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FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Table for Two

Review by Eric A. Ponce

You can learn a lot about someone by getting dinner with them. At a small table, in the glow of candlelight, you might find yourself connecting with a new acquaintance as if they were an old friend. In Table for Two, the new collection of stories from beloved novelist Amor Towles, that level of intimacy is reached and at times exceeded. Towles presents his protagonists with such a high degree of detail that readers will feel like they know the characters personally. While this is the hallmark of any good fiction, Towles elevates these stories further by setting them in complex political landscapes and amid moral quagmires. The result is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.

One choice that distinguishes this collection is its geographical organization. Towles begins with six stories that take place in New York City. The first of these, “The Line,” actually opens in rural Russia, where our “hero,” Pushkin, lives an idyllic life. However, after the Bolshevik revolution, his wife, Irina, insists that they move to Moscow. From there, through many winding twists of fate, the couple ends up in New York City, far away from their feudal beginnings and their Communist awakenings. The five following stories take place in the New York of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, displaying the city at its wealthiest through characters trying to take some of that wealth for themselves. The second half of the book is a novella set in early 20th century Los Angeles, capturing a unique time in the city’s history when financial success coupled with an increasingly seedy underground laid the foundation for LA to become one of the largest, most diverse cities in the United States.

The most engaging, artful part of Table for Two, however, is the unique ability Towles has to approach his characters simultaneously through authorial intervention and through getting inside their heads. Frequently, Towles writes about the characters as though he and they know what is going to happen, or as though they know what the moral of their story is. Rather than spoiling the plot or coming off as heavy-handed, this technique allows readers to fully engage in the stories, pushing them to consider for themselves: What does success mean? What lengths would you go to for money? What does it mean to be happy with your life? Towles forces the reader and his characters to address these questions, and the answers you find in this book will move you.

Amor Towles’ latest, Table for Two, is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Glorious Exploits

Review by Thane Tierney

At its heart, Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is something of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let’s-put-on-a-show romp . . . with a few minor, and mind-bending, exceptions. The stars are a pair of foul-mouthed unemployed potters from Syracuse, Sicily, the year is 412 BC and the acting troupe isn’t a bunch of neighborhood kids; it’s composed of Athenian prisoners of war left in a quarry to starve.

The tale’s narrator, Lampo, is a garrulous scoundrel always on the lookout for spare coin. One day, after tossing scraps of food to the Athenian prisoners in exchange for their reciting passages from Euripides, Lampo’s more taciturn friend Gelon presents him with a plan: reinvent themselves as directors, recruit the prisoners as a cast, tart up the prison quarry as their amphitheater and present two of Euripides’ plays, Medea and Trojan Women, back to back.

What could possibly go wrong? Apart, of course, from the fact that the potential audience of Syracusans hates the defeated Athenians, and that the production is to be mounted by two unemployed potters with no background in theater. Nonetheless, the show must go on; the hapless duo happens upon a mysterious benefactor who offers funds for the production, sets are built, costumes are sewn and various potentially hazardous wheels are set in motion.

At the outset of rehearsals, co-director Gelon gives his captive cast a little pep talk. He reminisces about how the Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex sparked his fondness for the theater: “I don’t hate you. How could I? Even though I know you came to make us slaves. I can’t hate you. I believe any city that gave us those plays has something worth saving.”

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then Glorious Exploits reveals that art makes even stranger ones, as the captors and the captives pause their hostilities for the sake of a greater—if imperfect—good. Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in this quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.

Ferdia Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in his debut novel, Glorious Exploits, a quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

The Limits

Review by Freya Sachs

Pia’s divorced parents live disparate lives: Her mother is a marine biologist, diving to explore coastal reefs and track the impact of humans on the oceans of French Polynesia; her father is a New York City doctor with a large apartment in Manhattan, caring for patients in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has just gotten remarried to Kate, a teacher who finds herself confounded by remote teaching. When Pia returns to live with her father in Manhattan, she has a new relationship to build with Kate, even while she carries a secret with her from her time in Tahiti with her mother.

At each turn, the characters in Nell Freudenberger’s The Limits discover themselves to be connected more complexly than they knew. From New York City to a Zoom screen, from a hospital full of early COVID-19 cases to an island off the coast of Tahiti, Freudenberger brings the anxieties and challenges of the early pandemic days to vivid, engaging life.

