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Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir
By T Kira Madden
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The Millions Interview
Living in a Way That's True: The Millions Interviews Jaquira Díaz
Ashley N. Perez - 2.24.2020
When I'm in a slump, I have friends who know how to put me back on track. Last fall, the state of the world and my place in it—and, by extension, my writing—had reached a low point. At just the right moment, a friend handed me an advanced reading copy of Jaquira Díaz's Ordinary Girls, a debut memoir about family, queerness, identity, and being seen.
I wasn't ready for this book. Yet all my life I'd been waiting for this book. In Ordinary Girls, Díaz writes about vital subject matter with a brilliance I wanted to understand. It's not hyperbolic to say that, at times, I literally had the breath knocked out of me reading Díaz's words on the page. I asked myself over and over again how she did this, and then I thought, what if I asked her?
I was thrilled when she agreed to the interview. When we got on the phone together, we talked about grief, complicated relationships, craft, and just whom Díaz is writing for.
The Millions: I love on the last page of Ordinary Girls you talk about the girls you wrote the book for. Why is it so important that the book reaches these girls?
Jaquira Díaz: It was important for me throughout the process to remember whom I was writing for, because otherwise I would have stopped writing. It was so difficult to get this book out. And to be honest, the book wouldn't let me go. I had to get it out of the way before writing other things, before moving on to writing fiction. And, in order to do that, to finish the project, I needed to remind myself whom I was writing it for. So it helped to keep returning to the opening. I kept thinking about all the books I needed when I was growing up, when I was in school, and all we read in class were books by cis, straight, white men. And I kept thinking about how this book might be the first time a queer Latina, a queer Afro-Latina, sees herself in a book, and how that would have been important to me growing up.
TM: This was one of those books I read that made me feel seen in a lot of ways I hadn't before, and I could imagine how impactful it would have been if I had this book when I was younger. You write about carrying the weight of intergenerational trauma and the history of your people no matter where you go. Do you feel that writing this book has changed the feeling of that somehow?
JD: Yes, absolutely. It felt like in all these years of writing, I had been avoiding writing this book, avoiding talking about sexual violence, colonialism, trauma. I felt that in some ways by being silent I was contributing to the violence and erasure that is so prevalent in our communities, that haunts our communities. Talking about sexual violence and colonialism and other kinds of racialized violence—how not talking about it can feel like a burden. The process itself was grueling, but being done with it felt like such an accomplishment. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. It took 12 years to finish the book, and I'm definitely changed after having written it. I have more faith in God now. I have more faith in myself. I feel much stronger, definitely much stronger than I was right in the middle of writing it. The book literally made me sick. I had the worst insomnia of my life while writing this book. I gained weight. I lost weight. I gained weight again. I had to go to the hospital because I wasn't sleeping. It took a real physical toll on my health; so being done with it feels like such an accomplishment.
TM: You write about very complicated relationships with your family and chosen family in super difficult situations. And I feel like you do so without anger or bitterness. Instead, you do it with fairness. How did you do that?
JD: First of all, I needed to be honest about my role in all of this, about who I was and who my family was. It was very important to me to write about the real people, to be as close to the truth as possible. I needed to interrogate not just everyone else's role, but myself and who I was. The project of this book became much more about making connections and interrogating things about the larger world than it was about telling a story. Which is why I keep returning to certain themes of girlhood, of sexual violence, of silence, of secrets, of monsters. And it became much more about making those connections and speaking out than it was about following one linear story. For years, I avoided writing about my mother, for example, because writing about my mother was so painful. She was one of the hardest people to write about because, in so many ways, she broke me.
I also thought, If I am not honest, readers will be able to tell. In that process of digging for the truth—for me, but also for my family members and my friends—I started thinking about forgiveness. In the middle of writing this book, I was able to forgive my mother, and we have a very different relationship now than we did back during the years that were covered in the book. We're very close now. We have a loving relationship, and I think part of that was definitely forgiveness. You know how they say that when you forgive people, it's much more about yourself than it is about them. It's for you. And being able to forgive all the people in my life, and myself, that made all the difference. I definitely wanted to write something without pity or glory or anger, something that was honest. That spoke to a factual truth but also a larger truth.
TM: How did you write about grief when it came to complicated relationships? You talk about when your maternal grandmother passed away and you had not seen her for a while, but the grief hit you so viscerally. And it's such a complicated relationship because there was a deep family bond, but there was also distance out of self-preservation. Can you talk more about that?
JD: When my mother's mother—she died by suicide—when I found out that she died, I didn't really understand what I was feeling because our relationship in life had been so painful. She was abusive. She was racist. She was homophobic. She was abusive in more ways than one. Physically, emotionally, psychologically. And I didn't even know that what I was feeling was grief. During the years she was alive, I spent so much time telling myself that when she died, I wouldn't feel anything. And when she actually died and I was finally facing the reality of it, I was actually questioning whether or not I was feeling grief. I wasn't sure. I had this limited idea of what grief actually was, because of my experience with it, which had been mostly dealing with my paternal grandmother's death. That was painful. But then I realized after Marcy died that grief was more than just one feeling. Grief was painful, but it was also joyous. And it was anger. And it was depression. And it was anxiety. Grief was like experiencing every single emotion you've ever felt all at once. And navigating that when my maternal grandmother died was much more difficult because I didn't know what I was feeling.
TM: I've always had this question of what we are allowed to feel when it comes to grief and complicated relationships.
JD: I definitely felt that when Marcy died. Because I was sad and because I felt pain, I felt I was in some way betraying myself— she had inflicted so much pain on me and on my family.
It took a few months for me to feel like it was okay to feel what I was feeling. That it would never truly make sense but that that was fine.
TM: Near the end of the book, you wrote about the differences in how you processed the grief for both of your grandmothers. With your paternal grandmother, what do you feel like she would be most proud of?
JD: I think she would definitely be proud of the book, but she would be prouder of the way I live my life. That I have faith. That I found love. That I'm living in a way that's true to who I am, that I'm not pretending to be someone else.
TM: Is there something about writing—about the kind of things that your book has—that you wish you would see more of in memoir?
JD I definitely wish that there were more writing about girlhood and navigating a certain kind of home. I definitely wish there was more writing about girls growing up in poverty. Queer girls, black and brown girls. I didn't have any books like that growing up. I mean, I certainly looked for them. I went to a library and what the librarians handed me were books about white people written by white people, written mostly by white men. I wish that there were an abundance of books about brown and black girlhood, about girls who grew up working class or in poverty. I also wish that there that there were just more books about Puerto Ricans, both in Puerto Rico and in the diaspora. When I was writing this book, I mean, I searched out almost every book written by a Puerto Rican in English that I could possibly find. And there weren't that many.
TM: Yeah, I feel like when Lilliam Rivera's novels (The Education of Margot Sanchez and Dealing in Dreams) had come out, I had similar thoughts.
JD: If only Lilliam had been writing when I was a girl—that would have changed my entire world.
TM: And I felt similarly about T Kira Madden's memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and then I felt the same thing with your memoir. There are so many different elements for me that resonated like being mixed race and what that means and how you're looked at in this world. Why was it important to include writing about being mixed race?
JD: Well, one of the things that I always knew growing up was that we definitely were not white. We definitely did not belong. We were made to feel—and by we, I mean my sister, my brother, and I— like we didn't belong in my mother's white family. We definitely didn't look like them. Also, my black grandmother made it clear to us that we were a black family, and that no matter how we looked to the world, we were a black family and we would be treated like one. Those are things that in our families I knew, but when I went out into the world, when I went to school, nobody saw me as black. People didn't know unless I told them. And sometimes people didn't believe me. It always made me feel like I was both invisible and hyper-visible, living in some liminal state where no one really saw who I was. And it was very important to kind of get that through to the reader. How much of my childhood and adolescence and even much of my adulthood was spent without really being seen. And also how exhausting it is to go out into the world and have people look at you and not really see you, never really understand who you are.
TM: Do you feel like writing this book was also a way to bring some of that together?
JD Yeah, in some ways. We all have to have some sort of reckoning with race. Being biracial, being a light-skinned black person, also means that you might be racially ambiguous, that you walk in the world with a certain amount of privilege that other black people don't have. And for me, I definitely feel like it's my responsibility to use it to open opportunities for other black people who don't have the privilege of being racially ambiguous or treated the way that I'm treated. I definitely feel like I've had access to a lot of things that some of my friends haven't had access to. And there have been moments in certain organizations when I realize that there is a possibility that I got this opportunity because they didn't know I was black and it certainly made me feel like shit, but also made me feel like I had a responsibility to try to open doors for other people.
TM: I know this was very hard to write, but what was a joyful element of writing your memoir?
JD: God, that's a very difficult question because it was so, so hard. One of the most joyful moments, to be honest with you, was to be able to write the acknowledgements, to thank people who have meant something in my life and have helped me, even if they just helped in very small ways. And to show them how that very tiny thing they did was very important in making me who I am, in helping this book become a reality. That was probably the most joyful moment.
Bonus Links from Our Archive:
— 'Ordinary Girls': Featured Nonfiction by Jaquira Díaz
— A Year in Reading: Jaquira Díaz
A Year in Reading: Paul Lisicky
Paul Lisicky - 12.19.2019
The uncategorizable, the mongrel, the hybrid, the impure: I don't consciously say I'm looking for any of those traits when I pick up a book, but I get excited by any piece of art that makes itself up on its own terms, that says no in its quiet (or loud) way to the call of obedience and conformity. I think all of the books on my list say no, as if that no were an affirmation, and I'm sure that's why I'll keep going back to them not just in the present, but 10 years from now.
While many contemporary novels restrict themselves to a tight focus, Elizabeth McCracken's Bowlaway gives itself permission to sprawl. Its characters come and go, live and die, lace together in startling, unexpected ways. Its sentences ring with insight and dark charm. Entire paragraphs feel like song, even those spotlighting a minor character—see the page featuring the woman who adopts wild animals and takes them into her bed. The thing is, there are no minor characters in McCracken's work, and that notion is central to her vision: Everyone has a face, a body, a longing. I can't think of a book that's as queer, even if its queerness isn't out front and center. Who would we be if we allowed ourselves to see that our closest ties aren't blood ties but chosen? How would history change if we de-centered procreation as the measure of time and interconnectedness? The novel enacts those questions with increasing urgency and takes us to a place where the character we've known the longest doesn't simply stop, but re-invents himself once more.
Speaking of things queer, some of the freshest books of 2019 have come from queer writers. I'm thinking of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, T Kira Madden's Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House. Sentence by sentence, these books are alert and alive, written with exacting description and a musical ear. Most importantly, they take queerness into their structure. They refuse chronology as the only way to tell an immersive story. Instead, these are stories of moving minds, minds at work, as they try to shuck off the old narratives that want to shoehorn us into sameness and oblivion. For that, and more, I love these books the way I would love a person.
Finally? Poets. We must not ever forget the poets, those beautiful monsters. Source of all things good, at least when it comes to the word. Jericho Brown's The Tradition, C.D. Wright's Casting Deep Shade, Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic, Morgan Parker's Magical Negro, Brenda Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum, Toi Derricotte's I, Dorianne Laux's Only as the Day Is Long, Carmen Gimenez Smith's Be Recorder.
A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang
C Pam Zhang - 12.11.2019 | 1
There are years in which you are a stranger to yourself. This was one of them. I stopped keeping to-do lists, forgot obligations, hit pause on making sense of my life: why I cried when I should have been happy, why I grew angry or listless, why convictions I'd held no longer convinced even me. It was the last year of my third decade on this earth, and it seems that with every passing year I grow increasingly alien to that earth, or it to me. A fragmented year.
This was the year I moved to San Francisco for the third time, ambivalent. A bizarre place. Nowhere else can the simple act of buying snacks or going to a day job trigger in me the question, How to live?, or perhaps, How to live as a human?, or, What is a human?, or, How is humanity defined in a place of enormous income disparity and mind-boggling callousness as well as beauty? I'm not sure we all share the same definition of human these days. I'm not sure that, were I to rap politely on the skulls of those beside me on Valencia Street or in the backseat of my rideshare, I would hear flesh rather than a more synthetic response. A surreal place. In trying to make sense of it, I found conversational partners in Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X, Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror.
This was the year I got engaged, and though publicly I kept it low-key, privately I gave myself license to obsess over my favorite obsession: the impossible paradox of being a good parent in a very bad world. I found dark and delightful and intelligent company in Louse Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God, Karen Russell's Orange World, Alex Ohlin's Dual Citizens, Lydia Kiesling's The Golden State, Meng Jin's forthcoming Little Gods. I sobbed through Mira Jacob's Good Talk. Though I doubt I want children, I have a perverse desire to marinate in the idea—maybe because children seem to bring with them a sense of anticipatory loss, and so a child might be a tangible thing on which to pin the ache I feel anyway.
