A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.

Fiction, Historical Fiction, Popular Fiction

Babylonia

Costanza Casati’s captivating and historically insightful second novel, inspired by a real Assyrian queen, is a resonant page turner.

Debut Fiction, Family Saga, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Family Saga Debut Fiction

Confessions

Catherine Airey excavates the intertwining stories of three generations of Irish American women in Confessions, a firecracker of a debut novel that never gives up any slack.

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Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Miller

ike sands through the hourglass If ol’ Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas, he’d probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra “See? What’d I tell you? It’s eternal recurrence all over again!” I don’t mean to poke fun at Mawer’s excellent novel, but merely to indicate that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” as commonly conceived, can profitably be used to view it. There may be other ways, but the book has about it a lot of what Nietzsche called the “eternal hourglass of existence” that is continually being “turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust.” Further, in The Gospel of Judas, time is not linear, like the idea of time that has come down to us from Aristotle through Judeo-Christian teaching, but circular and cyclical, like Nietzsche’s time. The novel shifts fluidly back and forth from World War II to the present day, and it definitely has much to do with Christianity.

Leo Newman is a Roman Catholic priest, British but living in Rome. A renowned scholar of biblical-era texts, he is summoned to Jerusalem to decipher a recently found scroll that appears to have been written by Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ. Leo quickly senses that the scroll is genuine and literally devastating to Christianity.

At this time Leo, who is apparently 50-ish, embarks on his first sexual affair. The woman, named Madeleine, is Catholic and the wife of a British diplomat. She is one element in the “potent sense of womanhood” that informs Leo’s life. Indeed, the novel gives off a muted sensation of must more than that, of the ancient fear that women are not only sexual predators but the very occasion for sin.

A leitmotif of repetition and reflection accompanies the time/eternal recurrence theme. The Leo-Madeleine affair reflects the affair that the priest’s mother, Gretchen, also a Catholic and the wife of a (German) diplomat, has with an Italian Jew named Francesco during World War II.

This leitmotif, in turn, is entwined with the book’s and Leo’s obsession with word origins and names. For instance, Yerushalem (Jerusalem), the author tells us, is not from shalom, the Hebrew for peace, but from the Canaanite god, Shalem.

While these explanations are a treat to come across, they amount to more than mere intellectualizing. Leo’s working life is one of words “Had he always feared that as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel?” and, as he tells Madeleine at one of their first meetings, “In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings.” Darn right they did, and do. Madeleine is a form of Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, the reformed and repentant whore of the New Testament. So is Magda, an artist and whore with whom Leo later shares an apartment.

A priest of Christ who takes up with two women named for the woman who, aside from Mary, is most associated with Christ. As Leo works at translating the scroll, one of them, Madeleine, stands figuratively at his shoulder, just as “her namesake had been there at the discovery of the opened tomb.” All of this would be mere symbol-dropping and parading of knowledge if the author did not make it so much of a piece. Tightly constructed is not the right term; try seamless. Mawer, author of Mendel’s Dwarf and several other novels, has produced tightly woven, brilliantly matching narrative threads that make up a splendid cloth. And for good measure, the scroll mystery adds a nice thriller element.

Like all good modern authors, Mawer lets us make of it what we will. “Was it here,” Leo wonders as he pores over the papyrus, “that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?” The weight of the book’s evidence would seem to point to one answer yes.

However, also like all good modern authors, Mawer’s true concern is not the cosmic and infinite, but the immediate and human. The priest of Christ, not Christ, animates this book.

In the final pages we learn that toward the end of the war Gretchen has taken the name “Mrs. Newman” names, after all, always had meanings and that Leo, the child with which she is pregnant, is “a kind of resurrection.” He is also, you will discover, a kind of eternal recurrence.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

ike sands through the hourglass If ol' Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer's The Gospel of Judas, he'd probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra "See? What'd I tell you? It's eternal recurrence all over again!" I don't mean to…

Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Sandy MacDonald

Pulitzer Prize-winner herself, Anne Tyler is a champion of holy losers, if not outright fools. Many of her novels (this is her 15th) read like blow-by-blow rundowns of extended family reunions at which all parties seem determined to present their worst or at best, most eccentric behavior. Rebecca (“Beck”) Davitch, the accidental matriarch at the hub of this Baltimore clan, finds herself at 53 with a grown brood three mildly squabblesome stepdaughters and their extended households, along with her own daughter, now on her third husband-and-child combo and a resident 99-year-old uncle-in-law, plus an in-home party business to run out of a grand, if deteriorating brownstone, the Open Arms. Beck’s problem, oddly, is not overextension, but a gap at the core: the one thing achingly missing from her life is her husband, Joe, who died only a few years after sweeping her into this maelstrom. Her midlife crisis, when it comes, is one of identity slippage. She’s perfectly clear or thinks she is on who she was at 21, when Joe mistook her for a “natural-born celebrator,” thus typecasting her into the role she has occupied for the past three decades. But who is she now? Has she inadvertently strayed from her “true real life,” the one she was meant to have? We all wonder from time to time about the road not taken. In Beck’s case, a seemingly portentous dream about the son she might have had with Will Allenby, her childhood-unto-college sweetheart, prompts her to look him up to often awkward, sometimes hilarious effect. A carefully staged meeting with his resentful teenage daughter is a modern classic. Beck’s family is far more accepting of this potential rekindling: indeed, her mother, an old-fashioned passive-aggressive whose every innocuous comment bears a barbed reproach, is outright ecstatic. Will Beck find the lost segments of her younger self by reconnecting with this phantasm from her past? The reader will quickly form a fervid opinion as to whether she should. Meanwhile, Tyler’s latest entertainingly refutes Tolstoy’s dictum that happy families are all alike.

