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A Gambler's Anatomy: A Novel
By Jonathan Lethem
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The Millions Interview
Building My Own Strange Machines: A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem and Christopher Boucher
Christopher Wood - 5.15.2017
Time flies. Six years ago Jonathan Lethem published The Ecstasy of Influence, a sprawling collection of essays, sketches, interviews, and fiction, knitted together with candid autobiographical notes. Since then, he's brought out his ninth and 10th novels — Dissident Gardens and A Gambler's Anatomy — as well as a story collection, Lucky Alan and Other Stories, and apen monograph on the album Fear of Music. A new year, another book. More Alive and Less Lonely collects literary essays, introductions and book reviews from the last 20-plus years. The book was edited — or curated, rather — for Melville House by Christopher Boucher, whose two novels (How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; Golden Delicious), as I recently read them, significantly altered my perception of language in fiction, reminding me of when I first encountered Lionel Essrog, the compulsively lyrical narrator of Lethem's now classic New York crime novel, Motherless Brooklyn.
In the spirit of generosity and of abundance, both author and editor agreed to participate in a roundtable conducted recently over several days of emails. Unlike in the humorous essay "The Counter-Roth" included in the new book, which details Lethem's attempts to entertain Philip Roth at literary functions, I made it clear up front I had abandoned any hope of making either of these writers laugh.
The Millions: This collection caught me completely by surprise, even though I'm an avid reader of Jonathan's work and previously hunted down several of these pieces online. The editor's introduction states that a framework and coherence were evident early on among the 60 or so short essays in this book. Were there other breakthroughs later in the process?
Christopher Boucher: It's fun to think back to the very beginnings of the process, when Jonathan started sending me contenders for the collection. I'd loved The Ecstasy of Influence, and so these uncollected essays seemed like a gift — my own "lonely book" (see "The Loneliest Book I've Read"), if you will.
As I remember it, we came to the idea of a "book on books" early on — during our first meeting at Melville House. I was thrilled with this direction, because that was the book I wanted to read. As a diehard fan of Jonathan's fiction, I gravitated towards his essays on books and literature — I found them addictive, sneakily-instructive, and full of the same joyful inquiry and insight that's so prevalent in Ecstasy. What's more, these essays made me want to read — to drop everything and read for days. I liked the idea of trying to create the same experience for the reader — to curate a book that served as a readerly "wake-up call."
That said, though, we left a lot of wonderful material out. Along the way, too, I found myself lobbying for a rather broad definition of "books and writers" so that we could include as many essays as possible. I remember really wanting to include Jonathan's fictional exchange between his character Perkus Tooth and director Spike Jonze ("The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head"), for example. While it's unlike anything else in the book, it's just so poignant and funny.
Jonathan Lethem: For me, the image of this book emerged in the negative space described by my two earlier essay collections — The Disappointment Artist, and The Ecstasy of Influence. The first one, Disappointment Artist, is really a memoir of my teenage life and self-invention as a writer, disguised as a cycle of cultural essays. It's about losing my mother and understanding my relationship to my father and concealing my vulnerabilities behind movies and pop music and books. The form is exclusive and everything I wrote in that mode is included in that short book (arguably, the Cassavetes piece doesn't really belong). Ecstasy of Influence is a baggy monster, full of writing in different modes, and on different occasions. There's even fiction in there, and a poem. It's a deliberate — and obnoxious, I'm sure — attempt to measure the space I'd blundered into as a "public intellectual," which wasn't a plan I'd had for myself. It's modeled, for better and worse, on Mailer's Advertisements for Myself.
What was excluded from those collections created the possibility that became More Alive and Less Lonely. I'd written more often on books and writers than on any other topic, in the form of reviews and introductions, largely. And "appreciations." Writing about books was the first thing I did besides writing fiction, and the first thing I published in any venue (in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, when I was 22). I reviewed a few books for Salon in the mid-'90s — one of those earliest examples is included here, on Jill Robinson's Past Forgetting. And the first book I was ever asked to introduce was Walter Tevis's Mockingbird. That's here too. It's really the heart of my activities, the center of my life, as a reader, bookseller, and "author." It's a book of devotions, basically.
TM: Were there specific collections (by other writers) that occurred to either of you during this process?
JL: By way of comparison, I thought mostly of books by British writers — things like Anthony Burgess's Homage to Qwert Yuiop, or Penelope Fitzgerald's The Afterlife — books that are full of things like introductions and "appreciations." I think the ways my bookishness manifests itself are more like a U.K. writer than like an American one, honestly.
But I didn't shove any of these comparisons at Chris. I preferred to let him find the form and the tone, and to do all the heavy lifting here. I really let him wade through the morass — and there was more ass than you'd think. He covered it, for the most part.
TM: I'm curious, how were the pieces received? How many at a time? Over what period of time? Were there any changes or cuts made to specific essays, or other issues or obstacles that came up in bringing this work into book form?
CB: Conversations about this project began in December of 2015, when a mutual friend put Jonathan and me in contact by email. Jonathan sent me 60 or so pieces to review, and we met to discuss the project in early 2016. It was during that meeting that we first talked about the idea of a "book on books." With a preliminary theme in mind, I dug in and started looking for threads in the essays that could inform their sequencing and the book's scope and shape. These pieces were published at different times and in a variety of venues, so our reader was going to have do some time travel. And I didn't want them to feel "unstuck," or mapless. So I searched for ways for the book to stake out its range and territory early on — that was certainly my goal in the first chapter, "Engulf and Devour," which shifts from a "devotion" on a book from Jonathan's childhood to pieces on Moby-Dick and Philip Roth.
Later in the book, the essays focus in on specific writers (Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip K. Dick), link thematically (as in the last chapter, "Fan Mail"), or connect via what I think of as "channels" — inquiries or enthusiasms that reappear in different garb. I love the various forms of nostalgia expressed in the chapter "It Can Still Take Me There," for example — there's a piece on the character of Batman, and further on, an essay about Jonathan's encounter with the beat hero Herbert Huncke.
As the book took shape, Jonathan sent along other pieces that might fit. To my delight, he also wrote some new essays that helped round out the chapters and complete some of the narratives therein. One of my favorite pieces in the book, for example, is his "Footnote on Thomas Berger," a new piece that follows two previously-published essays on Berger. I won't spoil it, but it's an astounding story.
Editorially, most of the heavy lifting took place last summer. Since most of these pieces were previously published, I saw my work as a sort of literary forensics: I read the manuscript version against the published version, and sent Jonathan edits that catalogued all editorial discrepancies and suggested a way forward. I sent these to Jonathan in batches of 10 or so and he returned finalized versions. Overall, my edits were modest — these essays were already in fighting shape. We settled on a preliminary structure and title by July, and the manuscript was submitted a few weeks later.
JL: I'm fighting the temptation to satirize Chris's scrupulous account of all his due diligence with claims of my having handled the perimeter defense, or being the one in charge of bringing the ziplock bags of trail mix. "First I built a bonfire hot enough to melt down the horse's hooves," etc. But the truth is that I did nothing so comprehensive or thoughtful even as that. I really just dumped that initial catastrophe's worth of pieces on Chris, by means of Dropbox. Then, to make matters worse, I sporadically discovered pieces I'd missed or forgotten about entirely that were hiding either in dingy corners of the Internet or of my own hard-drive, and sent those along as well.
As Chris began to settle on pieces — which didn't happen all at once, but in sequences — I periodically flew into a panic of rewriting. I think I did a bit more "improving" — or at least triage — on these clumsy old sentences than Chris shows signs of being aware of. Mostly I tried to simplify tormented thoughts into merely agitated ones.
I really like hearing about Chris's concerns about the risk of "maplessness" and the way he thought of his solution in terms of "channels." I find the design and flow he arrived at consistently surprising and delightful, nothing I'd have managed myself. That feeling extends to the title of the various sections, and the title of the book itself, which are all Chris's discoveries.
TM: Readers now can go over the trail themselves to find a discarded ziplock, map in hand. The Hawkman trail? To borrow language describing two kinds of Pynchon novels (in the essay "Pychonopolis") this new collection teeters between Comparatively Stable and Utterly Centrifugal. Not because it is chaotic but because there is narrative drive and so many plot threads. The time-travel aspect, far from disorienting, is gratifying. What was lived, and sometimes suffered through, for decades, we see transpire in a few pages. I'm wondering if Jonathan's attitude toward collaboration has changed at all since the famous Harper's essay and his "Promiscuous" Internet project, where material he authored was made available for filmmakers and music bands?
JL: Well, I'm in no way repentant, if that's what you mean. All of my impulses — my yearnings — are still in the direction of a gift economy. It seems even more urgent to me now, more bound up in our political lives, all this stuff: acknowledging intertextuality, breaking the spell of "property" over our expressive cultural lives, find ways to reclaim a commons or create a "temporary autonomous zone" wherever possible. Locating versions of mutual aid for artists and artworks. Distinguishing corporatist imperatives from life imperatives. Not that I have some coherent political plan on offer!
The Promiscuous Materials site is in disrepair — I need to rework it, and freshen it up, make it inviting again. I'm not web-savvy that way, and there are only so many hours in the day. Still, people still do find their way to those stories and texts and song lyrics and make their own things out of them from time to time. I'm glad about that. I should say that it wasn't some major experiment, I don't make any such claim for it. The project was more a gesture — a mild provocation, combined with a sort of playground. Like a community garden in a vacant lot.
My main job is writing novels, and as I get older I know I've got to exclude a lot of other involvements. Too often that means missing chances to collaborate, and locking myself in my room. But I'm still really dedicated to breaking down the dull imperial notion of the novelist-as-Prometheus. Finding ways to introduce apertures or slippages in the mask of authority — both inside the text, and around it.
CB: My response here skims the surface of your question, Chris, but for me this project has been wholly defined by Jonathan's generosity. After the briefest of introductions in late 2015, Jonathan invited me to help steer this ship; I'll always be grateful for, and amazed by, the trust he showed in me from the get-go. Received en masse as they were, too, these essays felt very much like "uncommodifiable surpluses of inspiration" — like gifts, in other words.
