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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Across the Boundaries: A Conversation with Sonya Chung and Rion Amilcar Scott
Sonya Chung's novel The Loved Ones is the type of book you read slowly, pausing to reflect on the difficult wisdom and the tangibly human characters. I corresponded via email with Sonya (a contributing editor at The Millions) about creating multi-dimensional characters, reader expectations, writing across difference, and more.
Rion Amilcar Scott: Part of what I love about The Loved Ones is how believably you render characters who are so different from one another and from you the author. You approach them all with a core of warmth and humanity. Can you talk about how you approached the creation of a Charles, and Alice or a Hannah. You mention in a previous interview that you had to work hard to get to know these characters. I’m wondering what that “working hard” looks like.
Sonya Chung: First, I’m gratified to hear that you found the characters believable and experienced warmth and humanity in the writing; of course that was my hope/intention, but in taking major imaginative leaps, one always risks failure on these fronts.
With each of the characters you mention -- Charles, who is African American, the youngest son in a large family, fatherless, a former soldier, a reader of spy novels; his wife Alice, who is white and estranged from her privileged, conservative southern family; and Hannah, who is closest to me demographically but odd and isolated in a very particular way -- the “working hard” meant different things.
Charles is a composite of different men I’ve either known well or observed closely (from one degree of separation) over the last 20 years. Developing and rendering Charles thus involved both melding the composite elements into a coherent singular person, as well as finding the part of me, the author, that would express itself in him (which is what I think we authors have to do with all our characters). Or: backing up a little, maybe the most significant work were those 20 years; I could not have written this book, say, 15 years ago, or even 10. In fact, I tried to write it six years ago and failed; that unpublished novel was a very different story with different characters, but I do think of it as the first try at this one.
With Alice, there was some research to do -- campus-protest culture in the early '70s, the Peace Corps in Chile, the Department of Defense educational system, and army-base life in Seoul -- but mostly I had to work at compassion for Alice, to understand that her often alienating behavior was motivated by a series of losses, compounded. I knew that if I couldn’t connect emotionally with Alice -- especially when her emotions went dark and cold -- then the reader wouldn’t either.
Hannah, interestingly, became the most challenging character to access and fully develop. I was a lonely child like her, but my family circumstances were very different; and my childhood world was multiracial but segregated, while hers, by design, collides with Charles and Alice Lee’s world. What ultimately befalls Hannah in The Loved Ones is quite far from my own experience, so she became a distinctly “write what you don’t know” character for me, and I had to employ all the textbook writerly skills of putting myself in her shoes, really immersing in “what if?” empathy, and investing myself in her way of reacting to the world around her (which is rather unconventional).
You’ve talked in an interview about the “work” of writing across gender. What does that look like for you? I’m also wondering your thoughts on the institutional power differentials surrounding these identity-crossing issues in fiction. For example, many people ask me about writing Charles Lee, but you are the first to ask me about writing Alice Lee. Is this because she is white? Or perhaps because she is less of a major character?
RAS: The “work” of writing across any sort of difference, to me, requires finding what sort of commonalities you, the author, have with that character. When I was writing from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl in “202 Checkmates” I first asked myself what mattered to me when I was 11. I remembered the futile crushes, the play, the curiosity and fear of the adult world, and the burgeoning reality that I was steadily marching into it. All of that is somewhat universal to children at that age. Then I had to think about how navigating these things is different for a girl.
I find it interesting that no one asks about how Alice Lee was created. She and Charles are the characters that stick with me most because they are such difficult people, both difficult in their own unique ways. Two theories on why people ask about Charles and not Alice: 1) It’s unusual seeing such a well-drawn black character, at least more rare than encountering a white character who is presented as fully human. Or, relatedly, 2) White is seen as the default in fiction so painting an Alice character is not regarded as extraordinary. By the way, even creating a well-drawn character that does not cut across difference, that is some composite of the author’s own life experiences, is a difficult and extraordinary feat.