Sandy MacDonald is incubating a family compound on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Either/Or

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is a delightful invitation to reunite with Selin by picking up her adventures where we left off in The Idiot. Now a sophomore at Harvard University, Selin continues to explore, meander and wonder throughout the autumn of 1996, the spring of ’97 and the summer that follows.

Selin’s voice is notably more mature, more reflective and perhaps more droll, and yet she’s still true to herself as she tries to figure out who, exactly, that self is and can be. She attempts to make sense of the previous summer—her travels in Hungary, her time with her crush, Ivan, and his strangeness and distance, and all the many experiences she’s lived but doesn’t yet understand—and searches for guidance through the works assigned for her literature class, including The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard and more.

As Either/Or moves through the year, Selin begins to live actively rather than reflexively; she develops agency, and her choices have power. As she shows an increasing awareness of and engagement with the world, she starts to move out of her novels and into her own self.

Readers will find the tensions of history and present-day politics difficult to miss while reading Either/Or: Russian literature is a strong influence in Selin’s life, and her on-campus job is at the Ukrainian Research Institute. The 1990s technology is a throwback and a joy, and it’s fascinating to consider the ways that email and the internet have changed and shaped everything in our world, from relationships to travel. There’s humor in the lived experiences of parties, classes, alcohol and sex, and Batuman’s balancing of all these elements is remarkable.

Our present moment will change, and technology will continue to evolve, but undoubtedly Selin’s voice will remain a gem.

Selin, hero of Elif Batuman's The Idiot, returns with a voice that is more mature, reflective and droll as she starts to move out of her novels and into her own self.

Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Bruce Tierney

n October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, into space. It orbited the earth for three months before re-entering the atmosphere and burning up. Widely regarded in the West as a military threat, Sputnik I simply sent a static-laden signal back to earth, each beep heralding the dawn of the space race that would dictate East-West relations for two decades.

Half a lifetime later, Haruki Murakami brings us Sputnik Sweetheart, a wise, sad and loving look at how we are each satellites in sometimes decaying orbit around one another. Three characters dominate the book: the unnamed male author, a grade-school teacher in modern day Japan; Sumire, the object of his unrequited affection, a free-spirited post-beatnik he has known since his college days; and Miu, a glamorous and successful businesswoman who has rather unexpectedly captured Sumire’s heart. “Sumire sighed, gazed up at the ceiling for a while, and lit her cigarette. It’s pretty strange if you think about it, she thought. Here I am in love for the first time in my life, at age twenty-two. And the other person just happens to be a woman.” When Miu invites her new protÅ½gÅ½ to accompany her on a whirlwind business trip to Europe, Sumire happily agrees. On an unnamed Greek Island off the coast of Turkey (Lesbos?), however, things go horribly awry. The teacher awakens to a frantic phone call from Miu summoning him to Greece in search of Sumire, who has gone missing in the wake of a cataclysmic evening. The teacher establishes a tenuous yet intimate bond with Miu as they ransack the beach cottage for clues. Bit by excruciating bit, pieces of Sumire’s last days float to the surface as the police and her loved ones try to make sense of her disappearance. In Sputnik Sweetheart, his seventh novel translated into English, Murakami again displays the minimalist craftsmanship that has made him a critic’s darling both in Asia and the West. Perhaps better than any contemporary writer, he captures and lays bare the raw human emotion of longing.

An interesting factoid picked up in the reading: the ominous Sputnik, which held the world in paranoid thrall for months, was about the size of a beach ball.

Bruce Tierney is a Nashville-based writer.

Audio, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Audio Literary Fiction

In a new audiobook recording, Mohsin Hamid is the voice in your head

Interview by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

It’s rare for a novelist to read their own audiobook. Most authors who step up to the mic are recording nonfiction, with fiction audiobooks typically being performed by a voice actor or full cast. But Booker Prize finalist Mohsin Hamid possesses transportive powers as an audiobook narrator, and with new recordings of his first two novels, Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (4.5 hours), he has now narrated all five of his books.

Told in a first-person monologue by a Pakistani man named Changez to an unnamed American at a cafe in Lahore not long after 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes for an especially powerful listening experience as, over the course of one evening, a sense of dread builds and demands a reckoning. For his first ever interview on his work as a narrator, Hamid took a video call at his home in Pakistan to discuss this “one-man play.”

When writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist, how much did you think about what it would be like to step into the role of author-narrator-character?
I sort of wrote all of my books as audiobooks. I didn’t realize this until years later, but I really do think of literature or fiction as something we absorb through our aural circuitry more than our visual circuitry. Many of us read books with our eyes—some people read with their fingers or with their ears, as with audiobooks—but so many of us grew up reading with our eyes, so it’s a very visual experience, and the way things look should be important. But I tend to feel that the circuitry involved is still very much the circuitry of sound and language and rhythm and cadence.

One of the formative moments for me as a writer was taking a creative writing workshop with Toni Morrison back in 1993 spring in college. . . . And one thing she did in her class is that she would read our work aloud back to us. She could make a Corn Flakes box sound like poetry. She was the greatest reader I ever encountered, and when she would read . . . I thought, “Wow, I can really write! I’ve got it!”

She said things like, “You want to keep your reader a sort of half-heartbeat ahead of the action, so that what comes next can be a surprise, but it should feel like it was inevitable.” . . . One of the ways we do that in cinema, for example, is through the soundtrack, which suggests movements and motions and directions even while the visuals are doing something else. In written fiction, cadence and sound and rhythm can begin to establish these sorts of movements and directions, so that you have the chance of this feeling of inevitability.

“I’d always imagined it as this almost stage story, and suddenly I was on this stage, and it felt oddly like coming full circle.”

