The Love Song of Jonny Valentine: A Novel

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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview

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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 [millions_email] 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. [millions_email]

The Kid Is Alright: On Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

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1. J: What r u doing tomorrow night want to go to a concert with me at Madison sq garden? Me: No plans as of yet. Quite possibly? What concert? J: One Direction. Don’t laugh! But I can’t think of a person who I would have a better time at a 15 year old Brit boy band concert with. Think of it as anthropological study!! Me: OH MY GOD YES. Me: NOT BEING IRONIC. A few weeks before Christmas, a friend invited me to the One Direction concert at Madison Square Garden. There were two distinct groups in attendance that evening: fans, ages 7-17, with a little wiggle room on either side, glowing and jumping and shrieking their hearts out, even when there was no one was onstage; and chaperones, ages 35-55ish, fondly exasperated and slapping down $9.50 -- the price of a Bud Lite -- on concessions counters across the arena with an extreme sense of purpose. For me, it was all a little surreal, I guess. I am 28 years old. But wait -- it’s probably best to pause straight away and unabashedly reject any lingering embarrassment over attending the concert: I sang along, I danced a bit, and I cheered enthusiastically, though I found myself physically incapable of matching the testing-the-limits-of-the-human-hearing-range screams of the assembled crowd. The boys put on a good show. For the uninitiated, One Direction (1D!!!) are a classic Simon Cowell product, a quintet of teenagers packaged together from individual auditions for The X Factor in 2010, and in the past two years, through the force of collective charisma, catchy pop singles, frankly spectacular hair, and a skillful marketing juggernaut, they’ve become the most successful group in the world. When I asked that same friend whether I needed to explain the band here, she wrote in a Facebook message, “haha no. they are the five most beautiful brits on earth.” It’s both short-sighted and a little curmudgeonly to sit at a One Direction concert and marvel at the "kids these days," though I’ll admit that when I was ages 7-17, I’m pretty sure that I never felt like any of my peers were literally about to fall to pieces over the Backstreet Boys, or Hanson -- though maybe I just had the wrong friends. The night at MSG felt more like the Ed Sullivan Show with laser lights and balloons full of confetti -- girls cast in black and white, trembling and jittery and ear-splittingly loud as they swooned over The Beatles, The Stones, and all those bands that never made it past 1964. One Direction plays up their Britishness -- their new album cover involves a top hat, a bow tie, and one boy hoisting another up onto a red telephone box -- which partly feels like a nod to (or, perhaps, a pale imitation of) the transatlantic sensations of half a century ago. Mick Jagger recently drew those comparisons himself: after watching a One Direction concert on television, he said, “It reminded me very much of our early concerts, when we were pushed around among the audience and we would kind of float. [T]hey were like, floating above the audience, and they looked like, really distinctly uncomfortable...It was a very funny moment, because it was very similar to the things we’ve been through.” So it was fitting, then, that just a week prior, I’d gotten drawn into watching Crossfire Hurricane, the new HBO-produced documentary about The Rolling Stones. It was entertaining all along, but for me, one segment was extraordinary: half an hour in, after a rapid-fire montage of clips of the early Stones and commercial images of the mid-1960s, we come to a young Mick Jagger in an ascot, sitting smugly beside a vaguely German man who’s theorizing about the singer’s rapturous fan base. “When these girls pounce upon Mick and seem to want to tear him to pieces, it’s not essentially an act of aggression,” the expert suggests, “but rather an act of devouring him. They want to incorporate his essence. It’s a sort of fetishism which has more in common with people collecting the relics of saints, as they did in the ancient past. There’s really no break with the ancient tradition -- it’s just a question of form.” The camera cuts over to Jagger, and the look on his face is inscrutable for a moment, before he hunches down to light a cigarette, and the expert goes on, “I’ve seen this with the most marvelous, dramatic intensity, with two or three thousand young girls in Manchester, and these girls, they wept, they were possessed by the spirit -- and I may add that all their little panties were soaking wet at the end. I mean, the complete physical and mental absorption.” The camera’s back on Jagger as he smirks at the last bit, agreeing with the assessment, but then he spins the analysis away from fan girls. “I think what’s more interesting is that in this country, the audience is indeed all girls and they do behave in this way, but in the rest of the world, this isn’t true. In lots of places, they’re nearly all boys. With the boys, it erupts, you know, much more aggressively. And they use it to have a great fight with the police. And they just beat the police up. As a show of sort of strength. Or a show of dissatisfaction. Or something.” Underneath it all, the first strains of “Paint It Black” start pulsing through, until they cut away, to shots of young boys pounding the stage, half gleeful, half infuriated. If there is one thing that’s pretty damn hard to find at a One Direction concert, it’s boys. And even harder to find there, amongst any gender, is a show of dissatisfaction. 2. If Britain has conquered the early-21st-century boy band, we’ve got the indisputable solo prince of pop here in America. Well, actually, Justin Bieber is Canadian. I could claim him for North America, but that doesn’t really seem necessary. Bieber is an American product: after the small-town childhood and the single-mother upbringing, he was a near-overnight YouTube phenomenon at 13 -- a phenomenon carefully fostered and orchestrated by recording-industry superstars. Bieber’s success is staggering but strangely focused: he wholly absorbs his target demographic, without much penetration beyond. A decade or two removed from that fan base, I know him for his fame alone -- the only song I could’ve sung along with before starting this piece is the one that repeats the word “baby” about 500 times (title: “Baby”). And this is coming from a person who really enjoyed a One Direction concert. But maybe that ubiquitous fame is all that really matters. That’s where we start with Teddy Wayne's new novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, whose eponymous protagonist is clearly drawn from a Bieber archetype -- sometimes the satirical masking feels so light that it’s hard to imagine that reality is much different. The superficial details of his life match his counterpart: raised by a single mother in St. Louis, he, too, was discovered on YouTube and promptly snapped up by a major record label. We meet him in the middle of his second tour, which doesn’t seem to be going as well as his first, with his mother and manager, Jane, and a small cast of handlers -- bodyguard, choreographer, and tutor, the latter of whom helpfully assigns Jonny a series of slave narratives to read. The strictness of his regime is painfully clear from the start. At only 11, Jonny is a good deal younger than your average teen pop icon, which serves to make the impact of his megastardom all the more extreme. His general confusion reads like the classic child star narrative, pre-adolescence deeply muddled by fame: he has more knowledge of the adult world than any child ought to have, but in other matters, he’s achingly clueless. He prides himself on his accuracy pinpointing adults’ exact ages and weights -- and between stringent calorie-counting and pre-show vomiting, it’s clear he’s got an eating disorder himself. His only frame of reference for friendship seems to be the single good friend he left behind in St. Louis, and he has to substitute his good-natured, middle-aged bodyguard for both best friend and father figure. He relies on a video game, “The Secret Land on Zenon,” for distraction and as a template for making sense of the world. And when he speaks, mostly in internal first-person narration, we get a mix of normal, if slightly awkward 11-year-old boy and strange corporate recording-industry drone -- a walking embodiment of a marketing plan presented to him, “JONNY VALENTINE 2.0 BRAND-EXTENSION STRATEGY” -- parroting adult voices with hollow certainty. It’s this juxtaposition that gives Jonny poignancy. When he returns to St. Louis for the first time, he pauses before an interview on a national morning show: Being a consummate professional means doing your job when you don’t want to, so I sucked it up and pasted on a huge smile when the camera light blinked and Robin introduced me as America’s Angel of Pop and the girls screamed like they were getting attacked and I got ready to give answers in Auto-Tune mode, where they sound right but have nothing behind them. Jonny is quick to scrub away self-pity with self-chastisement, and it all works to make him a deeply likable and thoroughly heartbreaking character. He is being mismanaged on every level, and whether that’s a critique of the personal or the professional is impossible to sort out, because they’re so intricately entwined. Much of the blame should land squarely on the culture at large -- and that, of course, is the main target of Wayne’s satire. We get snippets of media, articles that ring uncomfortably true across a range of publications, and we get Internet comment threads full of celebratory snark after a man tries to assault Jonny during a concert. “It’s like people are afraid to be the first one to be an asshole, but once some others clear the way, they get super-excited about it,” he thinks. “Except with most blogs, the blogger himself is the biggest asshole, so all the commenters think it’s okay to write whatever they want from the start.” It’s air-tight satire, particularly because Wayne doesn’t have to do much to alter modern-day America -- we’re admittedly a bunch of celebrity-sucking vampires, after all, just as so many celebrities jump to bare their necks to us -- and as the narrative rings true, the boy Jonny’s forced to mold himself into becomes all the more tragic. He lives a deeply false life, but our complacency in this, whether we’re teeny-boppers or not, lends us that same cheapness. It’s masterfully done, but it does leave us mired in the age-old questions of celebrity and authenticity, wondering what about any of this is new. 3. And then