I’m curious about what sort of responses you’ve gotten about your characters and how that differed from your intentions for them?
SC: You know, I’ve gotten positive feedback about the book in general -- its ideas and themes and overall multi/interracial conception -- and about “the characters” being real and dimensional. Most people share your sense that the characters are “difficult,” and a few reviewers and interviewers have commented on how impressed they were to be drawn into rooting for such difficult characters. One thing I hear often is how much readers cared about “every one of the characters.” On the one hand, that’s extremely gratifying, given the challenges of creating well-drawn characters we’ve just discussed; but I do wonder in what ways different readers connect or attach themselves to specific characters.
Some readers have said The Loved Ones is Charles’s story; others have said Hannah takes center stage. A few readers attach themselves strongly to Hannah’s parents. I don’t hear much about Veda (Charles and Alice’s biracial daughter), which surprises me a little: she’s a secondary character, but sort of the breath-of-fresh-air character. And again, very little comment on Alice, generally speaking (poor Alice!).
I wonder: how much does the reader’s own identity -- race, gender, age, sexuality, etc. -- affect, if at all, connection to/repulsion by various characters? I also wonder who, in these current times, is drawn to reading a book with a multiracial ensemble cast. There are a number of high-profile novels that came out this fall that are “Black” or “Asian,” and I sometimes wonder if The Loved Ones is a harder sell amidst them.
(I could probably do a little research on all this by poring over Goodreads reviews or something; but I am intentionally choosing not to do that, for my own sanity!)
Do you have a sense of who is reading your work and how they are responding to various stories, characters, ideas?
RAS: I’m surprised that anyone at all is reading Insurrections. But people are and the reception has been generally positive, people showing me things I hadn’t necessarily considered about the stories. For instance, students showing me the ways “Juba” -- about a man being mistaken and arrested for being a mythical drug dealer -- can be read as a parable for the mass incarceration era.
People like to ask about where the reality in the work lies, which is odd since most of my stories are akin to fever dreams, I think. Ordinary people don’t go out looking for mythical drug dealers after mistaken identity encounters; that’s an insane thing to do and I don’t recommend it.
Readers have also asked me a lot about the bigger picture. My book takes place in the fictional town of Cross River, Md., which was founded after a successful slave revolt; I plan to explore Cross River for as long as I’m writing fiction. So I tend to think of Insurrections as one piece in a much larger puzzle. Some readers wanted to see a lot of the stories resolved and I don’t want to resolve anything for anyone, I want readers to ruminate when they get to the end of a story; people tend to be happy to hear the town is coming back and some of the characters are coming back. But when Cross River comes back it’s not to resolve or to provide happy endings, but for us to keep thinking about the ways we access and react to history that controls us despite our dim awareness of it.
How about you? What is your sense about how The Loved Ones fits into what you envision is your larger landscape as an author?
SC: “Ordinary people don’t go out looking for mythical drug dealers after mistaken identity encounters; that’s an insane thing to do and I don’t recommend it.” I think we’ve just found the tagline for this conversation. Or maybe the title of your next Cross River installment . . .
But seriously: I love hearing about the stories in Insurrections as “fever dreams” (that rings true for me, as one of your readers) and that Cross River is a place you are continuing to explore. I recall reading a review of Insurrections in which the reviewer did feel that the place was as yet fully explored, and I appreciate your perspective as the artist, which is Yeah, exactly. The patience and process-centeredness of that resonates.
By the way, when my first novel came out, I was also surprised when people said they’d read it. You have? I would think. Why in the world would you do that? Recently I walked into an esteemed writer’s vast library (someone I don’t really know, a friend of a friend) and was awestruck -- it was like a mythical Borgesian sort of place -- then I looked over and saw, literally, right there on a shelf by my knee, a copy of my first novel, Long for This World. It was a little crazy; I mean I’m proud of that book, but it didn’t exactly sweep the nation. I nudged my friend and asked if she’d given it to the writer whose library it was, and she said no and was as delighted and surprised as I was to see it there. I share that story just to remind us writers -- lest we fall into defeatism or assumptions -- that there is still something magical about the way books and readers find each other.