The characters have full and fascinating inner lives, and real concerns—parenthood, a spreading virus, preserving the natural world—that layer with their interpersonal conflicts. Each chapter shifts our focus, holding our attention on one place and perspective before turning to reveal relationships from a new angle. The novel addresses race, class, education and access without coming off as heavy-handed; it feels reflective of how circumstance determines our real-world choices.

One of the unique strengths of Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science—as she did with physics in 2019’s Lost and Wanted—in engaging, relevant ways. In The Limits, Freudenberger deftly employs the questions posed by climate change, seafloor mining and the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown to shape the story.

One of the unique strengths of Nell Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science in engaging, relevant ways, from the questions posed by climate change to seafloor mining to the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Wild Houses

Review by Arlene McKanic

In this reviewer’s (possibly prejudiced) view, there are few things as satisfying as a good work of Irish literature. The form doesn’t matter too much; a poem, a short story, a play, even a novel that makes no sense—looking at you, Finnegan’s Wake. A genius Irish writer can, in the words of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, make the English language “as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.” Such is the case with Colin Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses.

The setup is straightforward: Dev Hendrick lives alone in County Mayo with his late mother’s yappy little dog, Georgie. One rainy Friday night, Dev’s cousins, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, drag a teenager to Dev’s home and expect Dev to hide him. The teenager, Donal “Doll” English, is the brother of Cillian, a petty drug dealer who owes the Ferdias—or their drug lord boss—money. Cillian will get Doll back if he coughs up the cash by Monday.

Certainly, the situation ratchets up the reader’s anxiety, to say nothing of that of Doll’s mother, Sheila, and his sensible girlfriend, Nicky. These are the folks who take it upon themselves to find a lot of money in not a lot of time. Ironically, Cillian did once have what he owes, but it was washed away by a turlough, a temporary lake that, according to him, only happens in West Ireland.

But if you come for the nail-biting plot, you’ll stay for Barrett’s gorgeous language. Consider such phrases as this description of a TV: “its screen patinaed in a fuzz of glinting dust.” The sagging nets of a derelict tennis court are “as frayed as used dental floss.” Gabe Ferdia has “a face on him like a vandalised church.” And so on. Barrett, author of the short story collections Young Skins and Homesickness, treats the sketchiest of his characters with tenderness and compassion. Wild Houses is a stunning work.

Come to Wild Houses for the nail-biting plot; stay for Colin Barrett’s gorgeous language: Here, tennis court nets are “as frayed as used dental floss” and a man has “a face on him like a vandalised church.”
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian FictionComing of Age

Memory Piece

Review by Laura Sackton

In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores memory, art, technology and consumption through the eyes of three childhood best friends. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese school in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. Though they come from different backgrounds and have divergent interests, they’re drawn together by a shared desire to make something more—or different—of their lives. Moving from the dot-com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways the three women’s lives converge and diverge.

Giselle turns to art, launching her career with an experimental performance piece in which she lives for a year in a hidden room in a mall. As she becomes more immersed in the art world, she begins to question her motives and desires, floundering through a life that is sometimes more display than substance. Jackie gets caught up in the early days of the internet, working for a tech startup by day and developing her own radical projects by night. Ellen becomes an activist in college, and devotes her life to community organizing and fighting against the gentrification threatening her home. 

The novel’s three distinct sections drive home just how differently Giselle, Jackie and Ellen engage with and react to the world—and each other—as everything changes around them. Jackie’s section is full of frenetic energy, while Giselle’s is dreamy and quiet: Her voice comes through at a remove, as if she’s narrating from a distance. Ellen’s section is poignant with loss and nostalgia. Throughout, Ko’s prose is beautiful and sharp, and her ability to shapeshift through a range of tones makes the novel a pleasure to read.

A bittersweet wistfulness permeates the whole of Memory Piece. Though Giselle, Jackie and Ellen remain important to one another throughout their lives, there is a separateness to each of the novel’s sections that gives it a meandering and melancholy feel. This is a compelling, often chilling and beautifully observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, each other.