The Reluctant Fundamentalist wasn’t originally conceived as a 9/11 novel. You finished its first draft prior to that day, but as the world changed, so did your book. Now we have the opportunity to revisit your 9/11 novel with the gift of hindsight. What do you think is its place in our current reading environment?
It’s hard for me to answer that. I remember once being at this literary festival in Mantua, Italy. And as I say this, I should make clear that my life is not spent at literary festivals in Mantua, Italy. It was as exotic for me to be there as it is to say it to you now, but there I was under some clock tower in the open air, the stars above us, and Russell Banks was there. . . . I knew that a book of his had come out recently, and I had asked him if he was happy with how it had done and, you know, the usual chitchat you try to make with some literary icon when you’re this young kid who’s written a book or two. And he said something that stuck with me.

He said, “You know, it’s too soon to say. . . . It’s not until about 10 years after a book comes out that you begin to have a sense of what it’s doing. And the reasons why people are still reading it 10 years on are probably what you actually did. That’s what people got from it.” This is the kind of thing you go to literary festivals for, so that some much more experienced writer can unload this wisdom on you. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is now 15 years old, so it’s past the Russell Banks 10-year law, and I think people still seem to be reading it.

I wrote that book very much with the idea of the reader as a kind of character. Not that the novel is addressed to you, necessarily, but the book is a kind of half novel. We never hear half of the story; we never hear Changez’s interlocutor really say anything. Even more than most novels—or all novels, by virtue of being pieces of ink printed on paper that require a transmutation by the reader that makes them come alive—this book, because so much of it is missing, [forces the reader] to try and restabilize this narrative. The book was intended as a way for the reader to encounter how they feel about the story. What are the instincts that it provokes in them? What are their inclinations? Who do you think is threatening whom? Why? And it leads you, in a sense, to a position that isn’t quite resolved, and so you have to figure out either how to resolve it or what that unresolved state makes you feel. And I think it still does that, I imagine.

The form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is this dramatic monologue, is really akin to a one-man play. So in doing an audiobook, I was performing that one-man play. I’d always imagined it as this almost stage story, and suddenly I was on this stage, and it felt oddly like coming full circle.

Read our starred review of The Reluctant Fundamentalist audiobook.

That dramatic monologue is so effective as an audiobook. The listener is called upon in a very different way than with other novels. We feel like we’re being addressed.
That’s good to hear. It is a very direct form of address. It has to be. And in that book in particular, voice is so important because Changez, we learn, is ostensibly Muslim. But he doesn’t pray, he drinks, he has sex, he doesn’t quote the Quran or think about the doings of the Prophet. . . . His Islam appears to be a sort of tribal [affiliation]. It’s sort of “these are my people, I belong to something,” much more than it is an operating system, you know, like MacOS.

Some people might imagine that Islam has a kind of . . . rigidity or formality, that it has a kind of, you know, menace. I think these sorts of perceptions that many people do have about Islam—who are not Muslims or don’t know very many Muslims, particularly in that post-9/11 environment—the novel doesn’t give those attributes to Changez, but it does use a voice that can invoke those attributes. So you can end up believing things about this guy, not because he thinks in a certain way or even does anything, but just because it sounds like he might.

And so the reading of that book was very interesting and actually fun because Changez speaks in this very formal, kind of anachronistic way, and that formality is also a distancing, and it builds to what feels like a kind of menace because, you know, so often we assume that a more colloquial, friendly form of address is not threatening, but Changez’s quite formal address [makes us wonder,] “Why is he keeping me at a distance? What does he intend to do to me? What kind of person speaks in this way? Why does he think like this?”

I used to talk about The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a thriller in which nothing really happens. And I think that sense of thrill comes from the fact that we are already frightened of each other. There’s a preexisting thrill in the reader—whether it’s a reader who sympathizes with Changez and is frightened of the American, or sympathizes with the American and is frightened of Changez—and the novel tries to invoke within the reader a feeling of that discomfort that we were all encouraged to have in those years, that we belonged to these different groups and that we had to be in conflict.

And as audiobook listeners, we’re even more vulnerable to what the story wants to invoke in us. We’re passive receivers; we’re not even moving our eyes across the page.
Weirdly enough, it’s closer to the experience of Changez’s interlocutor in the book itself. The confined space of this conversation, where somebody is forced to listen to somebody else for hours, is more akin to an audiobook experience, where you’re sort of sitting there and this person is coming at you with their voice.

“I used to talk about The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a thriller in which nothing really happens. And I think that sense of thrill comes from the fact that we are already frightened of each other.”

Are you a frequent audiobook listener?
I tend to feel that the inbound-information-to-my-eyes thing is a little bit overloaded. Either I’m reading stuff online or I’m actually reading a book or I’m writing something, and then when I’m not, there’s a complex series of advertisements directed at me and my kids’ devices, and I think that I long to just have my eyes be free. And that’s when the idea of just listening to something becomes so attractive. My daughter does the exact same thing, but she listens to music for hours every day, and she’s dancing in her room by herself, and she has that relationship with music that teens and preteens sort of have had from time immemorial. It’s just ears. It’s ears and your body in space.

You know, I’m now reminded of this thing that Philip Gourevitch once said to me when he was editor of The Paris Review. He said, “It’s strange, but we get more short story submissions than we have subscribers.” . . . I feel a little bit like that, where I’ve recorded this handful of audiobooks these last few years, but how many have I listened to? I think I’m like the Paris Review submitter of audiobooks. I talk a good game, but I don’t really walk the walk as far as listening is concerned. So it’s a bit shameful, but anyway, I’m a writer, so I make the things. I don’t listen that much.

