A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
L. Doctorow’s City of God is a novel about almost everything imaginable: New York, the Holocaust, the 20th century, apocalypse, love, religion, and the universe.
The namesake for this novel is St. Augustine’s book of the same title, which responded to those who blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome. Augustine saw human history as a struggle between an Earthly City and the City of God with the holy city winning in a final apocalyptic battle.
In Doctorow’s novel, the city is New York, the time 1999, and the apocalypse at once personal, psychological, social, and theological.
The novel revolves around an odd occurrence: A cross disappears from behind the altar at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, eventually reappearing on the roof of the synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. Everett, a novelist, decides to investigate the mystery and in doing so befriends the priest at the church and the couple who are rabbis at the synagogue.
Always in the background of this novel’s tale lies the Holocaust, both its historical reality and its effect on the present. Thus, as he investigates the mystery of the moving cross, Everett also finds himself investigating the Holocaust.
To tell the tale, Doctorow peppers his novel with a multitude of voices speaking directly from the pages of Everett’s notebook including an ex-reporter for the New York Times, a Holocaust survivor, a World War II veteran, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Albert Einstein.
In its postmodern use of many voices strung together in a stream-of-consciousness style, City of God resembles the convoluted work of James Joyce, and like Joyce’s novels, Doctorow’s requires close attention from the reader. What the reader gives to this novel, however, the novel returns tenfold. It is a tale of depth and passion, humor and pain. It is a novel about apocalypse, yes, but it is also about finding hope, love, and some measure of faith amidst the ashes of the 20th century.
Vivian Wagner is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio.
E.
L. Doctorow's City of God is a novel about almost everything imaginable: New York, the Holocaust, the 20th century, apocalypse, love, religion, and the universe.
The namesake for this novel is St. Augustine's book of the same title,…
No, not the Typhoid Mary kind, but the kind you carry around with you from place to place, the kitchen to the bedroom, the car to the dentist’s office, just in case you might have an empty minute somewhere to check out the next event in the lives of the complex and troubled Blau clan.
Thirteen-year-old Stefan Blau triggers the multigenerational saga in 1894 when he runs away from Burgdorf, Germany, and emigrates to the United States, eventually settling in Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire. From a rented rowboat, he sees on shore the image of the Wasserburg, a magnificent apartment house he will build, six stories of pillars, marble fireplaces, beveled mirrors, and wrought-iron sconces. Dancing around the fountains and courtyards, a small girl whirls in his vision. Later he will recognize her as his own granddaughter, sharing his passion for this water fortress which, for better or worse, will dominate the lives of the next century of Blaus.
Ursula Hegi, author of six other books, and herself an immigrant from Germany at age 18, has covered this territory before, most notably in Stones from the River, a contender for the PEN/Faulkner Award and an Oprah book club selection. Picking up characters from the fringes of that novel, she follows them through four generations of relationships with each other and the beautiful, sometimes obsessive, building.
Hegi writes with a German accent. Her work is strong and teleological, driving to an end that is telegraphed from the beginning ( many years later when Robert would . . . ). Because so much ground must be covered, her characters here are sometimes seen from a distance, their actions and thoughts described more than lived on the page. For all that, The Vision of Emma Blau grabs that soap-opera hook in every reader’s brain and hangs on for dear life, serving up a prime collection of mildly and majorly dysfunctional souls.
Metaphorically, it has always been the sin of the fathers that is visited upon the children. Hegi takes the idea into another dimension. In this book, it’s the dream of the father that is visited upon the children. Maude McDaniel reviews for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers.
This book's a carrier.