Moving from the dot com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways three women’s lives converge and diverge.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Fervor

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is a daring hybrid quality to Toby Lloyd’s Fervor, a sense of branching interests that might doom another, less focused book. In his debut novel, Lloyd explores a wide array of emotional and philosophical topics, from the influence of God to the duties of a memoirist to the characteristic wrinkles of family dysfunction. In the process, he also merges a family saga with a coming-of-age story, a metaphysical exploration and even an outright horror novel. It’s a lot to pack into less than 300 pages, but Lloyd pulls it off, announcing himself as an exciting voice to watch. 

Fervor follows the Rosenthal family, a devout Jewish household rocked by the loss of their patriarch, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor who’s recently divulged his life story to his daughter-in-law Hannah, the family’s resident writer. Every member of the family—from Yosef’s son, Eric, to his grandsons, Gideon and Tovyah—has their own feelings about Hannah’s project, but in the end it’s Yosef’s granddaughter, Elsie, who is impacted the most. After her grandfather dies, Elsie starts to act out, visibly suffering in ways that frustrate her teachers and her parents. When Elsie suddenly disappears one day, then reappears in a disheveled, dazed state, Hannah suspects that something supernatural has entered her daughter, upsetting the family’s balance of power and threatening their sanity.

Lloyd frames the story of Elsie’s unraveling in several ways, ranging from third-person storytelling that looms over the entire family, to Hannah’s written account, to sections from the point of view of Tovyah’s college friend, who witnesses the Rosenthals’ strangeness firsthand. In spreading the story out across these perspectives, and even across years of family history, Lloyd invites readers to ask whose version of the narrative is actually the truth. Hannah’s presence as the family’s self-appointed chronicler adds to the dramatic tension, propelling events forward with her ferocious longing for secret knowledge that heightens the stakes of the book’s questions of faith and reason.

But even beyond the structural cleverness and the way it plays with perspective, Fervor succeeds on the strength of Lloyd’s elegant, confident language. The book is driven by a constant push-pull between the sacred and secular, and Lloyd’s prose reflects that with sentences that feel like they could simultaneously conjure up a spirit and captivate a very human audience. His voice is practiced, smart and spellbinding, making Fervor a book that fans of family dramas and horror stories alike will happily devour.

Toby Lloyd’s voice is practiced, smart and spellbinding, making Fervor a book that fans of family dramas and horror stories alike will happily devour.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Review by Carole V. Bell

Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a powerful and lyrical allegory about an older artist haunted by her own creativity.

Alma Cruz is a writer and professor based in Vermont and one of four daughters in a family from the Dominican Republic. Having witnessed a friend and fellow author driven to a mental institution and then to an early death by writerly frustration, Alma is guilt-ridden for resisting her friend’s pleas for help with her unfinished story, and, more than that, determined to avoid the same fate. In the aftermath of her father’s subsequent death, two things become clear. First, Alma herself will “soon be entering that territory of the old—okay, not old old, but the anteroom, no matter what the magazines said about seventy being the new fifty.” And second, aging isn’t just a matter of physical or cognitive decline; “aging also happens in the creative life.” And “there weren’t enough years left to tell all the stories she wanted to tell.”

Seeking change and control, Alma quits her day job. But it’s not enough. The feeling of artistic aging, that she’s running out of time, won’t allow her any peace. The solution, Alma realizes, is to set herself free by exorcising the ghosts of her unfinished projects. Returning to the D.R., she decides to bury her failed manuscripts in the soil of her homeland, but rather than squashing them permanently, the rite gives her characters new life. The stories Alma buries grow like seeds. The remainder of the novel is focused on these tales.

Alvarez has a wonderful way of being both lyrical and precisely concrete at the same time. The specificity of her writing is reflected in myriad ways on every page, and it’s not limited to the beauty of The Cemetery of Untold Stories’ central metaphor about storytelling. Two characters stand out: Papi, Alma’s father, a doctor turned dissident who hated talking about the past, and Bienvenida, a fictionalized version of the wife of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the D.R. for 31 years. They have exile in common: “Bienvenida had been erased from history; Papi had sealed himself off . . . these were precisely the characters Alma felt drawn to. The silenced ones, their tongues cut off.” That brutal image is one indelible description among many. Magical and multifaceted, this meditation on creativity, culture and aging is a triumph.