My larger landscape: with The Loved Ones I had the experience of writing (and rewriting and rewriting) a book that felt like a deep and wide and compressed and honed version of who I am -- so much of the best and most difficult stuff I’ve really known in my life. Not literally, but intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. And so I feel like I kind of understand now how the best books -- my best books -- will get written: it can’t be a craft exercise, or an imaginative exercise, or a conceptual exercise, or -- and this feels particularly relevant right now -- a political statement. I mean, it can, but there also has to be real, personal skin in the game. And so the next books -- I have two simmering in adjacent pots right now (I like the idea of a work of art as a stew that needs a long time to find its optimal flavor) -- are also both reaching into those most interesting, complicated, difficult-to-talk-about lived life spaces. Specifically, race, sex, art, religion, family -- the complicated undersides of all these. If there’s a big-picture trajectory -- and I’m not sure there is -- but if there is, I imagine myself becoming more and more invested and vulnerable in what I’m writing, while also upping (sharpening, experimenting, paring down) my craft to match. It sounds simple, but writers know how impossible this is. I like what the sculptor Henry Moore said, that the secret of life is devoting yourself tirelessly to the tasks of your vocation, and the task at hand “must be something you cannot possibly do.”
I’d love to hear a little about your forthcoming book Wolf Tickets. Is it related/connected to Insurrections, or something completely different? How does the new book compare with the first one -- writing process, publication process, your anticipation of its release and reception now that you have one book under your belt?
RAS: Wolf Tickets also takes place in Cross River, but it is a very different book. Much more hallucinatory, much darker, much more relentless. It’s a collection of linked (mostly) flash stories about a wolf hunt that gets very out of control. It’s a time of violence and lacking common decency and resistance. I wrote and submitted Wolf Tickets before Insurrections was completed. For reasons beyond my control it’s been sitting on the shelf for a while now. Things are starting to move with it. The thing I love about writing these two books is all the little things they teach me about Cross River. I worked on them in tandem so they really do speak to each other. Characters in the books do not overlap, but locations and ideas and the common histories do. The final story in Wolf Tickets called on a lyricism I wasn’t sure I was capable of so I learned to write word by word -- often my writing day consisted of just listing words that I imagined needed to appear in the story. This taught me how to write, “Three Insurrections,” the final story in Insurrections, which had been troubling me for years (it took me three years to write).
What about, you? I’m very much looking forward to whatever you’re working on now and/or have coming next.
SC: And I’m really looking forward to Wolf Tickets -- writing “word by word” is especially intriguing and exciting to me, as I’m sure it is to all our language-oriented readers here. It’s also interesting about the timing: production and publishing is indeed often out of our control, but I’ll look forward to hearing you tell the “story” of the two books, how they speak to each other and what it means to you for one to precede the other in the world, and vice versa in your process.
As for me, I’m working on book-length nonfiction and fiction simultaneously. I’m finding both really difficult and really absorbing (à la Henry Moore), though in different ways. I like going back and forth between the two, although each requires serious immersion, so I can’t flip-flop too frequently. I find I have to really “listen” for which project to be working on, for fear that the simultaneity will forestall completion of either in an unproductive way; my hope is for the projects to feed each other and my writing energy.
Trying to publish book-length nonfiction will be a new journey for me. But I’m optimistic about publishing prospects in general, because of the excellent experience I’ve had with Relegation Books, a micropress/“craft” publisher. There are so many fabulous small presses right now, and I was able to experience the reality that there are myriad superb options out there outside The Big Five -- that there truly is a best way to publish one’s book, as opposed to the conventional, erroneous idea that there is Plan A (corporate) and Plan B (indie). I feel we are living in a world now where claiming and investing ourselves in robust democratization -- bottom-up creativity -- is more crucial, and more appealing, than ever.