No, not the Typhoid Mary kind, but the kind you carry around with you from place to place, the kitchen to the bedroom, the car to the dentist's office, just in case you might have an empty minute…
It all began with the idea of writing a story about a school assignment. It blossomed into the remarkable novel Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde, an extraordinary tale that, like its young protagonist, just might change the world. When social studies teacher Reuben St. Clair writes on the blackboard, Think of an idea for world change, and put it into action, 12-year-old Trevor McKinney takes the assignment seriously and comes up with the concept of Paying Forward. His plan is fairly simple: He’ll do something really good for three people who, instead of paying him back, will be asked to pay it forward by aiding three more. Hard as he tries, Trevor’s initial attempts seem to fail. Time after time, the recipients of his good deeds let him down. But just when Trevor thinks his entire project has been for naught, things take a turn for the better and his efforts slowly snowball into a national phenomenon. Pay It Forward is Hyde’s second novel and, 20 years in the making, it is truly a labor of love. Telling the story of Trevor’s remarkable project from the alternating perspectives of Trevor’s diary and the people who are touched by the young boy’s vision, Hyde grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go until the novel’s passionate surprise ending.
Big things are expected of this book (there was already a movie deal in the works before its release), and with good reason. Pay It Forward is a delightfully uplifting, moving, and inspiring modern fable that has the power to change the world as we know it which would be a wonderful phenomenon indeed.
Sharon Galligar Chance is the senior book reviewer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas.
It all began with the idea of writing a story about a school assignment. It blossomed into the remarkable novel Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde, an extraordinary tale that, like its young protagonist, just might change the world. When social studies teacher Reuben…
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.
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.
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 TheParis 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.
John Jakes, author of The Kent Family Chronicles and The North and South Trilogy, began a new cycle of historical novels with the best-selling Homeland, “to tell what happened” in America, and the world, during the last one hundred years. Now, for all those readers who followed the stories of Pauli Kroner, Herschel Wolinski, Joe and Ilsa Crown and their children Fritzi, Carl, and Joe Junior and who have since bombarded the novelist with requests to tell what happened next Jakes has completed the long-awaited second novel of the Crown family dynasty. American Dreams is aptly named. Against a panoramic view of American life and culture in transition between 1905-1917, it continues, in vivid detail, the stories of three dreamers previously introduced in Homeland: Fritzi, her younger brother, Carl, and their cousin, Paul. For each one of these protagonists, the American dream is tinged with the same Apollo-like promise a bittersweet blend of happiness and loss. Fritzi achieves the public acclaim she has longed for, but only at the cost of abandoning her dream of a stage career and becoming engulfed in the burgeoning motion picture industry.
Carl, fascinated with machines, pursues a turbulent, out-of-control course that brings him into conflict with Henry Ford in Detroit. He plunges into the maelstrom of the racing circuit with speed king Barney Oldfield and is eventually sent skyward, first as a pilot for a flying circus, then as a mercenary for the Mexican Federalists, and, finally, as a fighter pilot in war-torn Europe.
Paul, the acclaimed author of I Witness History, a book about his experiences as a newsreel filmmaker, loses his job when he defies British law by making public his footage of atrocities committed by the German army. Toward the end of the novel, back in Europe to obtain more war footage, Paul, in a moment of supreme despair, senses that the deaths he is recording are a harbinger of the end of an era that the nightmare of war has “enveloped Europe’s golden summers of peace and confidence, turning them to winters of despair and ruin.” But in the midst of this darkness, the novel like America, and like the giddy century which the world is still experiencing rises above despair. The real American dream, perhaps, is emblemized in the rhapsody of hope spoken by music maestro Harry Poland (once known as the immigrant Herschel Wolinski) about Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty: “She says so much, that great lady. She says, ÔWelcome, whoever you are. You needn’t be rich, or renowned, there is a place for you anyway.’ To me especially, she says, ÔThis is the land where you can realize your wildest dream if you work hard. So go forward, for that’s where the future lies . . . ahead of you. You will never find it by going back.'” Reviewed by Robert C. Jones.
John Jakes, author of The Kent Family Chronicles and The North and South Trilogy, began a new cycle of historical novels with the best-selling Homeland, "to tell what happened" in America, and the world, during the last one hundred years. Now, for all those readers…
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.
Hernan Diaz
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.
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.
Islands are magical places, no doubt about it. Whether you live on one, as I do, vacation on one, or read about them, islands stir some deep core of fantasy. Island Justice is a satisfying island book. Elizabeth Winthrop understands and better still, makes us understand the feeling of a close-knit community that knows everyone else’s business and personal life, that pulls together when it needs to.