Read our interview with Julia Alvarez on The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Magical and multifaceted, Julia Alvarez’s meditation on creativity, culture and aging, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is a triumph.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

James

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Percival Everett brings The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved supporting character, Jim, into the foreground of his new novel, James, a reworking of the Mark Twain classic. Though James stays with Huck Finn’s characters, setting and first-person perspective, it’s Jim, not Huck, who narrates this story. Jim overhears that he’s about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, and, as in the original, he runs, landing on Jackson Island, where he encounters Huck, who’s faked his own death to flee his abusive, alcoholic father. The two set out together, floating down the Mississippi.

James, like Huck Finn, is a picaresque tale, one of improbable adventures and moments of reunion. Jim and Huck encounter the con men the Duke and Dauphin, and though this duo get their comic moments, Everett highlights their quick turn to brutality. Jim and Huck are soon separated, and Jim recounts a series of horrors—Everett pulls no punches in depicting white enslavers’ treatment of enslaved people—leavened with the unexpected connections Jim makes. Unlike in Huck Finn, James’ Jim can read and write, secretly reading books from his enslaver’s library. In a feverish dream encounter after he’s bitten by a snake, Jim debates Voltaire, proponent of liberty and equality, forcing Voltaire to admit to his own racism. All the while, he longs for his wife and daughter, determined to gain his own freedom and theirs.

Everett balances a moral clarity about the atrocities of slavery with a dry, Twainian humor, even turning Twain’s dialect on its head to great effect: In this telling, enslaved people use this stereotypical “slave” dialect only around white people, so as to seem unthreateningly foolish, while laughing about it together in private. On his journey, Jim repeatedly encounters other enslaved people being brutalized by white people, but he’s powerless to intervene; life has taught him that to do so leads to greater violence, and sometimes death. Throughout, the novel’s revelations feel both surprising and convincing, and its explosive, cathartic ending points at the possibility of hope for Jim and his family.

In an era of retellings, James stands out for staying true to Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people. In revealing Jim’s full humanity, deep thinking and love through his hero’s journey, Everett has written a visionary and necessary reimagining.

In an era of retellings, Percival Everett’s James stands out for staying true to Mark Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Habitations

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Place, purpose and self-worth are front and center in Sheila Sundar’s debut novel, Habitations, about a young girl’s journey into womanhood. We begin in the mid-’90s in South India and follow Sundar’s protagonist, Vega Gopalan, through a childhood marked by the devastating loss of her younger sister, her developing interest in sociology, her sexual longings and experiments, and the overall angst of being young.

When a scholarship takes Vega to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City, the comforts and privileges she knew as an upper-caste Brahmin dissolve into the confusing and often lonely experience of being an immigrant student in the U.S. Meek and naive, however, she is not. Vega’s intelligence, humor and curiosity keep her open and engaged with new experiences.

Reflections on race, sex, caste and social norms remain the focus as Vega navigates the labyrinth of her immigrant community, academia, friendships, lovers and, eventually, a marriage not for love, but for a precious green card that will allow her to live in the U.S. and pursue her academic interests. Career developments and the birth of her daughter, Asha, unfold new challenges for Vega. But through these challenges, she becomes a surer, more hopeful woman ready to live life on her own terms.

There are many reasons to love this novel. Vega’s journey will resonate in one way or another with anyone who has suffered loss or struggled with self-doubt. Sundar’s supporting characters and rich depiction of immigrant life round out Vega’s story, no doubt drawing on the author’s own experience growing up in the ’90s as the child of Indian immigrants to the U.S. Best of all, the novel speaks to the human experience of how the burdens we carry eventually come to define our strengths.

Insightful and hopeful, Habitations delivers on all fronts.

Insightful and hopeful, Sheila Sundar’s debut novel Habitations follows a young Indian American woman’s experiences with academia, immigrant community, marriage and motherhood.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Julia Alvarez: Writing to the gaps on the bookshelf

Interview by Carole V. Bell

Julia Alvarez’s work is inspired by what she feels is missing in the world: “I write very much to gaps on my bookshelf.” When Alvarez conceived her 1991 debut novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, “the few immigrant stories that were out there like [those] by Oscar Hijuelos, Piri Thomas and Edward Rivera” were all by male authors. That glaring lack spurred the Dominican American author to action. She thought deeply about what the immigrant experience was for women and how to depict it for her characters, even as, having moved from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. when she was 10, she was living a version of that reality herself.