there are the Latchkeys. The opening act on Jonny’s tour is a four-piece band of 20-somethings, with “literate” and sexuality explicit lyrics and a heartthrob lead singer, Zack Ford, whose female teenage fans overlap with the older end of Jonny’s demographic. Zack plays a lot of roles in the novel: an older brother for Jonny; an idol and a role model, usurping Tyler Beats, the Justin Timberlake figure who looms in Jonny’s mind as a benchmark for enduring pop stardom; a well-meaning bad influence, slipping whiskey into ginger ale under the table; and, occasionally, a homoerotic point of focus as Jonny grapples with puberty. And perhaps most importantly, Zack is a foil, as Jonny haltingly stumbles over questions of authenticity and the definition of success. Because Zack is working through the questions that Jonny can sense but can’t yet articulate: he worships The Clash’s “Complete Control,” to the chagrin of his band-mates. “They said we'd be artistically free / When we signed that bit of paper.” The Latchkeys are described disdainfully by a minor character as “corporate indie rock for the masses. The Urban Outfitters of bands,” despite Jonny’s defensive protests that they weren’t, in this girl’s words, “cooked up in some music laboratory by a group of record executives to sound exactly like it wasn’t,” just a bunch of college friends that had made it big. But in a way, the distinction no longer matters. And she says as much -- when she accuses the band of being “rich white boys” and Jonny talks about Zack’s working-class roots, she says, “He’s rich now. All that matters is what you are now.” Does it matter to us how culture is made? Won’t we swallow the cooked-up laboratory celebrity just as easily as the authentic talent? And does it even matter if, like Jonny, it’s a case of both? The past decade has seen the conversation surrounding "reality" reach a fever pitch; the children born and raised under the shadow of this conversation must inevitably turn to Jonny Valentine, or Justin Bieber, or whoever else ticks all the right boxes, as brand strategists figure out which boxes matter the most. As long as we take our cues from them, nothing changes. Mick Jagger, who once said, “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I'm 45,” turns 70 this July. Tickets for a string of Rolling Stones 50th anniversary concerts last autumn sold for thousands of pounds online. “Everybody all right in the cheap seats?" Jagger asked at the O2 Arena in London last November. “They aren’t so cheap though, are they? That’s the trouble.” There’s another moment in Crossfire Hurricane, in which an off-screen interviewer probes a black turtlenecked-Jagger about his appeal to young people. The camera stays tight on his face. Interviewer: Why, then, if you think that most of your work is about dissatisfaction and so on, why do you think you’re so popular? Mick Jagger: Because most young people are dissatisfied. I: In what way? MJ: With the generation which they think is running their lives. I: What things are you dissatisfied with? [and here Jagger gazes off-screen for a moment, his brow furrowing in thought, before looking straight at the camera, like he’s telling the punch line to the world’s most serious joke] MJ: The generation that runs our lives. Image source: waitscm

Tuesday New Release Day: Kincaid, Sendak, Shields, Suri, Capote, Wayne, Wodehouse, Nadler, Sloss, Bauer, Wolf, Guthrie

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A very big week for new books: See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid; My Brother's Book, the last book completed by Maurice Sendak before his death in May 2012; How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields; The City of Devi by Manil Suri; a new edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote; The Love Song of Jonny Valentine by Teddy Wayne (see our interview today); P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters; Wise Men by Stuart Nadler; debut novels Autobiography of Us by Aria Beth Sloss and Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer; City of Angels, an autobiographical novel by Christa Wolf; and House of Earth, the lost novel of Woody Guthrie.

An Alternate Universe of Pop Culture: A Conversation with Teddy Wayne, Author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

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I first came across the work of Teddy Wayne in his debut novel, Kapitoil, the story of a Qatari computer programmer living in Manhattan. Daring in subject matter yet impeccably relatable in its concerns — how does one live well? — Kapitoil marked the arrival of a new voice in fiction with something important to say about our relationship to not only the complex machinations of the stock exchange but to pop culture as well. Now, Wayne returns with his sophomore effort, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, a coming-of-age novel about a tween singer in the vein of Justin Bieber. Once again, Teddy Wayne examines the role pop culture plays in our lives. Who creates it? Who benefits from it? What is its effect on us? In January, I had the opportunity to read with Wayne in Manhattan, and almost immediately after, we set up this interview to discuss some of these questions. The Millions: The lame cliché writing instructors often tell their students is to avoid dropping pop culture references in their work so that it’ll be more timeless. Yet both of your novels are steeped in their time and place. Kapitoil touches on fantasy baseball and samurai flicks, and the plot hinges on the paranoid run-up to Y2K. Your new novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, discusses Jonny’s music, his concerts, his Twitter feed, even his staged relationship with another teeny bopper. What is it about popular culture that interests you? Why do you think it keeps popping up in your work? And do you think the old advice about avoiding pop culture in fiction is old-fashioned or esoteric? Teddy Wayne: David Foster Wallace got into arguments about this in graduate school, when he wanted to depict the heavily mediated space around him — subject matter his professors thought was inconsequential or un-literary. As he pointed out, he’d see hundreds of ads and commercials each day, and they constituted an integral part of his mental activity. Writing about this material gets pejoratively labeled “postmodern” or “experimental,” but what’s more “realist” than describing the physical world, even if billboards and 30-second spots replace trees and rivers? Likewise, it misses the point to discard fiction simply because it’s about social media or the celebrity-gossip machine and not Iraq or divorce. By focusing on areas that seem marginal through a narrow aperture, you can sometimes render a much more expansive portrait of a country. I’m an advocate of critic Manny Farmer’s agile, industrious “termite art” (as opposed to bloated, self-important “white elephant art”): The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement. Moreover, James Joyce and Jane Austen — and nearly all writers, ever — also wrote about the popular culture of their times; it just wasn’t called “pop culture” then. Disposable songs of the day frequently recur in Ulysses, for instance, including “What-Ho! She Bumps!,” which sounds like a Black Eyed Peas' single. Many Americans no longer have physical communities. We don’t know our neighbors or live in the same place for our whole lives; our kids don’t play together in the street; we don’t socialize in organized groups, whether in a house of worship or a bowling alley. What we do have is mass culture that binds us, so that two coworkers who have little in common can still discuss last night’s episode of American Idol around the water cooler. (And that ritual, too, is getting fragmented now that people watch television shows on their own time and the culture is further splintering into yet more tribes.) This has become our ersatz religion, and it’s important to document and analyze its effects on us. TM: Even though The Love Song of Jonny Valentine is drenched in our tween-sensation, YouTube landscape, there are very few references to real life pop culture phenomena within the book. Jonny’s favorite video game sounds appropriately complex and plausible, yet it doesn’t exist. Jonny speaks about the artists that have influenced him, but they’re rarely, if ever, real-life singers. Even his hero, Michael Jackson, is only referred to as MJ throughout. What prompted you to go this route with the novel? Why create an entire alternate universe of pop culture for Jonny to exist in? And did you ever consider using real life singers and video games in the novel? TW: I generally find it hacky when public figures show up fictionalized in books (or TV shows or movies) in cameos, because it lends itself to caricatures, unless the writer does something radically revisionist with the received persona (as Wallace, for example, does with Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak in the story “Little Expressionless Animals”). It feels like gratuitous name-dropping, in the same way that it annoys me when writers use a historical event, completely independent from the story, to ground us in time and place (the way Mad Men does far too much, for my taste). So while Jonny and the novel refer to real musicians and songs throughout — from the aforementioned MJ and “Billie Jean” to The Clash and “Complete Control” — the two other musical performers who dominate the book are fictional: pop megastar Tyler Beats, whose career Jonny is trying to emulate, and Zack Ford, the front man for the Latchkeys, Jonny’s opening rock band. The late-night talk-show host who interviews him might strike some readers as similar to a real figure, but by naming him, it reduces the character to that sole possibility. I’d like the book to operate, as you suggest, as an alternate universe, both to preserve this potential and to invite in readers who have limited knowledge of contemporary music. Ideally, you should be able to enjoy this even if you stopped listening to new music after 1970. A friend proposed I name the video-game system Jonny plays, but I declined to, for the same reason; if it’s a PlayStation, then it can be only that system, and the game Jonny plays incessantly has to accord to its real-life standards. Incidentally, the game, called The Secret Land of Zenon, is based off a real role-playing game series (does this make me sound incredibly cool or what?), Ultima, that I played for a few years when I was much younger. It’s always a catalyst for bonding — since I’m not in a bowling league — when I find out someone else has a nostalgic attachment to the same semi-obscure object from their youth. I got a lot of emails for a throwaway allusion to the “purple stuff” Sunny Delight commercial in Kapitoil. TM: I also steep my work in the details of the era. My novel Last Call in the City of Bridges is set during the first Obama campaign, and