Photo of Mohsin Hamid by Jillian Edelstein

Fifteen years after its initial publication, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets a haunting new audiobook recorded by its author.

Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Linda Stankard

magine if you and your nearest neighbors had chalkboards hanging outside your homes and rather than communicating by talking, you wrote messages to each other on these boards. While the medium might be somewhat limiting, curtailing “dialogue” to brief missives, it might prove liberating in other ways. Without having to risk a face-to-face confrontation, or the entanglement of a protracted conversation, people might feel free to speak their minds, airing issues perhaps as openly as in the traditional chat over a cup of coffee or as curtly as the rigid warning sign, “Beware of Dog.” Melinda Haynes uses this peculiar, yet intriguing premise to create an isolated and bizarre setting for her riveting new novel, Chalktown. The mysterious aura of Chalktown beckons Hezekiah Sheehand, a 16-year-old boy who literally and figuratively has “the weight of the world on his shoulders.” One day he cuts school, bundles his mentally and physically disabled little brother, Yellababy, on his back, and heads out to visit this curious, small village.

From this simple beginning, Haynes weaves a provocative tale that intertwines the lives of her numerous characters, each struggling toward some measure of peace and self-respect. Before Hezekiah even sets out for Chalktown, we are introduced to Susan Blair, his abusive mother, who fills their shabby home with other people’s cast-off clothing to sell on consignment, and Marion Calhoun, the Sheehand’s black neighbor who is treated with derision by his white neighbors. As Hezekiah makes his way to Chalktown, the plot and list of characters expands like ripples from a stone thrown in a lake, but Haynes masterfully reins the ripples in, tying diverse elements like love and murder, racism and romance, kindness and cruelty into a cohesive, fascinating tale of hope and redemption.

Readers who reveled in the artistry of Hayne’s debut novel, Mother of Pearl (a highly acclaimed, New York Times bestseller and Oprah book club selection) will be no less impressed with Chalktown, a stunning second book which reaffirms Haynes’ stature as a gifted writer and incredible storyteller. If I had a chalkboard outside my home and my neighbors were anxiously awaiting my words of wisdom regarding Haynes’ latest book, I would simply go outside, pick up my chalk and write, “Wow!” Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Let me tell you a true story

Behind the Book by Hernan Diaz

by Hernan Diaz

Literature has always had the power to create realities around itself. Indeed, this ability has been one of fiction’s obsessions over centuries. As different literary devices come in and out of style throughout history, one of them has remained relevant for at least a couple of millennia: the framed narrative. We are all familiar with this form of storytelling, which can be found in works as dissimilar as the Odyssey, the One Thousand and One Nights, the Decameron and Ethan Frome. For expediency’s sake, here’s a made-up example:

The express train had been streaking through the stormy night for hours, which is why it was curious that the man who came into my compartment was shivering and soaked to the bone. He took the seat opposite mine, wiped his face, and, after struggling to light a wet cigarette, started to speak in a whisper that grew louder as he warmed up:

This, of course, is followed by the story that explains how the man came to hop on board a fast-moving train in the middle of the night. But that’s not quite relevant right now. The most important part of this example is that final colon. This is the graphic boundary between two different planes of reality—and what a beautiful coincidence it is that the colon should resemble a hinge! Of course, not all framed narratives feature this punctuation mark (although a lot of them do: Borges, a master of the framed tale, often uses them just like this), but it provides a helpful way of seeing how these two levels interact. On this side of the colon, what passes for the real world; on the other side, the realm of storytelling.

“We understand the world through stories. Is it that surprising, then, that their texture, slant and tone should condition what we perceive to be true?”

Part of why this is such a successful device has to do with the geography of the text. The frame is quite literally closer to you, the reader, than the story it contains. And it’s this physical closeness to reality (to the person holding the book) that makes the framing story more believable. Meanwhile, the framed story, by virtue of being removed, serves as a tacit reminder of that closeness. (Also, the soaked man’s tale may turn out to be outlandish, but wouldn’t that, by contrast, make the circumstances of the narrator in the compartment even more plausible and believable?) We experience this more acutely in those stories where we forget there was a frame, only to, in the final chapter, return to it. After the soaked man’s account of his adventures, we find ourselves, once again, in the safety of the compartment. The feeling upon returning to the frame—and this is quite telling—can resemble that of waking up from a dream. We are back in “the real world.” In short, framed stories create a gradation of reality. And in this scale, the frame is the closest we can get to the referential world.

Yet when we read Don Quixote, Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, we think of the knight-errant fighting windmills, of the creature seeking revenge on its creator, of the mercurial antihero roaming the Yorkshire moors. These are the characters and events that immediately come to mind. However, this is not what these novels are, strictly speaking, about. Don Quixote is about a person reading a translation of an Arabic manuscript. Frankenstein is about a sea captain writing letters to his sister. Wuthering Heights is about a housekeeper talking by the fire as she does her needlework. This is all that happens in these novels—on this side of the colon. The fact that we tend to forget these scenes containing the stories shows how effective these frames are at mimicking “the real thing.” Because it is always there, reality can afford to be taken for granted, disregarded and even forgotten.

These stories (about the mad knight, the friendless monster, the haunted lover) have severed their ties to the referential world. They are quite literally surrounded by fiction (the tales about the translator, the captain, the servant). Their context is no longer life but literature. This, of course, enhances the verisimilitude and lifelikeness of the novels—because literature is no longer trying to copy anything outside itself.

Framed narratives show us something important about the way in which we understand the world through fiction. If a proper context can be created around a story, it will stand a much better chance of being believed, since the parameters of truthfulness have been established beforehand. The referent for this sort of fiction is another fiction. And it is we, in the end, who have been framed.

