vers Row imprint makes its debut As the market for African-American books grows, mainstream publishers are seeking new ways to meet the demand. The readership is evolving quickly in its hunger for a more diverse, increasingly sophisticated array of books a challenge that has sent publishing houses scrambling to find fresh ways to keep that momentum going. One of their approaches has been to create specialized imprints geared to the African-American customer, producing books that are soulful and innovative but with a commercial touch.

At last count, seven such imprints, all backed by large mainstream publishing houses, are currently in competition to woo black readers. The imprints are Ballantine’s One World Books, Doubleday’s Harlem Moon, Kensington Publishing’s Dafina Books, HarperCollins’ Amistad Press, Hyperion’s Jump At The Sun and Warner Books’ Walk Worthy Press. The latest entry is Strivers Row, launched by the Villard division of Random House, which joined the publishing marketplace in January with its first offering of new books. Under the savvy leadership of associate editor Melody Guy, Strivers Row plans to be out front with a daring, ground-breaking series of new voices in its line of African-American literature published as trade paperbacks.

“We’re going to find those books which are quite important but were first self-published or published by small houses,” Guy explained to BookPage. “By publishing these books as trade paperbacks with a lower price, we can take a chance on new authors and build careers. There will be many new names introduced to readers who will both surprise and enchant them.” Strivers Row will publish nine titles a year, mainly works by first-time authors. The imprint’s debut list includes: Parry A. Brown’s novel, The Shirt Off His Back, a riveting look at a black single father’s dogged effort to create a loving home for his 11-year-old twin girls; Guy Johnson’s debut historic epic; Standing at the Scratch Line, the tale of anti-hero King Tremain who will stop at nothing to preserve his family; and Nichelle D. Tramble’s searing “hip-hop noir” novel, The Dying Ground, a dark thriller of drugs, deception and secret lives.

Coming later this year, Strivers Row will offer two previously self-published works: Travis Hunter’s revealing fictional male relationship saga, Hearts of Men; and Satin Doll, Gloria Mallette’s sexy suspense novel of an adulterous woman who finds the tables turned on her when the wife of a lover starts to stalk her. Also coming up is Solomon Jones’ hard-edged mystery, Pipe Dreams, a no-holds barred story of a Philadelphia politician found dead in a crack house and the ruthless hunt for his killers.

“We’re looking for new voices and new visions,” Guy concludes. “We want to expand the boundaries of African-American literature, and Strivers Row is just the vehicle to do that. There are readers out there seeking something different and challenging. We’re going to provide that for them.”

Altar music, for those who hear it, must be a partial lament. Altar Music is the first novel by Weber, a former nun who writes with the spare cadence of prayer, and the story itself becomes a formal ritual heavy with incense and portent. The plot focuses on Elise, raised in a remote town as the third generation of religious women limited by their notions of faith. As a little girl, she observes and absorbs the emotional sacrifices her mother and grandmother made in their attempt to be good Christian women. The choices available to them in that constricted role are frustrating and painful to witness. The Church’s historical interpretation of godly behavior and its hypocrisy force these women to sublimate their passions and their marriages, shriveling spirit and hope. As Elise reaches her teens, her talent for music helps channel a sensitive, creative nature destined to be criticized and controlled. Elise’s mother and grandmother encourage her to take piano lessons at the local convent, where a townswoman has escaped to the cloth after the annulment of a brief, abusive marriage. Elise’s mother befriends this nun, visiting her regularly and making her godmother to her daughter. As she matures, Elise discovers that her passion for music and her godmother’s quiet influence has created a call to be a bride of Christ. The vows and rituals and romantic sacrifice of her very self might redeem and heal her legacy of anger and pain, but first Elise must solve the mystery of spiritual marriage alone. Weber’s voice speaks of experience and deep contemplation, and while her characters have no easy answers, she gives them the dignity of spiritually courageous lives.

Deanna Larson is a reviewer in Nashville.

vers Row imprint makes its debut As the market for African-American books grows, mainstream publishers are seeking new ways to meet the demand. The readership is evolving quickly in its hunger for a more diverse, increasingly sophisticated array of books a challenge that has sent publishing houses scrambling to find fresh ways to keep that momentum going. One of their approaches has been to create specialized imprints geared to the African-American customer, producing books that are soulful and innovative but with a commercial touch.

At last count, seven such imprints, all backed by large mainstream publishing houses, are currently in competition to woo black readers. The imprints are Ballantine’s One World Books, Doubleday’s Harlem Moon, Kensington Publishing’s Dafina Books, HarperCollins’ Amistad Press, Hyperion’s Jump At The Sun and Warner Books’ Walk Worthy Press. The latest entry is Strivers Row, launched by the Villard division of Random House, which joined the publishing marketplace in January with its first offering of new books. Under the savvy leadership of associate editor Melody Guy, Strivers Row plans to be out front with a daring, ground-breaking series of new voices in its line of African-American literature published as trade paperbacks.