This seems like a good time, too, to note that Jonathan's donating all of his earnings from the book, and that half the proceeds are going to the charity Doctors Without Borders. Jonathan included this proviso in the initial book proposal, and I think it set the tone for the entire project. While I know I'm speaking of a different currency now than the one that drives the gift-economy, the creation of this book was certainly driven by a "Give All" sensibility.
TM: That kind of generosity is inspiring. Now pet theories are kicking around in my mind. Did the choice of Doctors Without Borders have anything to do with the list of doctors acknowledged in last year's A Gambler's Anatomy and the convincing, or convincingly imagined, medical research involved in that book, or does the association go back further?
JL: I'm sure it would be easy to overthink it. The fact is that I've always just been astonishingly moved by what they do. Which is no knock on, say, The Southern Poverty Law Center, or The Center for Biological Diversity, or many other possible destinations. But you have to pick one. Doctors Without Borders might seem to me — I've never thought about this, exactly, before — like the ultimate opposite of the kind of indirect politics practiced even by the most righteous of us artists and writers (I don't mean myself). That's to say, where we're by definition operating in the realm of the figurative and the intangible, in my case also the hesitant and ambiguous. While they are literally rushing bodily into zones of violence and crisis and putting bandages on other human bodies. So it was the least I could do. Let's leave it at that.
Oh, but I should confess here that the doctors acknowledged in A Gambler's Anatomy aren't all doctors! By the time my list of acknowledgees had four or five doctors on it, it seemed fair — I mean, it seemed funny — to award the same title to Chris Offutt, and to my wife. Doctors of my spirit, and doctors to my book.
TM: The acknowledgments reminded me of the dedication, also funny, in Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show. A list of radio hosts and their stations — Jean Shepherd; WOR…etc — ending with Joan Elkin; WIFE. I guess compared with the earlier discussion of a cultural commons, I was struck in this new collection by more traditional roles of authorship, for the reader respecting what great authors do on their terms. Which of course is a different matter, although I admit conflating them a little. One of my favorite pieces is the essay on Joseph McElroy. It does a great job anticipating a reader's objections while full-throatedly supporting a big league writer's craft. Are there some artists that, more than others, represent some kind of line or limit? With McElroy, "narrative 'sense'" sums it up. Have you experienced any conversions during your reading lives? This essay does much toward recruiting me to the McElroy camp.
JL: Elkin's WIFE, I'd forgotten that. Genius — I wouldn't try to compete. But my own wife regards my honorary doctorates as embarrassing jokes, so I took my revenge by awarding her a bogus one too.
As for the opposition you suggest between "authors doing things on their terms" and the cultural commons, I'd say nah. My whole point, if I had one, was that to wade into the cultural commons was my description of what authors do when authors do what they do — on their terms. Anyway that's how it feels to me. Whether conscious or semi-conscious or unconscious of the fact, we're all intertextually polymorphous-perverse in the end. As Dr. George Harrison wrote, "text goes on within you and without you."
I'm glad I rallied your curiosity about McElroy — he'll gratify it (though, honestly, I probably wouldn't pick up Ancient History as an entry point. Try Lookout Cartridge first.) But since I've gotten started picking apart premises lurking in your questions, let me do it again, and protest the terms "big-league," "conversion" and "recruit." Because I know McElroy is generally associated with "difficulty," and so what I hear in those words of yours is a kind of reader's hierarchy of striving, as if reading him or someone like him is a matter of stepping up to some higher realm or duty. I'm not into it. Too much Protestant work ethic in there, and status-seeking, and a hair shirt too. Read hedonistically instead. McElroy offers a delicious blast of oxygen — it's fun to be in his brain, that's the reason to go there. I mean, if it turns you on to think of your reading of great novels, whether canonical or modernist or postmodernist or translated or just loooong, as some kind of sacrificial devotional act or military campaign or mountain-climbing expedition, go ahead. But admit that that's what turns you on! Life's too short to be intimidated by the books that are waiting only to be picked up and encountered, and then devoured, if you like what's on offer — it's like being intimidated by food.
CB: I'll resist the urge to go literal here and steer us towards the last piece in the book, "Books Are Sandwiches," and say instead that I love this answer because it reminds me, as a reader, to eat what I like and all that I can — to follow my instincts without regard for anything that might obstruct my engagement with the page. Some of my favorite moments in the book, too, are those when Jonathan finds vitality in places I wouldn't have known to look for it — when he hails Chester Brown as a "a citizen of the timeless nation of the dissident soul," for example, or sees in the work of Gilbert Sorrentino "a mind whose only way of handling a first introduction is to blurt out 'Don't we know one another already?'", or praises Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments as "an object in furious motion, humming with its own energy, and all you might wish to do is touch it, alter its trajectory barely, so as to nudge it into universal view."
TM: One other term that probably does more to activate a reader's resistance, if the book doesn't conform to the reader's preconceived notion of said term, is novel. It's understood that this is the reader's problem, the reader's loss. Although, also it's a cultural loss if the book or author goes out of print, which lends an urgency to what's said about the lesser-read authors praised in this book and elsewhere. In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan calls the dip in John Barth "terrifying." This collection nonetheless concerns novels, second only to the unmitigated joy of reading anything. It's largely a novelist's bag of novels and novelists. What draws you to writing novels?
CB: What I love about the novel, both as a writer and a reader, is that it lives with you for a while, imprints itself on you. The novels that first invited me to write one, though, were particularly strange machines: The Age of Wire and String, for example,and Trout Fishing in America. I remember well the experience of reading the latter for the first time, and how the world continued buzzing for me even when I wasn't reading it; it felt like having a pair of anti-gravity boots stowed away in my backpack. No other object has informed my life quite like my favorite novels have.
From a craft perspective, the novel caters to the kinds of risks that I like to take in my writing. Because of my early influences, perhaps, I'm drawn to building my own strange machines. Also, I don't think novelistically, as I know some writers do. I have to think small, write small, and I only find my novels once I'm inside them. I began my second book, for example, with one stand-alone piece about a piano that changes your point of view, and another about a character who has a sentence for a pet. It wasn't until a year later, maybe, that I admitted to myself that these should be part of the same narrative. At the core of my process is a certain unease or anxiety about the form, and I'm glad for that — I think it's a good place to write from.
Even so, I marvel at those writers who seem to have an easier relationship with the form. Jonathan's one of my favorite living novelists, and for me his novels are built like tanks — each one different from the last, and yet always dizzyingly inventive, uniquely ambitious, and expertly constructed. Reading A Gambler's Anatomy, for example, I was amazed by its grand design — the way that the narrative arc, pacing, and sentence-level music all work together. I'm curious to hear what he has to say about a form to which he clearly brings such mastery.
JL: "A novelist's bag of novels and novelists" — you make it sound like a sack of cats! Yet one also being carried around by another, larger cat. Or a smaller one who is struggling with a very large sack.
Well, I doubt I could write a more impassioned love letter to the novel than Chris B. has done here, so instead I'll play the feisty elder, and remind you young whippersnappers what Norman Mailer said when someone played devil's advocate about the viability of his chosen form (some of which devil's advocacy I think I hear in your question). I quote: "The novel will be at your funeral!"
Maybe me and Boucher have our heads too far up the wazoo of the novel to realize that the world has moved on to other, better things…the human attention span having suffered irreparable damage,,,I doubt it…but even if so, it has been a pretty good place to spend my life. What I really think is this: the novel is the least airless, the least restrictive, the least solipsistic of wazoos to have climbed up. It is a wazoo with a view.
Okay, to be a bit more serious, I really have come to understand that the humbling mystery of my chosen practice is how capacious the damn thing is. It holds together impossible things (like life itself). It even makes room for the anti-novel — for those always turn out to be novels, too. It models human consciousness in any number of ways — by its involvement simultaneously in narrative and language and also sensation, dreaming and projection and fear, and with our feeling of duration — time, that is. It concerns itself with concurrence of being-in-our-heads (that's the siren call of solipsism) and being-in-the-herd (the basic fact that we're social creatures, wandering among others every day of our lives). The two are simultaneous immersions, never resolving their permanent juxtaposition. The novel actually captures this! How incredible. And even the shortest and simplest novel is oceanic, confusing, too big to get your head around, or see all at once (again, like life).
Anyway, this here bag of cats — it's got other things in it, I swear. There's my mother-in-law, in the "Footnote to Berger." She's no novelist! There are cameos by any number of others — painters, poets, children, and teenaged pre-novelist me. It's less lonely because it's fungible to human beings. As are novels. Whereas bags of cats are just — well, cats, all the way down.
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Turns 75
Bill Morris - 10.26.2016
In a land where most magazines have the lifespan of a fruit fly, how is it possible for one magazine to survive — and thrive — for 75 years? Janet Hutchings has a theory: "The great power that Frederic Dannay gave this magazine was its variety and its reach."
Hutchings was referring to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and she was invoking the name of its founding editor, Frederic Dannay, who, along with his cousin Manfred B. Lee, collaborated to produce the short stories and novels of the pseudonymous mystery writer Ellery Queen, selling somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million books. Hutchings is now the magazine's editor, and she offered her theory about its longevity at a symposium that launched a delightful new show, "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine 75th Anniversary Exhibition," which is now at the Butler Library at Columbia University in New York.
The exhibition is a little gold mine for mystery fans in particular and book lovers in general. There are typed manuscript pages by Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James, Isaac Asimov, and others. Sitting there behind glass, they have the look of Scripture. There are letters, photographs, and book and magazine covers, including the inaugural issue of EQMM from the fall of 1941, which featured stories by Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and, of course, Ellery Queen. The cover illustration of the 75th anniversary issue is by venerable Milton Glaser, whose very first published illustration was a cover for EQMM in 1954. Among its many delights, the anniversary issue features a new story by Joyce Carol Oates, a frequent contributor, and a classic from 1948 by Stanley Ellin, "The Specialty of the House."