This was the year I was so paralyzed by anxiety that only horror could shake me out of it. In the summer, my non-American partner was exiled in Mexico for an unspecified amount of time, awaiting opaque "further processing" on his routine visa run. On my trip back alone, the only book that could distract me was Lee H. Whittlesey's Death in Yellowstone—at least we weren't being boiled alive or eaten by bears! I read Junji Ito's Uzumaki, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall, Megan Gidding's forthcoming Lakewood, Brian Evenson's Song for the Unraveling of the World. Meanwhile, I practiced pacing my apartment while voicing the very worst possibilities: I could quit my job and move to another country! I could sell our needy puppy! I could delete my digital presence and become a hermit! How soothing to twist reality into its most nightmarish shape, and then study it.
This was the year I sought to lose myself in worlds I'd visited before. I reread sagas: Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu from the Earthsea Cycle, Cynthia Voigt's Elske from the Tales of the Kingdom series, and George R. R. Martin's entire A Song of Ice and Fire series (as far as it exists; George, please). The escapism is not lost on me. Closer to home, I reread Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth—more than one reread, in the case of certain stories. "As ordinary as it all appears," Lahiri writes of the immigrant experience of shifting from one world to another, "there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
This was the year I grieved and found solace in books that peered closely at the texture of daily, mundane grief. I read Chia-Chia Lin's The Unpassing and Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's Starling Days, and Miriam Toews's strangely hilarious All My Puny Sorrows.
This was the year I looked for joy in the last pure place: in syllables. I read Patrick DeWitt's Undermajordomo Minor and Jamil Jan Kochai's 99 Nights in Logar, in which syntax is sheer delight. I reread Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies on a solo writing trip to Hiroshima where, alone in my hotel with a sea view and two beds, no one minded if I occasionally threw the book across the room to yell WHAT THE FUCK when metaphors got too good. Intending it as mourning, I reread Toni Morrison's Beloved the day the news of her death broke. I felt only elation. It is a perfect book. It is new every single time, as if the language is being birthed in radical shapes as you read—you can't help but celebrate the life in it.
This was the year I stopped assuming I could see how things would turn out and cozied up to ambiguity. I read books that, rather than force a sweeping lesson, do what good friends do: hold space for complexity. I read Brandon Taylor's forthcoming Real Life and T Kira Madden's Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, in which endings are not ends. I reread the lyrical puzzle box that is Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero. I read collections whose individual pieces fragmented, overlapped: Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Sabrina & Corina, Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias. I read Sarah Elaine Smith's Marilou Is Everywhere and Alexandra Chang's forthcoming Days of Distraction, their narrators keeping me company in my state of persistent bemusement. Maybe it's enough, these books say, to live with integrity through a day, a paragraph, a sentence.
This was the year in which I wondered what happens to women's rage and hurt when it is no longer as fresh as it was in, say, 2016. What happens as time passes, what ferments or crusts or festers. I read Shelly Oria's Indelible in the Hippocampus and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Miriam Toews's Women Talking. One of the first books I read this year was Susan Choi's Trust Exercise, a real mindfuck of a book, too smart and too cynical and too exacting to give its reader the easy gift of catharsis. It won't let me forget it. I don't want to forget.
In 2019, I stopped reading more books than I ever have before; life is too fucking short. The books that held my attention this year—that reached out to me—are capsules of strangeness, of varied extremity; what they don't do is try to convince me that everything is okay. That was a form of companionship I needed very much.
A Year in Reading: Carolyn Quimby
Carolyn Quimby - 12.7.2019
I've spent this year second-guessing myself. Every decision inspired fear. My emotions were out of control. I despised (yet yearned) for change. My astrology-inclined friends tell me this is my "Saturn return," which is when Saturn returns to the position it was in during your birth. Saturn return tends to be a period of time rife with change, intensity, and questioning. And, despite being skeptical of cosmic predictions, I can't help but feel like I'm in the midst of something larger than myself. And, like my thoughts and emotions, my reading has been all over the place.
I kicked off the new year by reading Lydia Kiesling's The Golden State poolside in the Sunshine State. Its willingness to explore the mundane (and maddening) minutiae of motherhood with a thoughtfulness usually reserved for Very Serious Topics™ felt revolutionary. I've never read anything like it (in the best possible way). In addition to reading and reviewing for work, I read a few books for fun including Michelle Obama's Becoming. I listened to the audiobook and I would argue it's the best (perhaps only?) way to read the book. Without realizing it, I started The Plot Against America (my first Philip Roth book) on a train to Newark. Disturbing in its own right, the alternate history of America post-WWII has far too many parallels to today's political climate. I also read, and enjoyed, a little book no one's ever heard of: Normal People by Sally Rooney. Rooney manages to capture the feeling of being young and desperate for belonging with honesty.
Summer was bookmarked by queer novels: Carolina De Robertis's Cantoras—a luscious and heartbreaking story about revolution in 1970s Uruguay—and Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things—a novel about a grief-stricken family, taxidermy, and obligation. In between those books, I read some incredible books: And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O'Connell, which made me cringe, laugh, and cry all at the same time; What My Mother and I Don't Talk About edited by Michele Filgate, which is one of the best anthologies I've read in years; Adrienne Brodeur's Wild Game, a beautiful memoir about toxic mother-daughter relationships; The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, a quiet, deliberate masterpiece; Rory Power's Wilder Girls, a creepy, queer YA dystopia; and Lauren Groff's Florida, a short story collection further proving Groff is one of the best. The New Me by Halle Butler was feverishly inhaled over the course of one afternoon. Butler's office novel hit too close to home and it sent me reeling. I also worked my way through Leslie Jamison's Make It Scream, Make It Burn, which I had been (unknowingly) waiting for since I read The Empathy Exams in 2016. No one writes an essay like Jamison, and I'm already awaiting her next collection.
As a freelancer, I mostly review fiction so I gravitated toward nonfiction in my free time. I read I'll Be Gone in the Dark, the late Michelle McNamara's haunting book about the Golden State Killer (her nickname). What a sadness that she couldn't finish what she started but, man, what she left behind was incredible. In a move that shocked no one, I tore my way through Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer's English, which was informative and hilarious in equal measure. John Glynn's Out East warmed my cold Long Island heart with its sun-kissed honesty. Furious Hours by Casey Cep was the perfect combination of true crime and literary history. I was horrified and enthralled by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's She Said about breaking the Harvey Weinstein story and the #MeToo movement. I've always loved books and movies about journalism, and this is journalism at its finest. For the aspiring writer in your life: Courtney Maum's Before and After the Book Deal (out January 2020) is an invaluable resource.
And then there were my two favorite books of the year: the ones I sat with the longest, that inspired me to write, and that I'll revisit over and over again. Read over the course of a weekend, T Kira Madden's Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls left me speechless, devastated, and hopeful. I cannot remember the last time I filled a book with so many annotations, asterisks, and exclamation points. Susan Choi's Trust Exercise totally and completely blew my mind. I said it then and I'll say it now: I would take a whole course dedicated to studying the structure and form of Choi's novel. Trust Exercise left me unmoored and it took weeks to find my next book. It's without a doubt the best novel I read all year.2019 was bad in many ways but the reading was good. If anything, that's what I'll take into 2020. More books and writing. Less indecision and trepidation. Stars be damned.
A Year in Reading: Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Kali Fajardo-Anstine - 12.4.2019
In December of 2018, in preparation for the publication of my first book, Sabrina & Corina, I quit my job as an office manager in Denver and organized a national book tour (with a couple stop offs in Canada along the way). Sabrina & Corina was born out of a decade of writing, countless rejections, and years of uncertainty. I was both excited for and afraid of what lay on the other side of publication, and I knew I had to do everything in my power to honor the book I had written. In the span of eight months, I traveled to over 20 cities and small towns, and I gave readings at places like universities, high schools, community centers, book stores, literary festivals, public libraries, art galleries, and more. All this is to say, in 2019 I spent long hours in the air, reading books. I read books by my debut peers. I reread many of my old favorites. I read books I found in Little Free Libraries. I read books abandoned in hotel lobbies. I read books gifted to me, wrapped in red bows.
In 2019, I took pleasure in reading new short story collections. I was charmed, delighted, and challenged by the power of the stories in Nafissa Thompson-Spires's The Heads of the Colored People. I loved the connection to place, Houston in particular, and the natural readability of Bryan Washington's Lot. Beth Piatote's The Beadworkers dazzled me with voice, dreamscapes, the reverence for ancestors and land.
As for novels, in Santa Fe, N.M., on a rooftop patio with adobe walls, sipping a bright green margarita, I was blown away by the robust storytelling in Inland by Tea Obreht. During a family vacation in Breckenridge, Colo., I took my father's advice and read the exquisitely written On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.
For a piece in Bustle, I revisited The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and was reminded of reading this masterwork for the first time in high school, the lingering pleasures of feeling seen on the page, 15 years later. In preparation for my conversation with Julia Alvarez for her NEA Big Read event in Denver, I reread In the Time of the Butterflies and was reminded of the power in her storytelling, the intricacies of her plot, the force behind the Mirabal sisters.
In 2019, I read memoirs, too, and I found myself staying up late into the night thinking about Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden. It's beautifully haunting and structurally gripping, providing an important look into loneliness and so much more. I also read a memoir from 1996, Drinking: A Love Story by the late Caroline Knapp, which I fished out of a free library in Golden, Colo., while I was on a walk one summer evening. I finished the book that night, and I thought a lot about my own relationship to alcohol and the vulnerability of Knapp's voice.
And then there were the poets. I saw Tommy Pico perform at the 2019 Bay Area Book Festival, and I was blown away as he read from Junk. His latest, Feed, kept me company this fall and reminded me of how bighearted and wide-ranging both language and the imagination can be. I adored the crisp and somber Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson. And during the summer in Los Angeles, I nearly teared up at Yesika Salgado's signing table after reading her Hermosa.
It was a beautiful year for books, and I was so honored to read these transformative words. Thank you to their authors.
A Year in Reading: Dantiel W. Moniz
Dantiel W. Moniz - 12.3.2019
As my relationship to reading has changed and deepened these past few years, so too has my ability to devour books as voraciously as I once did, when I read mainly for pleasure rather than parsing technique. The pleasure is still there, of course, but now there's an additional layer of wonder, of anxiety, of "How the hell did you do this?" and "Can I make this magic work for me?" Add this to selling and editing my first book, facilitating my first graduate-level workshop, the absolute shit-fire of our country's white supremacist agenda, and you have a recipe ripe for not reading as much as you wanted. But I did read, and in the spirit of learning to be kinder to myself and not measuring my productivity by the productivity of others, I'm glad to put together what I'm calling my "Past, Present, and Future" list of books by favorite, new, and new-to-me authors.
2019 has been a year of rereading for me, of taking refuge in the pages of books that have already won my heart. I do this with television and films, too. Rewatch and dissect rather than hopping into anything new. Between us, my husband and I have four streaming services and yet I've watched Mad Men thrice in its entirety; I've lost track of how many times I've mouthed lines along with Crooklyn. Sometimes I wonder if I'm afraid to fall in love, to be vulnerable to or invest in new characters, new worlds. There's something about the feeling of sinking down into a life for the first time, wondering if you'll understand the rules by which the author set the game. I both love and resist it. I reread A Visit from the Goon Squad for its form and the devastating ending of "Safari," and We the Animals for another lesson on brevity and beauty. The Color Purple, which teaches me so much about our ideologies on God and power, is a book I will read for the rest of my life. I dove back into Alice LaPlante's The Making of a Story to help me structure lessons I wanted to impart in my classrooms, and as a reminder that, in this life, I want to remain a student myself. Maybe my resistance isn't about fear of the new, so much as the appeal of a knowledge that seems fixed, but never really is.
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter made me think more seriously about white space in novels; Bryan Washington's Lot opened me to the possibility of endings; the entire collection of Julie Orringer's How to Breathe Underwater was so stunning that, at times, I was almost offended. And I read both Leni Zumas's Red Clocks and Sigred Nunez's The Friend so quickly, so needfully, it reminded me that I can still allow myself to be wonderfully overcome. I read Nella Larson's Passing and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names; I wish I'd read them sooner. I've been so grateful to the spate of stories allowing women to be human, to be unsexy and imperfect and absolutely radiant in that imperfection: so thank you to Chemistry by Weike Wang, Come to Me by Amy Bloom, Goodnight Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes, and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden. I am indebted to Tiana Clark's I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. This one straddles the line between present and future, but the language in C. Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills Is Gold kindled a spark in me, and I got to walk around the whole day after finishing it feeling permeable to inspiration.
