch A Coyote tells the tragic narrative of the Walker family by expertly defying traditional narrative structure. Straightaway, the reader is given the bare bones of the story. Within the first ten pages we learn the principal narrative events, so I don’t think it’s giving away too much to describe them here: Hill Walker drops out of college and marries Maryanne when she gets pregnant with their daughter, Dakota; later, they have a son, Daniel; Hill molests his daughter; Maryanne kicks Hill out; the daughter leaves town; Hill dies from rabies. In the subsequent chapters, meat is added to the bones of this narrative, until it becomes a living, breathing creature.
2AM at The Cat's Pajamas
A nine-year-old girl has lost her mother and wants to be a jazz singer. A club owner discovers he may lose his building, and a fifth grade teacher reunites with her high school love. Over the course of a single day (Christmas Eve Eve), Marie-Helene Bertino guides readers through three lives as they move in concert—toward, with, and among one another—in her stunning debut novel 2 AM at The Cat’s Pajamas.
Painted Horses
Malcolm Brooks’s debut Painted Horses walks the steady line of genre archetypes without veering into stereotype. It’s an old-fashioned novel, sweeping in scope and probing of character, without leaning on showy language and post-modern literary gimmicks. Sure, you have a somewhat rote plot and a slightly under-written female lead, but the author recreates his Montana of the 1950’s with subtle strokes and warm reverence. This is a love letter to an American West that has all but disappeared.
Also, I hope you like horses, because there are a lot of horses.
Elegy on Kinderklavier
As you may have seen in our recent interview, Arna Bontemps Hemenway doesn’t seem boxed in by the typical constraints of the established writer. That’s probably on account of his newness, but perhaps a bit of it is just rule-exploding ambition. “I wanted to try and get out into that territory that is maybe not dictated by what has become traditional narrative expectation,” he mentioned in our interview. Challenge well met, Hemenway. The stories in Elegy On Kinderklavier (Sarabande Books, 2014), his debut collection, are astonishingly confident.
Naked Me
Summarized, most of the stories in Christian Winn’s debut collection, Naked Me, seem plainly absurd. In the title story, a man makes a bet that he will have sex with the woman who lives across the street from his illegal poker games—in clear view of his fellow gamblers. In “All Her Famous Dead,” perhaps the best story in the collection, an adrift, melancholy woman who (secretly) shares her mother’s lover mourns the deaths of celebrities whom she has never met. However, these stories aren’t in love with their absurdity. More often than not, they bemoan it.
Friendship
Female friendships are often complicated and layered. I don’t know a single meaningful female relationship that hasn’t been tested to some degree. It almost feels like a right of passage that every “best friendship” endure at least one fight, flirt with jealousies, and challenge hierarchy in order to asses its foundation. Emily Gould’s debut novel examines the evolution of one such friendship by focusing on Bev Tunney and Amy Schein as they navigate the waters of their early thirties in New York City.
Stay
The collection is focused around San Francisco’s East Bay, and the people who live and love and fight and struggle there. A lot of the stories also include baseball, and while I’m not a huge fan of the sport, I found its inclusion fitting. There’s something about the American mythos that makes baseball very poignant, even if you’ve never set foot in a ballpark, and the sport underpinned the emotionality and themes of the work well. One of the standout stories (other than “Stay”), was “Man of Merritt,” about a widower in a custody battle with his deceased wife’s parents over his daughter, Vida Blue. He eventually kidnaps Vida Blue (named for the ball player), and takes her on a tour of America’s ballparks, dodging APBs to catch one-hitters at Turner Field.
Made to Break
Made to Break is a boozy, fast-paced, tweaked out bingefest. Five friends, already high from days of partying, retire to Dinky’s cabin to celebrate New Year’s Eve and spend time with their friend Lucille, who is leaving their world of fun and recklessness for a corporate position. Her job transition serves as the impetus for the party, but also forces the pack of thirty-somethings to examine group dynamics—and thus themselves—on the eve of inevitable change.
The Awakening of Miss Prim
The Awakening of Miss Prim follows, as one might suppose, the story of Miss Prim, a young woman who leaves behind her busy city life to take a job as a librarian in a remote village of France. San Ireneo de Arnois is not like most places, however. It is devoted to the simplicity of life, an enclave of exiles who have fled the bustling outside world in order to live purposefully, surrounded by intellectual discussions, literature, family, and a great many teatimes.