Dannay made no secret during his lifetime that he and his collaborating cousin had their disagreements — "We fight like hell," was how he put it — and this show offers an amusing glimpse into their creative differences. As a rule, Dannay cooked up the plots, Lee did the storytelling, then Dannay did the editing. When Lee complained about Dannay's heavy use of the blue pencil, a letter in the exhibition at Columbia reveals Dannay's indignant reaction: "Do you know that I am considered one of the most perceptive and astute detective-story editors in the business? By everyone but you." In another letter, Dannay added, "Manny, you are emotionally, physically and mentally incapable of taking criticism."
For all the friction, the magazine was a smooth-running machine from day one. The inaugural issue sold more than 90,000 copies, and it contained a note from Dannay that expanded on Janet Hutchings's "variety and reach" recipe for its success: "We propose to give you stories by big-name writers, by lesser known writers, and by unknown writers. But no matter what their source, they will be superior stories."
True to Dannay's word, the magazine has published the work of more than 40 Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, countless mid-listers, and more than 800 writers who broke into print in the magazine's Department of First Stories. The Passport to Crime series has showcased the work of international writers. Jorge Luis Borges was first published in English in the pages of the magazine.
"One of the things about EQMM is that it made a major change in publishing," Hutchings told me. "The only criterion for inclusion in the magazine was quality. Dannay was determined that the magazine be general — with hard-boiled stories, classic English mysteries, noirs, suspense, cozy mysteries, the work of literary writers. That really hadn't been done before, and it had the effect of mainstreaming the mystery. Now academics are starting to write articles about this."
Indeed, EQMM can be seen as a pioneering force in what is now a fact of life in American fiction — the blending of supposedly "high" and "low" literary forms, the blurring of genre boundaries, the growing sense among writers and readers that the old strictures and snobberies hampered free and fruitful cross-pollination. Now, writers of every stripe gleefully plunder one or more genres, stitching together scraps or horror, pulp, crime, fantasy, ghost stories, mysteries, westerns.
In 2011, the literary novelist Colson Whitehead published Zone One, in which a plague has turned most of the world's population into zombies. A decade earlier, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon's exuberant mash-up of comic books and high lit, won the Pulitzer Prize. Loren D. Estleman, primarily a writer of crime and western fiction, just published a short story collection called Desperate Detroit that features a western with vampire cowboys. In a related vein, the movie Cowboys & Aliens sets extraterrestrials loose in the Wild West. Elmore Leonard and Stephen King, unapologetic genre writers, both penned well-regarded advice on how to write well. "Nowadays," Kurt Anderson recently wrote in The New York Times, "esteem isn't much withheld from people who write thoughtful, first-rate novels that also happen to be page-turners, like [Jonathan Lethem's] A Gambler's Anatomy. The boundaries between high and low — or between serious fiction and 'entertainments,' in Graham Greene's binary classification of his work — are no longer prissily enforced. That's progress." I agree. All the while, such literary writers as Joyce Carol Oates, William Faulkner, and P.G. Wodehouse have made rich contributions to EQMM. The magazine's 75th anniversary edition features a story by Charlaine Harris, who, in Hutchings's estimation, "has done more than any other recent writer to break down the boundaries between mystery and fantasy." On and on it goes, to the delight of every reader who hates the formulaic and loves unfettered, unpredictable writing.
"There's still some snobbery left in certain areas," Hutchings said, "but there's much more openness, and I do think EQMM played a role in that. And still does."
Don't take her word for it. Go see "Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's 75th Anniversary Exhibition" at Columbia. It will be open through Dec. 23.
Tuesday New Release Day: Lethem; Lasdun; Khalifa; Prose; Correa; Macy; Hajdu; Chung
Thom Beckwith - 10.18.2016
New this week: A Gambler's Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem; The Fall Guy by James Lasdun; No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khaled Khalifa; Mister Monkey by Francine Prose; The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa; Truevine by Beth Macy; Love for Sale by David Hajdu; and The Loved Ones by our own Sonya Chung. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
Book Previews, Lists
October Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)
Editor - 10.3.2016 | 4
We wouldn't dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here's what we're looking out for this month — for more October titles, check out the Great Second-Half 2016 Fiction and Non-Fiction Previews.
The Mothers by Brit Bennett: The Mothers begins when a grief-stricken 17-year-old girl becomes pregnant with the local pastor's son, and shows how their ensuing decisions affect the life of a tight-knit black community in Southern California for years to come. The church's devoted matriarchs — "the mothers" — act as a Greek chorus to this story of friendship, secrets, guilt, and hope. (Janet)
A Gambler's Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem: Lethem's first novel since 2013's Dissident Gardens has the everything-in-the-stewpot quality that his readers have come to expect: the plot follows a telepathic backgammon hustler through various international intrigues before forcing him to confront a deadly tumor — as well as his patchouli-scented Berkeley past. Though it remains to be seen if A Gambler's Anatomy can hit the emotional heights of Motherless Brooklyn andThe Fortress of Solitude, it will be, if nothing else, unmistakably Lethem. (Jacob)
The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine: I love a novel the plot of which dares to take place over the course of one night: in The Angel of History, it's the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, and Yemeni-born poet Jacob, who is gay, sits in the waiting room of a psych clinic in San Francisco. He waits actively, as they say — recalling his varied past in Cairo, Beirut, Sana'a, and Stockholm. Other present-time characters include Satan and Death, and herein perhaps lies what Michael Chabon described as Alameddine's "daring" sensibility…"not in the cheap sense of lurid or racy, but as a surgeon, a philosopher, an explorer, or a dancer." (Sonya)
Nicotine by Nell Zink: Zink now enters the post-New Yorker profile, post-Jonathan-Franzen-pen-pal phase of her career with Nicotine, a novel that seems as idiosyncratic and — the term has probably already been coined — Zinkian as Mislaid and The Wallcreeper. Nicotine follows the struggle between the ordinary Penny Baker and her aging hippie parents — a family drama that crescendos when Penny inherits her father's squatter-infested childhood home and must choose "between her old family and her new one." Few writers have experienced Zink's remarkable arc, and by all appearances, Nicotine seems unlikely to slow her winning streak. (Jacob)
The Loved Ones by Sonya Chung: Her second novel (after Long for this World), this ambitious story is a multigenerational saga about family, race, difference, and what it means to be a lost child in a big world. Charles Lee, the African-American patriarch of a biracial family, searches for meaning after a fatherless childhood. His connection with a caregiver, Hannah, uncovers her Korean immigrant family's past flight from tradition and war. Chung is a staff writer at The Millions and founding editor of Bloom, and her work has appeared in Tin House, The Threepenny Review, and BOMB. Early praise from Nayomi Munaweera compares Chung's prose toElena Ferrante or Clarice Lispector, "elegant, sparse, and heartbreaking." (Claire)
The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky: Dermansky's Bad Marie featured an ex-con nanny obsessed with her employer and with a tendency to tipple on the job. The protagonist of her latest is a less colorful type: a struggling novelist suffocated by her husband, also a struggling novelist. When her former boss dies in a crash, Leah is willed the red sports car in which her nurturing friend met her end: "I knew when I bought that car that I might die in it. I have never really loved anything as much as that red car." What is the idling heroine to make of the inheritance and the ambiguous message it contains? (Matt)
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood: Margaret Atwood joins authors Jeanette Winterson, Howard Jacobson, and Anne Tyler in the Hogarth Shakespeare series — crafting modern spins on William Shakespeare's classics. Hag-Seed, a prose adaptation of The Tempest, follows the story of Felix, a stage director who puts on a production of The Tempest in a prison. If Felix finds success in his show, he will get his job back as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Festival. The Tempest is one of Atwood's favorites (and mine, too), and Hag-Seed should be an exciting addition to the Hogarth Shakespeare series. (Cara)
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio: Palacio's debut novel follows his excellent, tense novella, How to Shake the Other Man. Palacio shifts from boxing and New York City to the aftermath of the Mariel boatlift, set in Miami and Hartford, Conn. Here Palacio's examination of the Cuban immigrant experience and family strife gets full breadth in a work reminiscent of H.G. Carrillo's Loosing My Espanish. (Nick R.)
The Trespasser by Tana French: In her five previous novels about the squabbling detectives of the Dublin Murder Squad, French has classed up the old-school police procedural with smart, lush prose and a willingness to explore the darkest recesses of her characters' emotional lives. In The Trespasser, tough-minded detective Antoinette Conway battles scabrous office politics as she tries to close the case of a beautiful young woman murdered as she sat down to a table set for a romantic dinner. On Goodreads, the Tanamaniacs are doing backflips for French's latest venture into murder Dublin-style. (Michael)
The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin: It's not without good reason that Jin has won practically every literary prize the United States has to offer, despite his being a non-native English speaker — he is something of a technical wizard who, according to the novelist Gish Jen, "has chosen mastery over genius." Steeped in the terse, exact prose tradition of such writers as Nikolai Gogol and Leo Tolstoy, Jin's work is immediately recognizable. His newest novel, The Boat Rocker, follows in the same vein. It finds Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin, a fiercely principled reporter whose exposés of governmental corruption have made him well-known in certain circles, wrestling with his newest assignment: an investigation into the affairs of his ex-wife, an unscrupulous novelist, and unwitting pawn of the Chinese government. (Brian)
Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple: Semple, formerly a writer forArrested Development and Mad About You, broke into the less glamorous, less lucrative literary world with 2013's Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (her second novel), which this reviewer called "funny." In this novel she sets her bittersweet, hilarious, perceptive gaze on Eleanor, a woman who vows that for just one day she will be the ideal wife, mother, and career woman she's always known she could be. And it goes great! Just kidding. (Janet)
No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khaled Khalifa: This novel, Khalifa's fourth, illuminates the prelude to Syria's civil war, and humanizes a conflict too often met with an international shrug. Tracking a single family's journey from the 1960s through the present day, No Knives in the Kitchens of This City closely examines the myriad traumas — both instantaneous and slow-burning — accompanying a society's collapse. As of this year, the U.N. Refugee Agency estimates there to be 65.3 million refugees or internally displaced persons around the world, and more than 4.9 million of those are Syrian. For those hoping to understand how this came to pass, Khalifa's book should be required reading. (Nick M.)
The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang: Entertainment Weekly has already expressed excitement about former journalist Chang's novel, calling it "uproarious," and in her blurb, Jami Attenberg deemed The Wangs vs. the World her "favorite debut of the year." Charles Wang, patriarch and business man, has lost his money in the financial crisis and wants to return to China to reclaim family land. Before that, he takes his adult son and daughter and their stepmother on a journey across America to his eldest daughter's upstate New York hideout. Charles Yu says the book is, "Funny, brash, honest, full of wit and heart and smarts," and Library Journal named it one of the fall's 5 Big Debuts. (Edan)
