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All Literary Fiction Coverage

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“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest. Tommy Orange demonstrates the veracity of that line in Wandering Stars, his follow-up to There There, the 2018 debut novel for which he was a Pulitzer finalist. Few literary debuts are as chillingly of-the-moment as There There, which spanned a huge cast of Native American characters and culminated in a tragedy at an Oakland powwow. Orange further explores the lives of some of those characters in this assured continuation.

Orange pulls off a neat sleight of hand in Wandering Stars: He limits the scope by focusing on only a few characters, yet he also expands his narrative by rewinding to the 19th and early 20th centuries to tell the story of ancestors of the Red Feather family.

The book begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when the U.S. Army attacked Cheyenne and Arapaho people in present-day Colorado. As Orange puts it, “seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons,” and killed hundreds of Native Americans—a prolongation of “America’s longest war.”

One of the survivors was Jude Star, a mute man sent by train as a prisoner of war to a fortress in St. Augustine, Florida. The man the army chose to run the prison was Richard Henry Pratt. Years later, Pratt founded the Carlisle School, to which Native American parents were forced to send their children to be “taught that everything about being Indian was wrong.” Jude’s son, Charles Star, is enrolled there. By the early 1900s, Charles develops an addiction to laudanum and tries to interview an aging Pratt to learn about his father.

The novel then shifts to 2018, when Orvil Red Feather, a survivor of the tragedy in There There, is trying to overcome his injuries and emotional trauma. Like Charles, he turns to drugs, in his case with the help of his friend Sean, whose father sets up a basement lab and starts his own pharmacopeia. He also tries to piece together the story of his Cheyenne family history, although Opal, the great-aunt with whom he and his younger brothers live, isn’t forthcoming about their heritage.

The style of the first part of the book is different from the second, more modern half. If the result feels like two separate books, there’s still much to recommend Wandering Stars, from Orange’s sensitive depiction of Orvil’s path to recovery to the chronicling of important, overlooked moments in the brutal history of America’s treatment of its Indigenous people. As Opal laments, Native Americans have been “consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions.” Wandering Stars is an impassioned censure of that marginalization.

Read Tommy Orange’s essay on the writing of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars sensitively depicts Orvil Red Feather’s path to recovery after the tragedy in There, There, as well as chronicling important, overlooked moments in the history of America’s brutal treatment of its Indigenous people.
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Valerie Martin’s captivating new novel, Mrs. Gulliver, lies just beyond the horizon. The year is 1954. Verona Island floats a longish ferry ride away from the mainland. Lila Gulliver’s clients enter through a side door behind a hedge, unseen from the street, though prostitution is legal on the island.

Lila, who tells this tale, is a keen observer of surfaces. She crisply describes the clothing and demeanor of everyone we meet. Of the two destitute farm girls who arrive in her drawing room one humid day, Carita stands out. She possesses a rich velvet voice and “an archness as well, distant and amused.” Carita has been blind since birth. Lila thinks Carita might just fulfill a fantasy of some of her clients.

We readers, like Lila, her clients, her colleagues and a college boy named Ian, are soon enchanted by Carita. Lila notes that Ian is “a romantic, self-righteous boy, and I liked the idea of him with Carita, two healthy young bodies driven together by sexual attraction and not much else. . . . She would forget him in a month, but he would remember her for the rest of his life.”

Alas, Lila is not quite right. Ian decides he must save Carita from this den of iniquity. (Lila’s house, by the way, is a place where part-time sex worker Mimi describes the economic theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and Carita decides Marx is right.) Ian, scion of the wealthiest family on the island, is involved with a murder that may be a gangland hit. He loses his mind. He and Carita flee to an impoverished fishing village.

Many complications ensue, mostly having to do with money, and the varying temperatures and power dynamics of love. In her afterword, Martin writes that she did not want Carita to end up like Juliet Capulet, a tragic heroine. Instead, in Mrs. Gulliver, Martin offers us an idyll, perhaps even a comedy. Her touch is tender and light. There are shadows and there is sunshine. All’s well that ends well. We hope.