Papers in the Wind
While studying abroad in college, I had a flatmate who spent hours playing a genre of sports video games that I could never imagine taking off in the States. In these PC and console games, you put together a roster for a football team, and use adjustments and stat tracking to give your squad the best chance of advancing to the finals. To be clear, you don’t play football in these games, you play numbers; you’re the manager or coach, never the player. Finalize your lineup and match results are rendered with the click of a button. You never even see the pitch. Anyone who calls it soccer is less likely to understand this world than the football fanatics whose every waking moment is dedicated to one sport and one sport only. I had that foreign affinity in mind for my read of Papers in the Wind, translated from Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem. Read more.
The Untold
Though The Untold is a work of fiction, it is inspired by the life of Jessie Hickman, a circus rider, horse thief, convict, fugitive, and all-around wild woman who hid out in the Australian Outback in the 1920s. This is Australian author Courtney Collins’s debut novel, published as The Burial in Australia in 2012 and also released in Europe. The book has already garnered critical acclaim and been shortlisted for several awards.
The novel opens with an almost unspeakable scene. Jessie’s premature baby describes the morning of its birth and its death, when its mother slits its throat, and buries it. Of course, with an act so horrific, Collins must undo it immediately…
Bald New World
There are a few things to address right off the bat in regard to Bald New World. Yes, the title is a direct Aldous Huxley reference. Yes, it is a science fiction dystopia. And yes, everyone in the book is bald.
It is, strictly speaking, a book exploring the premise of “What if the whole world suddenly became bald?” and because of that, there’s a certain absurdist vibe that pervades the entire novel. The most influential people are the owners of wig companies and the man who plays Jesus the General on TV. Travel from L.A. to China takes two hours, but getting through customs takes three. Plastic surgery has progressed so far that, for a hundred-million-dollar fee, anyone can look like Marilyn Monroe.
The Impossible Exile
The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig is enjoying something of a zeitgeist of late. This past week, Other Press published George Prochnik’s The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, a probing and personal biography that follows the exiled novelist’s journeys from his home in Vienna to a tiny Rio suburb. The book comes only a couple of months after the release of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson’s film, which included the credit, “Inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig,” was probably more of a head-scratcher here in America than abroad. Though Zweig was the most translated German author writing during the ascendancy of Nazi Germany (and, hence, the most hated and burned by Nazi brass), he has never achieved an American popularity equal to his worldwide critical acclaim. Read more.
Us Conductors
It’s no secret here at The Masters Review that we’re big fans of Tin House. So when I received my copy of Us Conductors, the debut novel by Montreal-based writer and music critic Sean Michaels, I had high expectations. Thankfully, this dense, yet lyrical novel, delivered in spades.
Us Conductors follows the path of Lev Sergeyevich Termen, the brilliant engineer who invented the theremin. While the book is a work of fiction, Termen and the theremin are not. If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing or hearing a theremin (it is no longer a common instrument), you’re missing out on a singular experience. Controlled by electrical current, the musician plays the theremin without touch, controlling pitch and volume with each hand. Listen to an audio clip of the book, here! Read more.
Sweet Dreams
This week brings another fantastic work in translation. Sweet Dreams, by Italian journalist Massimo Gramellini, is published in the U.S. by Atria Books. The book was the most successful Italian novel of last year, and has now been translated into 20 languages and sold 1.5 million copies. A quietly powerful bestseller, the story follows young Massimo as he grows up and tries to deal with the loss of his mother, whom he lost when he was nine years old.
Massimo’s young life was ideal until his mother, weakened from cancer, died of a heart attack one night after tucking him into bed. After her death, Massimo is sure, with a young boy’s certainty, that she will return. When he finally accepts that she will not, he begins his journey to come to terms with her death—a journey that takes most of his young adult life. Read more.
Praying Drunk
Kyle Minor’s second book of short stories, Praying Drunk, published to rave reviews earlier this year. It has been well covered, and rightly so, as this heartfelt collection brims with craft and wisdom. I’ll admit this is a tough one for me to review, mostly because Minor undoubtedly knows so much more than I do—about writing, about life, about faith; the way it guides us and tears us apart. This book will slap you in the face with its talent. Kyle Minor is that good.
Praying Drunk begins with this note to the reader: “These stories are meant to be read in order. This is a book, not just a collection. DON’T SKIP AROUND.” (For the record, I don’t know anyone who skips around, but perhaps I need fewer type-A friends.)
A Fairy Tale
Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale, published by Other Press, examines the relationship between a father and son, and how legacies are passed down from one generation to the next. This is Bengtsson’s English language debut; however, he has previously written two award-winning novels in Danish. Although American readers are becoming more open to reading translations — perhaps due in part to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series, another Scandinavian bestseller — the University of Rochester estimates that only 3% of works published in the US are works in translation. As such, it’s particularly satisfying that Other Press pursued translation rights for this book and introduced the American and Canadian readership to a skillful author who has already gained recognition internationally. Read more.
