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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]

‘A Walk in the Woods’ vs. A Walk in the Woods: On Reading as a Substitute for Experience

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In the summer of 2000, two friends and I embarked on an epic cross-country drive. In preparation for the journey, we rented a Dodge Caravan, stocked up on peanut butter, and debated where to go. Using a Rand McNally map book, I laid out our path in pen, drawing lines from campsite icon to campsite icon across erica and back. We planned to leave from Delaware, where I was a senior in college, in late June, and return in mid-August — in all, six weeks of whiskey-addled, open-skied adventure. For the quiet moments -- of which there turned out to be few — I brought along a worn copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Like the Joads, we were also striving for California — but with more Led Zeppelin CDs in tow. That month and a half became one of the fullest periods of my life, with one exhilarating escapade after another: outracing tornadoes in Kansas, nearly freezing to death in Yosemite, close calls with bears in both Sequoia and Glacier National Parks. We hiked and camped and ate our peanut butter. With cheap snapshot cameras, we ran through dozens of rolls of film. From Seattle to Pittsburgh, we forswore bathing, a foul contest of wills. It was all very stupid and perfectly glorious. It was, as they say, a formative experience. Afterwards, we made a pact to do a similar expedition every year, but outside of a few days in West Virginia in 2001, our oath died on the vine. As I progressed through my 20s, though, I still thought of myself as the same daring moron who once pushed a minivan to 110 on a Montana interstate. My girlfriend and I would go on long drives just to see what we could see; we hiked with the same questing spirit I’d carried on my trip. Once, in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, we became covered in deer ticks -- and as we scraped them from our shins, laughing in horror beside our car, I had the feeling that, uncomfortable as I was, I remained on the proper track. You can’t get covered in bugs if you don’t enter the woods. As time went on, I began to read about people who, I flattered myself to think, had a similarly — if more pronounced — searching spirit. There was Percy Fawcett of The Lost City of Z, who rambled through the Amazon as if it were Central Park. And Into the Wild's Chris McCandless, whose fatal Alaskan trek was equally noble and misguided. I became a sucker for such narratives, subscribing to Outside magazine for its pieces on doomed hikers and wayward canoeists. Most know Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run for the creepy 10-toe running shoes it helped to popularize, but I was more taken by its description of Mexico’s Tarahumara and their daunting mountain races. To write Savage Harvest, about the 1961 disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Carl Hoffman traveled to New Guinea -- just as I would have done, I thought as I read. After all, I was pretty intrepid myself. Except that I wasn’t; not anymore. I was now married to that girlfriend, and had become both a father and an eternally fatigued commuter. Any journey I now took was occurring inside my skull: instead of going on spontaneous road trips, I was reading Charles Portis’s Norwood. Instead of hiking until my feet bled, I was reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Instead of tearing across Montana, I was reading Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land. I had outsourced the work of outdoor experience to various authors, my risk limited to paper cuts and coffee spills. It had happened slowly, imperceptibly, until the transformation was all but complete. The version of myself who “got out there and did things” had been replaced by a softer, safer, far more boring person. In short, I was spending too much time reading about interesting people and almost no time being one — an insight that recently hit me wit depressing force. I’m not sure what spurred the revelation — perhaps it was the contrast between the solitude of reading and the chaos of what I read. Maybe it struck me that I’d just read two books about people surviving deadly cold (Crazy for the Storm, The Shining) and was, absurdly, preparing to read two more (The Revenant and Alone on the Ice). Whatever it was, I’d become unhealthily comfortable; to quote an old Radiohead song, I was now a pig in a cage on antibiotics — or, less dramatically, a guy in cozy slippers whose vitality had slipped away. This suspicion was soon confirmed by a family hike — the first my wife and I had been on in years, despite the fact that the woods are a short drive from our house. Though we only walked for two hours or so, and the air was getting cold, the forest quietly filled a need that, in recent years, I had learned to ignore. We marveled at trees that intertwined like rope, gazed at a creek as if it were a national landmark. We inhaled, exhaled, looked for the paint blazes that marked our path. We were again away from everything, and it felt really fucking good. [millions_ad] That was a month and a half ago, and that feeling — the recognition of some innate inner need — hasn’t faded; it now seems to burn within me, steady as a pilot light. I’ve resolved to reclaim myself — my old self, tick-stippled and chased by bears, a person who’d do most anything for the sake of doing it. In a way, it’s already happened; we’ve since gone on another such hike, and we’re planning a what-the-hell-let’s-just-go trip to Tennessee in the spring. Reading is an incredible thing, but it’s a poor substitute for life. I’m amazed, and embarrassed, that I’ve had to learn such an obvious lesson. Yes, adulthood is tiring, children will suck you dry, and it’s easy to stay inside. But I remember now: though I packed The Grapes of Wrath on that long-ago, six-week drive, I read almost none of it. And I didn’t miss it at all. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

A Year in Reading: Jacob Lambert