“Don Quixote is about a person reading a translation of an Arabic manuscript. Frankenstein is about a sea captain writing letters to his sister. Wuthering Heights is about a housekeeper talking by the fire as she does her needlework.”

These were some of the thoughts behind my latest novel, Trust. What is the relationship between literature and reality? To what extent is our everyday life a framed narrative? And what are the stories that frame our quotidian experience?

I became interested in how many historical accounts regularly reveal themselves to be, at least to some extent, fabrications—narratives distorted for political gain. Still, these fictions have a direct impact on our lives. Although we know that with some regularity they will be questioned, transformed and even debunked, a great part of our identity is defined by these stories.

Another of these public fictions is money. It’s an all-encompassing illusion with all-too-real effects. There’s nothing material or tangible that links a dollar bill to the value it represents (and in this, money resembles language). Its value is the result of a long series of conventions. It’s make-believe. All money is, at heart, play money. And all of us have gathered, voluntarily or not, around the board.

Trust, then, explores the very material consequences fiction can have. The book is made up of four different “documents”—a novel-within-the novel, two memoirs and a diary—and the reader is enlisted as a textual detective in order to come up with a possible version of the truth behind these stories. Part of this quest will challenge the contracts we enter into when we engage with narratives of any kind—literary, historical, political, financial. More than asking itself how literature imitates life, Trust interrogates how the stories we tell shape the world around them. We understand the world through stories. Is it that surprising, then, that their texture, slant and tone should condition what we perceive to be true?

I wouldn’t say that Trust, as a whole, is a framed narrative in a traditional sense. But each layer in the novel creates a reality for the others. It’s hard to reveal more without giving too much away. Let’s just say, expanding the little example I made up at the beginning of this essay, that once the soaked man is done with his story, neither his listener nor the reader will be so sure about that train’s destination.

Read our starred review of Trust by Hernan Diaz.

Photos of Hernan Diaz by Pascal Perich.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Hernan Diaz, author of Trust, investigates the joys and mysteries of the framed narrative.

Fiction, Short Stories

Fiction Short Stories

Book Clubs: May 2022

Feature by Julie Hale

by Julie Hale

In Love in Color: Mythical Tales From Around the World, Retold, British Nigerian author Bolu Babalola re-envisions traditional love stories from West Africa, the Middle East and Greece with a focus on empowered female characters. In “Nefertiti,” Babalola casts the famed Egyptian ruler as a defender of women, while in “Osun,” she draws upon a Yoruba folktale to tell the story of a love triangle. Babalola displays wonderful range throughout this inventive collection, and reading groups will enjoy discussing topics like the nature of desire and traditional notions of love and romance.

Yoon Choi explores the Korean American experience and the complexities of human connection in her beautifully crafted story collection, Skinship. “First Language” is the story of Sae-ri, who struggles to make her arranged marriage a success while dealing with a difficult son. In “The Art of Losing,” Mo-sae grapples with old age and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. In every piece, Choi investigates what it means to be an immigrant, writing with compassion and wisdom throughout this uniquely assured debut.

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, George Saunders digs into seven classic stories—all included in the book—by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and other greats, integrating insights from his graduate course on Russian literature along the way. As he unpacks the meaning of each story, Saunders examines the mechanics of narrative and considers what makes a work of fiction succeed. His discerning study of the short story form will appeal to readers and writers alike.

The stories in The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans’ powerful second collection, explore racial dynamics, isolation and the difficulty of connection in contemporary culture through deeply human character moments. “Alcatraz” is a poignant depiction of a family devastated by the wrongful conviction of a relative. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Claire, a white college student, faces fallout when she’s photographed in a Confederate flag bikini and the picture is shared online. Again and again in these stories, Evans lays bare the loneliness and displacement that so often define modern existence, setting up book clubs for meaningful conversations surrounding identity and loss.

Ready for some deep conversations? These collections offer fresh perspectives on relationships, race and the human condition.

Fiction, Poetry

Fiction Poetry

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Julie Hale

ID VIDEOS Quiet time music Does listening to Mozart really increase one’s IQ? After viewing Mozart Nature Symphonies, you will probably decide that it doesn’t really matter. What really matters is where this video takes you. With birds in flight and swirling schools of fish matching Mozart’s soaring notes and spinning melodies, rich and colorful footage of animals in their natural habitats eases viewers young and old into a wonderful calmness. If it increases the IQ, so much the better but if not, this tape is still a keeper.

Recommended for ages 0Ð2 Let’s make music Pre-schoolers adore Steve, his imaginary dog Blue and the rest of the Blue’s Clues fanciful cast. In Blue’s Big Musical Movie, real-person Steve awakens in an animated, boldly colored world where he and Blue are planning to produce a backyard musical. Steve, using the Blue’s Clues format of tracking down clues, shows his viewers as well as his imaginary friends how to organize such an event. What sets this piece apart from the rest is its fabulous lesson on writing music. The affable G Clef (Ray Charles) explains notes, harmony, rhythm and tempo to Steve, who jumps from one piano key to the next to demonstrate how the written music sounds. It’s a terrific introduction to music that bridges the abstract and the concrete.