the characters routinely voice their triumphs and failures on Facebook and Twitter. Even in four short years, the way people interact over social media is totally different. People don’t write things like “Teddy Wayne is answering questions for an interview” anymore, but they did back in 2008. So I’m wondering if you share my fear, that perhaps we’re dating our work by relying so much on the internet and pop culture. In Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, he worries that his book will one day be “as outdated as a 1983 book about Fantasy Island.” I teach Klosterman’s essay about Saved by the Bell, and it’s always astounding to see how and if undergraduates can interact with it if they have no knowledge of the show. Do you ever worry about prematurely dating your book, or do you think it’s almost impossible not to date your work? TW: I really like that Klosterman essay, having parlayed my years of committing every episode to memory into a single humor piece years later. Efficient use of my youth. And I’ll resist the urge to make a bad joke about dating my book by taking it out to dinner and a movie and we’ll see where the night takes us. I’ll strongly resist it. My aim for this book, and my first one, was to capture something about the era it portrays (and in the case of Kapitoil, set in 1999, also the era it was published in) while doing my best to write a story that transcends the time period. It’s true that, 50 years from now, we won’t be using Twitter as we currently do, but we don’t ride in stagecoaches or believe in the Olympian gods, either, and plenty of those narratives remain relevant. Investigating your contextual surroundings confines you to that spatial-temporal sphere only if that’s your one concern. I recall reading an interview with Bret Easton Ellis about Glamorama, in which he responded to concerns that its extensive cast of millennial celebrities might soon be outdated, as this list from the first chapter makes clear: Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Cindy Crawford, Sheryl Crow, David Charvet, Courteney Cox, Harry Connick, Jr., Francisco [sic] Clemente, Nick Constantine, Zoe Cassavetes, Nicolas Cage, Thomas Calabro, Cristi Conway [sic], Bob Collacello, Whitfield Crane, John Cusack, Dean Cain, Jim Courier, Roger Clemens, Russell Crowe, Tia Carrere and Helena Bonham Carter — but I'm not sure if she should be under B or C. Ellis’s answer was that of course it would be outdated — that was exactly his point. (This seems like an easy point to make, but that’s another matter. When a novel’s major project is to expose the shallowness of the culture, it risks being equally shallow. Also, check out how outdated that New York Times page looks by now.) If your entire mission is to traffic in the there-and-gone minutiae of our culture, then, yes, I think you flirt with early obsolescence. If you marshal it as the trappings for a complete story, though, you have a chance to pinpoint exactly what it is about the epoch that is also universal. It’s ironic, though, that we sometimes criticize contemporary work steeped in modern detail for its triviality, yet lavish praise on period fiction or entertainment with hyper-accurate attention to historical detail (again, Mad Men). To me, that sometimes also feels like the name-dropping of celebrities, or an occasion for the writer — or set and costume designers — to prove to the reader that he’s done his homework. TM: This is a bit of a softball question, but it’s one I kept coming back to while reading Jonny Valentine. You seem like a very well-adjusted, adult man. What prompted you to write a book from the perspective of a prepubescent tween heartthrob? What is it that interests you about this world? What do you think it says about us as a society when Justin Bieber can go from a completely normal kid singing on YouTube to an overnight sensation recording tracks with Kanye West and the Rza? Does it say anything? TW: You’d have to canvas my friends to gauge how well-adjusted and adult I really am. Though I’m not an 11-year-old, I certainly share many of Jonny’s anxieties, especially his professional ones. He gets nauseous before sold-out performances at corporate arenas; I get a few butterflies before reading in front of four people at a bookstore. He’s promoting his second album; this is my second book. He chronically masturbates in hopes of achieving his first ejaculation; I...never mind. I’ve always been interested in child stars and prodigies. It’s a strange phenomenon, to have an adult mind or adult responsibilities but the restricted emotional comprehension of a child. We’ve had huge child stars in this country for a long time, ever since Jackie Coogan and Shirley Temple in the 1920s and ’30s, and many more the last few decades, especially this most recent one. We’re fascinated by the contrast of outsized talent in somebody so small, and we impute qualities to them — usually angelic innocence — that may not necessarily reflect their private personae. And their histories are often profoundly tragic; I don’t need to list the examples. I don’t know what the overnight-sensation trend says about us other than that we’ve always been a country fixated on get-rich-quick schemes and the dream that someone with power will discover us at the drugstore soda fountain and turn us into a star. The difference, now, is that nearly everyone has the potential to make him or herself famous for fifteen seconds (perhaps not minutes) — especially if you don’t mind public humiliation. TM: How deeply did you research this world? In the acknowledgments section, you bring up some influential nonfiction books, but I want to focus on the music here. Did you go out and buy a bunch of tween albums? Did you listen to them incessantly? Do you have favorites? Did you listen to any while writing? TW: I listened to more tween pop than I cared to, to get a feel for the public images but also the lyrics, so that Jonny’s own songs sounded plausible and not like satirical send-ups. But I also read some child-star autobiographies, from the somewhat more serious (Tatum O’Neal’s A Paper Life) to the semi-trashy (Drew Barrymore’s Little Girl Lost) to the propagandistic-advertorial (Miley Cyrus’s Miles To Go). And I read a number of tween-celebrity websites and magazines, sometimes in public, which can be hard to explain to onlookers. I’m partial to One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.” I think that would be the way to be an adolescent pop star: in a quintet, so that you’re among friends, even if everyone knows that just one of you will make it out alive (Mark Wahlberg, Justin Timberlake). TM: On the surface, Kapitoil and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine couldn’t be more different; however, they share some similarities. Both are told in very convincing first-person voices from characters with extremely different backgrounds from your own, and, reduced to their most basic levels, both involve young men finding their place in the world. Do you find it easier to write in first person than third? Did you ever attempt to write either of these books in third person? Is third person something you want to work toward in future novels, or do you not obsess about the divide between third and first as much as I do? TW: I do find it easier to write in first person, when I’m able to stretch out the fullest possibilities of a character’s voice, which is the most pleasurable part of writing for me. I’m always drawn to ventriloquism, especially of characters with idiosyncratic speaking styles. This is not to say I won’t ever write in the third person, but reading first person typically inspires deeper empathy for me. It also feels like it best exploits the native advantages of fiction — interiority and subjective language — whereas film can sometimes surpass what third-person narration does. (Film can use voice-over, of course, but it’s usually clunky.) Kapitoil didn’t sell in its first round of submissions, and several editors complained about Karim Issar’s voice, an English-as-a-second-language hybrid of technofinancial jargon and mathematically precise grammar. My agent thought I should see what it would look like in the third person, so I “translated” a page. It was lifeless, lacking everything that a reader might gravitate to in the book, so I stopped. (I did revise the last third of the book, among other things, which was a more necessary fix.) TM: Kapitoil was released in April 2010, and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine will be published this February. That’s less than three years. How do you manage to produce so many pages? Do you write every day? Or are you someone who writes in quick bursts? Do you think your process informs the work you do? And finally, what’s next? Are you going to take some time off between books, or are you already imagining what your third novel will be? TW: Before and after Kapitoil was published, I was slogging through another novel for about a year. I wasn’t having fun with it and the words were coming slowly; I think I produced about 100 pages. Then, one morning in October 2010, a friend emailed me asking if I had any ideas for a humorous book we could collaborate on. Without much premeditation, I suggested a parody of the pop-star autobiographies I would later go on to read for research. He liked the idea; an hour later, I realized it could make a good novel if I treated it with more gravity. I wrote 3,000 words that afternoon, a torrent for me. (I usually aim for 500 a day and am ecstatic if I get 1,000.) Soon after, I signed up at Paragraph in New York, a writers’ room, and used an old computer with no Internet so that my only entertainment was writing the novel itself. I finished a first draft in six months, also speedy for me, and spent about a year revising until my agent tried to sell it (and then several more months of work with my diligent, brilliant editor, Millicent Bennett, after Free Press bought it). It was a lesson that if a project is proceeding torturously, maybe you should abandon it, and if something is coming (relatively) easily, it might be a good sign. I mix in a decent amount of freelance writing, too, so I try to write something most weekdays and sometimes on the weekends, though I don’t hold myself to a strict schedule. With fiction, I can concentrate for about four hours at a time; for nonfiction or humor writing, I can last much longer. In the near future, I’ll be working on a screenplay with the writer Amber Dermont, author of The Starboard Sea and the forthcoming story collection Damage Control, and on a TV pilot with her and director/screenwriter Yaniv Raz. I have a vague idea for a new novel, but if the past is any indication, it will also be a bust (I finished a failed novel before Kapitoil, too). I look forward to referring back to this interview several years from now to tell an anecdote about the misguided novel I’d been struggling with before I righted my ship.

