E: A Novel

New Price: $14.90
Used Price: $1.80

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

-
January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

Reply All: Ten Novels Written as Email

- | 1
Clarissa, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Sorrows of Young Werther...the epistolary novel has a long and distinguished tradition, predating the classic doorstoppers of the 18th century. It’s a fascinating form that allows for a complex interplay of different characters and plot lines—and for plenty of dramatic confusion as messages overlap, are read by the wrong people, or are read in the wrong order. The advent of email created a sort of electronic sub-genre of the classic epistolary tale. The email novel often takes place in a corporate setting, where it can shed light in interesting ways on the scandals and disappointments of office life. But as this list shows, writers have used emails in lots of other interesting ways too, delivering effects that are by turns hilarious, moving, romantic, poetic, and even erotic. What follows is a list of ten of the best novels written as email. 1. e by Matt Beaumont (2000) Probably the best-known email novel of them all, Matt Beaumont’s e was originally published with the subtitle The Novel of Liars, Lunch and Lost Knickers. The story takes place in a fictitious ad agency, Miller Shanks, and captures some of the hedonistic excess for which the ad industry was notorious in the late 20th century. At the start of the book, Miller Shanks has two weeks to win the prestigious $84 billion Coca-Cola account. The company’s big idea was actually stolen by creative director Simon Horne from a couple of recent college graduates. Because of an IT snafu, all the CEO’s messages are being rerouted via the Helsinki office, which brings the Finns in with a rival pitch of their own. There’s also a creative team on a location shoot for a porn channel in Mauritius, where they bump into Ivana Trump and lose each of their models to a series of comedy misfortunes. The plot is pure office farce, and with its exploding implants, Y2K references, light bulb-obsessed jobsworths, creative prima donnas, and a boss with “an MBA from the Joseph Stalin School of Management,” it feels a tad dated now. But at the time, reviewers welcomed a hip new voice that had updated the epistolary novel for the modern age. In the ad industry itself, meanwhile, copywriters gnashed their teeth with envy and tried to work out who was who. The book was a bestseller in several countries, and for a time Miller Shanks even had its own fictitious website. Beaumont, who had worked as an advertising copywriter himself, went on to write a follow-up, e Squared (2010), with text messages added to the mix. 2. Who Moved My Blackberry? by Lucy Kellaway Though Who Moved My Blackberry? is a clear descendant of e, it is a triumphant satire of marketing and corporate nonsense in its own right. It’s largely told through the emails of fictitious marketer Martin Lukes, the sort of man who sends motivational emails to his own children, advising them, for example, to come up with “six key behaviors that will help you going forward.” When Lukes, a character who began as the subject of a humorous weekly newspaper column, fails to land a plum new job, he engages life coach Pandora (motto: “Strive to thrive!”) and is soon engaging in heated negotiations with her over his maximum potential. (“Can we compromise and say I’m going to be 22.5 per cent better than the best I can be?”) We follow him over the course of a calendar year in which he must deal with marital separation, professional rejection and rebirth, troubles with his children, office affairs, rebrandings and corporate cock-ups—and all of it set against the expensively nonsensical nostrums of Pandora. “Think of yourself like a colander,” she advises him. “Energy pours in, but pours out again through the holes. We need to find where those holes are, and find ways of blocking them.” Well, quite. A kind of Bridget Jones for marketers, this is a very funny book indeed. But as with all satire there is a serious point here too, about the way in which corporate culture allows language to obscure narcissism, inauthenticity, and unpleasantness. A series of sackings are described euphemistically as “off-boarding 15 to 20 per cent of our family,” and the individuals affected are chosen by a process known as “Project Uplift.” Or as Lukes, who has little time for his wife or children or mother, observes: “There is a lot of negative baggage around the term ‘homeless.’” 