A Year in Reading: Sonya Chung
In August of this year, my president, Barack Hussein Obama, wrote:
We need to keep changing the attitude that raises our girls to be demure and our boys to be assertive, that criticizes our daughters for speaking out and our sons for shedding a tear. We need to keep changing the attitude that punishes women for their sexuality and rewards men for theirs. We need to keep changing the attitude that permits the routine harassment of women, whether they’re walking down the street or daring to go online. We need to keep changing the attitude that teaches men to feel threatened by the presence and success of women...And yes, it’s important that [Sasha and Malia’s] dad is a feminist, because now that’s what they expect of all men. (Glamour, August 4, 2016)
Sigh.
This year my Year in Reading selections are themed: fathers and daughters. The topic is close to home: the father-daughter relationships in both my novels -- Long for This World and The Loved Ones -- are central.
Not all the following fictional father-daughter bonds are as beautiful or evolved as the first family’s, but they are all complex and memorable. These fathers and daughters are flawed, some painfully so, yet there is an honesty and a messy striving in these depictions that I find compelling.
The 1955 novella Bonjour Tristesse -- a delicious, devastating anti-coming-of-age tale written by Françoise Sagan when she was 17 years old -- tops my list. Cécile (also 17), her father, and his mistress du jour take a villa on the Mediterranean for the summer. In her own words, Cécile’s father Raymond, a 40 year-old widower, is
a frivolous man, clever at business, always curious, quickly bored, and very attractive to women. It was easy for me to love him for he was kind, generous, gay and fond of me.
Father and daughter are similarly flawed -- self-centered, hedonistic, driven too much and too often by a need for “physical charms” at the expense of intelligence or moral depth. Thus Cécile “cannot imagine a better or more amusing companion.” American readers in particular -- now as then -- will judge Raymond harshly, as indulgent and inappropriate and oblivious to fatherly responsibility. For these very reasons, I confess I find Raymond, Cécile’s relationship with him, and the narrative perspective on both (Cécile’s retrospective but not fully illuminated first-person point-of-view) not just refreshing, but persuasive. In an era of helicopter parenting and an oppressive parenting industry, the absence of all that striving by this duo to be anything but themselves means an implicit bond/trust between them that one can’t help but give its due: it’s them against the world. Both do behave badly, and others suffer seriously as a result. The brilliance of the novel, I think, is its power to reflect back to the reader how much you care about the damage the pair causes versus the assertion of their essential selves. Diane Johnson, in her introduction, implies that the reader unequivocally does, is meant to, read through the narrator -- assess her failures from a wiser, morally superior vantage point -- and internalize a cautionary tale of weakness of soul. I’m not so sure, myself; ambiguity teems in the subtext, and as far as I’m concerned, herein lies the elegant technical achievement of a prodigy’s debut -- the first of Sagan’s 30 novels to come.
Our own Hannah Gersen’s debut novel, Home Field, shows us just how tragic the unbridgeable gap between a father and daughter can be, when connection is desperately needed and the disconnect no one’s fault. Under the best of circumstances, Dean and his teenage daughter, Stephanie, would fail to connect: he is the high school football coach, a hero in a small town and wholly absorbed in his devotion to his players, while Stephanie doesn’t much care for the sport at all. When Dean’s wife/Stephanie’s mother, Nicole, commits suicide, all bets are off as each family member is sent reeling into remote grief. Stephanie goes off to her freshman year in college, which lets Dean off the hook, sort of. In the short-term he reaches for another woman, as well as a kind of unconscious replacement for Stephanie in his niece. Then, when Stephanie suffers a bad acid trip while at school, and he isn’t home to receive the emergency call from Stephanie’s roommate, Dean’s uselessness comes into stark relief. Gersen doesn’t tidy any of this up easily. Her novel has been compared to the TV series Friday Night Lights, but whereas the show -- of which I am a huge fan -- leans YA in its goodness-prevails outlook, Home Field allows characters to scatter and come together more quietly: the violent loss hits each family member uniquely, and in the end it’s mere proximity and watchfulness that they can offer one another: “Dean got a glimpse of what [Stephanie] would look like when she was older, and for the first time he could picture her in the world, the adult world.”