About My Mother by Tahar Ben Jelloun: Frequent Nobel-shortlister Jelloun, who the Guardian calls "Morocco's greatest living author," has a newly translated novel–a mother-story set in Fez and Tangier that explores the familiar ravages of Alzheimers. (Lydia)
Truevine by Beth Macy: One day in 1899, a white man offered a piece of candy to George and Willie Muse, the children of black sharecroppers in Truevine, Va., setting off a chain of events that led to the boys being kidnapped into a circus, which billed them as cannibals and "Ambassadors from Mars" in tours that played for royalty at Buckingham Palace and in sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Like Macy's last book, Factory Man, about a good-old-boy owner of a local furniture factory in Virginia who took on low-cost Chinese exporters and won, Truevine promises a mix of quirky characters, propulsive narrative, and an insider's look at a neglected corner of American history. (Michael)
Upstream by Mary Oliver: Essays from one of America's most beloved poets. As always, Oliver's draws inspiration from the natural world, and Provincetown, Mass., her home and life-long muse. Oliver also writes about her early love ofWalt Whitman, the labor of poetry, and the continuing influence of classic American writers such as Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Hannah)
Book Previews, Lists, Notable Articles
Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview
Editor - 7.6.2016 | 25
This year is already proving to be an excellent one for book lovers. Since our last preview, we've gotten new titles by Don DeLillo, Alexander Chee, Helen Oyeyemi, Louise Erdrich; acclaimed debut novels by Emma Cline, Garth Greenwell, and Yaa Gyasi; new poems by Dana Gioia; and new short story collections by the likes of Greg Jackson and Petina Gappah. We see no evidence the tide of great books is ebbing. This summer we've got new works by established authors Joy Williams, Jacqueline Woodson, Jay McInerney, as well as anticipated debuts from Nicole Dennis-Benn and Imbolo Mbue; in the fall, new novels by Colson Whitehead, Ann Patchett, and Jonathan Safran Foer on shelves; and, in the holiday season, books by Javier Marías, Michael Chabon, and Zadie Smith to add to gift lists. Next year, we'll be seeing the first-ever novel (!) by none other than George Saunders, and new work from Kiese Laymon, Roxane Gay, and (maybe) Cormac McCarthy. We're especially excited about new offerings from Millions staffers Hannah Gersen, Sonya Chung, Edan Lepucki, and Mark O'Connell (check out next week's Non-Fiction Preview for the latter).
While it's true that no single list could ever have everything worth reading, we think this one — at 9,000 words and 92 titles — is the only 2016 second-half book preview you'll need. Scroll down and get reading.
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn: In a recent interview in Out magazine, Dennis-Benn described her debut novel as "a love letter to Jamaica — my attempt to preserve her beauty by depicting her flaws." Margot works the front desk at a high-end resort, where she has a side business trading sex for money to send her much younger sister, Thandi, to a Catholic school. When their village is threatened by plans for a new resort, Margot sees an opportunity to change her life. (Emily)
Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers: The prolific writer has made his reputation on never picking a genre, from starting the satirical powerhouse McSweeney's to post-apocalyptic critiques on the tech world. But if there's one thing Eggers has become the master of, it's finding humor and hope in even the most tragic of family situations. In Eggers's seventh novel, when his protagonist, Josie, loses her job and partner, she escapes to Alaska with her two kids. What starts as an idyllic trip camping out of an RV dubbed Chateau turns into a harrowing personal journey as Josie confronts her regrets. It's Eggers's first foray into the road trip novel, but it's sure to have his signature sharp and empathetic voice. (Tess)
Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra: The Chilean writer Zambra's new book is: a.) a parody of that nation's college-entrance Academic Aptitude Exam, b.) a parody of a parody of same, c.) an exercise in flouting literary conventions, d.) all of the above. The correct answer is d.) — because this sly slender book, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is divided into 90 multiple-choice questions suggesting that how we respond to a story depends on where the writer places narrative stress. The witty follow-up questions suggest that the true beauty of fiction is that it has no use for pat answers. For example: "What is the worst title for this story — the one that would reach the widest possible audience?" (Bill)
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams: Williams is the sort of writer one "discovers" — which is to say the first time you read her, you can't believe you've never read her before; and you know you must read more. Ninety-Nine Stories of God is a "slim volume," according to Kirkus, at the same time it lives up to its name: each of the very-short stories (yes, there are 99 of them) features God and/or the divine — as idea, character, or presence. In the world of Joy Williams, we can expect to meet a God who is odd, whip-smart, exuberant, surprising, funny, sad, broken, perplexed, and mysterious. I look awfully forward. (Sonya)
Home Field by Hannah Gersen: The debut novel from The Millions's own Gersen has one of the best jacket copy taglines ever: "The heart of Friday Night Lights meets the emotional resonance and nostalgia of My So-Called Life"…I mean, right? Its story bones are equally striking: the town's perfect couple — high school football coach Dean and his beautiful sweetheart, Nicole — become fully, painfully human when Nicole commits suicide. Dean and his three children, ages eight to 18, must now forge ahead while also grappling with the past that led to the tragedy. Set in rural Maryland, it's a story, says Kirkus, built upon "meticulous attention to the details of grief," the characters of which are "so full, so gently flawed, and so deeply human." (Sonya)
How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball: Jesse Ball's last novel, A Cure for Suicide, wrestled with questions of memory's permanence, existence, and beginning again — all subjects that, according to The New York Times, "in the hands of a less skilled writer…could be mistaken for science fiction cliché." Ball's newest novel, his sixth, is something of a departure. How to Set a Fire and Why takes place in a normal-enough town peopled by characters who have names like Lucia and Hal. Don't worry, though, Ball the fabulist/moralist is still very much himself; the young narrator muses on the nature of wealth and waste as she gleefully joins an Arsonist's Club, "for people who are fed up with wealth and property, and want to burn everything down." (Brian)
Problems by Jade Sharma: Problems is the first print title from Emily Books, the subscription service that "publishes, publicizes, and celebrates the best work of transgressive writers of the past, present and future" and sends titles to readers each month. They'll be publishing two original printed books a year in conjunction with Coffee House Press. Sharma's debut is described as "Girls meets Trainspotting," about a heroin addict struggling to keep her life together. Emily Books writes, "This book takes every tired trope about addiction and recovery, 'likeable' characters and redemption narratives, and blows them to pieces." (Elizabeth)
The Unseen World by Liz Moore: Ada is the daughter of a brilliant computer scientist, the creator of ELIXIR, a program designed to "acquire language the way that human does," through immersion and formal teaching. Ada too is the subject of an experiment of sorts, from a young age "immersed in mathematics, neurology, physics, philosophy, computer science," cryptology and, most important, the art of the gin cocktail by her polymath father. His death leaves Ada with a tantalizing puzzle to solve in this smart, riddling novel. (Matt)
The Trap by Melanie Raabe: Translated from the German, the English version of this celebrated debut was snaffled up by Sony at the Frankfurt Book Fair and is now on its way to a big-screen debut as well. A thriller, The Trap describes a novelist attempting to find her sister's killer using her novel-in-progress as bait (this always works). (Lydia)
Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon: The Pushcart-winning author received a lot of praise for her debut, The Little Bride, and accolades are already flowing in for her latest, with J. Courtney Sullivan calling Lucy Pear, "a gorgeous and engrossing meditation on motherhood, womanhood, and the sacrifices we make for love." It opens with an unwed Jewish mother named Bea leaving her baby beneath a Massachusetts pear tree in 1917 to pursue her dreams of being a pianist. A decade later, a disenchanted Bea returns to find her daughter being taken care of by a strong Irish Catholic woman named Emma, and the two woman must grapple with what it means to raise a child in a rapidly changing post-war America in the middle of the Prohibition. With poetic prose but a larger understanding of the precarious world of 1920s New England, Solomon proves herself as one of the most striking novelists of the day. (Tess)
Bad Faith by Theodore Wheeler: Kings of Broken Things, Wheeler's debut novel about young immigrants set during the Omaha Race Riot of 1919, is coming in 2017 from Little A. The riot followed the horrific lynching of Will Brown. A legal reporter covering the Nebraska civil courts, Wheeler brings much authenticity to the tale. For now, readers can enjoy Bad Faith, his first story collection. (Nick R.)
Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan: Described in promotional materials as both Breakfast at Tiffany's and Emma set in Singapore, Tan's first novel explores "the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs and busy streets." It is also the first novel written entirely in "Singlish" (the local patois of Singapore) to be published in America. The long-time journalist — Tan has been a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, In Style, and The Baltimore Sun — previously published a memoir called A Tiger in The Kitchen: A Memoir of Food & Family, which was praised as "a literary treat." (Elizabeth)
Pond by Claire Louise-Bennett: Published in Ireland last year, a linked series of vignettes and meditations by a hermitess. The Guardian called it a "stunning debut;" The Awl's Alex Balk offers this rare encomium: "the level of self-importance the book attaches to itself is so low that you are never even once tempted to make the 'jerking off' motion that seems to be the only reasonable response to most of the novels being published today." (Lydia)
An Innocent Fashion by R.J. Hernández: Ethan St. James was born Elián San Jamar, the son of multiracial, working-class parents in Texas. At Yale, he befriends two wealthy classmates, who help him reinvent himself as he moves to New York to work for the fashion magazine Régine. But once he's there, things begin to crumble. It's described as "the saga of a true millennial — naïve, idealistic, struggling with his identity and sexuality," and an early review says that Hernández writes in "a fervently literary style that flirts openly with the traditions of Salinger, Plath, and Fitzgerald." (Elizabeth)
Listen to Me by Hannah Pittard: Following up The Fates Will Find Their Way and Reunion, two-time Year in Reading alum Pittard hits us with a "modern gothic" novel about a faltering marriage and an ill-fated road trip. (Lydia)
My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal: A former magistrate who has spent years doing family law and social work in England, de Waal publishes her debut novel at the respectable age of 55, bringing experiences from a long career working with adoption services to a novel about a mixed family navigating the foster care system in the 1980s. (Lydia)
Night of the Animals by Bill Broun: A strangely prophetic novel set in London, Night of the Animals takes place in a very near, very grim future — a class-divided surveillance state that looks a little too much like our own. A homeless drug addict named Cuthbert hears the voices of animals who convince him to liberate them from the London Zoo, joining with a rag-tag group of supporters to usher in a sort of momentary peaceable kingdom in dystopian London. The book is difficult to describe and difficult to put down. (Lydia)