My TBR pile judges me (or I continue to project judgement upon myself), especially for my tendency to add to it before I've finished others waiting. But I'm looking forward to reading so many more books, monumental to myself, maybe even before the year is through. Here are just a few on my list: Aria Arber's Hard Damage; Chet'la Sebree's Mistress; Michael Lee's The Only Worlds We Know, because poetry is at the raw heart of language; Elaine Castillo's America Is Not the Heart and Ayşe Papatya Bucak's The Trojan War Museum because fiction is at mine; and Toni Morrison's The Source of Self-Regard because of her timelessness, her wisdom, her place in the shaping of my past, present, future. Because it is necessary, and I am not yet ready to let the Queen go.
Editor - 12.2.2019
Welcome to the 15th annual Year in Reading series at The Millions. When site founder C. Max Magee first put together his year-end reading reflections in the early 2000s, no one suspected that a blog post would eventually grow into a series that has featured hundreds of writers and readers: librarians, critics, bloggers, journalists, essayists, poets, and fiction writers ranging from just-starting-out to just-won-a-Pulitzer-Prize. What the participants have in common is that they are loving, devoted readers.
To celebrate its 15th year, this December's series is, at 90-something contributors, the most crowded yet. As in every year, entries turn out not to be mere lists of books, but records of time passing–there were births and deaths, moves and separations and career changes. As in every year, some books pop up again and again in contributors' collections of memorable reading experiences. And as in every year, we guarantee you will conclude the month with at least one book to add to your TBR pile.
The names of our 2019 contributors will be unveiled throughout the month as entries are published (starting with our traditional opener from Languagehat's Stephen Dodson later this morning). Bookmark this post, load up the main page, subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter to make sure you don't miss an entry — we'll run at least three per day for the next three weeks.
Stephen Dodson, proprietor of Languagehat.Ayşe Papatya Bucak, author of The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories.Shea Serrano, author of Movies (And Other Things)Dantiel W. Moniz, author of the forthcoming collection Milk Blood Heat.Andrea Long Chu, author of Females.De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills.Omar El Akkad, author of American War.Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina: StoriesAlexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.Isabella Hammad, author of The Parisian.Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us.Marcos Gonsalez, author of the forthcoming memoir Pedro's Theory.Max Porter, author of Lanny.Yan Lianke, author of The Explosion Chronicles.Lauren Michele Jackson, author of White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation.Catherine Lacey, author of the forthcoming novel Pew.Sonya Chung, staff writer for The Millions, author of The Loved Ones.Carolyn Quimby, associate editor for The Millions.Nick Ripatrazone, staff writer for The Millions, author of Longing for an Absent God.Garth Risk Hallberg, contributing editor for The Millions, author of City on Fire.Jianan Qian, staff writer for The Millions.Nick Moran, special projects editor for The Millions.Kate Gavino, social media editor for The Millions, author of Last Night's Reading and Sanpaku.Adam O'Fallon Price, staff writer for The Millions, author of The Grand Tour and The Hotel Neversink.Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers.Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn't Require You.Devi S. Laskar, author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues.Jason R Jimenez, author of The Wolves.Iva Dixit, associate editor at The New York Times Magazine.Jennifer Croft, author of Homesick.Venita Blackburn, author of Black Jesus and Other Superheroes.C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold.Jedediah Britton-Purdy, author of This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth.Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth.Osita Nwanevu, staff writer at The New Republic.Jennine Capó Crucet, author of My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education.Kate Zambreno, author of Appendix Project (Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents) and Screen Tests.Chanelle Benz, author of The Gone Dead.John Lingan, author of Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-TopBeatrice Kilat, a writer and editor living in Oakland, Calif.T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls.Grace Loh Prasad, a contributor to the anthology Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Immigration, Identity and Coming to America.Kaulie Lewis, staff writer for The Millions.Il'ja Rákoš, staff writer for The Millions.Zoë Ruiz, staff writer for The Millions.Ed Simon, staff writer for The Millions.Edan Lepucki, staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions, author of California.Hannah Gersen, staff writer for The Millions and the author of Home Field.Matt Seidel staff writer for The Millions.Bill Morris, staff writer for The Millions, author of Motor City Burning.Rene Denfeld, author of The Butterfly Girl.Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers.Anita Felicelli, author of Love Songs for a Lost Continent.Oscar Villalon, managing editor of ZYZZYVA.Terese Mailhot, author of Heart Berries: A Memoir.Jenny Offill, author of Last Things and Dept. of Speculation.Joseph Cassara, author of novel The House of Impossible Beauties.Daniel Levin Becker, senior editor at McSweeney's.Nishant Batsha, a writer whose work has appeared in Narrative, TriQuarterly, and The Believer.Mike Isaac, author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.Andrew Martin, author of Early Work.Kate Petersen, a writer whose work has appeared in Tin House, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Paris Review Daily.Anne Serre, author of The Fool & Other Moral Tales.Tanaïs, author of Bright Lines and creator of independent beauty and fragrance house Hi Wildflower.Sophia Shalmiyev, author of Mother Winter.Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers.Anne K. Yoder, staff writer for The Millions.Michael Bourne, staff writer for The Millions.Marie Myung-Ok Lee, staff writer for The Millions.Lydia Kiesling, contributing editor at The Millions and the author of The Golden State.Thomas Beckwith, staff writer for The Millions.Roberto Lovato, teacher, journalist and writer based at the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, California.Dustin Kurtz, Social Media Manager for Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull.Kevin Barry, author of novel Night Boat to Tangier.Susan Straight, author of In the Country of Women.
Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Oyeyemi, Thiong'o, Butler, Means, and More
Thom Beckwith - 3.5.2019
Here's a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of Helen Oyeyemi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Halle Butler, David Means and more—that are publishing this week.
Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today.
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about Gingerbread: "In Oyeyemi's idiosyncratically brilliant latest (following Boy, Snow, Bird), she spins a tale about three generations of women and the gingerbread recipe that is their curse and their legacy. In an effort to understand her heritage, precocious British schoolgirl Perdita Lee recreates her family's famed gingerbread recipe—but with additional ingredients that have near-fatal consequences. When she slips into a coma, her mother, Harriet, is forced to tell her the truth of their family. To do so, she must recount her upbringing in the mysterious country Druhástrana and the arduous journey that finally brought her and her mother, Margot, out of it. Harriet's account is an astonishing tale of rigged lotteries, girls in wells, and the mystifying and meddling Gretel Kercheval, a childhood friend of Harriet's who seems to have an awful lot to do with Harriet's fate. Though Harriet and Margot do eventually manage to leave Druhástrana, they realize that it's not quite as easy to master the outside world, especially not when there are more Kerchevals around to complicate things. Oyeyemi excels at making the truly astounding believable and turning even the most familiar tales into something strange and new. This fantastic and fantastical romp is a wonderful addition to her formidable canon."
The New Me by Halle Butler
Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about The New Me: "Butler's incisive latest (following Jillian) opens in winter in Chicago, where 30-year-old Millie is sweating inside her coat as she rides the crowded train to her temp position at the Lisa Hopper interior design showroom, where the uptight senior receptionist Karen calls her Maddie, and she gets paid $12 an hour to clip together mailers and answer the phone. Millie's life is deeply stagnant—besides her temp position, she has one awful friend named Sarah, little to no social life, and a deep dependency on the crime show Forensic Files, which she watches nightly. It's clear to Millie that something must change. When she receives an innocuous email from her temp agency, Millie mistakes it for an impending job offer, and throws herself into revamping her life. In short chapters, readers are treated to insights into the lives of the other women at Lisa Hopper, especially Karen, who has different plans for Millie's future than what Millie is expecting. Though Millie's mundane and self-destructive despondence sometimes feels all too familiar, Butler has nonetheless created an disquieting heroine with an indelible voice. Butler is a sharp and observant writer, who takes to task the tragicomedy of modern capitalism."
Minutes of Glory by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about Minutes of Glory: "Thiong'o's outstanding collection (following Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir), set over decades in Kenya, follows a range of characters: mothers and children, fighters and martyrs, secret lives and shadows and priests. 'And the Rain Came Down!' is about Nyokabi, a childless woman who isn't able to have relationships with mothers due to her overwhelming jealousy. One evening, in a storm, she finds a lost child and brings him home, intending to keep him. In 'The Martyr,' Mrs. Hill and her European settler neighbors are shocked to learn about a Caucasian couple who were murdered in their home. Mrs. Hill, who owns a tea plantation, considers herself to be a woman who trusts her servants, but nevertheless feels unsettled. Meanwhile, Njoroge, her servant, dislikes Mrs. Hill (she flaunts her kindness, and he's been on the land longer than her) and believes that she does too much for the help, yet he finds that he has misguided loyalty. 'Minutes of Glory,' follows Beatrice, who scrapes by working in bars. She meets a fellow outcast and they become involved, yet a criminal act changes their trajectories. Thiong'o weaves together disparate stories of people attempting to deal with change in their lives, either chosen or forced upon them, showing his understanding of human nature, its frequent resistance to change, and its ability to surprise. This is a masterful collection."
A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum
Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about A Woman Is No Man: "Rum's pleasing debut employs two timelines to recount the story of a Palestinian family living in America. In the early 1990s, Isra is married off and moves to Brooklyn to live with her husband, Adam, and his culturally traditional parents, Fareeda and Khaled. While Isra stays home to cook and clean, Adam spends all of his time running the family's deli, yet the couple is pressured by Fareeda to produce a son. Isra gives birth to four girls, however, fracturing family relations. The second story line jumps forward two decades to follow Deya, the oldest of Isra's daughters, as she faces the prospect of her own arranged marriage. Deya lives with Fareeda and Khaled, as her parents died in a reported car crash when she was young, and as she resists Fareeda's insistence on finding a suitor, preferring to attend college, Adam's long-absent sister, Sarah, reaches out to her niece. The pair meet clandestinely, and Sarah reveals a far darker family history than Deya suspected. Rum's short chapters crisscross timelines with the zippy pace of a thriller, yet repetitive scenes and unwieldy dialogue deflate the narrative. Though the execution is sometimes shaky, there's enough to make it worthwhile for fans of stories about family secrets."
Instructions for a Funeral by David Means
Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about Instructions for a Funeral: "For 30 years, Means (Hystopia) has examined the ways in which violence embeds trauma that warps the American character. This superb new collection covers similar geographic, characterological, and thematic ground, yet finds Means at his most compassionate and mischievous. In the title story, a man directs every last detail of his own send-off ('Please tilt the coffin slightly toward the room so that a view of my body is unavoidable.') in a letter that doubles as a tale of betrayal foretold. Often, stories contain told tales, creating an aura of oral history. In the wonderfully digressive 'The Ice Committee,' a Vietnam vet tries to tell a story he's already told to a man who's already heard it, about a story he once told someone else. In the gripping 'El Morro,' a dreamer holds two women captive from northern California to New Mexico with his ceaseless mania. Characters in 'Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950' and 'The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934' interrogate explosions of violence with the attention to detail of the obsessed. What Means writes about his dying father in the autofictional 'Confessions' aptly describes his own distinct style of storytelling: 'He is consumed in the vortex of the moment.' Means spins intricate, highly textured yarns with great artistry, care, and an acute, empathetic eye. Treasures abound."
Joy by Erin McGraw
Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about Joy: "McGraw's fourth collection proves she's a master of the form. Across these 53 brief stories, it is astonishing what she is able to conjure up in the span of a few pages. In 'Second Sight,' a married lesbian couple on the rocks has their relationship resuscitated after receiving unconventional help from one of the women's mothers. Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra return to Ava's home for a family gathering in 'Ava Gardner Goes Home.' There are stories told entirely in dialogue ('Friendship'), in nonlinear order ('Pebble'), and as a prayer ('Prayer'). A few of the stories examine events from the viewpoints of different characters, such as 'Comfort (1)' and 'Comfort (2),' which tell the story of the killing of a young boy from both the unrepentant murderer and the grieving mother's sides, or 'Bucket (1)' and 'Bucket (2),' in which an advice columnist receives a letter he thinks is from his wife before the second story reveals its true author. McGraw (The Good Life) is wise and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, with a seventh sense for the perfect turn of phrase (a mouth is "just on the brink of an expression," a "dreamy girl… must have fallen into his hands like a plum"). This quintessential collection of stories serves as an homage to the form while showcasing McGraw's stunning talent and deep empathy for the idiosyncrasies, small joys, and despairs of human nature."
Also on shelves: Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden.
March Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)
Editor - 3.4.2019
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 March titles, check out our First-Half Preview. Let us know what you're looking forward to in the comments!
Want to know about the books you might have missed? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today.