Most Anticipated: The Great 2013 Book Preview

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2013 is looking very fruitful, readers. While last year offered new work from Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, and many more, this year we'll get our hands on new George Saunders, Karen Russell, Jamaica Kincaid, Anne Carson, Colum McCann, Aleksandar Hemon and even Vladimir Nabokov and J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as, beyond the horizon of summer, new Paul Harding, Jonathan Lethem, and Thomas Pynchon. We'll also see an impressive array of anticipated work in translation from the likes of Alejandro Zambra, Ma Jian, László Krasznahorkai, Javier Marías and Karl Ove Knausgaard, among others. But these just offer the merest hint of the literary plenty that 2013 is poised to deliver. A bounty that we have tried to tame in another of our big book previews. The list that follows isn't exhaustive - no book preview could be - but, at 7,900 words strong and encompassing 79 titles, this is the only 2013 book preview you will ever need. January or Already Out: Tenth of December by George Saunders: Tenth of December is George Saunders at his hilarious, heartbreaking best, excavating modern American life in a way that only he can. In "Home," a soldier returns from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to a deteriorating family situation. In "Victory Lap," a botched abduction is told from three very different perspectives. Tenth of December has already prompted an all-out rave profile from the New York Times. And for those George Saunders super fans out there, yes, there is a story set at a theme park. (Patrick) Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright: While Wright was working on his 25,000-word take-down of the Church of Scientology for The New Yorker (where he is a staff writer), a spokesman for the organization showed up with four lawyers and 47 binders of documentation. “I suppose the idea was to drown me in information,” Wright recently told the Times, “but it was like trying to pour water on a fish.” The investigation has blossomed into a full-length book that’s shaping up to be as controversial as anything that crosses Scientology’s path: Wright has been receiving numerous legal missives from the church itself and the celebrities he scrutinizes, and his British publisher has just backed out—though they claim they haven’t been directly threatened by anyone. (Elizabeth) Umbrella by Will Self: Shortly before Umbrella came out in the UK last September, Will Self published an essay in The Guardian about how he’d gone modernist. “As I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.” Umbrella is the result of Self’s surge in ambition, and it won him some of the best reviews of his career, as well as his first Booker shortlisting. He lost out to Hilary Mantel in the end, but he won the moral victory in the group photo round by doing this. (Mark) Revenge by Yoko Ogawa: English-reading fans of the prolific and much-lauded Yoko Ogawa rejoice at the advent of Revenge, a set of eleven stories translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder.  The stories, like Ogawa's other novels (among them The Diving PoolThe Housekeeper and the Professor, and Hotel Iris) are purportedly elegant and creepy. (Lydia)     Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra: Drop the phrase “Chilean novelist” and literary minds automatically flock to Bolaño. However, Alejandro Zambra is another name those words should soon conjure if they don't already. Zambra was named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010, and his soon-to-be-released third novel, Ways of Going Home, just won a PEN translation award. The novel has dual narratives: a child’s perspective in Pinochet’s Chile and an author’s meditation on the struggle of writing. In Zambra’s own words (from our 2011 interview): “It’s a book about memory, about parents, about Chile.  It’s about the 80s, about the years when we children were secondary characters in the literature of our parents.  It’s about the dictatorship, as well, I guess.  And about literature, intimacy, the construction of intimacy.” (Anne) Scenes from Early Life by Philip Hensher: In his eighth novel, Scenes from Early Life, Philip Hensher “shows for the first time what [he] has largely concealed in the past: his heart,” writes Amanda Craig in The Independent.  Written in the form of a memoir, narrated in the voice of Hensher’s real-life husband Zaved Mahmood, the novel invites comparison with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.  Described as a hybrid of fiction, history, and biography—and as both “clever” and “loving”—the inventive project here is distinctly intriguing. (Sonya) Exodus by Lars Iyer: Exodus, which follows Spurious and Dogma, is the eminently satisfying and unexpectedly moving final installment in a truly original trilogy about two wandering British intellectuals—Lars and W., not to be confused with Lars Iyer and his real friend W., whom he’s been quoting for years on his blog—and their endless search for meaning in a random universe, for true originality of thought, for a leader, for better gin. (Emily M.) February: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell: Russell’s short stories are marked by superb follow-through: many succeed due to her iron-clad commitment to often fantastical conceits, like the title story of her first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which draws a powerful metaphor for adolescent girlhood in an actual orphanage for girls raised by wolves. Last year saw her debut novel, Swamplandia!nominated for the Pulitzer prize; this year, her second short story collection—and another batch of fantastical conceits—finally arrives. Just imagine the characters in this title story, trying to quell their bloodlust, sinking their fangs into lemons under the Italian sun. (Elizabeth) My Brother’s Book by Maurice Sendak: When Maurice Sendak died last May he left one, final, unpublished book behind.  It is, according to a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, a beautiful, intensely serious elegy for Sendak’s beloved older brother Jack, who died in 1995.  The story, illustrated in watercolors, has Guy (a stand-in for Sendak), journeying down the gullet of a massive polar bear named Death- “Diving through time so vast—sweeping past paradise”- into an underworld where he and Jack have one last reunion. “To read this intensely private work,” writes Publisher’s Weekly, “is to look over the artist's shoulder as he crafts his own afterworld, a place where he lies in silent embrace with those he loves forever.” (Kevin) Benediction by Kent Haruf: Kent Haruf’s previous novels, which include Plainsong and Eventide, have all taken place in the fictional Colorado town of Holt, which is based on the real life city of Yuma.  His newest work is no exception.  It is a network of family dramas in a small town, most of which revolve around loss or impending loss, strained relationships, and efforts to grapple, together, with the pain the characters face in their own lives and feel in the lives of those around them. (Kevin)   See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid: For See Now Then, her first novel in a decade, Jamaica Kincaid settles into a small town in Vermont, where she dissects the past, present and future of the crumbling marriage of Mrs. Sweet, mother of two children named Heracles and Persephone, a woman whose composer husband leaves her for a younger musician.  Kincaid is known as a writer who can see clean through the surface of things – and people – and this novel assures us that "Mrs. Sweet could see Mrs. Sweet very well." (Bill) The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works by Leonid Tsypkin: Like Chekhov, Tsypkin was a doctor by trade. In fact, that was all most people knew him as during his lifetime. At the time of Tsypkin's death, his novel Summer in Baden-Baden, one of the most beautiful to come out of the Soviet Era, remained unpublished, trapped in a drawer in Moscow. Now New Directions brings us the "remaining writings": a novella and several short stories. (Garth)   How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields: Like his 2008 book The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead, which was nearly as much a biology text book as it was a memoir, How Literature Saved My Life obstinately evades genre definitions. It takes the form of numerous short essays and fragments of oblique meditation on life and literature; and, as you’d expect from the author of Reality Hunger, it’s heavily textured with quotation. Topics include Shields’s identification with such diverse fellows as Ben Lerner (his “aesthetic spawn”) and George W. Bush, the fundamental meaninglessness of life, and the continued decline of realist narrative fiction. (Mark) The City of Devi by Manil Suri: Manil Suri is perhaps best known for his first novel The Death of Vishnu, which was long-listed for the Booker and shortlisted for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award.  The City of Devi, his third novel, takes place in a Mumbai emptied out under threat of nuclear attack.  Sarita, a 33-year-old statistician, stays in the city to find her beloved husband, who has mysteriously vanished.  She ends up teaming up with a gay Muslim man named Jaz, and together they travel across this dangerous and absurd and magical landscape.  