Recommended for ages 5Ð8 Flying colors Mac, a 150-year-old talking parrot (voice by John Goodman), is The Real Macaw in this high-flying adventure that includes pirate treasure, the South Pacific, a villainous curator and a somewhat eccentric Grandpa played by Jason Robards. Mac is a brilliant bundle of color and one-liners that leads teenager Sam away from his home in Australia to recover a treasure chest of riches for Grandpa, whose debts threaten to force him from his home. The music, like the script, is hip, upbeat and funny. Fantasy melding with real-life family issues will also appeal to older teens, and a noble, culturally sensitive ending redeems Sam’s run-away behavior. Recommended for ages 8Ð12 VIDEO PICK OF THE MONTH Dreams of many colors This year, April is the month of Easter and the Jewish Passover, a perfect time to share an Old Testament story of forgiveness. The privileged youngest son of Jacob loses his famed coat of many colors but not his dreams in Joseph: King of Dreams and, in the end, forgives his brothers for their betrayal. Animation can sometimes exceed real-life acting because portrayals are not colored by our knowledge of the mortal actors, and such is the case in this animated musical masterpiece. Joseph (Ben Affleck) is convincing as a human who grows into a hero. Saturated colors, artistic rendering and an inspiring score do this timeless story justice. And Joseph’s Vincent van Gogh-like dreams may color the dreams of your teens at a time in their lives when they are just beginning to build them. Recommended for ages 12 and up Deborah Cool is the jury coordinator for the Coalition for Quality Children’s Media. The Coalition’s KIDS FIRST!¨ project evaluates and rates children’s videotapes, CD-ROMs, DVD, audio recordings and television programs, using a volunteer jury of child development professionals, teachers, parents and children of diverse geographic, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. KIDS FIRST!¨ (www.cpcm.org) publishes The New York Times/KIDS FIRST!¨ Guide to the Best Children’s Videos.

ID VIDEOS Quiet time music Does listening to Mozart really increase one's IQ? After viewing Mozart Nature Symphonies, you will probably decide that it doesn't really matter. What really matters is where this video takes you. With birds in flight and swirling schools of fish…

Horror, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy Horror

Two frighteningly good horror novels

Feature by Laura Hubbard

by Laura Hubbard

Some horror novels grab you by the throat and pull you through them, rubbing your face in the uncomfortable, terrifying things that lurk in the dark. Other horror novels can feel more sinister, slowly creeping up on you out of the banality of everyday evil. Two new novels explore these facets of fear to great effect, creating worlds that are both fantastical and terribly real.

Black Tide

Set along Oregon’s foggy coast, Black Tide by KC Jones is the story of two strangers who are thrust together when the world comes to an end. Beth might be a disaster (even her mother says so), but her latest gig housesitting for wealthy vacationers at least keeps her from living in her car. The night before everything changes, she meets Mike, a film producer with no new projects in sight. In the early morning hours after their champagne-soaked one-night stand, they realize that something is terribly wrong. The power is out, cell phone service is down and the beach is littered with bowling ball-size meteorites that smell as if they have been pulled from a landfill in hell. Soon the unlikely pair learn a horrifying truth: Far from being an isolated incident, the meteor shower was the harbinger of an apocalyptic encounter with creatures from another world. Stranded together on an Oregonian beach, Beth and Mike must rely on each other if they are to have any chance of survival.

Jones’ debut novel reads like a summer blockbuster stuffed with adrenaline-pumping action scenes and moments of heart-stopping suspense. Jones deftly punctuates long, tense scenes of Mike and Beth trying to avoid notice by the alien creatures with short, intense bursts of them fighting for their lives. Moments of relative calm allow for character exploration, bringing readers into Mike’s and Beth’s minds as they work through their feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Jones lets both characters take turns as first-person narrators, demonstrating the difference in how they see themselves (flawed to the point of worthlessness) and how the other person sees them (flawed but essentially good).

For readers used to tome-size horror novels, the length of Black Tide may be surprising. It’s just over 250 pages, but anything longer would have detracted from the frenetic pacing and torn attention away from Jones’ perfectly simple, extremely frightening premise: two people trapped at the end of the world, desperate to not be eaten by monsters.

★ The Fervor

Alma Katsu’s The Fervor casts a wide net. It starts in 1944 during the waning days of World War II. Meiko Briggs is a Japanese immigrant and wife of a white American man. Even though her husband is serving in the U.S. Air Force, she’s still torn from her new home by the American government and forced to live in an internment camp in the remote reaches of Idaho with her daughter, Aiko. When a mysterious illness starts to move through the camp, rage and distrust rise, threatening the fragile corner of relative normalcy Meiko has tried to create for her daughter.

Meanwhile, mysterious balloons have begun to appear and then explode across the West, leaving a similar illness in their wake. One of these bombs turns a preacher in Bly, Oregon, into a widower, driving him into the arms of hate movements cropping up across the country. A close encounter with another bomb leads a newspaper reporter to crisscross the region looking for answers, but she finds only closed doors and deep distrust. As the illness intensifies in both the camps and the surrounding towns, the sins of the past collide with the present to create an inescapable web of hatred, fear and desperation.

In light of the rash of anti-Asian violence of the 2020s, Katsu’s historical parable about the horrors—and the virulence—of racism and xenophobia feels particularly pressing. The Fervor gives readers a glimpse into one of the darkest moments of American history, and then gives the already-terrifying ethos of that time a new and frightening shape: As the disease spreads from person to person, it is often accompanied by mysterious, possibly supernatural spiders. The image of near-invisible spiders crawling from one person to another, over eyelids, mouths and bodies, is an indelibly creepy illustration of just how pervasive mistrust and prejudice are.

The terror only grows from there. From visitations from a ghostly woman in a red kimono to midnight car chases through the prairie, The Fervor delivers a punch that’s equal parts psychological horror and jump scare. It will make you want to read into the wee hours of the morning, even though you may question that decision when the shadows start to move.

KC Jones’ apocalyptic debut and Alma Katsu’s latest eerie novel have one thing in common: They will absolutely terrify you.