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell: Described as the "Great Zambian Novel you didn't know you were waiting for," this debut novel, from the winner of the 2015 Caine Prize for African writing, tells the story of three Zambian families—black, white, and brown—caught in a centuries-long cycle of retribution, romance, and political change. Serpell asks, "How do you live a life or forge a politics that can skirt the dual pitfalls of fixity (authoritarianism) and freedom (neoliberalism)? And what happens if you treat error not as something to avoid but as the very basis for human creativity and community?" Recipient of a starred review from Kirkus and advance praise from Carmen Maria Machado, Alice Sebold, and Garth Greenwell, The Old Drift is already well positioned to become the Next Big Thing of 2019. (Jacqueline)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi: Oyeyemi became a critical darling in 2014 with Boy, Snow, Bird, a retelling of "Snow White." She takes us back into fairy tale world with Gingerbread, the story of mother and daughter, Harriet and Perdita Lee, and their family's famous, perhaps…magical, gingerbread recipe. Along with Harriet's childhood friend Gretel, the Lees endure family, work, and money drama all for the sake of that crunchy spice. (Janet)
The New Me by Halle Butler: If Butler's first novel, Jillian, was the "feel-bad book of the year," then her second, The New Me, is a skewering of the 21st-century American dream of self-betterment. Butler has already proven herself a master of writing about work and its discontents, the absurdity of cubicle life and office work in all of its dead ends. The New Me takes it to a new level in what Catherine Lacey calls a Bernhardian "dark comedy of female rage." The New Me portrays a 30-year-old temp worker who yearns for self-realization, but when offered a full-time job, she becomes paralyzed after realizing the hollowness of its trappings. (Anne)
Kaddish.com by Nathan Englander: Pulitzer finalist Englander's latest novel follows Larry, an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews. When he refuses to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for his recently deceased father, Larry risks shocking his family and imperiling the fate of his father's soul. Like everyone else in the 21st century, Larry decides the solution lies online, and he makes a website, kaddish.com, to hire a stranger to recite the daily prayer in his place. What follows is a satirical take on God, family, and the Internet that has been compared to early Philip Roth. (Jacqueline)
Minutes of Glory by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Thiong'o, the perennial Nobel Prize contender who once got through a prison sentence by drafting a memoir on toilet paper, has collected his best short stories in this collection, which spans half a century. From "The Fig Tree," which Thiong'o wrote when he was an undergraduate in Uganda, to "The Ghost of Michael Jackson," which he wrote while teaching at Irvine, these stories affirm the wide range of a global sensation. (Thom)
Look How Happy I'm Making You by Polly Rosenwaike: A couple of months ago I zipped through this funny and poignant collection of stories about women grappling with motherhood in many different ways: One struggles with infertility, for instance, and another gets pregnant by accident. Throughout, I was struck by the depth of feeling, not once compromised by the brevity of the form. In its starred review, Kirkus calls it "an exquisite collection that is candid, compassionate, and emotionally complex." Meaghan O'Connell says, "Each story in Look How Happy I'm Making You is a lovely universe unto itself—funny, intimate, casually profound—but there is something transcendent about reading them together like this." (Edan)
If, Then by Kate Hope Day: In a quiet mountain town, four neighbors' worlds are rocked when they begin to see versions of themselves in parallel realities. As the disturbing visions mount, a natural disaster looms and threatens their town. From a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "Day's well-crafted mix of literary and speculative fiction is an enthralling meditation on the interconnectedness of all things." (Carolyn)
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden: With a sparkling blurb from Mary Gaitskill—"Sad, funny, juicy and prickly with deep and secret thoughtful places"—and a sparkling cover (literally—see her website), T Kira Madden's debut memoir, a coming-of-age story set in Boca Raton, is primed for buzz. As a grownup, Madden self-describes as an "APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician"; as a child, "Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability…she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls." One of the best, most evocative titles of the release season, IMHO. (Sonya)
A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum: Isra, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl in 1990, prefers reading to suitors, but after her family marries her to an American deli owner she finds herself living in Brooklyn, trapped in a losing struggle against his oppressive mother, Fareeda. Eighteen years later, Fareeda attempts to pressure Isra's oldest daughter into an early marriage, but an estranged family member offers Isra a chance to determine her own life. Rum, who was born to Palestinian immigrants living in Brooklyn, has written that she hopes her debut novel moves readers "by the strength and power of our women." (Kaulie)
The White Card by Claudia Rankine: The author of Citizen, Macarthur Genius grant honoree, and founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute will publisher her first play, one that examines the concept of whiteness and white Americans' failures to acknowledge it, through a series of interactions between an artist and an affluent couple. In the play's introduction, Rankine writes "The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters' disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond." (Lydia)
EEG by Daša Drndic: I first encountered Daša Drndic through her novel Belladona in June, unwittingly a mere two weeks after the author's death from lung cancer. I was struck by the character Andreas Ban, and his idiosyncratic reflection upon ears, that "marvelous ugly organ," accompanied by a diagram of an ear marked with the body's points. This character Ban continues into Drndic's next and final book, EEG, where after surviving a suicide attempt he goes on to dissect and expose the hidden evils and secrets of our times. He's stand-in for Drndic herself, who wrote emphatically and had stated that "Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue, be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become." (Anne)
Instructions for a Funeral by David Means: Means's last publication, Hystopia, was a Booker-nominated novel, but he is still best known for his short stories. Instructions for a Funeral is therefore a return to (the short story) form, 14 pieces, previously published in the New Yorker, Harpers, The Paris Review, and VICE, that display the intelligence and questing range for which Means is known. From a fistfight in Sacramento to a 1920s FBI stakeout in the midwest, Instructions for a Funeral invites readers on a literary journey with a master of the modern short story. (Adam P.)
The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Sam Taylor): Writes Priya Parmal in her 2014 New York Times review of Maylis de Kerangal's first novel translated into English, The Heart, "These characters feel less like fictional creations and more like ordinary people, briefly illuminated in rich language, beautifully translated by Sam Taylor, that veers from the medical to the philosophical." In The Cook, a "hyperrealist" tale centered around a self-taught professional cook, we are treated to "lyricism and [the] intensely vivid evocative nature of Maylis de Kerangal's prose, which conjures moods, sensations, and flavors, as well as the exhausting rigor and sometimes violent abuses of kitchen work." The Cook is her 10th novel, her second translated into English (also by Taylor); Anglophones can be grateful that we're finally catching up with this many-prize-winning author. (Sonya)
Sing to It by Amy Hempel: Hempel, the short story legend best known for "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," is back with her first new collection of stories in over a decade. From "Cloudland," which depicts a woman's reckoning with her decision to give up her child, to "A Full-Service Shelter," which follows a volunteer at a shelter where abandoned dogs are euthanized, the stories in Sing to It are fitting additions to Hempel's work. (Thom)
The Other Americans by Laila Lalami: Lalami, whose previous novel, The Moor's Account, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, returns with a "structurally elegant mystery" (Kirkus). At the opening of this highly anticipated new novel, Morroccan immigrant Driss Guerraoui is killed by a speeding car on a California highway. The book then follows a number of characters connected to and affected by his death, including his jazz composer daughter, his wife, and an undocumented immigrant who witnessed the accident. J.M. Coetzee says, "This deftly constructed account of a crime and its consequences shows up, in its quiet way, the pressures under which ordinary Americans of Muslim background have labored since the events of 9/11." (Edan)
Good Talk by Mira Jacob: A graphic novel about raising her mixed-race son in a white supremacist society by the author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, built around conversations with a curious six year old. Jacqueline Woodson says "In Jacob's brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterical, always honest, and ultimately healing." (Lydia)
Joy by Erin McGraw: In her newest collection, McGraw gathers 53 "very short stories" about time, religion, class, and relationships. In Publishers Weekly's starred review, they said "this quintessential collection of stories serves as an homage to the form while showcasing McGraw's stunning talent and deep empathy for the idiosyncrasies, small joys, and despairs of human nature." (Carolyn)
The Club by Takis Würger (translated by Charlotte Collins): German reporter Würger's debut novel focuses on the Pitt Club, an exclusive all-male dining club, and Hans Stichler, the young boxer tapped to investigate them. Full of secrets, violence, and ruminations on class, the novel explores the dangers of toxic masculinity and the cost of justice. (Carolyn)
The Dragonfly Sea by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Owuor, whose debut Dust was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, returns with a coming-of-age novel about Ayaana, a young African woman who travels in order to find her place in the world. The book has received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly—the latter writes, "with a rollicking narrative and exceptional writing, this epic establishes Owuor as a considerable talent." (Carolyn)
Portrait of Sebastian Khan by Aatif Rashid: Fiction and nonfiction writer Rashid's forthcoming debut follows the eponymous Sebastian Khan—a noncommittal, Muslim American art history student—on the cusp of his 2011 college graduation. Author J. Ryan Stradel called the debut "a smart, thoughtfully constructed, and propulsive coming-of-age story." (Carolyn)
Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2019 Book Preview
Editor - 1.8.2019 | 8
As you learned last week, The Millions is entering into a new, wonderful epoch, a transition that means fretting over the Preview is no longer my purview. This is one of the things I'll miss about editing The Millions: it has been a true, somewhat mind-boggling privilege to have an early look at what's on the horizon for literature. But it's also a tremendous relief. The worst thing about the Preview is that a list can never be comprehensive—we always miss something, one of the reasons that we established the monthly previews, which will continue—and as a writer I know that lists are hell, a font of anxiety and sorrow for other writers.
That said, the technical term for this particular January-through-June list is Huge Giant Monster. Clocking in at more than 120 books, it is quite simply, too long. (If I were still the editor and he were still the publisher, beloved site founder C. Max Magee would be absolutely furious with me.) But this over-abundance means blessings for all of us as readers. The first half of 2019 brings new books from Millions contributing editor Chigozie Obioma, and luminaries like Helen Oyeyemi, Sam Lipsyte, Marlon James, Yiyun Li, and Ann Beattie. There are mesmerizing debuts. Searing works of memoir and essay. There's even a new book of English usage, fodder for your future fights about punctuation.
Let's celebrate very good things, and a lot of them, where we find them. The Millions, its writers, and its readers have been some of my very good things. I'm so grateful for the time I've spent as editor, and with all of you. Happy new year, and happy reading. I'll be seeing you around.
-Lydia Kiesling
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma: Millions Contributing Editor Obioma's debut novel, The Fishermen, is a merciless beauty and one of my favorites of 2015. I wasn't alone in this feeling: The Fishermen garnered universal critical acclaim with its recasting of biblical and African mythos to create a modern Nigerian tragedy. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, is a contemporary retelling of Homer's Odyssey blended with Igbo folklore that has received similar glowing notice so far. As Booklist says in a starred review, An Orchesta of Minorities is "magnificently multilayered…Obioma's sophomore title proves to be an Odyssean achievement." (Adam P.)
Hark by Sam Lipsyte: In Lipsyte's latest novel since The Ask, we meet Hark Morner, an accidental guru whose philosophies are a mix of mindfulness, fake history, and something called "mental archery." Fellow comedic genius Paul Beatty calls it "wonderfully moving and beautifully musical." While Kirkus thought it too sour and misanthropic, Publishers Weekly deemed it "a searing exploration of desperate hopes." Their reviewer adds, "Lipsyte's potent blend of spot-on satire, menacing bit players, and deadpan humor will delight readers." (Edan)
Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin: Schweblin's Fever Dream, published in America in 2017 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was, excepting Fire and Fury, perhaps the most frightening book of the last two years. Schweblin has a special knack for blending reality and eerie unreality, and she provides readers more nightmare fuel with Mouthful of Birds, a collection of 20 short stories that has drawn advance praise describing it as "surreal," "visceral," "addictive," and "disturbing." If you like to be unsettled, settle in. (Adam P.)
We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin: VQR columnist and essayist Ruffin now publishes his debut novel, a near-futurist social satire about people in a southern city undergoing "whitening" treatments to survive in a society governed by white supremacy. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls this a "singular and unforgettable work of political art." For Ruffin's nonfiction, read his excellent essay on gentrification and food in New Orleans for Southern Foodways or his work for VQR. (Lydia)
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley: It took Hadley 46 years to publish her first novel, 2002's Accidents in the Home. In the 17 years since, she has made up for lost time, publishing three story collections and six novels, including Late in the Day, about two middle-aged married couples coping with the death of one member of their tight-knit quartet. "Hadley is a writer of the first order," says Publishers Weekly, "and this novel gives her the opportunity to explore, with profound incisiveness and depth, the inevitable changes inherent to long-lasting marriages." (Michael)
House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma: House of Stone is a debut novel by Zimbabwean author Tshuma. The book opens with the narrative of a 24-year-old tenant Zamani, who works to make his landlord and landlady love him more than they loved their son, Bukhosi, who went missing during a protest in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. In his book review for The Guardian, Helon Habila praises Tshuma as a "wily writer," and says that her book is full of surprises. House of Stone not only takes unexpected turns in terms of plot lines, but also bears no single boring sentence. It makes the violent political scenes and circumstance-driven characters vivid on the page and thus renders Zimbabwean history in a very powerful and yet believable way. (Jianan)
Sugar Run by Mesha Maren: In what Publishers Weekly describes as an "impressive debut replete with luminous prose," Maren's Sugar Run tells the story of Jodi McCarty, unexpectedly released from prison after 18 years inside. McCarty meets and quickly falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother, and together they set out towards what they hope will be a better life. Set within the insular confines of rural West Virginia, Sugar Run is a searing, gritty novel about escape—the longing for it, the impossibility of it—and it announces Maren as a formidable talent to watch. (Adam P.)