In Mrs. Gulliver, Valerie Martin offers us an idyll, perhaps even a comedy. All’s well that ends well. We hope.
Behind the Book by

Before March of 2018, I never intended to write a sequel to There There. When I first decided to do it, the mean voices inside immediately began judging me. Like it was lowbrow. Like it belonged in the Marvel universe of decision-making, like people would think it was a cash grab even though I made the decision before the success of There There.

The idea first came to me when I was sitting in a Penguin Random House warehouse signing an insane amount of books ahead of the publication of There There. That is not a romantic place for a novel to be conceived. I feel embarrassed to share that it came during that moment, but that is when it came. The sales reps who were helping me to sign all these books played a Spotify radio station based on the song “There There” by Radiohead. “Wandering Star” by Portishead came on and right when I heard it, I knew I wanted to write a sequel and that it would be called Wandering Stars. I didn’t at all know at first where the follow-up novel would lead based on this title, but I knew with strange certainty it would be the title. I could never have guessed all the unexpected places it would lead me.

Some of the earliest writing I did for Wandering Stars was about Maxine Loneman experiencing the death of her grandson. I was on a run in Baltimore, and I thought of Maxine and Tony in the afterlife and then of all these afterlife experiences of the characters from There There. That was the original conception—there was going to be a lot of weird afterlife stuff. And then in early 2019 I was in Sweden for the translation of There There. I almost didn’t go on this trip. I was to go to Italy, Sweden and Amsterdam. I’d traveled so much in 2018 that despite these being really cool sounding places, I didn’t actually want to go.

It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

Just before I was to leave I went to a Lunar New Year festival at the Oakland Museum with my family, and we parked at the Lake Merritt BART parking lot, which is notorious for break-ins. I think I wanted something bad to happen. I even left my backpack in the car. And then it did. Someone stole all of my luggage, my passport and my backpack with my computer in it, plus even my son’s toys and some of my wife’s clothes and jewelry. I was upset but also excited because I thought it meant I wouldn’t have to go to Europe. But my agent insisted I should. And she was right. So I got an emergency rushed new passport and only missed the Italian portion of the trip.

Anyway, so then the organizers in Sweden asked if I wanted a private tour of a museum. They said there was a Cheyenne exhibit. I ended up getting this really weird meta-tour where the person leading me through the museum kept explaining that they knew the museum shouldn’t have all this stuff and that they were trying to find ways to return it but weren’t entirely sure how yet. It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

When we came to the Cheyenne exhibit I looked at old regalia and felt that familiar sadness I feel at museums, wondering about why anyone thought showing stolen stuff directly related to colonialism was a good idea, when I caught sight of a newspaper article clipping that said “Southern Cheyennes in Florida, 1875.” I know enough about my tribe’s history to know we were never in Florida. Not as a people. When I came home from the trip, I ended up falling deeply down a rabbit hole researching why some of us were in St. Augustine, Florida, from 1875 to 1878, at a prison-castle called Fort Marion that was shaped like a star. St. Augustine was also the very first European settlement in the continental United States. It should be noted, and some know, but many do not, that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, not in North America. His discovery of the United States is just as false and meaningless as his legacy as some kind of hero. He went home in chains and will always be remembered by people who know the history as an awful human being.

But how would I connect this piece of history with the aftermath of the powwow from There There?

It was in the research that the moment happened. This was maybe six months after Sweden and first finding out about Fort Marion. I’d been reading a book called War Dance at Fort Marion by Brad D. Lookingbill. I was immersing myself in the world of Fort Marion and beginning to write what would become the beginning of Wandering Stars. I got to the end of the book and it listed the names of the prisoners. The character I had already started writing I’d named Star. And there in the list of names was a Southern Cheyenne named Star, and not far below him, someone named Bear Shield. I immediately started crying seeing the names. That I had already written a character named Star was one thing, but to see a family name from There There was just so overwhelming. I became convinced at that moment that I would make a generational tie between one of the prisoners at Fort Marion and one of the families who survived the shooting at the powwow at the end of There There.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing.