Three decades later, Alvarez’s seventh novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, beautifully illuminates the experience of an artist’s twilight years. Writer Alma Cruz feels worn down by her cherished vocation, like she has “run out of stories and creative stamina.” When she inherits a piece of land in a poor barrio next to a town dump in her homeland of the Dominican Republic, she seizes the opportunity to push what torments her away. She decides to make “a cemetery for all her failed manuscripts, her rough drafts, her never fully realized characters and lay them to rest there.” What happens next is magical. Alma’s characters refuse to be discarded. Alvarez likens the events that ensue to a famous aphorism: “They tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds.”

Instead of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, why not a portrait of the artist as an older woman?

If writing to fill the gaps on her shelf is how Alvarez makes sense of her work, with this novel, the hole Alvarez is trying to fill is the universal yet neglected topic of growing older yet remaining vital and productive as an artist and human being. As she so perfectly puts it, instead of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, why not a portrait of the artist as an older woman? Intrigued by the evolution involved in aging and what critic Constance Rooke called the Vollendungsroman—“a novel of completion” or “winding up” in contrast to a Bildungsroman— Alvarez uses the supernatural metaphor of a graveyard of stories to bring the issue of aging and art to life on the page. In the abstract, envisioning the creative process as a metaphorical haunting sounds wonderfully fanciful and inventive. From a reader’s experience, the effect is simply genius. Alvarez invites the reader to enter her novel as if they are at the gates of that island cemetery.

The choice to focus on an older artist comes from Alvarez’s soul and experience, but it’s also well-timed. As the large cohort of baby boomers grow older, this phase of life is increasingly salient. Despite the size and influence of the boomer generation, in books, as in much of American culture, the dominant preference for youth remains overwhelming. Alvarez calls out literature’s persistent ageism, which is resistant and slow to change. This bias manifests in a multitude of ways, but Alvarez particularly notes that older characters, especially older women, usually play supporting roles to the protagonist. “When older women do appear as characters, we’re their mothers and their abuelitas,” says Alvarez, a fact that the 73-year-old novelist finds discomfiting and unsatisfactory.

In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alvarez turns that marginalization on its head, putting older main character energy on every page. Conjuring a material metaphor of burial for the tangled psychological process of moving on from unfinished business proves a brilliant starting point. And for Alvarez, who began her writing life as a poet, putting ideas into metaphor is a necessary, vital process. “That’s what stories are,” Alvarez says. Her protagonist Alma wants to get beyond the “groomed lawns of once upon a time, she wants to break out of her life as a writer, but what is a life beyond narrative?” What Alma discovers is that “there is no life beyond narrative,” explains Alvarez. In this territory, Alvarez is also inspired by literary critic Edward Said, who wrote about the particular “late style” of older storytellers, which he characterized by a feeling of displacement, running out of time and being preoccupied with things that are unresolved—much in keeping with what Alma and her writer friend go through in The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Read our starred review of The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Alvarez has long been a professor of creative writing and literature at Middlebury College (now emeritus, but she’ll teach the occasional workshop for those lucky few students). Her writing is infused with lyricism and metaphor, but it’s also engrossing and accessible. It has the appeal of someone with great respect for the universality of storytelling and the oral tradition. The Dominican American writer is also bilingual, and that too shapes her style and expression. She remembers once being asked at a reading, “When are you going to start writing shorter sentences?” and wondering whether the questioner was right. But Alvarez now knows that what that reader considered flaws are part of what makes her style distinctive. “I’m writing my Spanish in English,” Alvarez says. “The structure is Spanish. The syntax, the floridness of it is the way I hear and understand and construct English. They’re all enmeshed.”

In conversation, Alvarez is an exuberant and fluid communicator of both ideas and process, yet she’s also clear that the transformation of ideas into stories isn’t easy. She likens this beautiful struggle of creation to exploring uncharted territory; there is no road map and no recipe. “When we talk, I have this abstraction, but really, when you’re writing, you’re sort of in the dark, you know, you’re discovering as you go along. You go down the wrong alley, and you have to start over.”