Break in Case of Emergency by Jessica Winter: The fiction debut of Slate editor Winter, a seriocomic look at a woman trying to do what used to be called "having it all," dealing with a job that sucks — a send-up of a celebrity non-profit — and uncooperative fertility. Publisher's Weekly called it a "biting lampoon of workplace politics and a heartfelt search for meaning in modern life." (Lydia)
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue: This is one of those debuts that comes freighted with hype, expectation, and the poisonous envy of writers who didn't receive seven-figure advances, but sometimes hype is justified: Kirkus, in a starred review, called this novel "a special book." Mbue's debut, which is set in New York City at the outset of the economic collapse, concerns a husband and wife from Cameroon, Jende and Nemi, and their increasingly complex relationship with their employers, a Lehman Brothers executive and his fragile wife. (Emily)
The Nix by Nathan Hill: Eccentricity, breadth, and length are three adjectives that often earn writers comparisons to Thomas Pynchon. Hill tackles politics more headlong than Pynchon in this well-timed release. The writing life of college professor Samuel Andresen-Andersen is stalled. His publisher doesn't want his new book, but he's in for a surprise: he sees his long-estranged mother on the news after she throws rocks at a right-wing demagogue presidential candidate. The candidate holds press conferences at his ranch and "perfected a sort of preacher-slash-cowboy pathos and an anti-elitist populism" and his candidacy is an unlikely reason for son and mother to seek reunion. (Nick R.)
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson: Although the National Book Award winner's Brown Girl Dreaming was a young adult book, everyone flocked to lyrical writing that honed in on what it means to be a black girl in America. Now Woodson has written her first adult novel in two decades, a coming-of-age tale set in 1970s Bushwick, where four girls discover the boundaries of their friendship when faced with the dark realities of growing up. As Tracy K. Smith lauds, "Another Brooklyn is heartbreaking and restorative, a gorgeous and generous paean to all we must leave behind on the path to becoming ourselves." (Tess)
Bright, Precious Days by Jay McInerney: This is the third of three McInerney novels following the lives of New York book editor Russell Calloway and his wife Corinne. The first Calloway book, Brightness Falls (1992), set during leveraged buyout craze of the late-1980s, is arguably McInerney's last truly good novel, while the second, The Good Life (2006), set on and around 9/11, is pretty inarguably a sentimental mess. This new volume, set in 2008 with the financial system in crisis and the country about to elect its first black president, follows a now-familiar pattern of asking how world-historical events will affect the marriage of McInerney's favorite cosseted and angst-ridden New Yorkers. (Michael)
Carousel Court by Joe McGinniss, Jr.: Each unhappy mortgage is unhappy in its own way. A man and his beautiful wife ("a face that deserves granite countertops and recessed lighting") try to flip a house in a California development at the wrong time. Now "it's underwater, sinking fast, has…them by the ankles, and isn't letting go." This is the bleak but gripping setup for McGinniss's second novel (coming 10 years after The Delivery Man), a portrait of a marriage as volatile as the economy. (Matt)
Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi: Korkeakivi's second novel — her first was 2012's An Unexpected Guest — opens with the death of a 43-year-old WWII veteran, and follows the lives of his widow and children in the years and decades that follow. A meditation on family, the long shadow of war over generations, and myth-making. (Emily)
How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee: Lee's debut novel (following her praised short story collection, Drifting House), is set in and adjacent to North Korea. The novel follows three characters who meet across the border in China: two North Koreans, one from a prominent and privileged family, the other raised in poverty, and a Chinese-American teen who is an outcast at school. Together the three struggle to survive in, in the publisher's words, "one of the least-known and most threatening environments in the world." (Elizabeth)
Moonstone by Sjón: "One thing I will not do is write a thick book," asserts Icelandic author Sjón, who seems to have done just about everything else but, including writing librettos and penning lyrics with Lars von Trier for Björk's Dancer in the Dark soundtrack. Sjón's novels often dwell in mytho-poetic realms, but Moonstone, his fourth, is set firmly in recent history: 1918 Reykjavik, a city newly awash with foreign influence: cinema, the Spanish flu, the threat of WWI. Moonstone deals with ideas of isolation versus openness both nationally and on a personal scale, as Máni navigates his then-taboo desire for men, his cinematic fantasies, the spreading contagion, and the dangers imposed. (Anne)
Insurrections by Rion Amilcar Scott: The fictional town of Cross River, Md., founded after our nation's only successful slave revolt, serves as the setting for the 13 stories in Scott's latest collection. Here, readers track the daily struggles of ordinary residents trying to get ahead — or just to get by. By turns heartbreaking, darkly funny, and overall compelling, Insurrections delivers a panorama of modern life within a close-knit community, and the way the present day can be influenced by past histories, past generations. Scott, a lecturer at Bowie State, is a writer you should be reading, and this book serves as a nice entry point for first-timers. Meanwhile, longtime fans who follow the author on Twitter are in no way surprised to hear Scott's writing described as "intense and unapologetically current" in the pre-press copy. (Nick M.)
White Nights in Split Town City by Annie DeWitt: DeWitt's first "slender storm of a novel" White Nights in Split Town City lands on the scene with a fury worthy of a cowboy western. To wit, Ben Marcus calls the book a "bold word-drunk novel," that deals a good dose of swagger, seduction, and "muscular" prose (as corroborated by Tin House's Open Bar). It's a coming-of-age tale where a young girl's mother leaves, her home life disintegrates, and she and her friend build a fort from which they can survey the rumors of the town. Laura van den Berg calls it a "ferocious tumble of a book" that asserts DeWitt as a "daring and spectacular new talent." (Anne)
A House Without Windows by Nadia Hashimi: Hashimi, part-time pediatrician and part-time novelist (The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, When the Moon Is Low), offers readers an emotional heavyweight in her latest story, A House Without Windows. An Afghan woman named Zeba's life changes when her husband of 20 years, Kamal, is murdered in their home. Her village and her in-laws turn against her, accusing her of the crime. Overcome with shock, she cannot remember her whereabouts when her husband was killed, and the police imprison her. Both the audience and Zeba's community must discover who she is. (Cara)
Still Here by Lara Vapnyar: In her new novel, Russian-born writer Vapnyar dissects the lives of four Russian émigrés in New York City as they tussle with love, tumult, and the absurdities of our digital age. Each has technology-based reasons for being disappointed with the person they've become. One of the four, Sergey, seeks to turn this shared disappointment upside down by developing an app called Virtual Grave, designed to preserve a person's online presence after death, a sort of digitized cryogenics. It could make a fortune, but is there anyone — other than Ted Williams or an inventive novelist – who could seriously believe that Virtual Grave is a good idea? (Bill)
Divorce Is in the Air by Gonzalo Torné: For his third novel (and first published in the U.S.), Spanish writer Torné gives us a man we can love to hate. Joan-Marc is out of work and alone as he sets out to make things right by coming clean with his estranged second wife, giving her a detailed account of his misspent life — from childhood scenes to early sexual encounters, his father's suicide and his mother's mental illness, and on through a life full of appetites indulged, women mistreated, and the many ways his first wife ruined him. The novel, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, becomes an unapologetic exploration of memory, nostalgia, and how love ends. (Bill)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead: In 1998, Whitehead appeared out of nowhere with The Intuitionist, a brilliant and deliciously strange racial allegory about, of all things, elevator repair. Since then, he's written about junketing journalists, poker, rich black kids in the Hamptons, and flesh-eating zombies, but he's struggled to tap the winning mix of sharp social satire and emotional acuity he achieved in his first novel. Early word is that he has recaptured that elusive magic in The Underground Railroad, in which the Underground Railroad slaves used to escape is not a metaphor, but a secret network of actual tracks and stations under the Southern landscape. (Michael)
Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer: It's tempting to play armchair psychiatrist with the fact that it's taken JSF 11 years to produce his third novel. His first two — both emotional, brilliant, and, I have to say it, quirky — established him as a literary wunderkind that some loved, and others loved to hate. (I love him, FWIW.) Here I Am follows five members of a nuclear family through four weeks of personal and political crisis in Washington D.C. At 600 pages, and noticeably divested of a cutesy McSweeney's-era title, this just may be the beginning of second, more mature phase of a great writer's career. (Janet)
Nutshell by Ian McEwan: "Love and betrayal, life and death come together in the most unexpected ways," says Michal Shavit, publisher of the Booker Prize-winner's new novel. It's an apt description for much of his work and McEwan is at his best when combining elegant, suspenseful prose with surprising twists, though this novel is set apart by perspective. Trudy has betrayed her husband, John, and is hatching a plan with his brother. There is a witness to a wife's betrayal, the nine-month-old baby in Trudy's womb. As McEwan puts it, he was inspired to write by, "the possibilities of an articulate, thoughtful presence with a limited but interesting perspective." (Claire)
Jerusalem by Alan Moore: For anyone who fears that Watchmen and V for Vendetta writer Moore is becoming one of his own obsessed, isolated characters — lately more known for withdrawing from public life and disavowing comic books than his actual work — Jerusalem is unlikely to reassure. The novel is a 1,280-page mythology in which, in its publisher's words, "a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-colored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them." Also: it features "an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters." Something for everyone! (Jacob)
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett: A new novel by the bestselling author of gems like Bel Canto and State of Wonder is certainly a noteworthy publishing event. This time, Patchett, who also owns Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., takes on a more personal subject, mapping multiple generations of a family broken up by divorce and patched together, in new forms, by remarriage. Commonwealth begins in the 1960s, in California, and moves to Virginia and beyond, spanning many decades. Publishers Weekly gives it a starred review, remarking, "Patchett elegantly manages a varied cast of characters as alliances and animosities ebb and flow, cross-country and over time." (Edan)
Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua: A one-time staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle who filed stories from around the world while winning prizes for her fiction (including The Atlantic's student fiction prize), Hua makes her publishing debut with this collection of short stories. Featuring characters ranging from a Hong Kong movie star fleeing scandal to a Korean-American pastor who isn't all he seems, these 10 stories follow immigrants to a new America who straddle the uncomfortable line between past and present, allegiances old and new. (Kaulie)