I have found in writing these two novels that there are things that go into the work, and also things that come out of it. For instance, the spider legs that Orvil Red Feather pulls out of his leg in There There, that was something that actually happened to me. In a West Oakland Target bathroom, just like Orvil. And then the week after I wrote the bat scene from the Thomas Frank chapter in There There, we had a bat fly into our house. The bat did what they call a flyby on my wife and niece. It felt so related to the bat I wrote into the novel and my wife definitely blamed me writing it in for what happened. And then my wife’s medical insurance had lapsed without our knowing and we ended up having to spend $10,000 to pay for rabies shots. One of the first things we did with advance money from There There was to pay that medical bill.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing. You have to be open to what it can become, I think. You have to open yourself up to what might be possible for it to become that you might never have imagined. It can be a kind of collaboration with your unconscious, and with something else. The process, I guess. It can feel like it takes everything you have. And it does.

Read our review of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange author photo by Michael Lionstar.

The author shares the moments from his life that became part of the story of his hit debut, There There, and the song that inspired his sequel’s title, Wandering Stars.
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Far too often, translators’ bylines go missing on book covers and in reviews. The author is seen as the one true artist, whose translators exist in service to them. Jennifer Croft, the International Booker Prize-winning translator of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (and many other authors), has become a leading advocate for changing this perception, encouraging readers to view translated books as acts of co-creation rather than pale shadows of their original text. In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.

As the book begins, the eight translators of world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey have arrived at the author’s home at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval, endangered wood that sprawls across the border of Poland and Belarus. All the translators are initially referred to by their languages of translation (English, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, etc.), and the narrator of these events is Spanish, who insists that the translators are wholly devoted to the author and her original text. “Irena’s works were eternal,” Spanish says, “but our translations were no more enduring than socks.” As they prepare to translate Irena’s new novel, Grey Eminence, they cocoon themselves in her world, fully isolated and committed to her unusual rules. But Irena’s behavior is bizarre. She’s reluctant to give them the manuscript, and after a couple of days, she vanishes. The translators are left scrambling to figure out where she went, and over the course of “seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks,” they race from one clue to the next, terrified and paranoid, getting more and more lost in the proverbial woods.

Croft’s novel employs a beguiling structure that serves to undermine any sense of truth we might try to reap from Spanish’s version of events. Spanish’s book is not a memoir but a work of autofiction, and it has been translated by English, who has illuminated the book with a vicious preface and copious footnotes, often mocking Spanish and offering a peep show of (some of) the changes made in translation. The reader is left to wonder which writer, if any, can be trusted.

Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.

Read our interview with Jennifer Croft on The Extinction of Irena Rey.

In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.
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At one point in Kirsten Bakis’ second novel, King Nyx, Anna Fort, the protagonist and narrator, contemplates the tendency of evil men to wreck the lives of everyone they come upon, especially women and girls. Such men can never have enough money or power, and cruelty is their intention. Anna has spent a good deal of her life reacting to men like this. One was her employer and father-in-law; another a mysterious magnate named Claude Arkel who invites her and her eccentric husband, Charles, to stay as guests on his private island.

On a late autumn day just after World War I, we find Anna and Charles (who are based on real people of the same names) waiting for a boat to take them to the island. All the while, Anna hugs a cage whose cover barely protects the two little parrots inside from the cold. Anna’s obsession with their care hints at the lengths she’ll go to protect the vulnerable, introduces themes of captivity and freedom, and serves as a callback to the titular bird, King Nyx. Despite the mighty moniker, King Nyx is a toy made of tin. To the lonely, impoverished and motherless Anna, the toy—thought of as female despite the name—was a childhood friend and a totem. It will turn out that it still is.

Once on the island, the Forts meet Frank and Stella Bixby, a couple who enjoy a strange, and as we learn, very dark dynamic. The couples take to each other right away. Charles and Frank bond over their mutual weirdness, and Stella and Anna both need a female confidant. Stella is a fantastic creation: She’s quick-witted, mouthy, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney and has a heart of gold. Indeed, the injection of humor in some very tense scenes comes courtesy of Stella craving a cigarette or blurting out a bon mot.

Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the first chapter, when two strange women warn of trouble on Arkel’s island while the Forts wait for their boat. Trouble happens quickly, and there are scenes so anxiety-producing that you might want to put the book down and check to see that your windows and doors are secure. King Nyx is a scary good book.

 

Kirsten Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the very first chapter of King Nyx. This is a scary good book.
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Imagine finding yourself in the company of a stranger. A simple hello organically morphs into hours of conversation, full of resonating and enlightening stories. This is the feeling one gets while reading Amitava Kumar’s latest novel, My Beloved Life. Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, the novel is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.

Born in 1935 in the tiny farming village of Khewali, India, without electricity, money or much else, to a mother who nearly died of a snake bite while pregnant, Jadunath (or Jadu) nevertheless seems destined for big things. Curiosity and a thirst for knowledge lead him away from peasant life to the city of Patna where he eventually becomes a respected professor, a political activist and a loving husband and father. Jadu’s story provides glimpses of life in rural India steeped in superstition and faith, and of India’s struggles for equality and progress from post-independence to the modern day.

In contrast to Jadu’s upbringing, his daughter, Jugnu, is born in the bustling city of Patna in 1965. Raised in a loving home, surrounded by her father’s intellectual circle, Jugnu grows up to be a passionate journalist for CNN in the United States. Jugnu’s perspective adds deeply to our understanding of Jadu beyond his words alone.

The novel feels very intimate as it unfolds in the first person from Jadu and then Jugnu’s perspectives. In the skillful blending of individual experience with extraordinary world events, Kumar’s journalistic background shines through, often making one forget that this is a work of fiction. Additionally, Kumar’s own upbringing in a small town near Patna, and his experiences as an immigrant and professor in the United States, add a very powerful element to his ultimate message that everyone has a story that is worth remembering.

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and mundane, My Beloved Life is storytelling at its best.

Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, My Beloved Life is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence chronicles the lives of Bengali sisters Deepa, Priya and Jamini beginning in 1947, during a period of upheaval in India. Deepa looks for fulfillment in marriage, while Priya hopes to become a doctor like their father, and Jamini focuses on family and duty. When their father is fatally shot during a riot, their lives are turned upside down. During the Partition of India and Pakistan, each sister is forced to make a life-changing choice. At once a tender family portrait and a powerful exploration of Indian history, Independence is a rewarding book club pick. 

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai tracks a diverse cast of characters whose lives are impacted by the Vietnam War. Phong, a Black American Vietnamese orphan, searches for his parents and dreams of immigrating to America. Dan, an American helicopter pilot haunted by his experiences in the war, goes back to Vietnam, aiming to lay the past to rest and mend his marriage. This stirring novel offers a nuanced look at how the country was affected by the conflict, and Nguyễn’s examinations of PTSD and racism will get book clubs talking.

Regina Porter’s The Travelers tells the story of two very different American families whose lives become interlaced over the course of several decades, beginning in the 1950s. James Vincent, a prosperous white lawyer, struggles to bond with his son, Rufus. Tensions mount after Rufus marries Claudia Christie, a Black woman. Through flashbacks, Porter provides a poignant account of Agnes, Claudia’s mother, who was raped as a young woman in Georgia. Porter masterfully spins the detailed stories of other family members as she explores the meaning of kinship and connection. The end result is an epic yet intimate tale teeming with humanity.

In Salt Houses, author Hala Alyan follows the Yacoubs, a Palestinian family displaced by the Six-Day War. The conflict splinters the family, as sisters Alia and Widad settle in Kuwait, and their mother goes to Jordan. Despite a troubled marriage, Alia and her husband, Atef, raise three children, two of whom move to America. Through skillful shifts in perspective, Alyan compassionately portrays the lives of the Yacoubs and their experiences across the years. Tradition, identity and assimilation are among the book’s many rich discussion topics.

Journey from India to Palestine, from Vietnam to midcentury America in these stellar reads.
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Part campus novel, part ghost story, Xochitl Gonzalez’s second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, fearlessly takes on racism and misogyny in the rarefied world of fine art and art history. 