Finding a book that does something new and speaks to your experience is a revelation. Early in Alvarez’s career, these moments were so rare that the pleasure of recognition still resonates today; when she talks about them now it sounds as though she’s experiencing the awakening all over again. “I loved Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior because it was the first book that I read that was by a Chinese American woman, but it could well have been written by a Dominican woman,” says Alvarez. She remembers the first line as one “that I think any Latina of my generation could start her novel with.” The line is “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’”—then Hong tells the story. Alvarez related because her own mother taught her that family secrets were to be fiercely guarded. Though she respects her family, she has reveled in the freedom of transgressing that taboo throughout her working life.

Alvarez continues to take great pleasure in exposing and exploring life’s great truths in her fiction. Not teaching means more time for travel and for writing from wherever in the world she and her partner land in. As she proves in The Cemetery of Untold Stories, there’s nothing retiring about this phase of life.

Julia Alvarez author photo © Todd Balfour for Middlebury College.

In her enchanting seventh novel, Julia Alvarez explores the perspective of a writer in the late stages of her career.
RomanceFictionPoetryLiterary FictionHistorical RomanceClassics

Poor unfortunate souls: Our 4 favorite unlucky characters

Feature by the editors of BookPage

When a Scot Ties the Knot

There’s unlucky, and then there’s “Surprise! Your fake pen pal is actually a real person!” Madeline Gracechurch dreamed up Captain Logan MacKenzie, an honorable Scottish soldier conveniently stationed elsewhere, to get out of making her debut and continue her work as an illustrator of naturalist texts. Maddie writes letters to Logan for years before she finally decides to kill him off, thinking herself safe from matrimony forever. And then, of course, Logan shows up on her doorstep, letters in hand, intent on getting married for real so that his battle-weary men can settle down on Maddie’s extensive property. When a Scot Ties the Knot is an absolute sugar high of a romance, complete with digressions on subjects such as why some men look hotter in glasses, how to seduce women by bathing in mountain lochs and the mating travails of Maddie’s lobsters (their names are Rex and Fluffy). Tessa Dare’s great talent as an author is her ability to root farcical silliness in emotional reality: Logan’s quest to give his men a life where they can heal and flourish is treated with utmost seriousness, as is the paralyzing social anxiety that led Maddie to start writing him in the first place. 

—Savanna, Managing Editor 

The Bee Sting

Was ever a family more unfortunate than the Barneses, the dysfunctional crew at the heart of Irish writer Paul Murray’s masterfully crafted fourth novel? Dickie Barnes is barely holding on to his auto dealership; his glamorous wife, Imelda, resents their fall in status. Their daughter, Cass, who plans to attend university in Dublin, may be jeopardizing that future thanks to too many nights at the pub, while 12-year-old PJ’s plan to escape his bullies is only leading him into more danger. Beginning with Cass, each family member takes a turn telling the story as they see it, unveiling layers of damage, secrets and bad luck. What keeps this tale of woe engaging across more than 600 pages is Murray’s tenderness for the Barnes family, despite their flaws. The voice of each character is refreshingly distinct, and there’s much satisfaction in seeing the puzzle pieces of their perspectives click together to create a full view of this fractured family, who love each other deeply but rarely manage to communicate that love in the right way or at the right moment. A heartfelt tragedy with a bravura ending, The Bee Sting is a strikingly human and empathetic read.

—Trisha, Publisher 

Troubles

Surely there could be no greater misfortune than that which befalls Major Brendan Archer, who, near the end of J.G. Farrell’s Troubles finds himself buried up to his neck in sand, awaiting drowning as the tide comes in. Troubles is the first in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, a series of masterful, bleakly hilarious eviscerations of British colonialism. After returning from World War I, the Major goes to Ireland to be with his fiancée, Angela Spencer, a woman he hardly remembers. Angela’s Protestant, Anglo-Irish family runs a once-glorious hotel called The Majestic. Even through the scrupulously polite Major’s eyes, it’s clear that the Spencers are in denial about the state of the hotel and the precarity of their political situation, as tensions with the majority-Catholic people of the surrounding area rise to a deadly pitch. Still, none of them manage to bring the danger into focus, to the point that the Irish Republicans go nameless and faceless throughout the book, even as they pack rocks around the Major’s body and leave him to die. Sadly, Farrell himself met an unfortunate end: At only 44, he was swept out to sea while fishing. We can only imagine what other great novels he would have graced the canon with, had he lived longer.