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I took The Shining down from its shelf a few days before Halloween, as it seemed a seasonally-appropriate read. It had sat there for years, Danny Torrance’s blank face staring out from its silver spine, asking me what I was afraid of, what I was waiting for. This will be much different from the movie, it said. Everybody knows how much Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s film. “I think he wants to hurt people with this movie,” isn’t that what King said? And besides, it went on, you haven’t seen it in 15 years. Book-jacket Danny had a point. And not only was it almost Halloween, but I’d just finished Jack Handey’s brilliantly asinine, irresponsibly funny The Stench of Honolulu. Among the books I’d recently read were Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, Dean King’s Skeletons on the Zahara, and Bill Beverly’s Dodgers. None of these were exactly “fun,” but they were entertainments, with none of the claustrophobic dread I associated with The Shining. I needed a change of pace, and I couldn’t avoid King’s novel any longer. It was time to get down to brass tacks. And within the first few chapters, it became clear that The Shining was all brass tacks -- sharp, blunt, and efficient. I most enjoy King when he scraps his leavening impulses -- inexplicable mysticism, mediocre humor, saccharine endings -- and lets the darkness rip. The Long Walk and Gerald’s Game are two of his best because almost no light shines through them, and even The Stand -- in which, after a trillion pages, good ultimately prevails -- ends on a demoralizing note. As a fan of Kubrick’s film, I knew what I was getting myself into, but King’s book was entirely different, a much more human -- and therefore, more unsettling -- family drama. As I made my way through, another unsettling drama -- the 2016 presidential campaign -- was mercifully winding down, and until election night, The Shining was just a way to escape the noise. What better way to distance myself from Donald Trump’s noxiousness than to read about an eerily quiet, snowed-in hotel, written decades before the terms “basket of deplorables” and “nasty woman” entered the vernacular? Then, early on November 9th, Donald Trump fucking won. I was about 80 pages from the end of The Shining, and like everything else -- large and small, consequential and irrelevant -- in the hours and days afterwards, the tenor of the novel changed. I was so unmoored by his victory -- by the very notion that someone so vile could be so richly rewarded -- that the book and reality engaged in a queasy merge. In The Shining, King conjured a world -- albeit limited to the grounds of the Overlook Hotel -- in which everything was wrong. Hedge animals came alive; dead guests reappeared; fathers tried to kill their families. Having a sociopathic pussy-grabber as president had more in common with that world than the one I’d been living in. The Shining is about many things -- parental love, the strictures of family, alcohol abuse -- but it is mainly about the perils of the mind. In The Shining, there is nothing more dangerous than an unstable thought allowed. And in the wake of the election, it became clear that our minds -- both individually and collectively -- had become territories as unsafe as anything King could muster. Trump’s more cartoonish supporters had become no less delusional than Jack Torrance, who spends the latter part of The Shining piss-drunk on imaginary gin. Those voters’ nihilism “sent a message,” we were told -- as if that message would improve a goddamn thing. Those of us crushed by the nation’s turn, meanwhile, became dazed Wendy Torrances, at once unwilling to believe what was happening and unable to dismiss it. The hornet’s nest that had sat empty and fumigated -- The New York Times puts Clinton’s chances at 85 percent, you know -- was suddenly abuzz. All of us -- Trump and Clinton supporters both -- had become untethered from reality. Or, more accurately, we were all now yoked to a reality that couldn’t possibly be real. In the end, King’s Shining was much more hopeful than the film, the shadow of which it deserves to escape. This isn’t surprising; King seems, at heart, a warm and caring person, while Kubrick was by all accounts a petty tyrant of his own. So amid my post-election grief, I was heartened by the novel’s ending, which qualifies as “happy” without, as often happens in King -- I’m looking at you, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon -- cheapening its preceding horrors. And that seems about as good as I can ask for from the next four years: to emerge from the ordeal damaged but still whole. This is the limit of my optimism at the end of 2016. Because we’re all in The Shining now. More from A Year in Reading 2016 Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? 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The Five Scariest Books Ever Written

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With Halloween upon us, now is the perfect time to curl up with a good, scary book. But if you’ve already read such standbys as Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Shining, you might be in need of a suggestion. With that in mind, here are five absolute chillers that will have you turning pages deep into the night -- and are guaranteed to have your teeth a-chattering as you pray for the sun to rise! Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom The elderly, disease-wracked Morrie is dying -- immobile and helpless in what is soon to be his deathbed. Outside his New England home, the pained echoes of atrocities past --- witch burnings, the slaughter of native peoples -- can still be faintly heard. Once each week, as regular as the doomsday clock, he is visited by a much younger man -- a man known, terrifyingly, as “Mitch” -- who has arrived from the murder-pocked wastelands of Detroit. Mitch hovers above Morrie’s bed, extracting stories, memories, and anecdotes from the elder as if withdrawing his very blood. Morrie, unsurprisingly, withers as Mitch’s visits mount. Is Morrie’s terminal illness sapping his will to live? Or is he a victim of Mitch’s vampiric need for enough material to fill an easily giftable book? It’s All Good by Gwyneth Paltrow In It’s All Good, a pallid wraith of a woman named Gwyneth, all eerie eyes and jutting bones, drags us into the depths of her madness -- a state in which simple, good-hearted folk might gobble down such witchy horrors as preserved lemons and quail eggs. Early on, we learn that Gwenyth shuns red meat -- it is, perhaps, too close to the taste of human flesh -- and any poultry raised inorganically. Her