The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay: Searching for answers about her late mother, Shalini, a 30-year-old privileged woman, travels from Bangalore to Kashmir in search of a mysterious man from her past. In the remote village, political and military tensions rise and threaten the new community she's immersed herself in. Publishers Weekly, in starred review, wrote: "Vijay's stunning debut novel expertly intertwines the personal and political to pick apart the history of Jammu and Kashmir." (Carolyn)
Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom: A scholar who has earned acclaim both within her discipline of Sociology and outside of the academy for her book Lower Ed, on the predatory for-profit college industry, Cottom has a huge following that looks to her for her trenchant analyses of American society. Now she publishes a collection of essays on race, gender, money, work, and class that combines scholarship and lived experience with Cottom's characteristic rigor and style. (Lydia)
To Keep the Sun Alive by Rebeah Ghaffari: A story of the family of a retired judge in Iran just before the Revolution, where the events that roil the family are set against, and affected by, the events that will roil the nation. Kirkus calls this "an evocative and deeply felt narrative portrait." (Lydia)
Castle on the River Vistula by Michelle Tea: Protagonist Sophie Swankowski's journeys in Tea's Young Adult Chelsea Trilogy will come to an end in Castle on the River Vistula, when the 13-year-old magician journeys from her home in Massachusetts to Poland, the birthplace of her friend "the gruff, filthy mermaid Syrena." Tea is an author familiar with magic, having penned Modern Tarot: Connecting with Your Higher Self through the Wisdom of the Cards, and she promises to bring a similar sense of the supernatural in Sophie's concluding adventures. (Ed)
Mothers by Chris Power: Smooth and direct prose makes Power's debut story collection an entrancing read. In "Portals," the narrator meets Monica, a dancer from Spain, and her boyfriend. "We drank a lot and told stories." A year later, Monica messages the narrator and says she wants to meet up—and is newly single. Power pushes through the narration, as if we have been confidently shuffled into a room to capture the most illuminating moments of a relationship. Lying on the grass together, Monica stares at the narrator as she rolls onto her back. "It was an invitation, but I hesitated. This was exactly what I had come for, but now the tiny space between us felt unbridgeable." Mothers is full of those sharp moments of our lives: the pulse of joy, the sting of regret. (Nick R.)
Nobody's Looking At You by Janet Malcolm: This essay collection is a worthy follow-up to Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. In this new collection, readers can catch up on the masterful profiles of Eileen Fisher, Rachel Maddow, and Yuju Wang they may have missed in The New Yorker, as well as book reviews and literary criticism. (Hannah)
Talent by Juliet Lapidos: This debut is a literary mystery/campus novel set into motion by a graduate student, Anna Brisker, who can't finish her dissertation on "an intellectual history of inspiration." When Anna crosses paths with the niece of a deceased writer famous for his writer's block, she's thrilled to discover that the eminent writer has left behind unfinished work. Anna thinks she's found the perfect case study for her thesis, but soon learns that the niece's motives aren't what they seem and that the author's papers aren't so easily interpreted. (Hannah)
Golden State by Ben Winters: With The Last Policemen Trilogy and Underground Airlines, Winters has made a career of blending speculative fiction with detective noir. His next in that vein is Golden State, a novel set in California in the not-too-distant future—an independent state where untruth is the greatest offense. Laszlo Ratesic works as a Speculator, a state force with special abilities to sense lies. (Janet)
Hear Our Defeats by Laurent Gaudé: Prix Goncourt winning French playwright Gaudé's philosophical meditation on human foibles and violence makes its English language debut. Bracketed around the romance of a French intelligence officer and an Iraqi archeologist, the former in pursuit of an American narco-trafficker and the latter attempting to preserve sites from ISIS, Hear Our Defeats ultimately ranges across history, including interludes from Ulysses S. Grant pushing into Virginia and Hannibal's invasion of Rome. (Ed)
You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian: The short story collection whose centerpiece is "Cat Person," the viral sensation that had millions of people identifying with/fearing/decrying/loving/debating a work of short fiction last year. (Lydia)
Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen: This writer from Greenland was 22 when she won a prestigious writing prize, and her subsequent debut novel took the country by storm. Now available for U.S. readers, a profile in The New Yorker calls the novel "a work of a strikingly modern sensibility—a stream-of-consciousness story of five queer protagonists confronting their identities in twenty-first-century Greenlandic culture." (Lydia)
Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer: A guide to usage by a long-time Random House copyeditor that seems destined to become a classic (please don't copyedit this sentence). George Saunders calls it "A mind-blower—sure to jumpstart any writing project, just by exposing you, the writer, to Dreyer's astonishing level of sentence-awareness." (Lydia)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James: Following up his Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, James has written the first book in what is to be an epic trilogy that is part Lord of the Rings, part Game of Thrones, and part Black Panther. In this first volume, a band of mercenaries—made up of a witch, a giant, a buffalo, a shape-shifter, and a bounty hunter who can track anyone by smell (his name is Tracker)—are hired to find a boy, missing for three years, who holds special interest for the king. (Janet)
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li: Where Reasons End is the latest novel by the critically acclaimed author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Li creates this fictional space where a mother can have an eternal, carefree conversation with her child Nikolai, who commits suicide at the age of 16. Suffused with intimacy and deepest sorrows, the book captures the affections and complexity of parenthood in a way that has never been portrayed before. (Jianan)
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang: Wang writes brilliantly and beautifully about lives lived with mental illness. Her first novel, The Border of Paradise, traces a family through generations, revealing the ways each becomes inheritors of the previous generation's isolation and depression. In The Collected Schizophrenias, her first essay collection (for which she was awarded the Whiting Award and Greywolf Nonfiction Prize), Wang draws from her experience as both patient and speaker/advocate navigating the vagaries of the mental healthcare system while also shedding light on the ways it robs patients of autonomy. What's most astonishing is how Wang writes with such intelligence, insight, and care about her own struggle to remain functional while living with schizoaffective disorder. (Anne)
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson: It's the mid-1980s and American Cold War adventurism has set its sights on the emerging west African republic of Burkina Faso. There's only one problem: the agent sent to help swing things America's way is having second, and third, thoughts. The result is an engaging and intelligent stew of espionage and post-colonial political agency, but more important, a confessional account examining our baser selves and our unscratchable itch to fight wars that cannot be won. (Il'ja)
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli: The two-time
finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award has written a road novel
for America in the 21st century. In the book, a family of four set out from their home in New York to visit a place in Arizona called Apacheria, a.k.a. the region once inhabited by the Apache tribe. On their way down south, the family reveals their own set of long-simmering conflicts, while the radio gives updates on an "immigration crisis" at the border. (Thom)
The White Book by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith): In 2016, Kang's stunning
novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker Prize; in 2018, she drew Man Booker attention again with her autobiographical work The White Book. There are loose connections between the two—both concern sisters, for one, and loss, and both feature Han's beautiful, spare prose—but The White Book is less a
conventional story and more like a meditation in fragments. Written about and to the narrator's older sister, who died as a newborn, and about the white objects of grief, Han's work has been likened to "a secular prayer book," one that "investigates the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life." (Kaulie)
Bangkok Wakes to Rainby Pitchaya Sudbanthad: NYFA Fellow Sudbanthad's debut novel, Bangkok Wakes to Rain, has already been
hailed as "important, ambitious, and accomplished," by Mohsin Hamid, and a book
that "brilliantly sounds the resonant pulse of the city in a wise and far-reaching meditation on home," by Claire Vaye Watkins. This polyphonic novel follows myriad characters—from a self-exiled jazz pianist to a former student
revolutionary—through the thresholds of Bangkok's past, present, and future. Sudbanthad, who splits his time between Bangkok and New York, says he wrote the novel by letting his mind wander the city of his birth: "I arrived at the site of a house that, to me, became a theatrical stage where characters…entered and left; I followed them, like a clandestine voyeur, across time and worlds, old and new." (Anne)
The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison: A new collection of nonfiction–speeches, essays, criticism, and reflections–from the Nobel-prize winning Morrison. Publishers Weekly says ""Some superb pieces headline this rich collection…Prescient and highly relevant to the present political moment…" (Lydia)
Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolano: Spirit of Science Fiction is a novel by the critically acclaimed author of 2666, Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Apparently it is a tale about two young poets aspiring to find their positions in the literary world. But the literary world in Bolano's sense is also a world of revolution, fame, ambition, and more so of sex and love. Like Bolano's previous fiction, Spirit of Science Fiction is a Byzantine maze of strange and beautiful life adventures that never fails to provide readers with intellectual and emotional satisfaction. (Jianan)
Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken: It's hard to believe it'sbeen 20 years since McCracken published her first novel, The Giant's House,perhaps because, since then, she's given us two brilliant short storycollections and one of the most powerful memoirs in recent memory. Her fanswill no doubt rejoice at the arrival of this second novel, which follows threegenerations of a family in a small New England town. Bowlaway refers to acandlestick bowling alley that Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, calls"almost a character, reflecting the vicissitudes of history that determineprosperity or its opposite." In its own starred review, Kirkus praisesMcCracken's "psychological acuity." (Edan)
Good Will Come from the Sea by Christos Ikonomou (translated by Karen Emmerich): In the same way that Greece was supposedly the primogeniture of Western civilization, the modern nation has prefigured over the last decade in much of what defines our current era. Economic hardship, austerity, and the rise of political radicalism are all manifest in the Greece explored by Ikonomou in his short story collection Good Will Come from the Sea. These four interlocked stories explore modern Greece as it exists on the frontlines of both the refugee crisis and scarcity economics. Ikonomou's stories aren't about the Greece of chauvinistic nostalgia; as he told an interviewer in 2015 his characters "don't love the Acropolis; they don't know what it means," for it's superficial "to feel just pride;" rather, the author wishes to "write about the human condition," and so he does. (Ed)
The Heavens by Sandra Newman: This novel connects analternate universe New York in the year 2000 with Elizabethan England, througha woman who believes she has one foot in each era. A fascinating-soundingromance about art, illness, destiny, and history. In a starred review, Kirkuscalls this "a complex, unmissable work from a writer who deserves wideacclaim." (Lydia)
All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópulos (translated by Alice Whitmore): Argentinian writer Dimópulos's first book in English is a novel that focuses on a narrator who has been traveling for a decade. The narrator reflects on her habit of leaving family, countries, and lovers. And when she decides to commit to a relationship, her lover is murdered, adding a haunting and sorrowful quality to her interiority. Julie Buntin writes, "The scattered pieces of her story—each of them wonderfully distinct, laced with insight, violence, and sensuality—cohere into a profound evocation of restlessness, of the sublime and imprisoning act of letting go." (Zoë)
The Hundred Wells of Salaga by Ayesha Harruna Attah: An account of 19th-century Ghana, the novel follows twoyoung girls, Wurche and Aminah, who live in the titular city which is a notoriouscenter preparing people for sale as slaves to Europeans and Americans. Attah's novelgives a texture and specificity to the anonymous tales of the Middle Passage,with critic Nadifa Mohamad writing in The Guardian that "One of the strengthsof the novel is that it complicates the idea of what 'African history' is."(Ed)