Nodding to real-life Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta and her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, the novel opens in the late 1980s with the death of artist Anita de Monte. After a violent argument with her husband, Jack Martin, Anita was found on the sidewalk outside their apartment, leaving speculators to wonder—did she jump or was she pushed? As Andre was in his real trial, Jack is acquitted and continues his successful and lucrative career, while Anita’s art is all but forgotten. Ten years later, Raquel Toro is an art history major at Brown. Her working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place at the university and even more so in her department, where she doesn’t fit in with the privileged “Art History Girls.” Fortunes change when Raquel begins dating art major Nick Fitzsimmons, whose wealthy parents have ties to New York’s major museums and galleries, and when her advisor enthusiastically supports Raquel’s senior thesis on Jack Martin’s career. 

The dynamic between Raquel and Nick mirrors the one between Anita and Jack, with both men trying to control their partner’s physical appearance, clothing and schedule through microaggressions and expensive gifts. As Raquel’s summer internship redirects her research to include Anita’s experience, Anita’s story, told in parallel chapters, takes a turn for the uncanny; she subtly haunts Jack from beyond the grave, transforming into a bat and shifting his meticulously displayed art works. Though told with humor and a light touch, Gonzalez doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges. As Raquel brings Anita’s groundbreaking sculptures to light, Anita de Monte Laughs Last boldly questions the choices behind what we are taught and demands that the complete story be disclosed.

Though told with humor and a light touch, Anita de Monte Laughs Last doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges.
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To step into one of Helen Oyeyemi’s worlds, you have to give up control—accept that something magical and unpredictable is about to happen. Reading with a “yes, and” mentality will make your experience all the more dynamic, curious and surprising. Following up on 2021’s Peaces, Parasol Against the Axe uses place as character to question what, exactly, is true and can be trusted.

That place is Prague. The city is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for Sofie Cibulkova, her estranged friend. Hero has brought a book with her, Paradoxical Undressing, and she soon discovers that the book is a changing thing: Depending upon who is reading it, where, when and even why, the text alters. Its instability comes to reflect the ways that people appear and complicate what should be a celebratory weekend.

Stories within the story unfold, and there’s a particular satisfaction in following how they reflect the main narrative of the novel. At famous sights around the city, unexpected guests arrive, some from Hero’s past. They add to the tension between Hero and Sofie, and in each scene, these new characters raise doubts about the truth of the story, the past and the present.

Oyeyemi’s language, along with her ability to drop clues and invite questions without clear answers, makes the reading experience a world unto its own. Readers will find themselves checking the various versions of Paradoxical Undressing against one another, to make sure they haven’t missed any echoes or revisions. The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imagined—and if, in Oyeyemi’s world, the difference even matters.

In Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe, the city of Prague is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for her estranged friend Sofie.
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In The Great Divide, her first novel since 2014’s The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez paints an intricate, layered portrait of a monumental moment in the history of the Americas: the construction of the Panama Canal. Set in 1907, this polyvocal novel is a powerful act of witness and remembrance.

Instead of focusing on only one character, Henriquez threads together the stories of over a dozen people whose lives are profoundly affected by the canal project. This inspired choice suits the scope of the event and hints at even more stories beyond these pages: It’s easy to imagine, in the snippets of lives that Henriquez zooms in on, just how many more love stories, deaths, moments of radicalization, migrations, injustices, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the construction of the canal between 1903 and 1914.

The characters come from many countries and a wide range of backgrounds. There’s Francisco, a Panamanian fisherman who’s disgusted at what the canal project is doing to his country, and his son Omar, whose decision to work in the excavation zone causes a deep rift between them. There’s Ada, a girl from Barbados who arrives in Panama hoping to earn enough money to help her ill sister back home. She finds work in the house of John and Marian Oswald, a white American couple who have come to the isthmus in the hopes that John can eradicate malaria. Joaquin, a fishmonger who’s mostly content to live an ordinary life in the city, gets swept up in his wife’s burgeoning protest movement when she finds out her hometown is being forcibly moved to make space for the canal.