goal, she proclaims, is to “cleanse” her “system.” This obsession with scouring her bowels of the merest impurity raises a troubling question: what is so vile within her that it must be so harshly scrubbed away? And if we read her book, are we just as poisoned as she? Crippled America by Donald Trump In Crippled America, a glaring, angry madman called Donald guides us through a harrowing realm of poverty, violence, and ruin -- a shattered deathscape that, if viewed through a certain prism, can begin to look like our own. As in other works of dystopian horror, Crippled America is vague on what has brought such pestilence, and at times Donald’s prose, as H.P. Lovecraft’s, becomes difficult to follow (“If you have laws that you don’t enforce, then you don’t have laws,” he writes. “This leads to lawlessness.”). At other times, however, he is as convincingly menacing as the Cryptkeeper himself -- as when he declares his lunatic intentions to rule this ravaged land. It’s a far-fetched bit of plotting, to be sure -- but just plausible enough to send a shiver down your spine. Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen Like Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Chicken Soup for the Soul is a collection of stories that, taken as a whole, form a mosaic of punishing psychological horror. Taking place in an eerie world in which humanity’s quirks and edges have been worn away -- shades of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives -- Chicken Soup for the Soul pounds the reader with sun-dappled tales of love, flowers, and workplace hugging. Chicken Soup for the Soul succeeds in terrifying by relentlessly piling false “goodness” upon false “goodness” -- and for the quivering, goose-pimpled reader, the effect is that of being forced to eat an entire sheet cake at riflepoint. The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell A modern classic of terror, The Carrie Diaries tells the story of Carrie White, a fragile teenager who is born with telekinetic powers -- powers that, as she matures, will allow her to avenge the high-school abusers who torment her endlessly. Bushnell controls the action with a firm and expert grip, allowing the horror of The Carrie Diaries to slowly build, a sense of dread permeating each page, until a catastrophic climax that stands as one of the...wait a minute — what? Oh. Really? Oh. Okay. So then..what’s The Carrie Diaries? Oh. Like a Sex and the City prequel? For fuck’s sake. That’s even scarier than whatever the hell it was I was originally talking about. Image Credit: Pixabay.

October Books: A Reading List for the Month of Harvests and Horror

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If you like Fall, you like October. It's the height of the season, the fieriest in its orange, the briskest in its breezes. "I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers," exclaims the irrepressible Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. "It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it?" October at Green Gables is "when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson" and "the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths;" it's a "beautiful month." Katherine Mansfield would have disagreed. October, she wrote in her journal, "is my unfortunate month. I dislike it exceedingly to have to pass through it -- each day fills me with terror." (It was the month of her birthday.) And Gabriel García Márquez's biographer notes that October, the month of the greatest disaster in his family history, when his grandfather killed a man in 1908, "would always be the gloomiest month, the time of evil augury" in his novels. Some people, of course, seek out evil augury in October. It's the month in which we domesticate horror as best we can, into costumes, candy, and slasher films. Frankenstein's monster may not have been animated until the full gloom of November, but it's in early October that Count Dracula visits Mina Harker in the night and forces her to drink his blood, making her flesh of his flesh. It's in October that the Overlook Hotel shuts down for the season, leaving Jack Torrance alone for the winter with his family and his typewriter in The Shining, and it's in October that his son, Danny, starts saying, "Redrum." Can you domesticate horror by telling scary tales? Just as the camp counselor frightening the kids around the fire is likely the first one to get picked off when the murders begin, the four elderly members of the Chowder Society in Peter Straub's Ghost Story, who have dealt with the disturbing death of one of their own the previous October by telling each other ghost stories, prove anything but immune to sudden terror themselves until they trace their curse to a horrible secret they shared during an October 50 years before -- just after, as it happens, another kind of modern horror, the stock market crash of 1929. In the odd patterns that human irrationality often follows, those financial terrors, the Black Thursdays and Black Mondays, tend to arrive in October too. Here is a list of suggested reading for the month of harvests and horror. The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1867) Those planning to celebrate National Novel Writing Month next month can take heart -- or heed -- from Dostoyevsky, who, having promised a publisher the year before that he'd deliver a novel by November 1866 or lose the rights to his works for nine years, didn't begin writing until October 4. He handed in this appropriately themed novel with hours to spare. Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne (1878) Scholars may argue whether Keats wrote the sonnet that begins, "Bright star! would that I were steadfast as thou art" in October, or even whether it was inspired by his love for Fanny Brawne, but there is no doubt that on October 13, 1819, in a letter that wasn't published until nearly 60 years later, he wrote to Miss Brawne, "I could be martyr'd for my Religion -- Love is my religion -- I could die for that -- I could die for you." Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James (1904) James had modest aims for the wittily unsettling tales, often set among the libraries and ancient archives that were his professional haunts, that he wrote to entertain his students at Eton and Cambridge. But their skillful manipulation of disgust has made them perennial favorites for connoisseurs of the macabre. Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed (1919) Oddly, one effect of Russia's October Revolution was to modernize the calendar so that, in retrospect, it took place in November. But wherever you place those 10 days, Reed, the young partisan American reporter, was there, moving through Petrograd -- soon renamed Leningrad -- as history was made around him. The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1952 by Charles M. Schulz (1950-52, 2004) October is of course the month of the Great Pumpkin (whose arrival Linus didn't anticipate until 1959), but it was also on October 2, 1950, when Shermy said to Patty in the very first Peanuts strip, "Well! Here comes ol' Charlie Brown! How I hate him!" Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956) The leaves are turning red, brown, and yellow in the small New England town, while the sky is blue and the days are unseasonably warm: it must be Indian summer. But let's hear Metalious tell it: "Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle." A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962) It's a dark and stormy October night when Meg comes downstairs to find Charles Wallace waiting precociously for her with milk warming on the stove. Soon after, blown in by the storm, arrives their strange new neighbor Mrs. Whatsit, "her mouth puckered like an autumn apple." Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) The October wedding in Jamaica of Edward Rochester and Bertha Mason, which plays a peripheral role in Jane Eyre, takes center stage in Rhys's novel, in which Rochester greets his doomed marriage with the words, "So it was all over." 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (1970) "Gentlemen," New York screenwriter Helene Hanff wrote to the London bookshop Marks & Co. in October 1949, "Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books," the first note in a cross-Atlantic correspondence that has charmed lovers of books, and of bookselling, ever since it was published two decades later. Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl (1975) The first day of October is the date of Mr. Victor Hazell's grand shooting party, which means that it's also the day on which Danny and his "marvelous and exciting father" conspire to ruin that piggy-eyed snob's plans with the aid of a hundred or so tranquilized pheasants. The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (1979) There's no particular reason to read The Dog of the South in October except that it begins in that month, when the leaves in Texas have gone straight from green to dead, and Ray Midge's wife, Norma, has run off with his credit cards, his Ford Torino, and his ex-friend Guy Dupree. Any month is a good month to read Charles Portis. "The Ant of the Self" by ZZ Packer (2002) Packer's short story uses 1995's Million Man March as the backdrop for Roy Bivens Jr. and his son Spurgeon -- "nerdy ol' Spurgeon" -- who, on an ill-fated mission to sell some black men some birds at the march, work out a more elemental drama of fatherhood and ambition. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk (2004) On a fall night in Harlem, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, James Brown recorded a show that turned him from a chitlin'-circuit headliner into a nationwide star, an event whose abrupt intensity was put brilliantly in context in Wolk's little book, one of the standout entries in the marvelous 33 1/3 series. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) The landscape McCarthy's father and son travel has been razed of all civilization, calendars included, but as their story begins, the man thinks it might be October. All he knows is that they won't last another winter without finding their way south. Image Credit: Pixabay

Everything I Know About America I Learned from Stephen King

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1. Back in 1975, Stephen King began 'Salem's Lot, his second novel, with an epigraph from George Seferis: "Old friend, what are you looking for?/ After those many years abroad you come/ With images you tended/ Under foreign skies/ Far away from your own land." This summer, I settled down to read Joyland, something like the fiftieth novel Stephen King has published since he began his career forty years ago. I joke to no one in particular that Stephen King has an occult novel-writing machine, or a crack team of monkeys with keyboards, or a computer formula that writes his books for him, and Joyland does occasionally convey that quality of phoning it in; it just feels so easy for this guy. But it's still a Stephen King book, which means it has a kicking story and a sentimental old heart. And since I seem destined, this summer, not to pick up a book or watch a movie or engage with any kind of artistic project without having some kind of maudlin experience or generally going through something, reading this nostalgic whodunit set in the lost world of the summer carnival launched me on my own nostalgic expedition. In Stephen King's funhouse mirror, I saw all the other Stephen King books I have read since my childhood, under foreign skies, far away from my own land. 2. I am an only child and I grew up in a Foreign Service family, which means that my family picked up and moved every two to five years. Being a quasi-international child had a variety of effects, some transitory, some enduring. Foreign Service children, in my experience, inhabit a strange half-life of cosmopolitanism. Foreign words roll off their tongues, foreign foods succor them, and they are at home with thin toilet paper and thinner ketchup. But in the Foreign Service, your orientation is always in the direction of America, Washington D.C. or the Northern Virginia suburbs your magnetic pole. The very mission of the Foreign Service demands this, of course, and the logistics follow. Vacation is called "home leave"; in addition to all their assorted relatives, most people have some property back home, a building that they fret over and find tenants for and supply with new coats of paint on their short weeks stateside. The orientation is spiritual as well as practical; overseas, I wore out VHS tapes my grandparents sent me, so that a select handful of episodes of 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, and Sesame Street are seared into such a precious, way-back corner of my brain that should I dare to Google for a vignette of