Short Story Week at The Millions: A Brief Introduction

As we reach the year’s midpoint, it’s time to look at some of the books we are most looking forward to for the second half. There are many, many intriguing books on the docket for the next six months, but these are some of the most notable. Please share your most anticipated books in the comments.August: Chris Adrian wowed readers in 2006 with his post-apocalyptic novel The Children’s Hospital. That novel’s ardent fans will be pleased to get their hands on a new collection of stories called A Better Angel. The collection’s title story appeared in the New Yorker in 2006. More recently, Adrian offered up a personal essay in the New York Times Magazine about getting a tattoo.September: Philip Roth remains tireless, and his latest effort arrives in September, less than year after Exit Ghost garnered seemingly wall-to-wall coverage. With Indignation, Roth takes readers to 1951 America and introduces a young man, a son of a New Jersey butcher, trying to avoid the draft and the Korean War. An early review (with spoilers) offers, “Indignation is a sad and bloody book, and even if it delivers nothing particularly new – indeed, most of Roth’s books could be retitled Indignation – it is a fine supplement to Roth’s late achievements. And we learn a lot about kosher butchery.”Norwegian author Per Petterson collected a number of international prizes and upped his name recognition with Out Stealing Horses, which appeared to much acclaim in English in 2005 and won the IMPAC two years later. I read and enjoyed his In the Wake, which was written before Horses but appeared afterward in translation. Of that book, I wrote, the “boundary between madness and loneliness is plumbed to great effect.” Petterson’s latest to be translated for American audiences, To Siberia, is his second novel. Like Petterson’s other novels, To Siberia is inspired by his parents, who died in a ferry accident along with two of his brothers in 1990. A snippet of an excerpt is available at the NYRB (and more if you are a subscriber).According to our Prizewinners post, Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 book Gilead was one of the most celebrated novels of the last thirteen years. Gilead arrived 24 years after Robinson’s debut, Housekeeping, but Robinson’s latest, Home, comes after only a four-year hiatus. As Publishers Weekly first reported, “Home shares its setting with Gilead, and its action is concurrent with that novel’s. Characters from Gilead will also appear in Home.”Kate Atkinson is bringing back her reluctant detective Jackson Brodie for a third book, When Will There Be Good News?. An early review on a blog is mixed, and apparently he has a wife in this one. (Not sure how all the Brodie fans will take that!)Garth writes: “David Heatley’s My Brain is Hanging Upside Down is a graphic novel that takes readers deep into the uncomfortable psychological undercurrents of everyday American life. Like Chris Ware, who gave him a prominent blurb, David Heatley is a double threat with a pen: both words and drawings are adventures in style.”Garth writes: “Indie stalwart Joe Meno delivers Demons in the Spring, a new collection of 20 stories, each of them illustrated by a leading graphic artist.”October: John Barth, one of the leading lights of American fiction, has a new book on the way. The Development is, according to the publisher promo copy, “a touching, comic, deeply humane collection of linked stories about surprising developments in a gated community.” A story from the book “Toga Party,” appeared in Fiction magazine and in the Best American Short Stories 2007. There’s not much on the book just yet, but “Toga Party” won some praise from readers.Also making October an impressive month for new books will be Death with Interruptions by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. Though the book will no doubt be allegorical like many of Saramago’s works, the title is apparently meant somewhat literally as the story involves eternal life.Garth writes: “Ingo Schulze’s 2005 tome, New Lives, finally reaches American shores, in a translation by the magnificent John E. Woods. According to Schulze, it concerns an aesthete who finds himself plunged into the sturm and drang of capitalist life. Die Zeit called it ‘the best novel about German reunification.’ Period.”John Updike will follow up one of his best known novels, 1984’s The Witches of Eastwick, with a sequel, The Widows of Eastwick.Sara Gruen of Water for Elephants fame will return with Ape House. It “features the amazing bonobo ape.”November: Garth writes: “Characteristically, Roberto Bolaño throws a curveball, delivering 2666 a massive final novel that both does and doesn’t match the hype surrounding it. I haven’t decided whether or not it’s a good book, but it is, indisputably, a great one. I devoured it in a week and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.”It’s not every year that we get a new book from an American Nobel laureate, but this year we will get A Mercy from Toni Morrison. The promo description on Amazon is downright mysterious, offering this brief blurb: “A new novel, set, like Beloved, in the American past.” But she has been reading from the book at various events and Wikipedia already has some details, though these appear to be pulled from promotional material as well. We can glean that the novel will take place in the 17th century, the early days of slavery in the Americas.Please let us know what books you are most looking forward to for the second half of 2008 in the comments.