The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer: This much sought-afterdebut, which was the object of a bidding war, is based on the life of LeeMiller, a Vogue model turned photographer who decided she would rather "take apicture than be one." The novel focuses on Miller's tumultuous romance withphotographer Man Ray in early 1930s Paris, as Miller made the transition frommuse to artist. Early reviews suggests that the novel more than lives up to itspromise, with readers extolling its complicated heroine and page-turningpacing. (Hannah)
Northern Lights by Raymond Strom: A story about the struggle for survival in a small town in Minnesota, the novel follows the androgynous teen run-away ShaneStephenson who is searching in Holm, Minn., for the mother who abandonedhim. Shane finds belonging among the adrift and addicted of the crumbling town,but he also finds bigotry and hatred. (Ed)
Adèle by Leila Slimani (translated by Sam Taylor): Slimani, who won the Prix Goncourtin 2016, became famous after publishing Dans le jardin de l'ogre, which is nowbeing translated and published in English as Adèle. The French-Morocconnovelist's debut tells the story of a titular heroine whose burgeoning sexaddiction threatens to ruin her life. Upon winning an award in Morocco for thenovel, Slimani said its primary focus is her character's "loss of self." (Thom)
The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-Jung (translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl): Known as "one of the most beloved masterpieces in Korean literature," The Nine Cloud Dream (also known as Kuunmong) takes readers on a journey reminiscent of Dante's Inferno combining aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, and indigenous Korean shamanic religions in a 17th-century tale, which, rare in Buddhist texts, includes strong representation of women. Accompanied by gorgeous illustrations and an introduction, notations, and translation done by one of my favorite translators, Heinz Insu Fenkl. Akin to Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, an intriguing read for readers interested in Buddhism, Korea, and mindfulness. (Marie Myung-Ok)
Notes From a Black Woman's Diary by Kathleen Collins: Notlong after completing her first feature film, Losing Ground, in 1982, Collins died from breast cancer at age 46. In 2017, her short story collectionabout the lives and loves of black Americans in the 1960s, Whatever Happened toInterracial Love?, was published to ringing critical acclaim. Now comes NotesFrom a Black Woman's Diary, which is much more than the title suggests. Inaddition to autobiographical material, the book includes fiction, plays,excerpts from an unfinished novel, and the screenplay of Losing Ground, withextensive directorial notes. This book is sure to burnish Collins'sflourishing posthumous reputation. (Bill)
Hard to Love by Briallen Hopper: A collection of essays on therelationships between family members and friends, with background on the author'schildhood in an evangelical family. The collection garnered a starredreview from Kirkus and praise from essayist Leslie Jamison, who calls is "extraordinary."(Lydia)
A Weekend in New York by Benjamin Markovits: Markovits is aversatile writer, his work ranging from a fictional trilogy about Lord Byron toan autobiographical novel about basketball. He returns to athletics in AWeekend in New York, where Paul Essinger is a mid-level tennis player and1,200-1 shot to win the U.S. Open. Essinger may be alone on the court, but he hasplenty of company at his Manhattan home when his parents visit during thetournament. Upon its British publication, The Guardian praised the "light,limber confidence" with which Markowits handles sporting knowledge and hisacute treatment of the family tensions amid "first-world also-rans." (Matt)
Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev: This debut is the memoirof a young woman's life shaped by unrelenting existential terror. The story istold in fragmentary vignettes beginning with Shalmiyev's fraught emigration asa young child from St. Petersburg, Russia to the United States, leaving behindthe mother who had abandoned her. It closes with her resolve to find herestranged mother again. (Il'ja)
Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina (translated by Lisa C. Hayden): It is 1930 in the Soviet Unionand Josef Stalin's de-kulakization program has found its pace. Among thevictims is a young Tatar family: the husband murdered, the wife exiled toSiberia. This is her story of survival and eventual triumph. Winner of the 2015Russian Booker prize, this debut novel draws heavily on the first-personaccount of the author's grandmother, a Gulag survivor. (Il'ja)
The Atlas of Red and Blues by Devi Laskar: This novel'sinciting incident is a police raid on the home the daughter of Bengaliimmigrants, told from her perspective as she lies bleeding and running throughthe events, experiences, and memories that have led her to this moment. KieseLaymon calls Laskar's book "as narratively beautiful as it isbrutal…I've never read a novel that does nearly as much in so few pages.Laskar has changed how we will all write about state-sanctioned terror in thisnation." (Lydia)
Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis: Imagine if Malcom Lowry'shallucinogenic masterpiece Under the Volcano, about the drunken perambulationsof a British consul in a provincial Mexican village on Dia de Los Muertos, hadbeen written by a native of that country? Such could describe Aridjis'snovel Sea Monsters, which follows the 17-year-old Luisa and her acquaintanceTomás as they leave Mexico City in search of a troupe of Ukrainian dwarves whohave defected from a Soviet circus. Luisa eventually settles in Oaxaca whereLuisa takes sojourns to the "Beach of the Dead" in search of anyone who "nomatter what" will "remain a mystery." (Ed)
Elsewhere, Home by Leila Aboulela: The 13 stories inAboulela's new collection are set in locales as distant as Khartoum and London,yet throughout they explore the universal feelings of the migrant experience:displacement, longing, but also the incandescent hope of creating a differentlife. (Nick M.)
The Cassandra by Sharma Shields: Mildred Groves, TheCassandra's titular prophetess, sometimes sees flashes of the future. She isalso working at the top-secret Hanford Research Center in the 1940s, where theseeds of atomic weapons are sown and where her visions are growing morehorrifying—and going ignored at best, punished at worst. Balancing thoroughresearch and mythic lyricism, Shields's novel is a timely warning of whathappens when warnings go unheeded. (Kaulie)
Tonic and Balm by Stephanie Allen: A new title from ShadeMountain Press, Tonic and Balm takes place in 1919, it's setting a travelingmedicine show, complete with "sideshows," sword-swallowers, anddubious remedies. The book explores this show's peregrinations against thebackdrop of poverty and racist violence in rural Pennsylvania. Allen's firstbook, A Place Between Stations: Stories, was a finalist for the Hurston-WrightLegacy Award. (Lydia)
Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa (translated by Leri Price): "Most of my friendshave left the country and are now refugees," Khalifa wrote in a recentessay. Yet he remains in Syria, a place where "those of us who have stayed aredying one by one, family by family, so much so that the idea of an empty citycould become a reality." If literature is a momentary stay against confusion,then Khalifa's novels are ardent stays against destruction and decay—and DeathIs Hard Work continues this tradition. The novel begins with the dying hours ofAbdel Latif al-Salim, who looks his son Bolbol "straight in the eye" in orderto give his dying wish: to be buried several hours away, next to his sister.The novel becomes a frenetic attempt for his sons to honor this wish and reachAnabiya. "It's only natural for a man," Khalifa writes, "to be weak and makeimpossible requests." And yet he shows this is what makes us human. (Nick R.)
Aerialists by Mark Mayer. For those gutted by the news ofRingling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus closing in 2017, Mayer's debutcollection supplies a revivifying dose of that carney spirit. The storiesfeature circus-inspired characters—most terrifyingly a murderous clown-cum-realestate agent—in surrealist situations. We read about a bearded womanrevolutionist, a TV personality strongwoman, and, in the grand tradition of petburial writing that reached its acme with Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, thefuneral of a former circus elephant. Publishers Weekly called it a "high-wiredebut [that] exposes the weirdness of everyday life." (Matt)
Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri: Published for thefirst time in the U.S., this is the seventh novel by the renowned writer, awork of autofiction about a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri revisiting hischildhood in Mumbai. Publishers Weekly says, "in this cogent andintrospective novel, Chaudhuri movingly portrays how other people can allowindividuals to connect their present and past." (Lydia)
A People's Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams: An anthology of 25 speculative stories from a range of powerful storytellers, among them Maria Dahvana Headley, Daniel José Older, and Alice Sola Kim. LaValle and Adams sought stories that imagine a derailed future—tales that take our fractured present and make the ruptures even further. Editor LaValle, an accomplished speculative fiction writer himself (most recently The Changeling, and my personal favorite, the hilarious and booming Big Machine), is the perfect writer to corral these stories. LaValle has said "one of the great things about horror and speculative fiction is that you are throwing people into really outsized, dramatic situations a lot…[including] racism and sexism and classism, biases against the mentally ill"—the perfect description for this dynamic collection. (Nick R.)
Trump Sky Alpha by Mark Doten: Doten's Trump Sky Alpha,is the first and last Trump novel I'll ever want to read. Doten started writingthe novel in 2015, when our current predicament, I mean, president, was a mereand unfathomable possibility. Doten's President Trump brings about the nuclearapocalypse, and in its aftermath a journalist takes an assignment to researchInternet humor at the end of the world. The result? An "unconventional anddarkly satirical mix of memes, Twitter jokes, Q&As, and tightly writtenstream-of-consciousness passages," according to Booklist. From this feat, saysJoshua Cohen,"Mark Doten emerges as the shadow president of our benightedgeneration of American literature." (Anne)
Nothing but the Night by John Williams: The John Williams ofStoner fame revival continues with the reissue of his first novel by NYRB,first published in 1948, a story dealing with mental illness and trauma withechoes of Greek tragedy. (Lydia)
Famous Children and Famished Adults by Evelyn Hampton:"[Evelyn] Hampton's stunned sentences will remind you, because you haveforgotten, how piercingly disregulating life is," writes Stacey Levine ofHampton's debut story collection Discomfort, published by Ellipsis Press. Ifirst encountered Hampton's fictions through her novella, Madam, a story of aschoolteacher and her pupils at an academy, where memory is a vehicle and somuch seems a metaphor and language seems to turn in on itself. Hampton'sforthcoming story collection Famous Children and Famished Adults won FC2'sRonald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and continues with the quixotic. Inthis collection, Noy Holland says, "the exotic and toxic intermingle." (Anne)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi: Oyeyemi became a criticaldarling in 2014 with Boy, Snow, Bird, a retelling of "Snow White." She takes usback into fairy tale world with Gingerbread, the story of mother and daughter,Harriet and Perdita Lee, and their family's famous, perhaps…magical,gingerbread recipe. Along with Harriet's childhood friend Gretel, the Leesendure family, work, and money drama all for the sake of that crunchy spice.(Janet)
The Reign of the Kingfisher by TJ Martinson: Martinson's debut novel is set in a Chicago that used to have a superhero. It'sone of those books that plays with genre in an interesting way: the prologuereads like a graphic novel, and the entire book reads like literary detectivefiction. With a superhero in it. Back in the 1980s, a mysterious and inhumanlystrong man known as the Kingfisher watched over the streets, until hismutilated body was recovered from the river. In his absence, crime once againbegan to rise. But did the Kingfisher really die? Or did he fake his own death?If he faked his own death, why won't he return to save his city? Either way,the book suggests, we cannot wait for a new superhero, or for the return of theold one. We must save ourselves. (Emily)
Lot by Bryan Washington: Washington is a talentedessayist—his writing on Houston for Catapult and elsewhere are must-reads—andLot is a glowing fiction debut. Imbued with the flesh of fiction, Lot is aliterary song for Houston. "Lockwood," the first story, begins: "Roberto wasbrown and his people lived next door so of course I went over on weekends. Theywere full Mexican. That made us superior." Their house was a "shotgun withswollen pipes." A house "you shook your head at when you drove up the road."But the narrator is drawn to Roberto, and when they are "huddled in hiscloset," palms squeezed together, we get the sense Washington has a keen eyeand ear for these moments of desire and drama. His terse sentences punch andpop, and there's room for our bated breath in the remaining white space. (NickR.)