—Phoebe, Associate Editor

The Odyssey

I never realized how often Odysseus wept: as Polyphemus the Cyclops wet the floor with the brains of his friends; on Aeaea when the clever witch Circe transformed his men into pigs; on the shore of Ogygia as Calypso’s captive; in the halls of the Phaeacians, as he bemoaned his misfortune. After two decades of trying and failing to read The Odyssey, I picked up Emily Wilson’s translation and saw myself in this most unlucky of men. I had long wanted to read Homer’s epic, but I found it unbearably dull and the verse too difficult to unravel. I could never even get to Scherie, let alone back to Ithaca. Wilson, the first woman to publish a translation in English, brings Homer’s epic alive. She writes in her translator’s note that other English translations render Homer’s text in “grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated English.” But the poet’s verse was not “bombastic or grandiloquent.” It was accessible, performed around the ancient world to people from all walks of life. Wilson opts instead to use straightforward language and syntax, along with good old iambic pentameter, to present a story that is full of suspense and pathos. I lost myself in The Odyssey, I found myself in Odysseus and I wept for his misfortune. 

—Erica, Associate Editor

There’s something weirdly engaging about a character who’s down on their luck. Fortunately (or not), their loss is our gain.
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Our top 10 books for March 2024

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW

Our top 10 books for March 2024

The best new books of the month include highly anticipated follow-ups from Sloane Crosley, Sasha LaPointe and Juan Gómez-Jurado.
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Book jacket image for 49 Days by Agnes Lee

49 Days is an unusual, profoundly moving graphic novel whose elegance belies its complexity and whose emotional impact only grows upon rereading.

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FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Jennifer Croft feeds the literary ecosystem

Interview by Cat Acree

It’s common practice among many publishers to leave translators’ bylines off book covers—an act of erasure that reinforces the widely held belief that original texts are sacred and thus superior to any translation. Jennifer Croft, who is best known for her translations of Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s books, is challenging readers and critics to rethink this flawed paradigm.

“Our contemporary notion of authority depends upon the existence—still—of a single trustworthy individual. In literature, this figure is the author, the inimitable person who chooses and disposes words,” Croft writes in “Superlichen,” an essay published in Orion Magazine in 2023. “In this mystical-commercial understanding of literature, translators are necessarily suspect. They adulterate the truth, making it impossible to trust. When translators are truly necessary, they’re ideally neither seen nor heard. That way we can tell ourselves that the Original has remained mostly unscathed on its journey into English.”

But books thrive in translation. They reach new readership, and in some cases, the quality of the original text can even improve. Croft, who won the International Booker Prize in 2018 for her translation of Tokarczuk’s Flights, urges readers to consider translation to be co-creation, a labor of interdependent individuals who are building a completely new work of art.

“The translator is the one who writes every single word of the book that you end up reading,” Croft says, speaking from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a late December morning—the kind of gray day that’s well suited to a discussion about her puckish, unnerving debut novel. “The writer is obviously the person who’s behind everything, which in a way, of course, is true. But I feel like people aren’t fully grasping the essentially, fundamentally collaborative nature, that [a translated work] is a co-authored book. So I really wanted to show that playing out in an exaggerated, humorous way.”

“What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership?”

The Extinction of Irena Rey, which earned Croft a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022, is the story of eight translators who are initially introduced not by name but by their languages of translation (English, Spanish, Serbian, etc.). It’s 2017, and they have convened at the idyllic home of (fictional) world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey. Her house resides at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval wood spanning the border of Poland and Belarus. Over the course of the next several weeks, they will translate her presumed magnum opus, Grey Eminence.

Translators aren’t always in contact with an author while translating, but Irena prefers to be highly involved in the process. The translators are forbidden from translating other authors—except two Polish poets widely considered untranslatable—and they must follow Irena’s many house rules, which include no drinking, no eating meat and so on. It is full isolation, full adoration, full commitment to Irena’s genius. But suddenly, Irena vanishes, and the translators are left reeling.