Children's & YA, Fiction, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Fiction Children's & YA

5 books with a dollop, a dash, a sprinkle of magic

Feature by BookPage staff

by BookPage staff

The Mirror

Combining fish-out-of-water humor and historical detail, time-travel stories must deftly balance magic and reality. A bestseller when it was published in 1978, Marlys Millhiser’s novel The Mirror is now something of a cult classic, and it’s easy to see why. On the eve of her wedding, 20-year-old Shay falls through an antique mirror into the body of her grandmother, Brandy, whose life on the Colorado frontier in 1900 involves strict gender roles, physical danger and structured undergarments. In exchange, Brandy is transported to Shay’s body in 1978 and must deal with that era’s comparatively lawless (and braless) abandon. This sounds like a prosaic setup, but The Mirror is a wild ride that almost never hits the expected beats. Shay and Brandy are fully realized characters, and the details of both settings are spot on and evocative, lending a sense of reality to the novel despite its absolutely chaotic premise. Along the way, Millhiser digs up some timeless truths about mother-daughter relationships and how the women who came before us are often reflected in the ones who come after.

—Trisha, Publisher

Nothing to See Here

My reading preferences vary widely, but I rarely gravitate toward fantasy novels whose first few pages consist of maps, family trees, timelines and other hallmarks of extensive world building. I get too overwhelmed! But I love when a work of fiction contains just a touch of the supernatural. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief if the magical or otherworldly elements are woven into the story in a way that feels effortless. Kevin Wilson’s 2019 novel, Nothing to See Here, is about two children who burst into flames when they’re upset. The kids’ newly hired nanny, Lillian, transitions from reluctant caretaker to fiercely protective parental figure over the course of the book. A note for other fantasy-averse readers like myself: If the whole catching-on-fire thing seems like too much, don’t let it deter you. You’ll miss out on a delightful story that’s as funny as it is moving.

—Katherine, Subscriptions

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

It may seem unusual to single out a nonfiction book for having a sprinkle of magic, but Alexander Chee’s exceptional essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, is the first title that comes to mind when I think of books with an undercurrent of enchantment. In 16 spellbinding pieces, Chee explores the stuff of everyday life—work, writing, family, activism—alongside more supernatural subjects, such as his lifelong pursuit of tarot and being tested for psychic abilities as a child. These brushes with the mystical elevate Chee’s more commonplace topics until the whole book seems to hover in that liminal space between the sacred and the profane. Suddenly, as you read about his stint as a cater waiter for William F. Buckley or his recollections of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, the sense that you’re encountering something extraordinary (that is, out of the ordinary) is heightened. Magic is all around us, Chee seems to say. Read it in the cards. Produce it with your mind. Find it in a well-tended rosebush in your own backyard.

—Christy, Associate Editor

The Raven Boys

The first time I read The Raven Boys, the first novel in Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle series, I was a high school junior in the midst of a reading slump. I occasionally found a book that I enjoyed, but not with the same ferocity that kept me plowing through stories in my childhood. Although I had seen fan-made content for Stiefvater’s series online, I didn’t know the plot until a friend described it to me. By the time I finished reading the first chapter, I was electrified by the prose and already attached to the characters. While I love fiction that includes speculative elements, I have a harder time feeling immersed in the worlds of high fantasy or sci-fi novels. The Raven Boys kept me rooted in reality while introducing me to Welsh mythology and women with psychic powers. These elements are expanded in the series’ subsequent three novels, but the foundational connection to the real world is never severed.

—Jessie, Editorial Intern

The Midnight Library

In the tender reading year of 2020, Matt Haig published what a friend of mine called a “cheerful book about suicide.” I had recommended The Midnight Library to her, but she was skeptical about reading it—understandably so, as so many of us were picky about the types of books we were willing to read while riding out the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Haig has been open about his experiences with depression for years, and all of his books have explored the terrain of mental health for both children and adults. In this gentle novel, a woman dies by suicide and is transported to a special library between life and death. There, with help from a kind librarian, she is able to step into the different lives she could’ve lived, as a rock star, intrepid explorer, parent and more. It’s such a smart and empathetic story, and exactly what it needs to be: a cheerful book about depression, yes, but also about making it through.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Sometimes the best way to understand reality is with just a hint of unreality. In these five books, fantastical elements reveal hidden or unexpected truths about our not-so-ordinary world.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Search

Review by Thane Tierney

by Thane Tierney

G.K. Chesterton once said that he had “searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.” In Michelle Huneven’s fifth novel, Search, we can begin to see why Chesterton’s hunt proved so fruitless.

Pastor Tom Fox has been dialing it in lately, and his Southern Californian congregation is becoming restless. Some of the church’s executive committee members approach a fellow congregant, restaurant critic and food writer Dana Potowski, with the suggestion that she take him to lunch and have a come-to-Jesus chat about the situation. Well, not exactly come-to-Jesus; the Unitarian Universalists don’t work that way.

For readers unfamiliar with it, the Unitarian Universalist Association is a spiritual organization that’s open to theists, atheists, agnostics and believers of all stripes, formed from the union of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. “I could go into some detail about the theological and class differences between the two groups,” says narrator Dana, “but suffice it to say that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian and P. T. Barnum a Universalist.”

When Pastor Fox cops to his critics’ appraisal and lets it slip that he’s planning to retire from ministry, this sets into motion a replacement search committee, which Dana semireluctantly joins. Previous committee meetings had taken place over potluck dinners, so Dana persuades herself to take the plunge by planning to get her next project—The Search Committee Cookbook—out of it.