The New Me by Halle Butler: If Butler's first novel,Jillian, was the "feel-bad book of the year," then her second, The New Me, is askewering of the 21st-century American dream of self-betterment. Butlerhas already proven herself a master of writing about work and its discontents,the absurdity of cubicle life and office work in all of its dead ends. The NewMe takes it to a new level in what Catherine Lacey calls a Bernhardian "darkcomedy of female rage." The New Me portrays a 30-year old temp worker whoyearns for self-realization, but when offered a full-time job, she becomesparalyzed realizing the hollowness of its trappings. (Anne)
Kaddish.com by Nathan Englander: Pulitzer finalist Englander's latest novel follows Larry, an atheist in a family of orthodox MemphisJews. When he refuses to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead,for his recently deceased father, Larry risks shocking his family andimperiling the fate of his father's soul. Like everyone else in the21st century, Larry decides the solution lies online, and he makes awebsite, kaddish.com, to hire a stranger to recite the daily prayer in hisplace. What follows is a satirical take on God, family, and the Internet thathas been compared to early Philip Roth. (Jacqueline)
Guestbook: Ghost Stories by Leanne Shapton: A collection of haunting stories and illustrations from the writer and visual artist Shapton, of which Rivka Galchen says, "Guestbook reveals Shapton as a ventriloquist, a diviner, a medium, a force, a witness, a goof, and above all, a gift. One of the smartest, most moving, most unexpected books I have read in a very long time." (Lydia)
Look How Happy I'm Making You by Polly Rosenwaike: A couple of months ago I zipped through this funny and poignant collection of stories about women grappling with motherhood in many different ways: one struggles with infertility, for instance, and another gets pregnant by accident. Throughout, I was struck by the depth of feeling, not once compromised by the brevity of the form. In its starred review, Kirkus calls it "an exquisite collection that is candid, compassionate, and emotionally complex." Meaghan O'Connell says, "Each story in Look How Happy I'm Making You is a lovely universe unto itself — funny, intimate, casually profound — but there is something transcendent about reading them together like this." (Edan)
Little Boy by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Ostensibly a memoir.Yet the idea of a Beat poet rhapsodizing, eulogizing or—God help us—memorizing his life as a Beat would be a defeat difficult to recover from.Don't worry. There's plenty of indignation, wry observation, and inevitableprognostication as Ferlinghetti looks back on his near-century on the planet toremind us to—among other matters—stop griping and play the hand we'redealt. (Il'ja)
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden: With a sparkling blurb from Mary Gaitskill—"Sad, funny, juicy and prickly with deep and secret thoughtful places"—and a sparkling cover (literally—see her website), T. Kira Madden's debut memoir, a coming-of-age story set in Boca Raton, is primed for buzz. As a grownup, Madden self-describes as an "APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician"; as a child, "Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability . . . she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls." One of the best, most evocative titles of the release season, IMHO. (Sonya)
EEG by Dasa Drndic: I first encountered Daša Drndic through her novel Belladona in June, unwittingly a mere two weeks after the author's death from lung cancer. I was struck by the character Andreas Ban, and his idiosyncratic reflection upon ears, that "marvelous ugly organ," accompanied by a diagram of an ear marked with the body's points. This character Ban continues into Drndic's next and final book, EEG, where after surviving a suicide attempt he goes on to dissect and expose the hidden evils and secrets of our times. He's stand-in for Drndic herself, who wrote emphatically and had stated that "Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue, be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become." (Anne)
Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda: Poet Terese Svoboda brings a lyrical intensity to her collection of short stories in Great American Desert. Svoboda examines the excavations that we perform on ourselves and on the land, with her stories ranging from the ancient North American Clovis people, to a science fiction description of a massive pink pyramid arising from the prairies far into the future. Author of Swamplandia! Karren Russel describes Great American Desert as "A devious and extraordinary new collection of stories from one of our best writers." (Ed)
King of Joy by Richard Chiem: Richard Chiem is the author of You Private Person, which was named one of Publishers Weekly's 10 Essential Books of the American West, and now he brings us King of Joy, an experimental narrative that explores fantasy, trauma, survival, and resilience. The novel follows Corvus, a woman that can imagine her way out of any situation–until she experiences a grief so profound that she cannot escape through fantasy. Foreword Reviews recently gave it a starred review and Kristen Arnette describes the novel as "a brilliant, tender examination of the unholy magnitude of trauma. It shows how pain can simultaneously destroy and preserve a person. Most of all, it is just goddamn beautiful writing." (Zoë)
The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Sam Taylor): Writes Priya Parmal in her 2014 New York Times review of Maylis de Kerangal's first novel translated into English, The Heart, "These characters feel less like fictional creations and more like ordinary people, briefly illuminated in rich language, beautifully translated by Sam Taylor, that veers from the medical to the philosophical." In the The Cook, a "hyperrealist" tale centered around a self-taught professional cook, we are treated to "lyricism and [the] intensely vivid evocative nature of Maylis de Kerangal's prose, which conjures moods, sensations, and flavors, as well as the exhausting rigor and sometimes violent abuses of kitchen work." The Cook is her 10th novel, her second translated into English (also by Taylor); Anglophones can be grateful that we're finally catching up with this many-prize-winning author. (Sonya)
Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan: A speculative novel about the "end of the Internet," and what comes after for a society increasingly dependent on Big Data, surveillance, and the other sinister trappings of the 21st century. From the author of this vivid take on Santa Claus and his elves in the age of Amazon. (Lydia)
What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young: A memoir in essays by the co-founder of VerySmartBrothas.com, heartfelt and bursting with humor. In Young's words, "it's a look at some of the absurdities, angsts and anxieties of existing while black in America," and includes deeply personal material, including about the death of his mother, which was rooted in racism in America. (Lydia)
The Parade by Dave Eggers: No one can accuse Eggers of playing it safe. Last year, in The Monk of Mokha, he profiled a Yemeni American who dreams of reconstituting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee. A couple years before that, he wrote a novel, Heroes of the Frontier, about an American dentist road-tripping around Alaska with her kids. In his latest novel, two Western contractors, one named Four, the other named Five, travel to an unnamed country to build a new road intended to mark the end of a ruinous civil war. It's "a parable of progress, as told by J.M. Coetzee to Philip K. Dick," says Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North. (Michael)
Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt: For her seventh novel, the celebrated Siri Hustvedt goes meta. A novelist of a certain age, known as S.H., discovers a notebook and early drafts of a never-completed novel she wrote during her first year in New York City in the late 1970s, some four decades ago. The discovery allows S.H. to revisit her long-ago obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. Weaving the discovered texts with S.H.'s memories and things forgotten, Hustvedt has produced a rich novel built on the sand of shifting memory. As a bonus, the book includes a sampling of Hustvedt's whimsical drawings. (Bill)
White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf: When a huge, garish home called the White Elephant infiltrates Willard Park, a quiet suburb, the neighborhood falls into utter comedic chaos. In the shadow of the home, neighbors begin to fight, lives are upended, and their once-peaceful town becomes anything but. Meg Wolitzer calls the debut novel a "smart, enjoyable suburban comedy." (Carolyn)
The Promise of Elsewhere by Brad Leithauser: The intellectually peripatetic Brad Leithauser—poet, novelist, editor, translator and MacArthur fellow whose interests range from Iceland to insects, American music and ghosts—has produced a sharp comic novel about a monster of a mid-life crisis. Louie Hake, a 43-year-old professor at a third-rate Michigan college, comes undone when his actress wife is discovered performing acts of "gross indecency" with her director. Bipolar Louie sets off on a tour of great world architecture, but he has stopped taking his lithium (though not all psychotropic substances), so he can get erratic. He can also be very funny—and very touching on those great American taboos, shame and failure. (Bill)
The Altruists by Andrew Ridker: Touted as "an international sensation" and sold in many countries, this debut novel follows the quest of a down-on-his-luck professor to get his mitts on his children's inheritance. In a starred review, Kirkus calls it "a painfully honest, but tender, examination of how love goes awry in the places it should flourish." (Lydia)
When All Else Fails by Rayyan al-Shawaf: Past Millions contributor and NBCC critic al-Shawaf is out with his own novel, an absurdist tale of a lovelorn and luckless Iraqi college student in the States whose life is upended by 9/11 and who later moves to Lebanon. (Lydia)
Good Talk by Mira Jacob: A graphic novel about raising her mixed-race son in a white supremacist society by the author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, built around conversations with a curious six-year-old. Jacqueline Woodson says "In Jacob's brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterical, always honest, and ultimately healing." (Lydia)
Working by Robert A. Caro: Widely known—and celebrated—for his monumental biographies of LBJ and Robert Moses, Caro steps out from behind his subjects in Working, a collection of personal writings about, well, working. Here he describes his experiences searching Johnson's presidential archives, what it was like to interview some of the major figures of the last half century, and how exactly he goes about structuring those massive, award-winning books. Think of it as a behind-the-scenes look at how "the greatest political biographer of our time" gets the job done. (Kaulie)
Morelia by Renee Gladman: It's been said again and again that no one writes quite like Renee Gladman, whose writing and drawing explore movements of thought. Gladman's Ravicka series of novels, published by Dorothy Project, traverses the fictional city, where "everything is vivid and nothing is fixed." In Gladman's essay collection Calamities, she writes toward the experience of the everyday where nothing of importance happens (which are most days, she has commented). Gladman's latest, short novel, Morelia, "is an expansive mystery," Amina Cain writes, "but I don't think it exists to be solved…. There is a city with structures in it that multiply or are 'half-articulated,' where climate dictates how the city's inhabitants move." (Anne)
Women Talking by Miriam Toews: Canadians have come to accept that we can't keep Toews to ourselves any longer. After her sixth novel, All My Puny Sorrows, became an international sensation, the timely and urgent Women Talking is set to do the same. It's a fictionalized telling of real life rapes that took place in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia. After repeated attacks, a group of women are told they are lying about the violence or being punished by Satan. The narrative unfolds as they meet to decide what they will do: forgive, fight, or run. (Claire)
Let's Tell This Story Properly by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: This story collection by the author of the acclaimed epic novel, Kintu, is centered on the lives of Ugandans living in Britain, where they are both hyper-visible and unseen, excluded from British life as they work jobs in airport security, in hospitals, in caring for the elderly. In the title story, when the protagonist's husband dies in England, her fellow Ugandans start a fund-raising drive to pay for transporting the body back home. Their motivation beautifully captures the dislocation of exile: "We are not burying one of us in snow." It has been said that Makumbi has done for Ugandan writing what the great Chinua Achebe did for Nigerian literature. (Bill)
Walking on the Ceiling by Ayşegül Savaş: Of her family, global citizen (of Turkish descent) Savaş writes, "They share a ruthless knack of observation and an eye for the comedic . . . This is a family of runaway bandits and conspiring matriarchs, where uncles swagger around with pistols, illegitimate children emerge at every turn, family heirlooms . . . are nicked from brothel fires." Evidently drawing on her own life, Savas's debut novel is set in Paris (where she lives) and features a young Turkish woman who tells her family's stories to a novelist friend. "Their intimacy deepens, so does Nunu's fear of revealing too much . . . fears that she will have to face her own guilt about her mother and the narratives she's told to protect herself from her memories." Writes Helen Phillips, "This quietly intense debut is the product of a wise and probing mind." (Sonya)
The Ash Family by Molly Dektar: A story about a young woman who is lured to an intentional community in the North Carolina mountains by an enigmatic man, only to find out that her community members are disappearing one by one. Samantha Hunt says "Dektar's unstoppable tale of a country beyond is an addictive read so engrossing I forget where I am." (Lydia)
I Miss you When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott: An debut essay collection from the Emmy-winning TV host and beloved bookseller at Parnsassus Books in Nashville. Philpott's inspiration came from readers who would beeline to the memoir section to pick up Eat, Pray, Love or Wild, then ask, "What do you have like this, but more like me?" With essays that Ann Patchett calls relentlessly funny, self-effacing, and charming," the result is a kind of wisdom that comes from making so many wrong turns they strangely add up to something that is exactly right. (Claire)
Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza (translated by Thomas Bunstead): Critically acclaimed Argentinian writer Maria Gainza's first book translated in English. The story interweaves the narrator's fascination and obsession with art and art history and her intimate experiences involving her family, romantic relationships, and work life. Mariana Enríquez declares, "In between autofiction and the microstories of artists, between literary meet-ups and the intimate chronicle of a family, its past and its misfortunes, this book is completely original, gorgeous, on occasions delicate, and other times brutal." (Zoë)
Naamah by Sarah Blake: In a stunning, feminist retelling of Noah's Ark, Blake's debut novel focuses on Naamah (Noah's wife) and their family in the year after the Great Flood. Full of desire, fury, strength, and wavering faith, Naamah becomes the bedrock on which the Earth is rebuilt upon. Written in poetic prose, Lidia Yuknavitch praises the novel as "a new vision of storytelling and belief" and "a new myth-making triumph." (Carolyn)
Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine: With accolades from all-stars like Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Joy Williams, Ann Beattie—Kali Fajardo-Anstine's debut short-story collection promises to wow us. "Set against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado–a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite–these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force." A two-book deal with historical novel to follow. (Sonya)
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim: This debut has it all—a novel of the Korean immigrant experience, a courtroom thriller, an exploration of controversies over autism therapies (specifically here, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, HBOT). Kirkus calls it "deeply satisfying" and says "it should be huge." (Marie Myung-Ok)