3. Eleven by David Llewellyn Eleven is set on a single day—9/11—in Cardiff. It is peopled by a cast of young office workers who spend most of their time emailing each other about anything but work—gossip, banter, the weekend’s plans, dreams of escape to London. At the center of the story is Martin Davies, a process accountant and would-be writer. Martin’s girlfriend has left him, another woman he loves is getting married, and he can’t see how he can ever escape work because he’s deeply in debt. He is bored and frustrated and charts his quiet despair in a series of unsent emails saved in drafts. “I work so that I can have money,” he writes, “And in the days that fall between the times when I’m working, I’ll fill myself with chemicals and I’ll put on a smile and pretend to be laughing. My pretend laugh is now more realistic than my real laugh.” Gradually, as the day unfolds, news filters through of a tragedy that has struck the United States. Against the backdrop of the horror of 9/11, our characters start to question their lives and all sorts of secrets and confessions emerge. But, despite the day’s events, the gossip and bickering and life’s immediate concerns can’t help reasserting themselves. Brilliantly paced and often very funny, Eleven’s blend of petty office politics and bloody world events makes this short book powerfully poignant. Llewellyn’s other novels include A Simple Scale and Everything Is Sinister. He has also written novelizations of the Torchwood and Dr. Who TV series. 4. The Closeness That Separates Us by Katie Hall and Bogen Jones Ed and Lena meet at an unspecified conference in a French town that is foreign to both of them. They enjoy an evening together with a few other attendees; afterwards, they exchange email addresses. Even though their time together is brief, some sort of powerful attraction occurs, and as soon as Ed is back home, he sends Lena a message. So begins an intense and curious correspondence, in which Ed and Lena gradually explore their feelings for each other as a strange virtual intimacy grows between them. Jokes and banter turn to confessions of desire and deeper feelings. But this growing passion is complicated by the fact that they barely know each other, live in different countries, and are already attached: Lena has a fiancé, while Ed has a wife and two children. Most of the novel takes place in a sort of tortuous limbo where feelings and desires exist only digitally. Both writers are intense, cerebral types, and their emails are often as long as the letters in epistolary novels. Ed and Lena play a dangerous game, and each seems to be waiting for the other to make the decisive move. That both write in English, which is not either of their first language, adds to the sense of strangled erotic inertia. At the end of the book, Ed and Lena finally meet, and the relationship is consummated—and ends in a rather convenient tragedy a few pages later. For all its intensity, it’s not always easy for readers to really believe in Ed and Lena’s passion, and the drawn-out suspense gives the book an unfortunate ponderous quality. Author Katie Hall’s first book was a collection of poetry, Scribbling. Her co-author here is playwright Bogen Jones. 5. The Boy Next Door by Meg Cabot The Boy Next Door is just the first of a bundle of four loosely connected novels that make up the Boy series by Meg Cabot, the author of more than 50 books of romance for teens and younger readers, who is best-known for the hugely successful Princess Diaries series, which were later made into two Disney films. The four novels in the Boy series comprise the personal communications between a group of staffers—and their families and friends—at a fictional New York City newspaper. Later installments use IM and journal entries too, but The Boy Next Door is all email. The plot is pure rom-com. Deeply lovable if slightly eccentric Mel, thus far unlucky in love, runs into a boy next door, John, who’s looking after his aunt’s cat. The aunt is in a coma after being banged on the head by an intruder. Boy and girl hit it off; only boy turns out to be pretending to be someone else, a trendy photographer named Max. But they both love each other really, and once he’s found a way to make amends for deceiving her and she’s found a suitably comic way to take public revenge, you just know they’ll get together and maybe even solve the mystery of the aunt’s assault in the process. Oh, and though the boy is trying to make a career on his own merits, bless him, he also turns out to be a millionaire, which is nice. The use of email between the characters inflates the dramatic ironies of the mistaken identity plot line. We also see how it helps office gossip spreads like wildfire, with various colleagues offering Mel relationship advice after every new development with John that she “confidentially” shares with her BFF. The milieu is unrealistic, the plot is utterly predictable, and the characters are glibly two-dimensional. But the whole thing is slickly done, with some enjoyable touches of spiky humor, and you can’t help rooting for Mel and John. [millions_ad] 6. Love Virtually by Daniel Glattauer Emmi bumps into Leo on email; she’s trying to cancel a magazine subscription and contacts him by mistake. After a few brief exchanges, the pair becomes hooked on a virtual correspondence that quickly becomes more intense and intimate. As they start to share their secret desires and fears, the question of whether they will or should actually meet in person—especially as Emmi already has a husband and two adopted children—keep readers