Whiting Award winner Huneven is uniquely suited to undertake a novel like this; not only did she study at the Methodist Claremont School of Theology and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but she’s also a James Beard Award-winning food journalist. She gleefully digs into the sausagemaking of a New-Agey church committee trying to reach consensus. They go on retreat. They hold meetings. They undergo anti-oppression training “to promote inclusivity and discourage undue discrimination in the search process.” And they talk—with one another, over one another, behind one another’s backs, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes lovingly, sometimes angrily. By the time the process winds down, all eight committee members have vetted not only the replacement candidates but also each other.

They also consume a great deal of food. If it’s true (as Napoleon may have said) that an army marches on its stomach, then a church committee bears some resemblance to a platoon. Here Huneven sparkles, with chop-licking descriptions of their potluck delectables, and as a bonus, she includes a baker’s dozen recipes as appendices.

But there’s also a profoundly spiritual dimension to Search. It raises difficult questions about living one’s beliefs in a faith-based community and doesn’t flinch when principles and practice come into conflict. Like a challenging sermon or a great restaurant’s tasting menu, Search leaves the reader hungry for more.

Read our review of ‘Search’ by Michelle Huneven.

How did your time at the Methodist Claremont School of Theology influence this book? Did you, like Dana, ever consider the ministry as a vocation?
In my 30s, I’d been supporting myself as a restaurant critic while trying to write a novel. I’d been working on that novel for more years than I’m willing to admit, and I was not getting anywhere. Like Dana, I yearned to do something more strenuous and meaningful with my life than write about what I put in my mouth.

The minister at my church was literary, erudite, funny and wide-ranging in his interests, and I thought I might like to do what he did. (Ministry and novel writing are among the few careers for generalists.) Also, I loved the sermon as a literary form almost as much as I loved the novel. So, off to seminary I went. Although the Claremont School of Theology was Methodist-affiliated, students from 31 denominations attended, including an African denomination of one. My study partner was a nun.

I loved every minute of my time there—the classes, the reading, the papers and preaching, the conversations, my colleagues, and professors. But about a year and a half in, as I sat in my Backgrounds of Contemporary Theology course, it came to me what I’d been doing wrong with the novel I’d been trying to write for so many years: I’d been starting it in the wrong place!

When school got out for the year, I went back to work on the old project, and by the fall, I was so deep into it, I put off finishing my divinity degree—and indeed, I never did complete it. I did, however, finish the novel, which was Round Rock. My second novel, Jamesland, was my first “church” novel, and Search, my fifth novel, is my second “church” novel. They share a character, and both make use of my seminary experience and, I hope, justify it. In Search, Dana actually gets my seminary years and, like me, never finishes. Like Dana, I have never lost my interest in ministers and ministry.

“Ministry and novel writing are among the few careers for generalists.”

Why did you decide to include recipes with the book? And how did you decide which recipes to include?
When I won a James Beard Award years ago, it was for the category “Feature Writing With Recipes.” The “With Recipes” clause always made me laugh. It seemed like both a pulled punch and the promise of a little bonus. That is, some might see the category as a lighter, perhaps slightly frivolous form of feature writing, while others might consider the recipes as a bonus, like a crackerjack prize. At any rate, the idea of a Novel “With Recipes” has also always amused and appealed to me.

Some recipes—like chicken fiesta and the whole wheat chocolate chip cookies—I knew I would include from the start, while other recipes made themselves known as the characters cooked and carried their dishes into committee meetings.

I had a lot of fun testing the recipes to get them right. How many fresh coconuts did I hurl on our concrete patio for the buko pie? Many! Enough to become an expert coconut cracker. And friends still speak reverently of the lamb nihari feast we held outside under heaters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that’s an interesting recipe—it’s not difficult, except that you must get out (and use) every single spice in your cabinet.

What link(s) do you find (or draw) between food and spirituality?
My husband, who is Jewish, likes to say, “Where two or more are gathered, food is served.” Eating together, breaking bread, communion, picnicking, coffee hour—here is where generosity, nourishment, conversation, conviviality and community occur, and connection is made. Food connects us to a vast web of labor and resources, not to mention growing cycles and the seasons. If you ever need a sense of “the interconnected web of which we are all a part,” consider how that cup of tea or apple or slice of bread reached your lips.

“Eating together, breaking bread, communion, picnicking, coffee hour—here is where generosity, nourishment, conversation, conviviality and community occur, and connection is made.”

Dana comes out squarely in favor of whole wheat chocolate chip cookies. And you? Do you prefer yours crunchy, chewy or cake-y?
Oh, I really do love those whole wheat chocolate chip cookies from Kim Boyce’s whole grain cookbook, Good to the Grain. Someone called them “adult cookies,” and maybe they are. They are certainly burly cookies. (I gave the recipe to a friend who had two adult sons living with her during the pandemic, and they nicknamed the cookies “The Burly Mofos.”) I admit, I use fancy muscovado for the brown sugar and excellent chocolate, so they are especially good. They are crunchy AND chewy, with all the buttery, grainy pleasures of whole wheat toast, plus some serious chocolate action.

But then, I’m a person who halves the sugar in most recipes and craves the bitterness in dark chocolate, marmalade and radicchio. Regular Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies are way too sweet and insubstantial for me, though of course I can’t stop mindlessly eating them once I start—they’re designed for that.

What do you hope readers will take away from Search?
Gosh. Ideally? A few hours of literary pleasure. And some choice recipes!

Photo of Michelle Huneven by Courtney Gregg.

The award-winning author’s fifth novel, Search, pairs delectable recipes with a church committee’s quest to find a new minister.

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Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

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Fiction Speculative Fiction

Megan Angelo

Cursive, privacy and other things worth saving

By Chika Gujarathi

Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.

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All Fiction Coverage

Black Tide

★ The Fervor

The Mirror

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

The Raven Boys

Trending Fiction

Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

Cursive, privacy and other things worth saving

Sean Adams

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