“We’re going to find those books which are quite important but were first self-published or published by small houses,” Guy explained to BookPage. “By publishing these books as trade paperbacks with a lower price, we can take a chance on new authors and build careers. There will be many new names introduced to readers who will both surprise and enchant them.” Strivers Row will publish nine titles a year, mainly works by first-time authors. The imprint’s debut list includes: Parry A. Brown’s novel, The Shirt Off His Back, a riveting look at a black single father’s dogged effort to create a loving home for his 11-year-old twin girls; Guy Johnson’s debut historic epic; Standing at the Scratch Line, the tale of anti-hero King Tremain who will stop at nothing to preserve his family; and Nichelle D. Tramble’s searing “hip-hop noir” novel, The Dying Ground, a dark thriller of drugs, deception and secret lives.

Coming later this year, Strivers Row will offer two previously self-published works: Travis Hunter’s revealing fictional male relationship saga, Hearts of Men; and Satin Doll, Gloria Mallette’s sexy suspense novel of an adulterous woman who finds the tables turned on her when the wife of a lover starts to stalk her. Also coming up is Solomon Jones’ hard-edged mystery, Pipe Dreams, a no-holds barred story of a Philadelphia politician found dead in a crack house and the ruthless hunt for his killers.

“We’re looking for new voices and new visions,” Guy concludes. “We want to expand the boundaries of African-American literature, and Strivers Row is just the vehicle to do that. There are readers out there seeking something different and challenging. We’re going to provide that for them.”

Love is a kind of warfare, Ovid wrote around 3 B.

C., and Good Peoples, the new novel by Marcus Major, is another in a two-millennia-long history of literary evidence. Rollicking, explicit at times, but deeply conservative at its core, the book is set in Lawndale, a tidy, mostly African-American and Hispanic neighborhood outside Philadelphia. Myles, a romantic and good-natured schoolteacher meets Marisa, a whip- smart and ambitious lawyer/media personality of Afro-Cuban descent at a party thrown by their mutual friend Jackie. Myles, celibate for the better part of a year, falls instantly in love, but Marisa is cautious, even a bit jaded, and the book follows the sometimes rackety course of their romance. On the sidelines cheering the couple on are Myles’s smart-cracking brother Amir, Myles’s friend Carlos, husband of the match-making Jackie, and Winston, Myles’s adorably clueless bulldog. Winston is the perfect alter ego for Myles both are a bit fat, a bit rumpled, and so pantingly eager that the reader wants good things to happen for them both. Whether they’ll happen for Myles with Marisa is the book’s big question. Marisa is a more complex and contradictory character than Myles, capable of high hilarity and leaden seriousness, warmth and soul-withering coldness, sweetness and cruelty. ( Some-times, too often, you’re not a man to me, she tells Myles during a particularly nasty argument). Orphaned early in life, she’s both a driven career woman and a scared little girl who wanders into Myles’s apartment in her pajamas looking for comfort. The consensus of her friends is that she’s a lady who needs to be worked on subtly. When she inevitably splits in a huff, Myles is warned not to follow her. Give her a chance to miss you, advises Carlos, even as pregnant Jackie arrives at Marisa’s house to warn her not to pass on the cuddlesome Myles. So persuasive and happily gravid is Jackie that you can almost hear someone whispering in the background, Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. One of the pleasures of the book is its snappy dialogue; the characters are articulate without seeming unnatural, and the sex scenes are erotic without being over the top. But as mentioned, the real message of Good Peoples is sometimes alarmingly retro. Sure, Marisa can have her career, but doesn’t she really want to be a good little self-effacing wife and mother? Major is rather blunt on this point. Whoever heard of a woman who didn’t want to get married? Myles yells at Marisa at one point. Whoever heard of a woman who didn’t want to have children? Marisa’s comeback is appropriately devastating. Still, the reader does wonder if this fiery and enigmatic Latina can be completely domesticated. We wonder if she’ll weather marriage and motherhood with her identity and ambitions intact or disappear into what Sylvia Plath called the totalitarian state of airless wifedom. For that, the reader probably will have to wait for a sequel. Arlene McKanic is a reviewer in Jamaica, New York.

The Inn at Lake Devine is a looming anachronism, a New England WASP character all its own. It reveals itself in pristine white clapboards, rolling mint green lawns reflected in a mountain lake, and porches filled with Adirondack chairs, sat in by the right sort. And at this inn, a remnant of the old order, Elinor Lipman sets her latest gentle social satire/romance. The story is a yellowed snapshot of the social upheaval of the Ô60s and early Ô70s , a coming of age portrait in a land of plenty and prejudice. Natalie Marx is a sharp, sensitive teenager growing up in a tight-knit Jewish family. One year her mother receives correspondence from a Vermont inn that she had queried about summer rates. The note concludes: “Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles.” Natalie’s parents renounce but ignore this blatant anti-Semitism, but Natalie becomes fixated on the affront. She asks her father, “Do you think they’ve seen the The Diary of Anne Frank?” The family decides instead to rent a cabin across from the Inn on Lake Devine for the next few summers. On one of these vacations, at the instigation of Natalie and her father, the family adopts another name and travels to the other side of the lake to inquire in person about vacancies. The Inn seems an ideal place for a healing experiment; they need to prove to themselves that people are generally decent, if only to one’s face. The following summer, Natalie discovers that her camp mate is going with her family to the Inn, and she manipulates her way into an invitation. Now she will infiltrate the Inn’s halls as herself, and encounter the monster. Lipman uses an oblique, subtle wit that pins emotions down with a glob of Blu-Tak instead of a nail. Natalie’s search for answers to unanswerable questions moves along with an elegant dignity; as she grows up, her fate seems bound to a place and issues that she rearranges with grace and compassion, finally finding peace in their patterns. At the end, the story surprises that it has finished, that there isn’t more to say. Leaving the reader wistful for eternal justice and a conquering love is perhaps the subtlest move of all.