In Rion Amilcar Scott’s “202 Checkmates,” my favorite story from his powerful debut collection, Insurrections, a 12 year-old girl and her downtrodden father find absorption and shared passion in the game of chess: “We both hunched over the board. There was no world outside the both of us, outside of this game.” The layering of a coming-of-age, working-class, black family struggle, and the complicated, aching need children have to both admire and conquer their parents is beautifully done here. The mother character is somehow both backgrounded and heartbreakingly blaring as she whisper-harangues her husband for encouraging their daughter toward chess instead of schoolwork, and for spending money on a marble chess set when he is chronically underemployed. Father and daughter reach together toward something beyond mere survival -- toward mental vitality and mastery and delight. The tension that builds toward the story’s end anticipates the reader’s conflicting investments perfectly, and the resolution satisfies just as well.
One stunning father-daughter portrayal this year came not through a book but across my screen, via French maîtresse-filmmaker Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum. Here -- as in her wonderful earlier film U.S. Go Home, which focuses on a brother-sister relationship -- Denis explores her interest in the romantic shades of familial love. Lionel -- a widowed métro train driver and West African migrant -- and his daughter, Josephine -- a university student in anthropology whose mother was German -- might be seen as a working-class version of Sagan’s Raymond and Céline: they have a special intimacy, it’s them against the world, and they’re each fearful of imagining life without the other. Unlike their privileged, indulgent counterparts, however, Lionel and Josephine see that they must try harder to connect with humanity, and their own hearts' desires, beyond the safety of their love. Denis -- a master of complex emotional layers in the guise of simple stories -- seems to laud that effort while simultaneously rendering its emotional cost and the uncertainty of its result.
Re: Daniel Paisner’s A Single Happened Thing, published this past spring, I’d like first to set the record straight: despite its cover art and the characters’ extreme passion for the sport, it is not “a baseball novel.” Not solely or primarily, anyway. (Paisner and I share a publisher, which is how I came to read the book, and I’m thankful, since, given its basebally veneer, it may otherwise have passed me by.) Rather A Single Happened Thing is a poignant and whimsical story about a man, David Felb, stalled at middle age, who anxiously doubts then gives himself over to the possibility of a fantastical visitation upon his unremarkable life. The central question Paisner asks via Felb’s story is, What happens when you are carried into a nether realm of anything-goes, and your loved ones are not willing to come along with you? In David Felb’s case, it is his wife, Nellie, who becomes wary of him; but his daughter, 15 year-old Iona, hitches her heart to her father’s leap of faith. Paisner’s novel walks the sad, beautiful line that children walk when they love both parents and know that “sides” are forming; it also allows us to feel for Nellie all that Felb himself feels -- love, longing, disappointment. Iona’s evolving originality and girl-power intelligence leap off the page, reminding us that parents often pour the best of their own remarkableness into their children; and that ain’t nothin.
Plus, if the same happens also to apply to Sasha and Malia Obama vis-à-vis their parents’ best, then look out, world: we absolutely do have hope for the future.
More from A Year in Reading 2016
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How Does it Feel? On Finishing a Book
Finishing a book is a great accomplishment, but does a writer revel in it? A rock star plays the last note and the crowd roars, a gymnast sticks a landing and thrusts her arms into the air, and an actor walks on the stage to take a bow. How about a writer?