When Maggie Hammond’s godmother, Nan, dies and leaves her island home to Maggie, a sophisticated world traveler, a furniture conservator who works with museums in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Prague, Maggie sets about selling the cluttered Victorian house. The task of getting the house ready for sale takes longer than she expects, and Maggie gets caught up in off-season island life. The body of an island man, missing for several days, washes up on her beach. Islanders rally around his daughter and give Maggie, who found the body, the support she needs. “You’re entitled to fall apart,” she is told. She learns about a serious problem in one of the families. Should she remain silent, closing her eyes the way the islanders have been doing? Should she call in authorities from the mainland? What role should she play? In Island Justice, Winthrop packs onto her small island (12 miles long, three miles wide) adventure, romance, mystery, and humor. We learn a bit about furniture conservation, a bit about training Vishlas, hunting dogs. When Randy Baker spots a school of fish off the beach: “ÔHallelujah,’ he shouted, and got on the radio with a single call. He knew he was breaking the cardinal rule of the island. The radio was to be used only for emergencies. But the fishermen had come up with a simple code. . . . Within twenty minutes, there were twelve fishermen lining the beach, calling news of lures and catches to one another.” Kasha, Maggie’s Siberian husky, is hurt badly and must get to the mainland. The word goes out, “Get down to the ferry will you, and try to convince Dan to hold that boat.” Besides being a good yarn, the story has the feel of an island. We hear the bell buoy, the fog horn, the gulls, we struggle along with Maggie to back a car onto the ferry. I was sorry when I finished this wonderful, rich book. Now that I’ve discovered Elizabeth Winthrop, I am off to my favorite island bookstore to order her previous novel, In My Mother’s House.
Reviewed by Cynthia Riggs.
Islands are magical places, no doubt about it. Whether you live on one, as I do, vacation on one, or read about them, islands stir some deep core of fantasy. Island Justice is a satisfying island book. Elizabeth Winthrop understands and better still, makes us…
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.
Alone on her mountain, Deanna is hugging a secret. A coyote pack has recently moved to the Appalachian Mountains overlooking Zebulon Valley, Virginia, where this story is set. Despite Deanna’s determination to protect them, the coyotes’ fate is precarious. Will they survive the malevolence of farmers and bounty hunters to the last page of Prodigal Summer? This suspense is but one of the many factors that makes Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel a haunting page-turner. Deanna has more in common with Lusa, a young widow living in the valley, than either woman knows. Both are scientists and environmentalists, striving to reconcile the economic interests of their Virginia tobacco farming town with the larger needs of the planet.
We wait for their lives to intersect, but Kingsolver spins their stories slowly, bringing them closer and closer together until their meeting is inevitable.
Prodigal Summer isn’t the first novel in which Kingsolver reveals her environmental ethos, but it is perhaps the first one that openly demonstrates how formidably well versed she is in natural history. Her detailed knowledge of the Appalachian ecosystem is especially impressive. But where science writing is frequently dry, Kingsolver makes the sex life of moths and coyotes riveting reading. In her hands, the silent war between organic farmers and those that believe in pesticides has the firm grip of a 1950s detective thriller.
Though Kingsolver’s politics are transparent in Prodigal Summer, she never reduces her characters to stereotypes. In the elderly Garnett, for instance, the novelist delivers a heartwarming, sometimes humorous portrait of an aging gentleman farmer, baffled at the changing mores which assail him from all sides, even in a rural Virginia farming town.
Without ridiculing him, Kingsolver shows that Garnett’s troubles the extinction of the American chestnut and a hardy strain of crop-devouring insects are the result of pesticide use and clear cutting, practices which Garnett still naively supports. Yet Kingsolver’s portrait of him is overwhelmingly forgiving and sympathetic. His diminishing eyesight, his Friday afternoon seafood buffet ritual, his inner turmoil, in which chivalry contends with petty revenge, are portrayed with uncanny realism. Readers will be deeply moved by his longing to restore the chestnut to the forests of America. They will perceive early on that he is in love with his neighbor, the rebel Nannie, a woman close to his own age. And they will ache for him to make this discovery himself.