skating muppets singing "Feliz Navidad," I would probably have a stroke. When I was a little girl in Athens (the first of our postings during which I was a sentient being for any prolonged period), this orientation west to the white dome, combined with the distance therefrom and the relative scarcity of things—products mostly—that are unfailingly associated with America, meant that for me the United States became imbued with an unspeakable glamour. It goes without saying (but I will say) that I never lacked for amenities—the life I am describing was a gift from my parents and divine Providence. That said, amenities-wise, the United States was the navel of the universe. I had some early object lessons in globalization, imperialism, and the profound power of marketing. When the first McDonald's opened in Syntagma square, there were lines around the block, and I rejoiced at the limp pickles on my hamburger. When Wendy's set up shop in a grand old peach-colored building nearby—formerly housing the American Office of Defense Cooperation, now housing a mall—it was a goddamned revelation (it's not there anymore, evidently; the franchise pulled out of Greece in 2009). But there were still things I wanted. I remember hoarding dollar bills for the purpose of buying a book on home leave. To my knowledge it is still the case that it is hard and expensive to get all the books in English you want overseas. My enthusiasm wasn't only on the material plane. One set of grandparents lived in the north-easternmost part of California in a very small town that feels pretty much like the edge of the world. I found this place so enchanting that I informed my grandparents of my plan to honeymoon there on the eventual occasion of my marriage. Sometimes I think I chose to roost in San Francisco largely due to the memory of that exotic scented air, snuffled up as we exited the airport to visit my other grandparents, who lived near the Bay. Back in Washington after eight years of overseas living, I went to public school and listened to 99.1 WHFS and DC 101 and surreptitiously watched Roseanne and generally got to the business of acclimating. By the time my parents moved back overseas and I started high school in the U.S., the mild foreignness I had tried to slough off began to seem like an asset, and I embarked on the period I now think of as Working It. This involved a deft combination of encouraging any perception of foreign grandeur associated with my person, protesting too much about my normalcy, and scoring laughs off the Otherness of my new home (I'm sorry, Armenia, for the things I said). Even after I embraced the foreign, however, sometimes the glamour of America reflected back at me in curious ways. At a store in Yerevan I bought Pink Floyd CDs and a Led Zeppelin album called Live Over America that I haven't seen since. The first cigarettes I ever bought, before I wanted to smoke a cigarette but respected their currency, came from an open-air market and had red and blue packages and names like "American Dream." Back in Athens before college with the new Euro cheaper than the dollar, I hit the summer sales for garments from Kookai and the heavenly Zara, and one day scored some New Balance sneakers of an unorthodox style. (In boarding school, where an entire female bourse operates around the borrowing of clothes, it's good to have some stuff that no one else has.) I took the bus to a gleaming new cineplex in an Athenian suburb to watch American movies that, as the years passed, drew temporally ever-closer to their American release dates, the celebrity name transliterations on the marquis ever more sophisticated. There is, obviously, nothing intrinsically interesting about an American with a passport and two pairs of genuine or otherwise New Balance kicks manufactured for a non-U.S. market. The world is full of meandering paths and displaced nationalities and people with much more exciting stories than my own. But your childhood is your childhood; as I get older, and the tables of circumstance turn, as I lose whatever light patina of foreignness I had or manufactured and there's a Zara in every American mall and a McDonald's in every city in the world, as I bemoan the garbage food and the garbage construction and the garbage policies of my country and yearn now for a seaside taverna and the glamour of Abroad, there are some early things that stick with me. I never see a 7-Eleven Big Bite and don't instinctively desire to eat it. I know that Heinz ketchup is unmistakable and precious and that a "cheeseburger" anywhere else is to an American cheeseburger what the grotesquerie of pressed dust we find in America is to a gyro. I don't use and barely deserve the driver's license I have, but I deeply admire a hot car. A new paperback purchased with crisp American dollars? That's bliss. A Stephen King book? That's Shangri-La. [millions_email] I've done the math, and somehow throughout this modestly peripatetic life, in the hotel lobbies and the airports and the back seat of the car and during idle moments at my series of illuminating summer jobs—visa office photographer, gas station attendant, commissary stockist, slide scanner—I managed to read more books by Stephen King than by any other writer. I remember vividly the row of Stephen King books on the shelf of the basement library in the American Embassy Athens, a fortified Bauhaus dream downtown. Reading Joyland this summer, and then plowing through a handful of others for the second or third or fourth time, I was struck by how much of my conception of America comes from those thick books—what they said to me during that quasi-rootless time, and what they say to me now that both the vague internationalism and the natural solipsism of my childhood have mostly dissipated. For better or worse, I cut my patriotic teeth on the oeuvre of Stephen King. 3. I am hardly the first person to identify Stephen King as holding some claim to the title of America's chief scribe. Nearly twenty years ago, Jonathan P. Davis wrote Stephen King’s America, an extended academic love poem to Stephen King as an author who "understood the human condition on all levels...who stood on the sacred ground of America...whose feelings about his country resonated throughout his fiction..." As with any attempt to distill the most somethingest traits of a given nation, the attributes typically end up being about things that are actually