Together, Apart
Together, Apart, Ben Hoffman’s debut chapbook, is recently out from independent publisher Origami Zoo Press. Hoffman’s manuscript won the press’s first-ever chapbook contest, judged by Matt Bell. As the title suggests, the stories in this collection transition rapidly between different modes of experience. The prose is by turns funny and sad. The narrators are cynical, then kind. The characters are constantly grappling with the difference between their desires and the realities they are presented with. It is in this impossible, transitional space that Hoffman’s stories flourish. I have to admit, I studied with the author at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, so I knew some of these pieces from workshops and readings. But as I read this chapbook it was hard to believe there had ever been other versions of these stories, that they were once edited and whittled. Read more.
Sleep Donation
In Karen Russell’s e-novella Sleep Donation, the inaugural title for Atavist Books, the reader enters a world in which our dreams are no longer private. Insomnia is an epidemic, and no one knows the cause. Every day, more people lose their ability to sleep. Healthy sleepers are asked to literally give their dreams away, to donate them in hours.
Summed up, these events may sound lofty, but in Sleep Donation they are described by narrator Trish bluntly, even clinically. After all, these are the facts of her life. Trish volunteers as a recruiter for the nonprofit Slumber Corps, soliciting people to give to their sleep banks.
The Apartment
The premise of The Apartment by Greg Baxter is straightforward. An unnamed American expat searches for an apartment in an unnamed European city. At the book’s start, the narrator leaves his hotel and heads into the city with local friend Saskia, who helps him search for permanent lodging. Over a single day, the book unfolds through the narrator’s stream of consciousness, slowly revealing details from his past. The novel’s themes and events expand from this principle, filling in like the snow that lightly falls throughout this cold and solemn text. The Apartment is successful in painting a portrait of a man struggling with a difficult past through slim and understated discoveries unveiled by his exposition. The book’s greatest success is it subtlety. It is also entirely elegant. I enjoyed every page. Read more.
Archetype
The buzz behind Archetype is not misplaced. I finished this book in a weekend, and I’m fairly sure that’s how most people have read it – fast and somewhat obsessively. With the proliferation of dystopian novels in the market, it’s becoming difficult to find a standout book among the masses. Archetype does that. It’s been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, Before I Go To Sleep, The Matrix, and The Hunger Games, but to me, while it did have echoes of those stories, it seemed more a beast of its own.
M.D. Waters creates a world in which women are commodities to be bought, fertility is controlled by men, surveillance is commonplace, and the resistance strikes in secret.
American Fun
John Beckman’s nonfiction debut, American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt (Pantheon, 2014), joins the shelf of recent cultural volumes like Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture by Jon Savage or Hip: The History by John Leland that view a weighty historical landscape through the prism of ribaldry and misbehavior. It’s a wildly entertaining work of sociology that pulls in examples from all corners of this country’s young history, from rent parties and teenage rumbles, to snowballs thrown at Redcoats, as well as pranks pulled on multinational corporations.
Know the Night
Know the Night is an impressive debut for author Maria Mutch, whose literary memoir maintains that magical balance between lyricism and realism. Occupying the liminal and flexible space of darkness, Mutch’s book takes place between midnight and six a.m., yet spans the years that the author’s son Gabriel was unable to sleep continuously through the night.
Gabriel, whose own story unfolds through the book, begins as a precocious toddler with Down Syndrome. As he grows older, he is also diagnosed with autism, and Mutch describes the experience of multiple-disability parenting with sincerity and honesty. The story is not sugarcoated.
"Beside Myself"
Beside Myself, Ashley Farmer’s debut story collection, is out March 3, 2014 from Tiny Hardcore Press. Farmer’s flash fiction surprises from story to story and from sentence to sentence, constantly asking the reader to re-evaluate impressions formed just a moment before. These stories are often surreal, but sometimes not; some are longer and more narrative; others are just a few sentences and focus on an image or scene. Whatever the case, the collection as a whole appeals to our desire to fantasize. Read more.
"MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction"
MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach, is the first book in a new nonfiction series by n+1 and Faber and Faber. In the collection’s title essay, Chad Harbach identifies MFA programs and New York Publishing as the two dominant forces in American fiction. He assigns an aesthetic to each culture: MFA writing is composed of short stories that take after an older, anthologized cannon. MFA writers don’t worry about their book’s profitability because their sole aim is to earn money through teaching. New York writers produce readable, socially relevant novels that aim to sell.
"Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail"
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a notable debut on two platforms. It is the first short story collection from writer Kelly Luce, whose sensibility and prose rings brilliant on the page. It is also the first book from publisher A Strange Object, co-founded by publishing veterans Callie Collins and Jill Meyers. Luce and her publishers have aligned a lovely and startling collection of short stories that readers will devour. I absolutely did. I fell in love with this book.
"A Field Guide To The North American Family"
Lyrically told and lavishly designed, Garth Risk Hallberg’s A Field Guide To The North American Family follows the story of two suburban families through a series of 63 illustrated chapters. This evocative novella presents its brief vignettes as a series of non-linear “field guide entries,” each complete with an abstract photo of whatever small-town indiscretion, teenage experimentation, patriarchal death, etc. is described on the opposite page.
"The Encylopedia of Early Earth"
To start, this book is beautiful. The first thing you notice when you heft it up (it’s just about as tall as my forearm) is the quality of production: the solid feel, the thick pages, the bold rendering of the lines and colors. Initially its size and luxury make it seem like a coffee table book, something to show off to company. But the story within is far too complex and satisfying to simply flip through.
"The Biology of Luck"
Jacob M. Appel’s THE BIOLOGY OF LUCK (Elephant Rock Books, 2013) is an inventive and thought-provoking new novel that transcends the simple boy-meets-girl plot. New York City tour guide Larry Bloom is by his own account neither handsome nor wealthy. (That’s if we can trust his word—more on that later.) Yet on the summer day in which this love story is set, he cannot deny his own luck. He is in possession of two items of life-changing potential: an unopened letter from a literary agency about his manuscript, and a confirmed date with his dream woman, an aimless 20-something Brooklynite named Starshine Hart.
"You Are One of Them"
You Are One of Them is one of the year’s most highly anticipated novels. Debut author, Elliott Holt was awarded a Pushcart Prize for her short story “Fem Care,” originally published in The Kenyon Review, was runner-up for the PEN Emerging Writers Award, and was one of New York Magazine’s six “literary stars of tomorrow.” Needless to say, when a writer of such promise publishes a novel, the literary world pays attention.
"I Am Holding Your Hand"
I Am Holding Your Hand is a rare treasure. This collection of short stories brought to us by new author Myfanwy Collins is a wonderful example of writing that feels fresh and intoxicating, while maintaining the sensibility of an author who writes like a seasoned pro. Many of the stories in this fine collection were previously published in literary reviews such as The Kenyon Review, PANK, and Flatmancrooked, to name a few. So it’s clear that while Collins is still new to the playing field, she is adept — and has been recognized as such — at short story writing of the highest quality.
"Ablutions"
Ablutions by Patrick deWitt was published in 2010 and is deWitt’s first novel. We chose this From the Vault pick because it’s the perfect book to review at the start of a New Year. Somewhat ironically, the book is filled with characters and situations one would resolve against when picking Resolutions, as this book is as much about addiction and self-loathing as it is a study on effective literary writing.
"The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets"
Kathleen Alcott’s debut work, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets is stunning, and thrills on a sentence by sentence level. The insight she offers through prose is striking at times, and brilliant, with much more depth and maturity than you’d expect from a first-time novelist. It stands as an excellent example of talented debut writing.
The book examines the complicated relationship between Ida, and two boys she grew up with, brothers, Jackson and James. Ida and Jackson find themselves in various stages of love, as best friends in childhood, and then as tumultuous lovers. However, the premise of the book is more intriguing than simply an examination of complicated relationships.
"Beside the Sea"
Beside the Sea is a haunting and fragmented tale that leaves readers immersed in a web of broken logic and misguided love. It begins with a mother and her two sons on a trip to the sea. “I wanted us to set off totally believing in it,” she says, setting the stage for a story that is doomed from the start. The mother wants to give her sons a happy memory of the ocean, but the trip is poorly planned, filled with gaps, and led by a character who contracts and expands in and out of mental illness.
"The Dog Stars"
The Dog Stars begins after a super-flu has wiped out nearly all of the world’s population. The novel follows Hig and his dog Jasper, who have taken refuge in a small airport hanger in the mountains, and Bangley, an army-type survivalist who has set up camp with enough weapons and ammunition to stave off bands of wanderers. When Hig and Jasper fly the perimeter of camp in a 1956 Cessna, a world that is both lonely and scenic unfolds. When Hig receives a strange transmission over the plane’s radio, it triggers the possibility of hope, sending Hig on a flight past the point of no return.