The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai: To get a sense of what Booker Prize-winning author Krasznahorkai is all about, all you need to do is look at the hero image his publishers are using on his author page. Now consider the fact that The Last Wolf & Herman, his latest short fictions to be translated into English, is being described by that same publisher as "maddeningly complex." The former, about a bar patron recounting his life story, is written as a single, incredibly long sentence. The latter is a two-part novella about a game warden tasked with clearing "noxious beasts" from a forest — a forest frequented by "hyper-sexualized aristocratic officers." All hope abandon ye who enter here. Beach readers beware; gloom lies ahead. (Nick M.)
Intimations by Alexandra Kleeman: Kleeman's first novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, earned her comparisons to such postmodern paranoiacs as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Her second book, Intimations, is a collection of 12 stories sure to please any reader who reveled in the heady strangeness of her novel. These stories examine the course life in stages, from the initial shock of birth into a pre-formed world on through to the existential confusion of the life in the middle and ending with the hesitant resignation of a death that we barely understand. With this collection, Kleeman continues to establish herself as one of the most brilliant chroniclers of our 21st-century anxieties. (Brian)
Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch: The author of the international bestseller The Dinner, will publish Dear Mr. M — his eighth novel to date, but just the third to be translated into English. A writer, M, has had much critical success, but only one bestseller, and his career seems to be fading. When a mysterious letter writer moves into the apartment below, he seems to be stalking M. Through shifting perspectives, we slowly learn how a troubled teacher, a pair of young lovers, their classmates, and M himself are intertwined. With a classic whodunit as its spine, the novel is elevated by Koch's elegant handling of structure, willingness to cross-examine the Dutch liberal sensibility, and skewering of the writer's life. This is a page turner with a smart head on its shoulders and a mouth that's willing to ask uncomfortable questions. (Claire)
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue: Set in 1850s rural Ireland, The Wonder tells the story of Anna, a girl who claims to have stopped eating, and Lib, a nurse who must determine whether or not Anna is a fraud. Having sold over two million copies, Donoghue is known for her bestselling novel, Room, which she also adapted for the screen to critical acclaim. But as a read of her previous work, and her recent novel Frog Music shows, she is also well versed in historical fiction. The Wonder brings together the best of all, combining a gracefully tense, young voice with a richly detailed historical setting. (Claire)
Black Wave by Michelle Tea: Expanding her diverse body of work — including five memoirs, a young adult fantasy series, and a novel — Tea now offers her audience a "dystopic memoir-fiction hybrid." Black Wave follows Tea's 1999 trek from San Francisco to L.A. in what Kirkus calls "a biting, sagacious, and delightfully dark metaliterary novel about finding your way in a world on fire." The piece has received rave reviews from the likes of Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson, which promise something for readers to look forward to this September. (Cara)
The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano: Modiano, a Nobel Prize winner, used a setting that shows up often in his work to give atmosphere to his 2012 novel L'herbe du nuit (appearing in English for the first time as The Black Notebook): the underdeveloped, unkempt suburbs of Paris in the 1960s. The book follows a man named Jean as he begins an affair with Dannie, a woman who may or may not be implicated in a local murder. As their relationship progresses, Jean begins to keep a diary, which he then uses decades later in a quest to piece together her story. (Thom)
Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy: Released last year in the U.K., Sleeping on Jupiter will hit the shelves in the U.S. this October. Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, Roy's latest novel follows the story of Nomita, a filmmaker's assistant who experiences great trauma as young girl. When Nomita returns to her temple town, Jarmuli, after growing up in Norway, she finds that Jarmuli has "a long, dark past that transforms all who encounter it." (Cara)
Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: Discussing The Sound of Things Falling, his atmospheric meditation on violence and trauma, with The Washington Post several years back, the Columbian writer Vásquez described turning away from Gabriel García Márquez and toward Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo: "All these people do what I like to do, which is try to explore the crossroads between the public world — history and politics — and the private individual." That exploration continues in Reputations, which features an influential cartoonist reassessing his life and work as a political scourge. (Matt)
Umami by Laia Jufresa: A shared courtyard between five homes in Mexico City is frequently visited by a 12-year-old girl, Ana. In the summer, she passes time reading mystery novels, trying to forget the mysterious death of her sister several years earlier. As it turns out, Ana's not the only neighbor haunted by the past. In Umami, Jufresa, an extremely talented young writer, deploys multiple narrators, giving each a chance to recount their personal histories, and the questions they're still asking. Panoramic, affecting, and funny, these narratives entwine to weave a unique portrait of present-day Mexico. (Nick M.)
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies: Davies, the author of The Welsh Girl and a professor at University of Michigan's esteemed MFA program, returns with a big book about American history seen through the lens of four stories about Chinese Americans. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it "a brilliant, absorbing masterpiece," and said it can be read as four novellas: the first is about a 19th-century organizer of railroad workers, for instance, and the last is about a modern-day writer going to China with his white wife to adopt a child. Celeste Ng says, "Panoramic in scope yet intimate in detail, The Fortunes might be the most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I've read about the Chinese American experience. It asks the big questions about identity and history that every American needs to ask in the 21st century." (Edan)
Loner by Teddy Wayne: David Federman, a nebbishy kid from the New Jersey suburbs, gets into Harvard where he meets a beautiful, glamorous girl from New York City and falls in love. What could go wrong? Quite a bit, apparently. Wayne, himself a Harvardian, scored a success channeling his inner Justin Bieber in his 2013 novel The Love Song of Jonny Valentine. This book, too, has its ripped-from-the-headlines plot elements, which caused an early reviewer at Kirkus to call Loner "a startlingly sharp study of not just collegiate culture, but of social forces at large." (Michael)
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver: From its description, Little Nothing sounds like a departure for Silver, the author of the novels The God of War and Mary Coin. The book, which takes place at the turn of the 20th century in an unnamed country, centers on a girl named Pavla, a dwarf who is rejected by her family. Silver also weaves in the story of Danilo, a young man in love with Pavla. According to the jacket copy, Little Nothing is, "Part allegory about the shifting nature of being, part subversive fairy tale of love in all its uncanny guise." To whet your appetite, read Silver's short story "Creatures" from this 2012 issue of The New Yorker, or check out my Millions interview with her about Mary Coin. (Edan)
After Disasters by Viet Dinh: Four protagonists, one natural disaster: Ted and Piotr are disaster relief workers, Andy is a firefighter, and Dev is a doctor — all of them do-gooders navigating the after-effects of a major earthquake in India. Their journeys begin as outward ones — saving others in a ravaged and dangerous place — but inevitably become internal and self-transforming more than anything. Dinh's stories have been widely published, and he's won an O. Henry Prize; his novel debut marks, according to Amber Dermont, "the debut of a brilliant career." (Sonya)
The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas: Cardenas's first novel The Revolutionaries Try Again has the trappings of a ravishing debut: smart blurbs, a brilliant cover, a modernist narrative set amongst political turmoil in South America, and a flurry of pre-pub excitement on Twitter. Trappings don't always deliver, but further research confirms Cardenas's novel promises to deliver. Having garnered comparisons to works by Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar, The Revolutionaries Try Again has been called "fiercely subversive" while pulling off feats of "double-black-diamond high modernism." (Anne)
Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler: Butler, who won the Pulitzer in 1993, is still most well-known for the book that won him the prize, the Vietnam War-inspired A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. In his latest, a novel, he goes back to that collection's fertile territory, exploring the relationship of a couple — both tenured professors at Florida State — who can trace their history to the days of anti-war protests. When the husband, Robert, finds out that his father is dying, he gets a chance to confront the mistakes of his past. (Thom)
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride: McBride's first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, unleashed a torrent of language and transgression in the mode of high modernism — think William Faulkner, think James Joyce, think Samuel Beckett. James Wood described its prose as a "visceral throb" whose "sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words…seem to want to merge with one another." McBride's follow-up, The Lesser Bohemians, is similar in voice, though softer, more playful, "an evolution," according to McBride. Again the novel concerns a young woman, an actress who moves to London to launch her career, and who falls in with an older, troubled actor. (Anne)
Every Kind of Wanting by Gina Frangello: Each unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way, but the families in Frangello's latest novel are truly in a category all their own. Every Kind of Wanting maps the intersection of four Chicago couples as they fall into an impressively ambitious fertility scheme in the hopes of raising a "community baby." But first there are family secrets to reveal, abusive pasts to decipher, and dangerous decisions to make. If it sounds complicated, well, it is, but behind all the potential melodrama is a story that takes a serious look at race, class, sexuality, and loyalty — in short, at the new American family. (Kaulie)
A Gambler's Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem: Lethem's first novel since 2013's Dissident Gardens has the everything-in-the-stewpot quality that his readers have come to expect: the plot follows a telepathic backgammon hustler through various international intrigues before forcing him to confront a deadly tumor — as well as his patchouli-scented Berkeley past. Though it remains to be seen if A Gambler's Anatomy can hit the emotional heights of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, it will be, if nothing else, unmistakably Lethem. (Jacob)
The Loved Ones by Sonya Chung: Her second novel, this ambitious story is a multigenerational saga about family, race, difference, and what it means to be a lost child in a big world. Charles Lee, the African-American patriarch of a biracial family, searches for meaning after a fatherless childhood. His connection with a caregiver, Hannah, uncovers her Korean immigrant family's past flight from tradition and war. Chung is a staff writer at The Millions and founding editor of Bloom, and her work has appeared in Tin House, The Threepenny Review, and BOMB. Early praise from Nayomi Munaweera compares Chung's prose to Elena Ferrante or Clarice Lispector, "elegant, sparse, and heartbreaking." (Claire)
The Fall Guy by James Lasdun: Lasdun is a writer's writer (James Wood called him "one of the secret gardens of English writing;" Porochista Khakpour called him "one of those remarkably flexible little-bit-of-everything renaissance men of letters"). Now, the British writer adds to his published novels, stories, poems, travelogue, memoir, and film (!) with a new novel, a spicy thriller about a troubled houseguest at a married couple's country home. (Lydia)
Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple: Semple, formerly a writer for Arrested Development and Mad About You, broke into the less glamorous, less lucrative literary world with 2013's Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (her second novel), which this reviewer called "funny." In this novel she sets her bittersweet, hilarious, perceptive gaze on Eleanor, a woman who vows that for just one day she will be the ideal wife, mother, and career woman she's always known she could be. And it goes great! Just kidding. (Janet)
Mister Monkey by Francine Prose: Widely known and respected for her best-selling fiction, Prose has had novels adapted for the stage and the screen. It's impossible to say (but fun to imagine) that these experiences informed her latest novel, Mister Monkey, about an off-off-off-off Broadway children's play in crisis. Told from the perspective of the actress who plays the monkey's lawyer, the adolescent who plays the monkey himself, and a variety of others attached to the production in one way or another, this novel promises to be madcap and profound in equal measure. (Kaulie)
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa: This debut novel, set in the 1930s, follows a young Jewish family as it tries to flee Germany for Cuba. When they manage to get a place on the ocean liner St. Louis, the Rosenthals prepare themselves for a comfortable life in the New World, but then word comes in of a change to Cuba's immigration policy. The passengers, who are now a liability, get their visas revoked by the government, which forces the Rosenthals to quickly abandon ship. For those of you who thought the boat's name sounded familiar, it's based on a real-life tragedy. (Thom)
The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke: A decade ago, The Guardian described Lianke as "one of China's greatest living authors and fiercest satirists." His most recent novel, The Four Books, was shortlisted for this year's Man Booker International Prize. The Explosion Chronicles was first published in 2013, and will be published in translation (by Duke professor Carlos Rojas) this fall. The novel centers on a town's "excessive" expansion from small village to an "urban superpower," with a focus on members of the town's three major families. (Elizabeth)
Martutene by Ramón Saizarbitoria: A new English translation of a work that the journal El Cultural has suggested "could well be considered the highest summit of Basque-language novels." The novel follows the interlinked lives of a group of friends in the contemporary Basque country, and the young American sociologist who's recently arrived in their midst. (Emily)
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar: Jarrar, whose novel A Map of Home won a Hopwood Award in 2008, comes out with her first collection of short stories old and new. In the title story (originally published in Guernica in 2010), a woman whose father has recently died goes to Cairo to scatter his ashes. In accompanying stories, we meet an ibex-human hybrid named Zelwa, as well as an Egyptian feminist and the women of a matriarchal society. In keeping with the collection's broad focus on "accidental transients," most of the stories take place all over the world. (Thom)
The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle: In 1994, a group of eight scientists move into EC2, a bio-dome-like enclosure meant to serve as a prototype for a space colony. Not much time passes before things begin to go wrong, which forces the crew to ask themselves a difficult, all-important question — can they really survive without help from the outside world? Part environmental allegory, part thriller, The Terranauts reinforces Boyle's reputation for tight plotlines, bringing his talents to bear on the existential problem of climate change. For those who are counting, this is the author's 16th (!) novel. (Thom)
Swing Time by Zadie Smith: The Orange Prize-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty returns with a masterful new novel. Set in North West London and West Africa, the book is about two girls who dream of being dancers, the meaning of talent, and blackness. (Bruna)
Moonglow by Michael Chabon: We've all had that relative who spills their secrets on their deathbed, yet most of us don't think to write them down. Chabon was 26 years old, already author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, when he went to see his grandfather for the last time only to hear the dying man reveal buried family stories. Twenty-six years later and the Pulitzer Prize winner's eighth novel is inspired by his grandfather's revelations. A nearly 500-page epic, Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It's simultaneously Chabon's most imaginative and personal work to date. (Tess)
Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao: A staggering tale of the death of a child, this novel is a poetic meditation on loss, the fluidity of boundaries, and feeling like a fish out of water. Viet Thanh Nguyen has described it as a "jagged and unforgettable work [that] takes on a domestic story of losing one's children and elevates it to Greek tragedy." (Bruna)
Virgin and Other Stories by April Ayers Lawson: Lawson's magazine debut was in the Paris Review with the title story of the collection. Other stories like "Three Friends in a Hammock" have appeared in the Oxford American. Fans of Jamie Quatro's I Want to Show You More will be drawn to Lawson's lyric, expansive dramatizations of Southern evangelical Christians, as she straddles the intersection of sexuality and faith. Her sentences, so sharp, are meant to linger: "The problem with marrying a virgin, he realized now, was that you were marrying a girl who would become a woman only after the marriage." (Nick R.)
Valiant Gentleman by Sabina Murray: PEN/Faulkner Award-winner (The Caprices) Murray returns with her latest novel Valiant Gentlemen. Murray's first novel, Slow Burn, was published when she was just 20 years old. Currently the chair of the creative writing department at UMass Amherst, Murray has also received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her sixth book (seventh, including her screenplay), Valiant Gentlemen follows a friendship across four decades and four continents. Alexander Chee writes, "This novel is made out of history but is every bit a modern marvel." (Cara)
Collected Stories by E.L. Doctorow: Written between the 1960s to the early years of this century, the 15 stories in this collection were selected, revised, and placed in order by the masterly Doctorow shortly before he died in 2015 at age 84. The stories feature a mother whose plan for financial independence might include murder; a teenager who escapes home for Hollywood; a man who starts a cult using subterfuge and seduction; and the denizens of the underbelly of 1870s New York City, which grew into the novel The Waterworks. They are the geniuses, mystics, and charlatans who offer both false hope and glimpses of Doctorow's abiding subject, that untouchable myth known as the American dream. (Bill)
Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías: Marías, one of Spain's contemporary greats, is nothing if not prolific. In this, his 14th novel, personal assistant Juan de Vere watches helplessly as his life becomes tangled in the affairs of his boss, a producer of B-movies and general sleaze. Set in a 1980's Madrid in the throes of the post-Francisco Franco hedonism of La Movida, a period in which social conservatism began to crumble in the face of a wave of creativity and experiment, the novel calls to mind Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories and the paranoid decadence of Weimar Germany. Spying and the intersection of the domestic with the historical/political isn't new territory for Marías, and fans of of his earlier work will be as pleased as Hari Kunzru at The Guardian, who called Thus Bad Begins a "demonstration of what fiction at its best can achieve." (Brian)
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins: Collins is described as "a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmaker — a contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley." The stories in this collection, which center on race in the '60s, explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in ways that "masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound." (Elizabeth)
The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma by Ratika Kapur: Kapur's first novel, Overwinter, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. This, her second, chronicles a changing India in which the titular Mrs. Sharma, a traditional wife and mother living in Delhi, has a conversation with a stranger that will shift her worldview. Described as a "sharp-eyed examination of the clashing of tradition and modernity," Asian and European critics have described it as quietly powerful. The writer Mohammed Hanif wrote that it "really gets under your skin, a devastating little book." (Elizabeth)
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy: Recent reports of the author's death have been greatly exaggerated, but unfortunately reports of delays for his forthcoming science fiction book have not. Longtime fans will need to wait even longer than they'd initially suspected, as The Passenger's release date was bumped way past August 2016 — as reported by Newsweek in 2015 — and now looks more like December 2017. (Nick M.)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: For Saunders fans, the prospect of a full-length novel from the short-story master has been something to speculate upon, if not actually expect. Yet Lincoln in the Bardo is a full 368-page blast of Saunders — dealing in the 1862 death of Abraham Lincoln's son, the escalating Civil War, and, of course, Buddhist philosophy. Saunders has compared the process of writing longer fiction to "building custom yurts and then somebody commissioned a mansion" — and Saunders's first novel is unlikely to resemble any other mansion on the block. (Jacob)
And So On by Kiese Laymon: Laymon is a Mississippi-born writer who has contributed to Esquire, ESPN, the Oxford American, Guernica, and writes a column for The Guardian. His first novel, Long Division, makes a lot of those "best books you've never heard of" lists, so feel free to prove them wrong by reading it right now. What we know about his second novel is that he said it's "going to shock folks hopefully. Playing with comedy, Afro-futurist shit and horror." (Janet)
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay: If this were Twitter, I'd use the little siren emoji and the words ALERT: NEW ROXANE GAY BOOK. Her new story collection was recently announced (along with an announcement about the delay on the memoir Hunger, which was slated to be her next title and will now be published after this one). The collection's product description offers up comparisons to Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July, with stories of "privilege and poverty," from sisters who were abducted together as children, to a black engineer's alienation upon moving to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, to a wealthy Florida subdivision "where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other." (Elizabeth)
Transit by Rachel Cusk: In this second novel of the trilogy that began with Outline, a woman and her two sons move to London in search of a new reality. Taut and lucid, the book delves into the anxieties of responsibility, childhood, and fate. "There is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose," enthuses Heidi Julavits. (Bruna)
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh: This first collection of stories from Moshfegh, author of the noir novel Eileen, centers around unsteady characters who yearn for things they cannot have. Jeffrey Eugenides offers high praise: "What distinguishes Moshfegh's writing is that unnamable quality that makes a new writer's voice, against all odds and the deadening surround of lyrical postures, sound unique." You can read her stories in The New Yorker and the Paris Review. (Bruna)
Selection Day by Aravind Adiga: The Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger returns with a coming-of-age tale of brothers and aspiring professional cricketers in Mumbai. (Lydia)
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki: Long-time Millions writer and contributing editor Lepucki follows up her New York Times-bestselling novel California (you may have seen her talking about it on a little show called The Colbert Report) with Woman No. 17, a complicated, disturbing, sexy look at female friendship, motherhood, and art. (Lydia)
Enigma Variations by André Aciman: New York magazine called CUNY Professor and author of Harvard Square "the most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century). Aciman follows up with Enigma Variations, a sort of sentimental education of a young man across time and borders. (Lydia)