Additional points of view include those of canal workers from across the Caribbean, a foreman, a mail carrier, a young woman with dreams of becoming a photojournalist and an egotistical French doctor. The canal disrupts their lives in different ways: It kills some of them and makes others rich.

The Great Divide is a collection of small narratives that together create a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. The novel’s greatest strength is this unrelenting smallness. It insists on the importance of every human life, and illuminates the endless, ordinary, forgotten stories that underlie every pivotal moment in human history.

Cristina Henríquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.
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Cuban literature, from the island and from its diaspora, has always been precise and powerful, taking a clear yet dreamy-eyed look at humanity. Jennine Capo Crucet’s new novel, Say Hello to My Little Friend, follows in this lineage, limning the catastrophic life of Ismael “Izzy” Reyes as he tries and fails to find his way in a sinking Miami. At the beginning of the novel, Izzy receives a cease and desist from Pitbull (aka Mr. 305) for doing unauthorized impressions of him around town, leaving Izzy at a loss of job and identity. He finds inspiration in Al Pacino’s Tony Montana from the movie Scarface (which he doesn’t actually watch until a few chapters later). With new wind in his sails, and a sidekick like Tony Montana’s Manolo found in his old high school buddy Rudy, Izzy tries to mold life into what he wants it to be: wealth, power and big booty women. Meanwhile, on the other side of Miami in a too-small Seaquarium tank, Lolita the orca senses the water level rising. She and Izzy are linked by their tragic orphan origin stories, and when the two meet, they share a telepathic message that transforms both of their fates.

Like many immigrant stories, Say Hello to My Little Friend is centered on transformation. Not only does Izzy transform into someone else for a living, but his entire life has been a process of transforming. Though he was raised in Miami, he never feels Floridian, much less American, and after having to take ESL (English as a second language) classes in school, his identity-formation has been constantly frustrated. There is something quixotic in watching Izzy spin himself and those around him into remakes of culture, but this, too, is true about the immigrant experience, which Capo Crucet details with breathtaking precision.

Capo Crucet’s writing strikes a balance between contemporary Spanglish (specifically Miamian), slang and achingly poetic descriptions. But Capo Crucet’s powers do not stop at this alchemy; she also has a rare knack for metanarrative, a skill that allows readers to think about Izzy’s story as a story without ruining its intimacy. Take one of the narrator’s interjections, asking readers to recall Melville’s Moby Dick. It not only grounds the antics of the novel in a classic tale of hubris but also emphasizes the delusional and naive nature of Izzy, allowing us to see him as a victim of fate. As Izzy creates himself again and again, readers are made aware of what stories make up a life.

Say Hello to My Little Friend limns the catastrophic life of Ismael “Izzy” Reyes, a Pitbull impersonator turned wannabe Tony Montana, as he tries and fails to find his way in a sinking Miami.
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Zhenia’s life is, admittedly, not going as planned. Having aspired to be an actor in Los Angeles, she now works as a medical translator for Russian-speaking patients, struggling to salvage what’s left of her marriage after breaking the news of a surprise pregnancy to her husband. So when a psychic named Paul calls to say that Zhenia’s deceased great-grandmother Irina wants Zhenia to listen to her life story and write it down, Zhenia hesitates only briefly; she has little reason to say no. Irina’s spirit seeks forgiveness from Zhenia, though she knows it will be challenging to obtain. They are both painfully aware of the generational pain stemming from Irina’s abandonment of Zhenia’s adored, and currently dying, grandmother Vera, when Vera was a young child. 

Through Zhenia’s listening sessions, author Katya Apekina makes the concept of ancestral connection fascinatingly tangible. Paul is able to connect Zhenia with Irina by venturing into a post-death communal “cloud” of regret, where Irina and others reside until absolved by the living. With Paul as an intermediary, Irina tells Zhenia tales of growing up in early 1900s Russia.

Apekina isn’t new to literary fiction; her first novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus Reviews and other outlets. But Mother Doll marks her triumphant first foray into fabulism. While Irina’s story is largely distinct and chronological, Zhenia’s life unfolds only in connection to her great-grandmother’s, producing parallel narratives that are impressively inseparable. Even as more details about Irina’s life surface, the reader remains grounded in Zhenia’s experiences, her dry humor lending a lightness to otherwise profound subject matter.