According to Keran Desai, this is Suri’s “bravest and most passionate book,” which combines “the thrill of Bollywood with the pull of a thriller.” (Edan) Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms: Two Novels by Truman Capote: Holly Golightly is turning 55, and to mark her entry into late middle age, the Modern Library is reissuing Capote’s dazzling 1958 novella that made her and Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue showroom into American icons. The short novel is paired with Capote’s (also brief) debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, a strange and haunting semi-fictional evocation of Capote’s hauntingly strange Southern childhood. Modern Library will also reissue Capote’s Complete Stories in March. (Michael) Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash: Ron Rash has earned a spot as one of the top fiction writers describing life in Appalachia with his previous books, The Cove, Serena, and One Foot in Eden.  His newest collection of short stories tells of two drug-addicted friends stealing their former boss’s war trophies, of a prisoner on a chain-gang trying to convince a farmer’s young wife to help him escape, and of an eerie diving expedition to retrieve the body of a girl who drowned beneath a waterfall. (Kevin)   The Love Song of Jonny Valentine by Teddy Wayne: If you have ever wondered what, if anything, is going on inside the head of one of those kiddie pop stars who seem animatronically designed to make the tween girls swoon, then Jonny Valentine may be for you. Winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award for his first novel Kapitoil, Wayne has built a reputation for offbeat wit in his humor columns for Vanity Fair and McSweeney’s, as well as “Shouts & Murmurs” pieces in The New Yorker. Here, he channels the voice of a lonely eleven-year-old pop megastar in a rollicking satire of America’s obsession with fame and pop culture. (Michael) Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun: English poet, novelist and short story writer James Lasdun’s new book is a short memoir about a long and harrowing experience at the hands of a former student who set out to destroy him and through online accusations of sexual harassment and theft. J.M. Coetzee has called it “a reminder, as if any were needed, of how easily, since the arrival of the Internet, our peace can be troubled and our good name besmirched.” (Mark)   Fight Song by Joshua Mohr: Joshua Mohr’s previous novels—Some Things That Meant The World To Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus—formed a loose trilogy, each book standing alone but all three concerned with a mildly overlapping cast of drifting and marginal characters in San Francisco. In Fight Song, Mohr is on to new territory, “way out in a puzzling universe known as the suburbs,” where a middle-aged man embarks on a quest to find happiness, to reconnect with his distant and distracted family, and to reverse a long slide into purposelessness. (Emily M.) March: Middle C by William H. Gass: Not many writers are still at the height of their powers at age 88. Hell, not many writers are still writing at 88. (We're looking at you, Philip Roth.) But William H. Gass has always been an outlier, pursuing his own vision on his own timetable. His last novel (and magnum opus) The Tunnel took thirty years to write. Middle C, comparatively svelte at 400-odd pages, took a mere fifteen, and may be his most accessible fiction since 1968's In The Heart of the Heart of the Country. It's a character piece, concerning one Joseph Skizzen, a serial (and hapless) C.V. embellisher and connoisseur of more serious forms of infamy. The plot, such as it is, follows him from war-torn Europe, where he loses his father, to a career as a music professor in the Midwest. Not much happens - does it ever, in Gass? - but, sentence by sentence, you won't read a more beautifully composed or stimulating novel this year. Or possibly any other. (Garth) The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout: Maine native Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, her novel in the form of linked stories.  Strout's fourth novel, The Burgess Boys, is the story of the brothers Jim and Bob Burgess, who are haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children in Maine.  They have since fled to Brooklyn, but they're summoned home by their sister Susan, who needs their help dealing with her troubled teenage son.  Once they're back home, long-buried tensions resurface that will change the Burgess boys forever. (Bill) The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte: Sam Lipsyte returns to short stories with his new book The Fun Parts. The collection contains some fiction previously published in The Paris Review, Playboy, and The New Yorker, including his excellent "The Climber Room," which ends with a bizarre twist. Several of the stories, including "The Dungeon Master" and "Snacks," explore the world from the perspectives of misfit teens. As with all of Lipstye's stories, expect his absurdist humor and a just a touch of perversion. Get excited. (Patrick) Red Doc> by Anne Carson: It’s been more than a decade since Carson, a poet and classicist, published The Autobiography of Red, a dazzling and powerful poetic novel that reinvents the myth of Herakles and Greyon: hero and monster reworked into a story of violently deep unrequited love. Red Doc> promises to be a sequel of sorts, with “a very different style,” “changed names,” and the spare preview is incredibly intriguing: “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”  (Elizabeth)   A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee: Author of The Privileges, arguably the best novel about haute New York in the boom years of the past decade, Dee returns with another tale of family life in the upper reaches of New York society, this time post-recession. When her husband loses his job as a partner at a white-shoe law firm, Helen Armstead finds a job at a PR firm, where she discovers she has an almost magical, and definitely lucrative, gift: she can convince powerful men to admit their mistakes. But this is a novel, so her professional success does not necessarily translate into success in her personal life. (Michael) Speedboat by Renata Adler: This novel, first published in 1976, brings to mind the old saw about the Velvet Underground. Not everybody read it, but everybody who did went on to write a novel of his or her own. Adler is primarily known for her acerbic New Yorker fact pieces, but, like her omnicompetent contemporary Joan Didion, she is also a terrific fiction writer. This fragmented look at the life of an Adler-like journalist may be her Play It As It Lays. Writers still urgently press out-of-print copies on each other in big-city bars near last call. Now it's getting the NYRB Classics treatment. (Garth) Mary Coin by Marisa Silver: Following the success of her novel The God of War, The New Yorker favorite Marisa Silver returns with Mary Coin, a novel inspired by Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” photo. The book follows three characters: Mary, the mother in the photograph; Vera Dare, the photographer; and Walker Dodge, a contemporary-era professor of cultural history. Ben Fountain says it’s “quite simply one of the best books I’ve read in years,” and Meghan O’Rourke calls it “an extraordinarily wise and compassionate novel.” (Edan) How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid: Hamid’s previous novels were The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Moth Smoke. His third borrows the structure of self-help books (chapter titles include "Avoid Idealists", "Don’t Fall in Love", and "Work For Yourself") to follow a nameless man’s ascent from a childhood of rural poverty to success as a corporate tycoon in a metropolis in “rising Asia.” (Emily M.)   The Tragedy of Mr. Morn Vladimir Nabokov: I furrowed my brow when I saw Nabokov's name on the preview list, imagining a horde of publishers rooting through his undies for hitherto undiscovered index cards.  But this is a very old play, in the scheme of Nabokov's life--written in 1923, published in Russian in 2008, published in English this spring.  The play is about royalty, revolutionaries, allegories; "On the page," writes Lesley Chamberlain for the TLS, " the entire text creeps metonymically sideways. Its author weaves language into a tissue of reality hinting at some veiled, mysteriously interconnected, static truth beyond."  I'm not sure what that means, but I think I like it. (Lydia) The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon: Sarajevo-born, Chicago-based author Aleksandar Hemon—winner of the MacArthur “genius grant” and editor of Dalkey Archive’s stellar Best European Fiction series—abandons fiction for essay and memoir in his fifth book, The Book of My Lives. The title alludes to and, as far as we can tell, calls upon Hemon’s New Yorker essay “The Book of My Life,” about his former literature professor turned war criminal, Nikola Koljevic. Just as Hemon’s novel Lazarus Project straddled the fiction/nonfiction divide, The Book of My Lives isn’t strictly memoir, pushing boundaries of genre now from the nonfiction side. (Anne) The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma: Kristopher Jansma, academic and Electric Literature blogger, drawer of daring and controversial parallels on the digital pages of our own august publication (Is The Killing like or not like Kafka?), publishes his debut novel on the first day of spring.  The novel features young writers, young love, artistic competition, girls, jaunts.  