guessing all the way. Plot-wise, there’s not much more to it than that, really. But the story keeps readers in suspense as the relationship winds through its various twists and turns and the near-meetings pile up. Leo has an ex that he’s struggling to get over, his mum dies, and he’s offered a job in Boston. Emmi sets Leo up with a good friend and then regrets it; later, an intervention from her husband sheds new light on our understanding of her family life. Here again, email is a space for shared intimacies, an outpost for feelings and confessions that can’t be expressed elsewhere. But a book like this stands or falls on how much you invest in the growing relationship, and whether you believe in their growing attraction for each other; personally I struggled. The idea of a woman randomly connecting with a stranger on email feels a bit uncomfortable today, too. Love Virtually was a bestseller in Germany, and its inconclusive ending paved the way for a sequel, Every Seventh Wave. Interestingly, although the book has a single author, it was translated by a husband-and-wife team, Jamie Bulloch and Katharina Bielenberg, who took respectively the male and female characters. 7. The Night Visitors by Jenn Ashworth and Richard V. Hirst With The Night Visitors, we have moved far from the worlds of romance and office politics into the realm of the truly uncanny. The story begins when Alice Wells, a woman at the crossroads of a disappointing life, emails Orla Nelson, a distant aunt who was once famous for a decades-old book and is now trying to make a comeback. Desperate to make something of her life before it’s too late, Alice wants to write a book about Orla’s grandmother, Hattie Soak, a silent film star best known for fleeing the scene of a gruesome multiple murder. Orla at first resists Alice’s overtures. She is tired of people digging up the old story, and adopts a cattily patronising attitude to her unknown relative, whom she dismisses as an amateur and a sensation-seeker. But her frostiness conceals infirmity and loneliness, and a series of mysterious tragedies soon turn the pair into uneasy virtual companions and amateur sleuths. The plot thickens. A film buff with a Hattie Soak obsession kills himself and his family in a car crash; Orla, whose sight is failing her, starts to see strange visions. Alice, who has visions of her own, goes to stay with the lone survivor of the crash, and finds that he, too, is behaving oddly. And what secrets are revealed when footage of Hattie’s final movie is uncovered? We learn more about Hattie, about how both Orla and Alice had difficult childhoods, and how each has been withholding information from each other. The tension builds to a gripping and macabre climax. No more spoilers, except to say that in this very contemporary ghost story, the ghost is truly in the machine, as evil finds a way to transmit itself along wires and through the ether. This is another email novel with co-authors. Richard V. Hirst is a journalist and author based in Manchester. Jenn Ashworth is the author of four novels, including A Kind of Intimacy, which won a Betty Trask Award in 2009. 8. Two Solitudes by Carl Steadman Published in 1995, Two Solitudes—the title is taken from a phrase in a Rilke poem—has the distinction of being perhaps the very first email novel ever. Like many early email works, this story first appeared in performance—as a series of actual emails that were sent between two participants, with subscribers to the story cc’d on the unfolding tale. Now, despite being such a venerable digital antique, it is available only in an obscure online archive. Both Love Virtually and The Closeness That Separates Us are inferior descendants of Two Solitudes, which is another dreamy, whimsical dialogue between two cerebral, introspective types reflecting on where their relationship is heading. But here, the exchange is far more subtle and oblique, and the overall effect far more satisfying. Dana has to go away for a few months. She is living in her mother’s house and does some temping and some teaching. Lane waits for her. Each aches for the other, and they fill the yearning between them with stories of their daily lives: the funny office where Dana works, her shopping trips, Lane’s obese cat and his inability to control her diet. Each email concludes with a quotation, some clever, some pop-cultural, most quite obscure, that together serve as a kind of chorus, providing another indirect commentary of the eddies of the relationship. As the emails slide by, we sense that Lane yearns more for Dana than she does for him—her evident fondness for him has a rival in her desire to be alone. The end, when it comes, has all the electronic finality of an undeliverable mail notification. This is not a story in which much happens, and yet it is beautifully written and its intimate, poetic mood stays with you long afterwards. Carl Steadman was co-founder of Suck.com, an early satirical web magazine, and wrote several pieces of fiction influenced by the emerging Internet. [millions_email] 9. Blue Company by Rob