Reviewed by Deanna Larson.

Philip Shumway is only 13 years old when his older brother disappears. Stepping out to explore Baker’s Bottoms Pond near his rural Massachusetts home, the child prodigy vanishes without a trace. Frederick Reiken’s The Odd Sea chronicles the decade following the disappearance, examining how the event affects an already dysfunctional family. The heroic father throws himself into the chisels of timber framing. The angry mother loses herself for months in a psychiatric hospital and Victorian novels. Amy, the oldest sister, screams at the family to move on and steals Ethan’s diary to keep them from trying to hang on to what doesn’t exist. All the while, Philip, the narrator of this touching story, wanders the woods "not-finding" Ethan.

Reiken remarkably captures the unresolved nature of a disappearance, the world of questions, false leads, and dashed hopes. At times various family members convince themselves that Ethan has been brutally murdered or has run away to Arles, France, to follow in the footsteps of Van Gogh. While everyone crafts their own personal grief crutches, it is Philip who creatively employs his desire to remember his brother with his own budding artistry. Philip walks the woods and backroads scribbling vignettes in bulging notebooks, attempting to "remember everything" about Ethan. He grows to realize these stories won’t bring his brother back, but they will bring him out of the nothingness he is so rightly afraid of.

In the hands of a lesser novelist, the story could easily dissolve into emotional schlock, but Reiken’s voice is pitch-perfect fragile, yet resolute, sad, but celebratory. He renders the family’s torment in all its contradictory complexity, depicting grieving not as a linear process that can be broken into 12 simple steps, but rather disparate mixture of melancholy, sureness, and confusion that defies timelines and the cliched words of experts. Much like Ordinary People, The Odd Sea strikes with its understated lyricism, surprises with its maturity and awes with its complexity. Reiken is only in his twenties, but writes with the confidence of an author three times his age; someone this young isn’t supposed to write something this good.

1 loaf of wry 2 cups of longing 3 cups of detailed observation 2 flank steaks of conviction Dash of critique of carnivorous colonialism Stir the wry, longing, and observation in a large mixing bowl. Pour atop flanks and cook for 364 pages. Garnish with critique. Beautifully serves one. Such a literary recipe takes the utmost care, patience, and preparation. Many first-time novel chefs manage to overcook, but Cynthia Ozeki is the rare cook she creates a sumptuous 12-chapter meal in her debut My Year of Meats.

Jane Little-Takagi reluctantly takes a job with My American Wife!, a TV show that brings the values and meats of the American heartland into the homes of Japanese wives. Jane considers herself a “cultural pimp” for hawking beef for a national lobby association, but as a sometimes brash, sometimes tender fledgling documentarian, she wants the experience and she needs the money. Across the Pacific Akiko Ueno watches My American Wife! and dutifully makes the dishes for her husband John, one of the producers of the show. But Akiko’s inability to conceive causes John shame, which he takes out by beating his quiet wife. However, the strength of Jane’s programs, which invariably veer from what the producers are looking for (one of her shows features vegetarian lesbians), gives Akiko hope to remove herself from an increasingly hellish existence. From the Wal-Martification of America to the hormone-fueled production of meats, Ozeki balances humor with horror, sardonic cultural comment with passionate evocations of the political, personal, and chemical politics of childbearing.

Conceptually the novel falters a bit in the last few chapters, but not enough to derail the surprisingly funny and surprisingly disturbing picture of cross-cultural clashes and the high stakes of meat production in the United States. Ozeki masterfully brings her skills as an accomplished documentarian, which provides unbelievable details, especially to the American sections of the book. She nails regional quirks in behavior and speech from the delta soul of Mississippi to the funkified East Village. Smart, sensitive, slick, and sizzling, My Year of Meats (Viking, $23.95. 0670879045), possesses an edgy hipness informed by maturing convictions, and Ozeki’s recipe simmers equal parts attitude and talent. As they say down South, “Them’s good eats.” Reviewed by Mark Luce.

The lyrical power of Delia Facloner’s The Service of Clouds can only be described as stunningly poetic. Her story rains passion, landscape, love and loss on readers, and Falconer writes with a grace not normally associated with first novels. Sensuous metaphors, historical complexity and swirling spirituality form the airy clouds of this absolutely gorgeous novel. Reviewed by Mark Luce.