It will be tempting for reviewers to call Prodigal Summer a manifesto against agricultural pesticides and bounties on predator animals. But Prodigal Summer should not be sold short. It is beautifully conceived fiction, with symmetry, suspense and complex characters as subtly crafted as any being written today.
Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.
Alone on her mountain, Deanna is hugging a secret. A coyote pack has recently moved to the Appalachian Mountains overlooking Zebulon Valley, Virginia, where this story is set. Despite Deanna's determination to protect them, the coyotes' fate is precarious. Will they survive the malevolence of…
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.
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.
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.
Barnaby Gaitlin is no prince. A quasi-reformed juvenile delinquent, Anne Tyler’s anti-hero in her new novel, A Patchwork Planet, has just celebrated his 30th birthday alone, swilling beer in his dank basement apartment. Still, Barnaby is a disheveled handyman with a heart, and Tyler’s 14th novel will not disappoint die-hard fans who cherish the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s knack for plainspoken storytelling.
Like most of Tyler’s novels, A Patchwork Planet is set in a Baltimore suburb, capturing a year in the life of an eclectic array of characters, primarily, the Gaitlin family. Barnaby, the proverbial black sheep of the bunch, has never managed to overcome his tarnished teenage years, when he soiled the Gaitlin name after he was arrested for burglary. His affluent family orchestrates a charitable foundation, but Barnaby is not impressed. His ill-fated marriage to the wholesome girl-next-door ended in a divorce after the birth of their daughter, Opal. Now, his ex-wife has married a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, and Barnaby has grown estranged from his only child.
A Patchwork Planet could have easily fallen into a predictable pattern, portraying the travails of a divorced dad who longs to be closer to his daughter. Tyler will have none of that with Barnaby, who is less than enthusiastic about his sporadic drives to Philly in his grandfather’s old Corvette. Indeed, Barnaby is passionate about two things: searching for his angel a mythical Gaitlin tradition and helping his elderly clients at Rent-A-Back, where he tackles odd-jobs alongside his co-worker, a scrappy, anemic-looking waif named Martine. Of course, Barnaby is searching for love, which arrives in the form of a plump, sweet-faced banker named Sophia. At last, Barnaby seems to have settled down, as Sophia’s hearty crock-pot meals and stolid serenity lull the former felon into a homespun nirvana. Even the Gaitlins approve of Sophia, and the romance blossoms with the blessing of Barnaby’s persnickety mother, Margot. But A Patchwork Planet is not a love story, and Tyler is too talented to serve up a neat and tidy conclusion. A common thread running through all of Tyler’s novels is the minutia of everyday the trips to the grocery store, the lace doilies and dusty furniture, and, above all, a deep respect for an average life. While many of Tyler’s prior novels have revolved around the struggles facing couples with teenage children (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Ladder of Years), at 57, the novelist seems to be taking a long, hard look at the so-called Golden Years.
It is a reflection that is alternately comedic and tragic, and Tyler does not shy away from the raw truth. As Barnaby’s aging clients whisper their fears and share their fading memories, he begins to believe that perhaps his search for a soul mate is pure folly. “At Rent-A-Back, I knew couples who’d been married almost forever. Finally, you’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself or even better, and she’s become the right person.” With A Patchwork Planet, Tyler has once again served up literary comfort food for the soul. While those who crave action and demand resolution may be frustrated by Tyler’s character-driven plots, even the most cynical reader will be charmed by Barnaby, and above all, an assortment of silver-haired saints.
Reviewed by Karen A. Cullotta.
Barnaby Gaitlin is no prince. A quasi-reformed juvenile delinquent, Anne Tyler's anti-hero in her new novel, A Patchwork Planet, has just celebrated his 30th birthday alone, swilling beer in his dank basement apartment. Still, Barnaby is a disheveled handyman with a heart, and Tyler's 14th…
Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.
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.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
A decade and a half in the making, The Antidote brings together undertold history of 1930s America and the fantastical vision that made Swamplandia! so remarkable.
In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