Wittig Another little-known gem from the annals of early electric literature, Blue Company is another tale that was initially told live: sent out in daily (or more) bulletins to select recipients over the course of May 2002. It tells the story of Alberto, a sensitive copywriter working for a heartless corporate giant, who finds himself transferred with a bunch of other staff to Italy—only not modern-day Italy, but the Italy of the 14th century. What sounds like a weak gag turns very quickly into something far more satisfying and entertaining because Wittig proves to be quite the historian, and fleshes out his medieval world with insight and wit. Food and hygiene are bad, of course, and the threat of violence is everywhere. But Wittig also gives us the post-traumatic impact of the Plague, the rise of humanism, the realpolitik of the city states, and wonderful sleights of perspective: “It still feels weird to pass by a brand new castle occupied by its original inhabitants.” Of course there are all sorts of parallels between the medieval Italy and 2002: “Bush-the-son pursuing Bush-the-father's personal vendetta against Iraq—That kind of shit happens all the time back here!” Alberto’s new role is not unlike his old one in marketing: “creating a fearsome field reputation for the company [of knights]—rumor mongering, essentially—so that people are (a) eager to contract us, (b) loath to fight us. It's all about the brand!” At a party in Milan, when the smart people break out the white powder, it turns out to be that elusive Renaissance commodity, salt. In this story, too, there is much yearning; prior to his transfer, modern-day Alberto had fallen in love with a woman and it is to her that he sends his secret bulletins via a smuggled laptop. Because there are no cameras, he sends simple but expressive ink drawings instead, which greatly add to readers’ enjoyment of the narrative. Our lovesick troubadour relates his travails and woos his centuries-distant love as he travels with his band of fellow mercenaries (‘Blue Company’) towards Milan. In order to enter the city— and for a chance to get an autograph of his hero Petrarach—Berto et al. have to compete in a grand tournament. Later, they are caught up in a real battle (something their employer had reassured them wouldn’t happen) and are tested as never before. The whole thing is wonderfully clever, funny, and original. Blue Company inspired another serial email novel, Kind of Blue, by digital theorist Scott Rettberg, with the same cast of characters. In this story, sanctioned by Wittig, Berto never ever actually made it to the 14th century at all, but was in fact simply “a mad sojourner trying to escape from the ruins of the 21st Century's earliest days.” 10. Work in Progress by Alex Woolf, Martin Jenkins, and Dan Brotzel A very British combination of pathos and farce, Work in Progress tells the story of a group of eccentric wannabe writers who join a critique group in their town of Crawley, England. The idea is to meet every few weeks, read out work, and share feedback. But before long, there are all sorts of complications: romantic entanglements, jealous rivalries, conspiracy theories, a whiff of scandal, and even an obsessive fan in a furry cosplay costume. Written by three authors who are all members of the same real-life writers’ group, the characters are a smorgasbord of endearing if eccentric writer types. Keith, for example, is a sci-fi hack who’s obsessed with monetizing his work and thinks nothing of banging out 5000 words before breakfast. Keith claims to have invented a whole language for his 12-volume Dragons of Xęn”räh saga, but on closer inspection it’s really just English with funny a few extra funny symbols. Alice is an obsessive writer who hasn’t managed to start writing yet; she’s been working on the first sentence of her novel for two years. Jon is a drug-addled hippie type with a UFO obsession; he writes deeply symbolic animal tales that people are forever misinterpreting. Peter sees himself as a “conceptual literary artist” who is always trying to push the boundaries in his stated aim to “re-present the present;” in practice, however, this mostly means just looking for new ways to spy on people. Blue writes very gloomy if rather derivative verse, Tom has an eye for the ladies, and Mavinder never actually shows up. The self-appointed leader of the group is Julia, a part-time actress with a wealthy husband whom no one ever sees. She organizes the meetings, and tries to defuse frictions and keep everyone’s morale up. But she has quiet ambitions of her own, and when her glamorous connections help her secure a publishing deal, her true colors emerge. The book culminates in a transcript of a farcical fly-on-the-wall documentary of a group meeting—commissioned by a TV company to promote Julia’s new book—where the group’s tensions explode in a variety of messily farcical ways. A series of appendices tell us what happened to the characters after this, and the mysteries of Alice’s fixation with her opening sentence are at last revealed. Image: Tarun Dhiman