I predict that at least one blurber will reference This Side of Paradise. (Lydia)   A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal: In the 2003, "a young Oklahoman who work[ed] in New York" stole the eleventh issue of McSweeney's from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and T.C. Boyle with a story - well, scenario, really - called "Weena." Maybe I only loved it so much because I, too, was from outlands like those it so lovingly described. Still, I've been keeping an eye out for that young Oklahoman, Benjamin Lytal, ever since. I assume that A Map of Tulsa, too, is about coming of age in Tulsa, a city that looks from the window of a passing car at night "like a mournful spaceship." (Garth) In Partial Disgrace by Charles Newman: Newman, the editor who put TriQuarterly on the map in the 1960s, was once spoken of in the same breath with the great dark humorists of postwar American writing. Even before his death, in 2006, his novels were falling out of print and his reputation fading. If there is any justice in the republic of letters (which is a big if), the belated publication of his incomplete masterwork, a sprawling trilogy set in a fictional Mitteleuropean nation to rival Musil's Kakania, should put him permanently back on the map. (Garth) The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: J.M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner, continues to explore the plight of the outsider in his new allegorical novel, The Childhood of Jesus.  It's the story of an unnamed man and boy who cross an ocean to a strange land where, bereft of memories, they are assigned the names Simon and David before they set out to find the boy's mother.  They succeed, apparently, only to run afoul of the authorities, which forces them to flee by car through the mountains.  One early reader has called the novel "profound and continually surprising." (Bill) April: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson: The beloved author of Case HistoriesBehind the Scenes at the Museum, and Started Early, Took My Dog (among others) is out with the stor(ies) of Ursula Todd. In 1910, Todd is born during a snowstorm in England, but from then on there are parallel stories — one in which she dies at first breath, and one in which she lives through the tumultuous 20th century.  As the lives of Ursula Todd continue to multiply, Atkinson asks what, then, is the best way to live, if one has multiple chances? (Janet) All That Is by James Salter: Upon return from service as a naval officer in Okinawa, Philip Bowman becomes a book editor during the “golden age” of publishing.  The publisher’s blurb promises “Salter’s signature economy of prose” and a story about the “dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition.” In our interview with Salter in September, he told us it was “an intimate story about a life in New York publishing,” some 10 years in the making.  From John Irving: “A beautiful novel, with sufficient love, heartbreak, vengeance, identity confusion, longing, and euphoria of language to have satisfied Shakespeare.” Tim O’Brien: “Salter’s vivid, lucid prose does exquisite justice to his subject—the relentless struggle to make good on our own humanity.” April will not come soon enough. (Sonya) The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud: The Emperor's Children, Messud's bestselling novel from 2006, did as much as anyone has to bridge the gap between the social novel and the novel of consciousness her husband, James Wood, has championed in his criticism. Now, Messud returns with the story of a Boston-area woman who becomes entangled with a Lebanese-Italian family that moves in nearby. Expect, among other things, insanely fine writing. (Garth)   The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer: In a review of her most recent book, 2011’s The Uncoupling, the San Francisco Chronicle declared that, “At this point in her career, Meg Wolitzer deserves to be a household name.” Wolitzer’s tenth novel begins at a summer camp for the arts in 1974, and follows a group of friends into the adulthood. They’re all talented, but talent isn’t enough, and as they grow up, their paths split: some are forced to exchange their childhood dreams for more conventional lives, while others find great success—and, as one might imagine, tensions arise from these differences. (Elizabeth) The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner: Rachel Kushner’s first novel, Telex from Cuba, was lauded for its evocative descriptions and its power of suspense. Kushner will surely call on both talents for The Flamethrowers, as her heroine first becomes immersed in a late ‘70s New York downtown scene peopled by artists and squatters, and then follows a motorcycle baron to Italy during the height of the Autonomist movement. Images are central to Kushner’s creative process: a ducati, a woman in war paint, and a F.T. Marinetti lookalike riding atop a cycle with a bullet-shaped sidecar were talismans (among others) for writing this book. (Anne) Harvard Square by André Aciman: In 1970s Cambridge, Massachusetts, a young Harvard graduate student from Egypt wants to be the consummate American, fully assimilated and ensconced in the ivory tower as a literature professor. Then he meets Kalaj — an Arab cab driver who denigrates American mass culture and captivates the student with his seedy, adventurous life. Harvard Square tells the story of this young student’s dilemma, caught between the lofty world of Harvard academia and the magnetic company of his new friend. (Janet) Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel: Woke Up Lonely is Fiona Maazel's first novel since being named a "5 Under 35" choice by the National Book Foundation. The book focuses on Thurlow Dan, the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness. Ironically, Thurlow himself is profoundly lonely and longing for his ex-wife, Esme. The book has been compared to the work of Sam Lipsyte and Karen Russell, and if there's one phrase that continually appears in early reviews and press materials, it is "action packed." (Patrick) The Dark Road by Ma Jian: Ma Jian, whose books and person are both banned from China, published his third novel The Dark Road in June (Yunchen Publishing House, Taipei); the English translation will be released by Penguin.  The story: a couple determined to give birth to a second child in order to carry on the family line flee their village and the family planning crackdown. At Sampsonia Way, Tienchi Martin-Liao described it as “an absurd story” that uses “magical realism to describe the perverse reality in China.” The publisher describes it as “a haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty.” Martin-Liao tells us that the book’s title, Yin Zhi Dao, also means vagina, or place of life and origin. (Sonya) The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard: Stothard’s second novel (after Isabel and Rocco) follows an unnamed 17-year-old narrator as she flies from London to L.A. for the funeral of Lily, a mother she never knew, the proprietess of The Pink Hotel. While the hotel’s residents throw a rave in Lily’s honor, her daughter steals a suitcase of Lily’s photos, letters, and clothes. These mementos set her on a journey around L.A., returning letters to their writers and photos to their subjects and uncovering the secrets of her mother’s life. Longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize, The Pink Hotel has been optioned for production by True Blood’s Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin. (Janet) Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perišic: Perišic is one of the leading new writers to have emerged from Croatia after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In this, his first novel to appear stateside, he offers the funny and absurd tale of two cousins from Zagreb who get caught up in the American Invasion of Iraq, circa 2003. Perišic speaks English, and assisted with the translation, so his voice should come through intact, and a blurb from Jonathan Franzen never hurts. (Garth) May: And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini: Few details have been released so far about the third novel from international publishing juggernaut Hosseini (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns).  In a statement posted to Penguin’s website, Hosseini explains,  “My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.” (Kevin) My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard: The first part of Knausgaard's six-part behemoth was the single most stirring novel I read in 2012. Or is the word memoir? Anyway, this year sees the publication of Part Two, which apparently shifts the emphasis from Knausgaard's childhood and the death of his father to his romantic foibles as an adult. But form trumps content in this book, and I'd read 400 pages of Knausgaard dilating on trips to the dentist. There's still time to run out and catch up on Part One before May rolls around. I can't imagine many readers who finish it won't want to keep going. (Garth) You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt: You Are One of Them is Pushcart Prize-winner Elliott Holt's debut novel. You might be forgiven for thinking she'd already published a few books, as Holt has been a fixture of the literary Twittersphere for years. Holt's debut is a literary suspense novel spanning years, as a young woman, raised in politically charged Washington D.C. of the 1980s, goes to Moscow to investigate the decades-old death of her childhood friend. (Patrick)   The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien: In a letter to his American publisher two decades after abandoning The Fall of Arthur, Tolkien expressed regret that he’d left the epic poem unfinished (some suggest it was cast aside as he focused on writing The Hobbit, published in 1937). Nearly eighty years later, the work has been edited and annotated by his son, Christopher, who has written three companion essays that explore the text and his father’s use of Arthurian legend in Middle Earth. Tolkien fans will be grateful for the uncharted territory but unused to the book’s bulk, or lack thereof: in the American edition, poem, notes, and essays clock in just shy of 200 pages long. (Elizabeth) Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The author of the critically acclaimed novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus, both set in Adichie’s home country of Nigeria, now turns her keen eye to the trials of cultural assimilation for Africans in America and England. In the novel, a young Nigerian couple leave their homeland – she to America for an education, he to a far more unsettled, undocumented life in England. In their separate ways, each confront issues of race and identity they would never have faced in Nigeria, where they eventually reunite. (Michael) Red Moon by Benjamin Percy: Percy, whose previous books include the novel The Wilding and the story collection Refresh, Refresh, imagines a world wherein werewolves have always lived among us, uneasily tolerated, a hidden but largely controlled menace, required by law to take a transformation-inhibiting drug. He describes his new novel as “a narrative made of equal parts supernatural thriller, love story and political allegory.” (Emily M.)   