As I embarked on the project of asking writers how it felt finish a book, I was reminded of what Kurt Vonnegut said about a reviewer who rages about a book, “He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” Vonnegut speaks to the post-publication feeling of being reviewed, often hot and gooey, but also goes some way to describing the feel of publishing a book from writer's perspective.
How did it feel to finish your book? I asked nine writers.
What I found was a group of people who seemed to have put on full armor -- broadly acknowledged to be the minimum protective gear needed to get through a book length project -- only to be tackled by a hot fudge sundae. They were in various states of recovery. Most had chocolate sauce still dripping from their chins.
Bream Gives Me Hiccups, actor Jesse Eisenberg’s book of stories, will be published September 8. As one who has stood under the lights, he might carry a sense of a finale into fiction. When I asked, though, he said, "I mainly write stage plays, so most of what I have written has been intended to be performed. In that way, finishing a book of short stories feels, by comparison, incomplete because there is no cathartic performance of it."
Patrick deWitt might agree as catharsis remains elusive. His novel, Undermajordomo Minor, comes out on September 15 and he remains in a restless state, “I still find myself considering the galleys, almost daily, reviewing this or that section, thinking of little things I might tweak.” He made clear, however, that the book is actually finished, “I’m not prepared to say goodbye to it yet.”
How long will this continue for deWitt? Sonya Chung pointed out that the flaws in a published novel might be, “fundamental flaws of the self.” She went on to say, “like the self, a novel is never really finished: pencil markings abound throughout my copy of my first novel Long for This World, which has been in print and between covers since 2010.” There could be trouble.
I found small relief in Lori Lansens’s mix of emotions. The author of The Mountain Story said, “typing those final lines -- doesn't bring a sense of euphoria for me, but relief, supplanted by fear merging with pride, upended by grief.” She also acknowledged the personal connection, “I imagine I'll feel exactly the same way when I send my son off to college.”
It could be that Nicholas Ripatrazone has already sent a kid to college in Texas or somewhere close, as he felt a release after finishing his novel Ember Days. For him, "place comes first in the genesis of a story.” As New Mexico and Texas dominated the narratives, now that the book is published it has freed him up, “to reach beyond the Southwest and allow new settings to guide my fiction.” When my kids leave the house, may I also fly free.
Hannah Gersen showed wisdom in allowing the finish of her as yet untitled novel to sneak up from behind, “I wrote the final sentence of my novel without knowing that it would be the last one.” Perhaps this is why she was able to find a quiet and peaceful place. “That was it. I was done. My mind got really clear and calm.”
I wouldn’t exactly describe Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor as clear and calm, but he was enthusiastic as he talked about the experience of writing non-fiction. He sold the book proposal first and then set out to write the story. “The world, as always, turns out to be stranger and more amazing than you imagined. And you lose yourself in a story -- a true story -- that has never been told before.” That sounded fantastic and couldn’t wait to hear what happened, was it a triumphant end? “Then I pressed send,” he said. “And it was over.”
I did find jubilance in Jonathan Evison who talked of his novel that will publish on September 8. “Finishing This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! felt triumphant.” But where there was a now party, there had once been pain: “The early drafts were a mess. They were stultifying in their linearity. I didn't have my ‘aha’ moment until very late in the game. Once I re-imagined the structure, the final draft wrote itself in two weeks.”
Naomi Jackson said of finishing: “ending was also a beginning.” She described how triumph and pain came together, “I knew that finishing The Star Side of Bird Hill meant giving it over to readers, and allowing something that had been private for so long to enter the public sphere. This moment of opening myself and my book up to the world was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.”
How does it feel to finish? The answers range from delicious to messy to many things in between. Schatzker, as a food expert, was able to precisely describe the sensation in a way that could double for the feeling of being tackled by a hot fudge sundae. “It’s relieving, it’s gratifying, it’s sad, but above all, it’s weird.”
Image Credit: Flickr/Official U.S. Navy Page.
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