universal—among Davis's areas of inquiry are "Technology," "Childhood and Rites of Passage," and "Survival in a Despairing World." But I responded, as someone who has alternately fetishized and scorned my country of origin throughout my life, to Davis's instinct to celebrate King as the great American writer of the late twentieth century. The success of a novelist has to do with the extent to which his work allows the reader to lose herself in the story, but the novels that really resonate are the ones that also invite the reader to apply them to her particular circumstances. In my case, Stephen King books appealed to my lingering sense, even in high school, of America's fundamental glamour, that feeling impelled both by the act of circumnavigating the globe broadly in the service of America's aims, and the foreignness imparted by its distance. And they achieved several things besides scaring and entertaining the hell out of me. At some level, Stephen King novels issued a necessary corrective to my wanton teenage materialism and overweening belief in American goodness. They did their own kind of national myth-making. In America and Americans, John Steinbeck’s dated, elegiac snapshot of American life in 1966, a book that in some ways encapsulates in non-fiction the portrait of America we find in Stephen King's corpus, Steinbeck writes: "One of the characteristics most puzzling to a foreign observer is the strong and imperishable dream the American carries. On inspection, it is found that the dream has little to do with reality in American life. Consider the dream of and the hunger for home. The very word can reduce nearly all of my compatriots to tears." In The Stand, Larry Underwood looks around at the Maine coast, cleansed of people: On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf. Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and-black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups—never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine.  In my adult grumpiness and the cold light of day, there are plenty of groups of Americans that I can take in without any pervading sense of their compelling romance, dirty or otherwise. But you can bet your ass I was receptive to this notion in my tender youth. Stephen King himself writes such a dirty, compelling romance that even now he breathes new life into that faded old vision of my homeland. I would wager that most people who have heard of Stephen King know that he is from Maine; he grew up in Maine, he is a product of its schools, and little Maine towns, real or fictional, are where many of his worlds are built. (And Stephen King novels are all about world-building—although the publishers initially forced him to cut The Stand down to a reasonable size, the magisterial Complete and Uncut edition is one of his best books because it makes so much room for so many people, so many vignettes and backstories.) And even though Derry, à la It or Insomnia, or 'Salem's Lot from the novel of the same name, are characterized as being host to some enduring, elemental evil, this has an odd way of privileging place. These places are special. Imagine knowing a place so well that you can write all of its inhabitants and landscape and make it feel so much like home, even home with something terrible lurking underneath. I think Stephen King books manage to appeal both to people who have experienced the tyranny and joy of the small town, as well as people who have known rootlessness in its many forms (not, of course, that the two are mutually exclusive). People in Stephen King novels are forever coming back to their hometowns after years away; no matter how long they are gone, they still know their physical and emotional topography. The recurring characters and places, Mike Hanlon the librarian or the Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes store, or even the Crimson King, contribute to that feeling that the world is just one big American town with all the same points of reference, where people read Misery Chastain novels and remember, or willfully forget, the fire at the Black Spot. (Even apart from the fast food chains springing up like toadstools across the globe, the nature of the Foreign Service, with its far-flung points of insularity, recalls a similar feeling. This will sound like Working It, but I once walked past a man on the street in Yangon whose wedding I had attended in Yerevan a decade before.) I love the Real Talk that comes out of the characters residing in these towns, things like "[he] looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lick up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog." They remind me of things that my beloved grandpa said or was said to have said, how he might describe someone as looking like "forty miles of bad road." Stephen King's novels transmit deeper things than hometown nostalgia. As Johathan P. Davis points out in his book, much of King's work is concerned with the American devotion, in theory at any rate, to individual liberty. When King isn't being gross, with his bone splinters and clots of blood and patented semantic move of creating an appalling noun just by adding the word "meat" to the back of another one—e.g., "boymeat" or "greymeat"—he spends a lot of time on the freedoms of the individual. Glenn Bateman, the retired sociology professor of The Stand, spends most of the novel talking about the formation of society and the tension between freedom and social cohesion. When, at the end of that novel, spunky Fran and Stu, a laconic badass from East Texas, make the choice to leave the crowding and rules of the Boulder Free Zone for the rugged, dangerous liberty of the Maine coast, this is posited as a sensible choice, one that only a couple of badasses would make. In Insomnia, when the yuppie, city-living children of Lois Chasse try to pry her out of her hometown and install her in a retirement community with "a Red Diet Plan, a Blue Diet Plan, a Green Diet Plan, and a Yellow Diet Plan," her beau Ralph "thought of eating three scientifically balanced meals a day for the rest of his life—no more sausage pizzas from Gambino's, no more Coffee Pot sandwiches, no more chiliburgers from Mexico Mike's—and found the prospect almost unbearably grim" (sometimes, freedom has a little bit to do with a Big Bite). Ralph prefers to die like his friend Jimmy V., without having to "show anyone either his