A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel: A short story collection that includes the author's New Yorker debut, "Atria". If that piece is any indication, the book is more than a bit fabulist – the plot involves a girl who finds herself pregnant and worries she'll give birth to an animal. The specter of parenthood, as the title suggests, appears in numerous guises, as does the reinvention that marked the protagonists of her novel (the genesis of which she wrote about in our own pages). (Thom) The Hanging Garden by Patrick White: The last work of Nobel Laureate Patrick White gives his homeland an Elysian feel. At the beginning, we meet two orphans, Eirene Sklavos and Gilbert Horsfall, whose parents both died in separate conflicts early on in the second World War. They escape to a house in suburban Sydney and bond in a lush little garden. As with most things published posthumously, the story is a little bit scattershot, but early reviews out of Oz (and our own take) say the book is worthy of its author. (Thom) Love Is Power, or Something Like That by A. Igoni Barrett: Barrett’s middle name, Igonibo, means stranger, though he’s no stranger to all things literary: he chronicled his childhood bookishness in our pages last year, and his father is Jamaican-born poet Lindsay Barrett who settled in Nigeria, where the younger Barrett was born and still lives. The streets of Lagos provide the backdrop for his second story collection, Love Is Power, or Something Like That. His first was called From the Cave of Rotten Teeth, and rotting teeth seems to be something of a recurring motif. It’s picked up at least tangentially in this book with “My Smelling Mouth Problem,” a story where the protagonist’s halitosis causes disturbances on a city bus ride. (Anne) The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer: George Packer reveals the state of affairs in America in his ominously-titled new book, a history told in biographical inspections of its various residents (read about one, a lobbyist, in a truly riveting excerpt in The New Yorker).  The bad news, probably, is that American is fucked.  The good news, I learned from an interview in The Gunn Oracle, the paper of record at Packer's high school, is that Packer didn't become a proper journalist until age 40, which is sort of heartening, and may officially qualify him for Bloom status.  (More bad news: no posted vacancies at The Gunn Oracle.) (Lydia) Pacific by Tom Drury: Drury’s fans will be ecstatic to learn that his new novel focuses once again on the inhabitants of Grouse County, Iowa, where two of his four previous books, The End of Vandalism and Hunts in Dreams, also take place. In this new novel, Tiny Darling’s son Micah travels to L.A. to reunite with his mother who abandoned him years before, while back in the Midwest, a mysterious woman unsettles everyone she meets.  The novel tells two parallel tales, plumbing both the comic and tragic of life.  Yiyun Li says that Drury is a “rare master of the art of seeing." This novel is sure to prove that—yet again. (Edan) Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm: The title of this collection comes from a 1994 New Yorker profile of the artist David Salle, in which Malcolm tried in 41 different ways, without success, to penetrate the carefully constructed shell of an artist who had made a bundle during the go-go 1980s but was terrified that he was already forgotten by the art world, a has-been.  Malcolm trains her laser eye on a variety of other subjects, including Edward Weston's nudes, the German photographer Thomas Struth, Edith Wharton, the Gossip Girl novels, and the false starts on her own autobiography. (Bill) June: Transatlantic by Colum McCann: Known for deftly lacing his fiction with historical events – such as the high-wire walk between the twin towers that opened his National Book Award-winning novel, Let the Great World Spin – McCann threads together three very different journeys to Ireland in his new novel, Transatlantic.  The first was Frederick Douglass's trip to denounce slavery in 1845, just as the potato famine was beginning; the second was the first transatlantic flight, in 1919, by Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown; and the third was former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell's repeated crossings to broker the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.  In an interview, McCann said it's the aftermath of such large historic events that interests him as a novelist: "What happens in the quiet moments?  What happens when the plane has landed?" (Bill) The Hare by César Aira: A recent bit of contrarianism in The New Republic blamed the exhaustive posthumous marketing of Roberto Bolaño for crowding other Latin American writers out of the U.S. marketplace. If anything, it seems to me, it's the opposite: the success of The Savage Detectives helped publishers realize there was a market for Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and the fascinating Argentinian César Aira. The past few years have seen seven of Aira's many novels translated into English. Some of them, like Ghosts, are transcendently good, but none has been a breakout hit. Maybe the reissue of The Hare, which appeared in the U.K. in 1998, will be it. At the very least, it's the longest Aira to appear in English: a picaresque about a naturalist's voyage into the Argentinean pampas. (Garth) Taipei by Tao Lin: Indie darling Tao Lin officially enters the world of big six publishing with his eighth published work, Taipei, an autobiographical novel beginning in 2009 and concerning a few years in the life of a 25-year-old protagonist moving from Taiwan to New York City and Las Vegas. In an Observer interview from 2011, Lin said that the book “contains a marriage, somewhat extreme recreational drug usage, parents, [and] a book tour” – all of which should be familiar subjects to people who’ve followed Lin’s exploits on Twitter, Tumblr and his blog over the past few years. (And especially if you’ve been one of his “interns.”) (Nick) In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell: Matt Bell’s novel is an exploration of parenthood and marriage, and it carries the premise and the force of myth: a woman who can sing objects into being and a man who longs for fatherhood get married and leave their hectic lives for a quiet homestead by the side of a remote lake. But as pregnancy after pregnancy fails, the wife’s powers take a darker turn—she sings the stars from the sky—and their grief transforms not only their marriage but the world around them. (Emily M.) His Wife Leaves Him by Stephen Dixon: Stephen Dixon, a writer known for rendering unbearable experiences, has built his 15th novel around a premise that is almost unbearably simple: A man named Martin is thinking about the loss of his wife, Gwen.  Dixon's long and fruitful career includes more than 500 shorts stories, three O. Henry Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and a pair of nominations for the National Book Award.  