For those who enjoy diving into the metaphorical, Mother Doll holds a deep wisdom. Apekina’s writing is witty and compellingly relatable, leading to a fast-paced reading experience. She hits on something beautifully innate: Who are we if not the histories of our ancestors?

In Mother Doll, Katya Apekina hits on something beautifully innate: Who are we if not the histories of our ancestors?

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

As the days become shorter, there’s nothing more comforting than immersing myself in a sweeping historical novel—the bigger, the better! When my book club recently voted to read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, I welcomed the opportunity to escape nightly into the grand halls of the Metropol hotel where aristocrat Count Alexander Rostov, deemed a threat by the Bolsheviks in 1922, is sentenced to lifelong house arrest. Hotel employees, guests and other visitors round out the vibrant cast of characters in the Count’s orbit as he adjusts to his new circumstances and tries to pursue a meaningful life in confinement. His friendship with precocious 9-year-old Nina is particularly endearing; the pair’s quest to explore every nook and cranny of the hotel is a delight. All the while, outside the Count’s window, political turmoil and inevitable social change are transforming Russian society. Written with wit and warmth, Towles’ tale is one you’ll want to curl up with and return to night after night.

—Katherine, Subscriptions 


The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

I spent a few sublime weeks last winter in the company of Umberto Eco’s magisterial debut novel, The Name of the Rose. This medieval whodunit is intellectually absorbing and slyly hilarious as it tracks Brother William of Baskerville and Brother Adso of Melk’s quest to solve a spree of bizarre murders at a monastery in Italy. A historian, philosopher and literary theorist, Eco transports readers into the 14th-century mind, and while things get heady (at one point, Adso contemplates a door for more than a page), Eco never lets his own erudition run away with him. There are impressively gruesome deaths to describe, tangled little dramas of monastery life to tease out and one of the most unforgettable libraries in literature to explore. I read long into the night, wrapped in blankets with a mug of tea at hand, happily looking up Latin phrases and medieval heretics until arriving at Eco’s grand finale, a satisfying conclusion with a few icy notes of existential dread to balance things out.

—Savanna, Managing Editor


The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide

To me, coziness is a cat dozing on my lap, but a book that captures the magic of our purring friends will also do. A sublime, delicate meditation on the passage of time within everyday life, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat washes over you like a dream, making it an ideal read for a long winter night. A male narrator and his wife fall in love with their neighbor’s cat, naming her Chibi as she begins visiting them at their rented house. The wife tells the man how a philosopher once said that “observation is at its core an expression of love,” and indeed, Hiraide’s ruminations on the quotidian—dragonflies flying towards water sprayed from a garden hose, Chibi climbing a tree—carry tremendous emotion despite the unembellished prose. With equal parts joy and melancholy, the couple’s relationships with the cat and each other shift, along with the course of their lives and Japan, as the late ’80s economic bubble bursts. Hiraide slips in and out of reflection and memory with precise, feline grace.

—Yi, Associate Editor


The New Life by Tom Crewe

There is something so pleasurable about spending a chilly day absorbed in the concerns of another time and identifying resonances with our own. Tom Crewe’s debut novel, The New Life, provides just such a pleasure, placing vivid characters and thorny moral dilemmas against a finely textured historical backdrop. Based on two real life freethinkers in late Victorian Britain, Crewe’s John Addington and Henry Ellis are documenting the lives of gay men for a book that they hope will shift cultural perceptions of homosexuality. It’s risky, but they believe in the cause—and that their status as married men will protect them. However, ideological differences emerge, and Addington begins to wonder if ideals can be legitimate if they are not lived openly. Crewe excels when depicting the nuances of conflict and the question of balancing personal risk against the ability to effect change, drawing readers in with polished old-fashioned storytelling that also speaks to a modern sensibility—A.S. Byatt meets Alan Hollinghurst.

—Trisha, Publisher

Ready the fireplace, put the kettle on and get out some thick woolen socks. These four titles are worthy companions for long winter nights.

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