Having lost their moral center, the translators move en masse from room to room, from forest to pub and back to Irena’s house, wondering if Irena’s dead and completely freaking out. It’s such an ominous, claustrophobic setup that the reader would be forgiven for not realizing at first just how funny it all is. There’s a lot of shrieking and kissing and running around with a frantic narrative pace that resembles an old episode of “Scooby-Doo.”

During the gang’s search for clues, they come across some postcards, which only serve to further confuse them. “Postcards are like translation,” Croft says. “There’s the inherent hybrid and potential for clashes between the one side that has the picture and the other side that has the message.” There’s also the potentially troubling political significance of the type of imagery that is selected to represent a place, which can be stereotypical or limiting, “and then it may end up forcing the place to become more like the postcard.”

Croft explains that when postcards were first introduced in the 1860s, they were a revolutionary innovation that allowed more people to send mail, which previously had been a luxury exclusive to the upper classes. “[But the elite] were horrified by the idea that the hired help would be able to read their words,” she says. “I love looking at old postcards, because sometimes you can sense there’s a code happening or a private reference that you just cannot possibly understand.”

The implications of obscured, divided or layered interpretations run rampant in Croft’s novel, which opens with a preface titled “Warning: A Note from the Translator.” We learn that the book is a work of autofiction by Spanish (whose real name is Emi), subsequently translated by English (real name Alexis). Alexis’ translator’s note is dismissive, even derisive, and her footnotes are deliciously scathing. As a translator, she’s doing the unthinkable: sharing her true feelings about the book and even illuminating choices made in the translation process. (For example, when Emi refers to her own “pubis,” Alexis adds the footnote, “Here I have preserved her ridiculous word.”) Their feud renders the story’s perspective so canted, so untrustworthy, that we have no idea which version of events to believe.

“What we do enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much.”

Even without quarreling co-authors, autofiction as a genre is a thorny bramble between memoir and fiction, memory and embellishment. The genre is particularly popular with French- and Spanish-language readers. Croft’s first book, Homesick, is a work of autofiction that she wrote in Argentine Spanish while living in Argentina, and it was only sold to an English-language publisher under the condition that it be published as a memoir, presumably because American readers aren’t as comfortable with the gray areas between truth and fiction.

“[Homesick] was kind of inspired by my childhood but [is] definitely not a factual account,” Croft says. “I think that frustration of always talking about what is true and what is not probably fed into the writing of [Irena Rey]. I think also I may have rebelled and made it even more outlandish. Obviously I’ve never fought a duel in a forest.”

The duel is only one of the many ludicrous outcomes of the translators’ search for Irena. It’s also, importantly, between two women: Emi and Alexis. “I actually wrote my PhD dissertation about duels in 20th-century fiction. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t find a single example of a women’s duel, or even a duel between a man and a woman,” Croft says. “A classic dueling premise is to fight over an ethical question. In this case, English and Spanish are fighting—well, at least Spanish believes that they’re fighting over the nature of truth, essentially. What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership? How do you truthfully or faithfully convey a sacred message to the world?”

The duel occurs in the Bialowieza Forest, which serves as a classic source of menace and myth. Forests exist in fiction to haunt us, and this one feeds off a history of violence, with corpses from World War II providing nutrients for a fungal network that subsequently feeds the trees and understory, which then feed the deer that feed the Polish villagers, and so on. In fact, the original title for the novel was Amadou, the name of a fungus that parasitically infects trees, serving as an essential decomposer in the forest, and which can also be used as both tinder and fabric.

“Obviously I’m an advocate for translation, and I love translators,” Croft says. “But I also wanted to think about the potentially darker side of translation in a lot of different ways, which goes hand-in-hand with thinking about the power of the translator.” However translation alters the original, or even betrays it, “what we do [as translators] enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much. What matters is this potentially really lovely afterlife that [a work] can have, and all of the echoes and reverberations that it can have throughout that ecosystem.”

The concept of a literary afterlife opens us to seeing books as living, changeable works of art, in which language can die and be reborn in translation. Certainly by the end of The Extinction of Irena Rey, the structures that uphold notions like artistic celebrity and all-powerful genius have rotted through and collapsed, and from the remains, something new grows.

Read our starred review of The Extinction of Irena Rey.

Jennifer Croft author photo © Nathan Jeffers.

With her mischievous debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft draws readers deep into a gnarled forest in which eight translators search desperately for their beloved, vanished author.

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