His Wife Leaves Him, according to its author, "is about a bunch of nouns: love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscence, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares, meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving." (Bill) Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai: The novels of the great Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai have recently begun to break through with American audiences. Thus far, however, we've only glimpsed one half of his oeuvre: the one that deals (darkly, complexly) with postwar Europe. Krasznahorkai has also long taken an interest in East Asia, where he's spent time in residence. Seiobo There Below, one of several novels drawing on this experience, shows a Japanese goddess visiting disparate places and times, in search of beauty. (Garth) Carnival by Rawi Hage: True to its title, Carnival – which takes place in a city loosely based on the author's hometown of Montreal – takes the reader on a tour of a place well-populated with odd and eccentric characters. The protagonist, Fly, is a cab driver with a penchant for binge reading. We learn that he chose his name to draw a contrast with a group called the Spiders. The Spiders are a loose collection of predatory cab drivers, who choose to wait for their customers rather than to hunt them on the streets. Fly himself, too, is no slouch when it comes to weirdness – he says that his mother gave birth to him in front of an audience of seals. (Thom) Cannonball by Joseph McElroy: Of the American experimental novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, Joseph McElroy may be the most idiosyncratic. He specializes in what you might call information architecture, overloading his narratives with nonfictional data while strategically withholding the kinds of exposition that are conventional in fiction. The results speak for themselves: moments of startling resonance, power, mystery…and topicality. His work has previously tackled the Pinochet regime, artificial intelligence, and, in his terrific recent story collection, Night Soul, terrorism. Now he turns his attention to the Iraq War. (Garth) On the Floor by Aifric Campbell: Banker-turned-novelist Aifric Campbell takes on the testosterone of the eighties. At Morgan Stanley, she saw firsthand the excesses of the era, which drove young female analysts to develop “contempt” for other women. As a product of that environment, her main character, Geri, feels like a “skirt among men.” She lacquers her ambitions with conspicuously feminine gestures and modes of dress. In an interview with the Guardian, Campbell pointed out that she used to race greyhounds, which gave her a “certain logic” that helped her in banking and writing. (Thom) July: Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff: Rakoff passed away last summer at the age of 47, shortly after completing this slender novel “written entirely in verse.” His previous books have been largely satirical, so this final work is a departure: stretching across the country and the twentieth century, the novel’s stories are linked by “acts of generosity or cruelty.” Ira Glass, who brought Rakoff to the airwaves for more than a decade, has described the book as “very funny and very sad, which is my favorite combination” (a fair descriptor of much of Rakoff’s radio work, like this heartbreaking performance from the live episode of “This American Life” staged just a few months before his death.) (Elizabeth) Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw: In his third novel, Aw writes about Malaysian immigrants to contemporary Shanghai, featuring an ensemble cast who hail from diverse backgrounds; their stories are interwoven, and counterpointed with the lives they left behind.  Aw, who was a practicing lawyer while writing his first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, won accolades for his debut: longlisted for Man Booker Prize, International Impac Dublin Award and the Guardian First Book Prize; winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region).  (Sonya) August: Night Film by Marisha Pessl: This much-anticipated, oft-delayed follow-up to Pessl’s bestselling Special Topics in Calamity Physics originally set to come out in 2010 is now scheduled – no, this time they really mean it – in the fall. The novel is a “psychological literary thriller” about a young New Yorker who sets out to investigate the apparent suicide of Ashley Cordova, daughter of a reclusive European movie director. (Michael) The Infatuations by Javier Marías: Javier Marías’s new book, translated by Marguerite Jull Costa, is his 14th novel to be published in English. It was awarded Spain’s National Novel Prize last October, but Marías turned it down out of an aversion to receiving public money. It’s the story of a woman’s obsession with an apparently happy couple who inexplicably disappear. It’s his first novel to be narrated from a woman’s perspective, so it will be interesting to see how Marias manages to accommodate his penchant for detailed descriptions of ladies crossing and uncrossing their legs. (Mark) Clare of the Sea-Light by Edwidge Danticat: My time at the University of Miami overlapped with Danticat’s, though unfortunately I never took her creative writing course. I did, however, see her speak at an event for the English department during my junior year. She was astounding. There are prose stylists in this world and then there are storytellers, and rare are people like Danticat who are both. She read from her memoir Brother, I’m Dying, which features one of the most devastating and personal depictions of our wretched immigration system ever written. Haiti has always been an remarkable place – a nation built with equal measures of hope, passion, charm, malfeasance and tragedy. In this forthcoming story collection, Clare of the Sea-Light – which draws its title from a piece she originally published in Haiti Noir – we can expect the prodigiously talented author to render each aspect of the place beautifully. (Nick) Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain: Caleb Crain’s debut novel, which concerns the topic of “youth,” borrows its title from W. H. Auden’s 1929 poem “[It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens]” and takes place in the Czech Republic during the last decade of the 20th century. Look for Crain, a journalist, critic and banished member of the NYPL’s Central Library Plan advisory committee, to use research and insight from his previous book – a provocative look at male friendship, personal lives, and literary creation – in order to give Jacob Putnam and the rest of the characters in Necessary Errors a great deal of interwoven influences, covert desires and realistic interaction. (Nick) September: Enon by Paul Harding: In 2009, the tiny Bellevue Literary Press published Harding’s debut novel, Tinkers, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Tinkers tells the story of George Washington Crosby, an old man reliving the memories of his life as he dies surround by family. Enon, named for the Massachusetts town where Crosby died, is about his grandson, Charlie Crosby, and Charlie’s daughter Kate. (Janet) October: The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert: Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega-bestselling Eat Pray Love put her on Time Magazine’s list of most influential people in the world, and then Julia Roberts played her in the movie adaptation. What many fans of that memoir don’t know is that Gilbert started her career as a fiction writer, penning a short story collection, Pilgrims, and the novel, Stern Men, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 2000.  Now, 13 years later, she returns to the form with the publication of “a big, sprawling, epic historical novel that takes place from 1760 to 1880, following the fortunes of a family called the Whittakers, who make their name in the early botanical exploration/proto-pharmaceutical business trade.” That description is from Gilbert herself, taken from this candid, illuminating and entertaining interview with Rachel Khong for The Rumpus. (Edan) Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem: Sunnyside Queens has long held a contrarian perspective. In the 1920s, as urban development projects washed over the outer boroughs, the folks in Sunnyside did all they could to keep the place from turning into a cookie-cutter suburb. Driveways were banned and garages were disallowed. Instead of lawns, the neighborhood’s designers recommended long courtyards that spanned the entire length of blocks – these were meant to encourage mingling and space sharing. It’s no doubt this spirit of dissent, skepticism and opinionated egalitarianism that’s drawn Jonathan Lethem to the neighborhood as the centerpiece for his new novel, a “family epic,” which focuses on three generations of American leftists growing up in the outer borough. (Nick) Unknown: Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon: Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news recently that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. (Though Penguin says the book has not yet been scheduled). Charles said the news of the new book was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that "everything is tentative" at this time. More as we know it, folks. (Max) Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush: There's still not much to report on Rush's latest, a novel of love and friendship set in upstate New York on the eve of the Iraq War. In October, though Granta Books in the U.K. announced an autumn 2013 publication date, so here's hoping... (Garth) The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann: The fifth of Vollmann's Seven Dreams books to appear, The Dying Grass will most likely not see print until summer of 2015, according to his editor. First up is Last Stories, a collection of ghost stories slated to hit bookstores next year. Assuming there still are bookstores next year. (Garth) Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt: Your Name Here seems to be stuck in a holding pattern at Noemi Press, befitting, one supposes, its tortured publication history. In a recent Believer interview, DeWitt suggested that the version that appears in print, if it appears in print, may not be the same as the .pdf she was selling on her website a few years back. Chunks may have been spun off into other works of fiction. Whatever the damn thing ends up looking like, we eagerly await it. (Garth) Escape from the Children's Hospital by Jonathan Safran Foer: Foer returns to childhood, to trauma, and to interwoven voices and storylines. The childhood here is Foer's own, though, so this may mark a kind of departure. We'll have to wait and see, as no publication date has been set. (Garth) More from The Millions: The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.