Phantoms by Christian Kiefer: Kiefer's previous novel The Animals, was downright masterful, and I've been anticipating Phantoms ever since. In this new novel, veteran John Frazier returns shaken from the Vietnam War to witness a dispute between his family and their former neighbors, a Japanese-American family that was displaced during World War II and sent to an internment camp. The jacket copy calls it "a fierce saga of American culpability." Luis Alberto Urrea says, "Christian Kiefer is a masterful writer, and this magisterial novel is aching with beauty and power. This is a great book." I, for one, cannot wait! (Edan)
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi: In this novel's opening section, Dave and Sarah, two new students at a prestigious performing arts high school, fall madly in love under the watchful eye of a charismatic acting teacher. But in a second segment, set 12 years later, a change in narrative viewpoint calls into question everything the reader has understood to have happened before. Early reviews are highly polarized. Publishers Weekly says the novel is "destined to be a classic" while a reader on Goodreads, speaking for a number of other dissatisfied early readers, complained "the payoff wasn't worth the ick." (Michael)
Normal People by Sally Rooney: Rooney, the Irish author known for the acclaimed Conversations with Friends, has written a second novel about the lives of young people in modern Ireland. The protagonists of Normal People are teenagers named Connell and Marianne, who develop a strange friendship that both are determined to hide. Years pass, and as the two get older, their relationship grows steadily more complicated. (Thom)
The Gulf by Belle Boggs: The author of a trenchant inquiry into fertility and maternity in America, Belle Boggs turns to satire in her debut novel, a divinely witty look at the writing industry and religion. A job is a job, and so Marianne, a struggling Brooklyn poet—and atheist—agrees to direct a Christian artists' residency program, "The Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch," in Florida. (One of the residents is working on a poem cycle about Terri Schiavo, the comatose woman in the "right-to-die" case that galvanized religious groups in 2005.) There'll be skewering aplenty, but also a comic hero's conversion toward acceptance of her new community. (Matt)
A Wonderful Stroke of Luck by Ann Beattie: How do our charismatic teachers set the stage for the rest of our lives? That's one of the questions that Ann Beattie tackles in this novel. When a former New England boarding school student named Ben looks back on his childhood, he starts to questions the motives of his superstar teacher. Later on, his teacher gets in contact, and Ben has to grapple with his legacy. (Thom)
The Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno: Sometimes, you don't stop being obsessed with something just because the book's written. The Appendix Project takes up where Kate Zambreno's last book, Book of Mutter, left off, examining, as Kate Briggs describes it, about "how things – interests, attachments, experiences, projects – don't finish." The Appendix Project is a genre-crossing work about grief, time, memory, and the maternal, which is also a work about writing itself. Oh, and she's also got a collection of stories and a novel coming out this year – no big deal. "I try to work on many books at the same time," Zambreno has said. Same. (Jacqueline)
The Limits of the World by Jennifer Acker: Meet the Chandarias. Premchand is a doctor. His wife Urmila imports artisanal African crafts. Their son Sunil is studying for a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard. But for all their outward success, theirs is a family riven with secrets, and when the family is forced to return to Nairobi, where Premchand and Urmila were born, Sunil reveals an explosive secret of his own: his Jewish girlfriend, who has accompanied the family on the trip, is already his wife. (Michael)
Cape May by Chip Cheek: A novel about a 50s couple from Georgia on what turns into a louche honeymoon in Cape May. It sounds like whatever the literary opposite of On Chesil Beach is, with lots of sex, gin, and intrigue. (Lydia)
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About edited by Michele Filgate: A collection of essays about subjects too painful or explosive to broach among families. Based on Filgate's essay of the same name, about being abused by her stepfather, the essay features work from a stellar lineup of writers like Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, Brandon Taylor, André Aciman, and Leslie Jamison, among others. (Lydia)
Furious Hours by Casey Cep: Did you know Harper Lee wanted to write her own true-crime story à la In Cold Blood? That following the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee spent a year living in the Alabama backwoods to report it, and many more years in research, but ultimately never completed the work? In Furious Hours, Casey Cep completes the work Lee couldn't, writing a vivid portrayal of a killer, but also exploring the effects of fame and success on one of the most famous writers in U.S. history. (Nick)
Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang: Home Remedies, forthcoming in May 2019, is a debut collection of stories by Xuan Juliana Wang. The characters in the 12 stories vary from an immigrant family living in a cramped apartment on Mott Street who tries very hard to fit in, to a couple of divers at the Beijing Olympics who reach for their success. Wang conveys a promising message through her mind-boggling stories that whoever they are and wherever they are from, they have their rights to live extraordinary lives. (Jianan)
Lanny by Max Porter: The follow-up to Porter's highly lauded Grief Is a Thing With Feathers, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. This follow-up gives readers all the experimental typography and poignant insight they might expect—with a twist of gut-wrenching suspense thrown in. Lanny is a mischievous young boy who moves to a small village outside of London, where he attracts the attention of a menacing force. Porter has done it again. (Claire)
Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores: Move over, chupacabra—there's a new mythical Southwestern beast in town: the trufflepig, a creature worshipped by a lost Aranana Indian tribe in this exuberant novel set on a trippier version of the American border. Drugs are legal in this near-future society, but the new (illegal) craze is "filtered animals," extinct species revived, Jurassic-park style, and sold at great cost. The novel follows Esteban Bellacosa, trying to live the quiet life amid the region's traffickers, obscenely rich pleasure seekers and legends. This is Flores's first novel after a short story collection, wonderfully titled Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas. (Matt)
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin: A Taiwanese family of six struggles to make a go of it in far-flung Anchorage, Alaska, but tragedy strikes like a stone in a still pond, rippling out to affect each family member differently. Lin's debut novel is a raw depiction of grief and resolve set against the terrible beauty of the Alaskan north. (Nick M.)
The Farm by Joanne Ramos: This debut novel takes us to Golden Oaks Farm, where the super-rich begin life in utero with the best of everything, including balanced organic diets in young, cortisol-optimized wombs. The surrogate Hosts offer their wombs in exchange for a big payday that can transform their marginal lives. But as the Hosts learn, nine months locked inside the Farm can be a very long time. The story roams from the idyllic Hudson Valley to plush Fifth Avenue to a dormitory in Queens crowded with immigrant service workers. Echoing The Handmaid's Tale, the novel explores the tensions between ambition and sacrifice, luck and merit, and money and motherhood. (Bill)
Riots I Have Known by Ryan Chapman: In a New York penitentiary, a doorman-turned-inmate has barricaded himself inside the computer lab while a prison riot rages like hell. Alone, the inmate confesses, recounting the twists of fate that landed him in this predicament, and pondering the many—often hysterically funny—questions he has about it all. Chapman's satirical jab packs a full-fledged punch. (Nick M.)
China Dream by Ma Jian (translated by Flora Drew): A new novel from the Chinese novelist who lives in exile in the U.K. and whose books have never been allowed to appear in China. A dystopian satire where the dystopia is today, and an exploration of totalitarianism in China. Madeleine Thien writes for The Guardian: "Ma has a marksman's eye for the contradictions of his country and his generation, and the responsibilities and buried dreams they carry. His perceptiveness, combined with a genius for capturing people who come from all classes, occupations, backgrounds and beliefs; for identifying the fallibility, comedy and despair of living in absurd times, has allowed him to compassionately detail China's complex inner lives." (Lydia)
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips: Fulbright alumna Phillips has written a literary mystery about two sisters who go missing on the Kamchatka peninsula, an isolated spot and one of the easternmost points of Russia. Jim Shepard called this "a dazzlingly impressive first novel." (Lydia)
The Dinner Guest by Gabriela Ybarra (translated by Natasha Wimmer): Ybarra's critically acclaimed first novel, which won the Euskadi Literature Prize 2016 and was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. Her novel makes connections between two losses in her family: her mother's private death from cancer and her grandfather's public kidnapping and murder by terrorists in the 1970s. Drawing on research and personal experiences, the book creatively blends nonfiction and fiction. The Irish Times praises her work as a "captivating debut…written with the forensic eye of a true crime writer." (Zoë)
Exhalation by Ted Chiang: A new collection by the beloved science fiction writer, winner of many Hugo and Nebula awards, whose story "The Story of Your Life" formed the basis of the movie Arrival. (Lydia)
Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer: Lots of people grow up loving horses; few of them end up competing (and winning) in the "world's longest, toughest horse race." Lara Prior-Palmer, the niece of famed British equestrian Lucinda Green, is just the person to attempt that challenge, galloping across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland, competing in a country so adept at riding that they once conquered the world from the backs of horses. In Rough Magic, Prior-Palmer follows in the hoofs of Genghis Khan and becomes the first woman to win the challenge. (Ed)
Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn: In her much anticipated second novel, the author of the acclaimed Here Comes the Sun—a Young Lions, Center for Fiction, and John Leonard National Book Critics Circle finalist, and Lambda Literary Award winner, among other honors—Dennis-Benn plumbs the wrenching, too-real inner (and outer) conflict that women face when self-fulfillment is pitted against nurturing loved ones. Immigration, mother-daughter estrangement, sexuality and identity; "Frank, funny, salty, heartbreaking," writes Alexander Chee. What else could you ask for? (Sonya)
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: Poet Ocean Vuong, winner of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, returns with his highly anticipated debut novel. When Little Dog writes a letter to his illiterate mother, he reveals the family's past as well as parts of his life he had hidden from his mother. With his tender, graceful style, Vuong's family portrait explores race, class, trauma, and survival. (Carolyn)
In West Mills by De'Shawn Charles Winslow: Winslow's debut novel takes place in a small town in North Carolina from the 1940s to the 1980s. Through the story of Azalea "Knot" Centre, a fiercely independent woman, and Otis Lee, a helpful neighbor and longtime fixer, the narrative explores community and love with compassion and a singular voice. Rebecca Makkai describes Winslow's voice as "one that's not only pitch-perfect but also arresting and important and new." (Zoë)
Vincent and Alice and Alice by Shane Jones: There's always a hint of play and whimsy in Shane Jones's fictions. His previous novel, Crystal Eaters, was a wonderfully sad and tender story where what remained of a character's life could be measured in crystal counts—and where a young girl attempted to save her sick mother by reversing her diminishing numbers. In his latest, Vincent and Alice and Alice, Vincent's life has hit some doldrums with a divorce from his wife Alice and a mindless job with the state. However, things turn weird when work enrolls him in a productivity program and Alice returns, but changed. Is she a clone? A hologram? Possibly. It's a book that Chelsea Hodson calls both "laugh-out-loud funny and knife-in-your-heart sad." (Anne)
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett: In her Twitter bio, Arnett, known for her award-winning fiction and essays, describes herself thusly: "writer, librarian, lesbian willie nelson. 7-eleven scholar ™." I assume you are already sold, but just in case: This debut novel starts when Jessa walks into the family taxidermy shop to find her father dead. Though grieving, she steps up to manage the business while her family unravels around her. Besides dead things, Jami Attenberg points out this novel includes all the best things, "messed-up families, scandalous love affairs, art, life, death and the great state of Florida." (Claire)
Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann: In the essay "Spill Spilt," T Fleischmann writes of itinerancy, languorous Brooklyn summers, and art-going, with Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) at its center. The artwork is a pile of candies piled high in a corner that visitors are invited to take from and consume, and I am struck how sensual and alluring and and contemplative and intimate both the artwork and Fleischmann's writing feel, how this pairing seems essential. I can only imagine that essential is the word to describe Fleischmann's forthcoming Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, a book-length essay which reflects on Gonzalez-Torres's artwork while probing the relationships between bodies and art. Bhanu Kapil says the book "is 'spilled and gestured' between radical others of many kinds. Is this love? Is this 'the only chance to make of it an object'? Is this what it's like to be here at all? To write 'all words of life.'" (Anne)
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert: The bestselling author of The Signature of All Things—and of course, Eat, Pray, Love—returns to historical fiction with a novel set in the theater world of 1940s New York City. Ninety-five-year-old Vivian Morris looks back on her wild youth as a Vassar College dropout who is sent to live with her Aunt Peg, the owner of a decrepit, flamboyant, Midtown theater, called the Lily Playhouse. There, Vivian falls in love with the theater—and also meets the love of her life. (Hannah)
How Could She by Lauren Mechling: A novel about women's friendships and professional lives within the cutthroat media world that Elif Batuman called "as wise and unforgiving as a nineteenth-century French novel." (Lydia)
Among the Lost by Emiliano Monge (translated by Frank Wynne): A perverse love story about two victims of traffickers in an unnamed country who become traffickers themselves, by the renowned novelist from Mexico. The Guardian says "Monge's realist, deadly topical fiction is a weighty metaphor for our world gone mad." (Lydia)
The Travelers by Regina Porter: A debut novel-in-stories with a large cast of characters from two American families, one white, one black, flung across the world—in America, France, Vietnam, and Germany—from points in time ranging from 1950 to the early 2000s. Garth Greenwell calls this "an innovative and deeply moving debut." (Lydia)
Shapes of Native Nonfiction edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton: A new collection of essays by Native writers using the art of basket-weaving as a formal organizing principle for the essays and collection. Featuring work by Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. (Lydia)
Oval by Elvia Wilk: In Elvia Wilk's debut novel, weird things have been happening in Berlin: strange weather, artists hired as corporate consultants. Young couple Anja and Louis move into an "eco-friendly" community on an artificial mountain, The Berg, where they live rent-free in exchange for their silence on the house's structural problems. When Louis invents a pill called Oval that has the power to temporarily rewire a user's brain to become more generous, Anja is horrified—but Louis thinks it could solve Berlin's income disparity. Described as speculative fiction, but also sort of just what life is like now, Oval depicts life in the Anthropocene, but a little worse. For fans of Gary Shteyngart and Nell Zink. (Jacqueline)