All the A-list moments you missed from this year's Emmy Awards.
As television's biggest night of the year unfolds, we're tracking all the best behind-the-scenes action on Instagram. From the most glam getting ready shots to the most unexpected backstage selfies, see the best celebrity snaps from the 2018 Emmys tonight. Plus, catch up on all the red carpet fashion here.


text:
import numpy

traindna=['CGCACGTACGTAGCTCGAT',
		      'CGACGTAGTCGTAGTCGTA',
		      'CGACGGGGGGGGGGTCGTA',
		      'CGACCTAGTCGTAGTCGTA',
		      'CGACCACAGTTATATAGTA',
		      'CGACGTAGTCGTAGTCGTA',
		      'CGACGTAGTTTTTTTCGTA',
		      'CGACGTAGTCGTAGCCCCA',
		      'CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATA',
		      'CGACGGGGGGGGGGGCGTA']
label_traindna=numpy.array(5*[-1.0] + 5*[1.0])
testdna=['AGCACGTACGTAGCTCGAT',
		      'AGACGTAGTCGTAGTCGTA',
		      'CAACGGGGGGGGGGTCGTA',
		      'CGACCTAGTCGTAGTCGTA',
		      'CGAACACAGTTATATAGTA',
		      'CGACCTAGTCGTAGTCGTA',
		      'CGACGTGGGGTTTTTCGTA',
		      'CGACGTAGTCCCAGCCCCA',
		      'CAAAAAAAAAAAACCAATA',
		      'CGACGGCCGGGGGGGCGTA']
label_test_dna=numpy.array(5*[-1.0] + 5*[1.0])

parameter_list = [[traindna,testdna,label_traindna,3,10,1e-5,1],[traindna,testdna,label_traindna,3,10,1e-5,1]]

def classifier_svmlight_linear_term (fm_train_dna=traindna,fm_test_dna=testdna, \
                                                label_train_dna=label_traindna,degree=3, \
                                                C=10,epsilon=1e-5,num_threads=1):

    from shogun import StringCharFeatures, BinaryLabels, DNA
    from shogun import WeightedDegreeStringKernel
    try:
    	from shogun import SVMLight
    except ImportError:
    	print("SVMLight is not available")
    	exit(0)

    feats_train=StringCharFeatures(DNA)
    feats_train.set_features(fm_train_dna)
    feats_test=StringCharFeatures(DNA)
    feats_test.set_features(fm_test_dna)

    kernel=WeightedDegreeStringKernel(feats_train, feats_train, degree)

    labels=BinaryLabels(label_train_dna)

    svm=SVMLight(C, kernel, labels)
    svm.set_qpsize(3)
    svm.set_linear_term(-numpy.array([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,7,6], dtype=numpy.double));
    svm.set_epsilon(epsilon)
    svm.get_global_parallel().set_num_threads(num_threads)
    svm.train()

    kernel.init(feats_train, feats_test)
    out = svm.apply().get_labels()
    return out,kernel

if __name__=='__main__':
    print('SVMLight')
    classifier_svmlight_linear_term(*parameter_list[0])

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Eugene Puryear (born February 28, 1986, in Charlottesville, Virginia) is an American journalist, author, activist, politician, and host on Breakthrough News. In 2014, he was a candidate for the at-large seat in the DC Council with the D.C. Statehood Green Party. In the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections, Puryear was the vice presidential nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Campaign for Council of the District of Columbia
In 2014, Puryear ran as a D.C. Statehood Green Party candidate for the At-Large City Council seat held at the time by Anita Bonds. His campaign put forward a 10-point program, which describes some of the policy positions taken by Puryear. On April 1, 2014, Puryear won the party's nomination, defeating G. Lee Aikin 67.3%–25.1%. On November 4, 2014, Puryear placed sixth out of 14 candidates in the general election.

Journalism
Puryear wrote the book Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America, which was published by PSL Publications. Among the book's innovative contributions is a critique of Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," because it doesn't attend to the historical transformations of white supremacy and capitalism. Mass incarceration "is a political and state response to the masses of Black people being thrown out of the productive process altogether," whereas "slavery and Jim Crow were designed around Black people actually laboring."

Puryear writes regularly for Liberation News, the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He has co-edited some of the PSL's books, such as Imperialism in the 21st Century: Updating Lenin's Theory a Century Later. He was the host of the daily political talk show By Any Means Necessary, on Radio Sputnik. He is currently the host of the shows The Freedom Side LIVE and the Punch Out on BreakThrough News. Additionally, he taught a 4-part digital course for Liberation School titled, "Black Struggle is Class Struggle," which analyzes Black Revolutionary History in the United States and its central role in the development of U.S. society.

Activism
Puryear studied at Howard University, where he became a lead organizer with the anti-war ANSWER coalition and has helped organize large protests against the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Puryear and the ANSWER coalition were involved in the campaign to free the Jena 6. As a freshman at Howard in 2005, Puryear was interviewed by The Washington Post as an "activist-in-training" and cited his engagement with activism against gentrification, racism, the US occupation of Iraq and other issues.

Puryear has been deeply involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Vice presidential campaigns
In 2008, Puryear ran on the Party for Socialism and Liberation's ticket alongside presidential nominee Gloria La Riva. The La Riva/Puryear slate was on the ballot in six states and received 6,818 total votes.

In July 2015, Puryear was announced as the running mate of Gloria La Riva, the Party for Socialism and Liberation's 2016 presidential nominee. However, he was not eligible to hold the office, as he would not have been at least 35 years old by Inauguration Day. He was critical of the Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

References

Further reading

External links

 PSL 2016 campaign website
 D.C. City Council 2014 campaign website

1986 births
Living people
African-American candidates for Vice President of the United States
American anti–Iraq War activists
American communists
Black Lives Matter people
D.C. Statehood Green Party politicians
Howard University alumni
Party for Socialism and Liberation politicians
Writers from Charlottesville, Virginia
2008 United States vice-presidential candidates
21st-century American politicians
2016 United States vice-presidential candidates

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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