driver's license or his Blue Cross Major Medical card." And then there are the abused women Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder, who declare their independence through a vale of blood. Ostensibly, every person spends his or her days in the exercise of whatever freedoms are afforded them, but America is famously a place where this individual liberty is (ostensibly) enshrined in founding documents meant to govern a collective whole—it's a nation of people living out their manifest destiny. Nobody understands, and in a sense reifies, this paradox like Stephen King. King disdains in his books the smug and unshakeable belief in personal rightness (he really has it in for yuppies), but he allows for a specialness that in many cases is literally divine—Dick Hallorann or Danny Torrance in The Shining, or Tom Cullen in The Stand, or any number of other characters endowed with exceptional ability, typically a clarity of vision, by some higher power. This is the kind of thing that really appeals to a child, especially an only child. I think it also resonates for good and ill with someone in a Foreign Service environment, which embodies a kind of exceptionalism, with its security doors and special badges and Fourth of July parties and commissaries filled with imported goods. [millions_ad] Stephen King believes in the individual; while his work battles what Steinbeck called "the screwball organizations which teach hatred and revenge to the ignorant and fearful people, using race or religion as the enemy," he devotes a lot of pages to what Steinbeck likewise calls "the pleasant, benign, and interesting screwballs...poets in flowing robes, inventors of new religions..." without whom we would be "a duller nation." King recognizes all of these screwballs as the real nobility of America. Often, they are teachers: in Insomnia, a character opines, "I think this country is full of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card-carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think most of them are teachers, living and working in small-town obscurity because that's the way they like it." That's American Dream talk, but I think a lot of Americans have a person like this somewhere up in their family tree. Isn't King himself the best testament? For all the pompous literary types he tears down in his work (like the Creative Writing Honors Seminar instructor in It, who calls the writer Bill Denbrough's horror stories "PULP" and "CRAP"), King sprinkles good teachers all over his work, along with other varieties of "benign screwballs" who, we suspect with folksy assurance, would do a sight better job of running the country than the people we pay to do the job. The best patriots are always the most fiercely critical of their countries, and the critical difference between Stephen King and the big-gun schlock that he often shares space with in airport newsstands, is that Stephen King's writing is a sustained exercise in pointing out the crappy and the horrifying things we all subscribe to by living out our American, and human, existence. Steinbeck wrote that in America, "Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes; but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence." Stephen King uses his stortytelling talents to counter this silence, to show us the worst things about the folks next door and, by extension, ourselves. King has hard words for the government, which does things like wipe out civilization with a series of evil fuckups, but many of his monsters and things that go bump in the night are actually the residents of ordinary little towns, which shelter wifebeaters and molesters and racists and complacent assholes. These characters aren't always bad because they're evil; sometimes they are weak and stupid, uncharitable, feeling sorry for themselves over a slight from a woman or a group. Sometimes they're just the beneficiaries of a hard row without the gumption and can-do to hoe it. When a man is locked up briefly for assaulting his wife in Insomnia, a citizen asks "'How can assault be a misdemeanor?...I'm sorry, but I never did understand that part.' 'It's a misdemeanor when you only do it to your wife,' McGovern said, hoisting his satiric eyebrow. 'It's the American way, Lo.'" Stephen King talks about other things that comprise the American way. The evil presence living under Derry enriches itself on the pre-existing condition, so to speak, of its citizens. When the fire at the Black Spot—a nightclub built by the black soldiers on the nearby military base—burns scores of people alive, it was the sheet-clad town fathers, not the alien spider, who set the blaze. On race (and gender), Stephen King has taken and acknowledged some very valid criticism. In his rush to write the whole America, he is basically one hundred percent responsible for the modern incarnation of the Magical Negro, for example in the character of The Stand’s Mother Abagail, a rustic lady Moses who communes with the Lord and walks uphill and back both ways to fix a good supper for her guests. King himself, in a Playboy interview quoted in Davis's book, called Mother Abagail and The Shining’s Dick Hallorann "cardboard caricatures of superblack heroes, viewed through rose-tinted glasses of white liberal guilt..." This is actually another part of my strange inheritance from Stephen King's work. Sometimes the hardest lesson about racism is that it's not always the guy in the sheet. Some discussions about race (beyond the easy ones like laughing at pictures of latter-day Klan members) and some articles about the number of black characters in Girls make me anxious and clammy. In spite of these faults, there are worse primers on American life than a Stephen King novel, worse pieces of propaganda to absorb. Steinbeck said of the so-called American way of life, "No one can define it or point to any one person or group who lives it, but it is very real nevertheless...These dreams describe our vague yearnings toward what we wish were and hope we may be: wise, just, compassionate, and noble. The fact that we have this dream at all is perhaps an indication of its possibility." I don't feel that way all of the time, but during a summer spent getting reacquainted with Stephen King, between the nostalgia and blood clots and things that go bump in the night, for a moment or two I entertained the possibility. Image Credit: Pexels/John-Mark Smith.

Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview

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The first half of 2013 delighted us with new books by the likes of George Saunders, Karen Russell, and Colum McCann, among many others. And if the last six months had many delights on offer for book lovers, the second half of the year can only be described as an invitation to gluttony. In the next six months, you'll see new books by Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl, Norman Rush, Jonathan Lethem, and none other than Thomas Pynchon. And beyond those headliners there are many other tantalizing titles in the wings, including some from overseas and others from intriguing newcomers. The list that follows isn’t exhaustive – no book preview could be – but, at 9,000 words strong and encompassing 86 titles, this is the only second-half 2013 book preview you will ever need. Scroll down and get started. July: Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda: Crime writer Dennis Lehane chose Pochoda’s lyrical and atmospheric second novel for his eponymous imprint at Ecco/Harper, calling it “gritty and magical.”  Pitched as a literary thriller about the diverse inhabitants of Red Hook, Brooklyn, Visitation Street has already received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal. Lionel Shriver says, “I loved it,” and Deborah Harkness calls it “marvelous.” (Edan)   Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff: Rakoff was the author of three books of essays, the winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and a beloved regular on This American Life who died last year shortly after finishing this book. A novel written entirely in verse (a form in which he was masterful, as evidenced here), its characters range across the 20th century, each connected to the next by an act of generosity or cruelty. (Janet)   The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman: Waldman recently weighed in for us on the centuries-old Richardson vs. Fielding debate. Now, in her first novel, she expertly plays the former's psychological penetration off the latter's civic vision. The titular Nathaniel, one of Brooklyn's sad young literary men, seeks to navigate between his public ambitions and his private compulsions in a series of romantic encounters. Those without 718 area codes shouldn't let the milieu scare them off; questions of whether Nate can heed the difficult imperatives of the conscience—and of how Waldman will pull off a whole book from the man's point of view—keep the pages turning, while generating volumes of quotable insight, in the manner of The Marriage Plot. (Garth) Fin & Lady by Cathleen Schine: A country mouse moves to the city in Cathleen Schine’s ninth novel. The mouse is Fin, an orphaned eleven-year old boy, and the city is Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Under the guardianship of his glamorous half-sister, Lady, Fin gets to know both the city and his wild sister, and encounters situations that are a far cry from his Connecticut dairy farm upbringing. As with many of Schine’s previous novels, Fin & Lady explores changing definitions of family.  (Hannah)   My Education by Susan Choi: Reflect upon your sordid graduate school days with a novel of the perverse master-student relationship and adulterous sex triangle. Professor Brodeur is evidently the kind of man whose name is scrawled on restroom walls by vengeful English majors—rather than end up in the sack with him, Choi’s protagonist Regina instead starts up an affair with his wife.  Later in the novel and in time, Regina reflects on this period in her life and the changes wrought by the intervening 15 years.  Choi was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her second novel, American Woman. (Lydia) Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw: The third novel from the winner of the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award follows the lives and business ventures of five characters in Shanghai, each representing various—and at times dichotomous—social strata. There’s Phoebe, the poor and unsophisticated migrant worker from Malaysia; and there’s Yinghui, the rich and ambitious businesswoman. There’s Gary, the waylaid pop star; and there’s Justin, the scion of a wealthy real estate family. Lastly there’s Walter, the eponymous billionaire, who meddles behind the scenes with the lives of almost everybody. Altogether, their multi-layered, intersecting lives contribute to make “Shanghai itself [into] the book’s real main character,” writes Jill Baker in the Asian Review of Books. It’s a city “luring in people hoping for a second chance or … any chance at all.” (Nick) Lotería by Mario Alberto Zambrano: It’s a rare first novel that can appeal to partisans of both S.E. Hinton and Julio Cortázar, but Lotería does just that. The story 11-year-old Luz Maria Castillo begins telling us from her room in a state institution is deceptively plainspoken: Here’s how I got here. But as the story proceeds in fragments, keyed not to chronology but to a deck of cards from Lotería (a kind of Mexican bingo), things get shiftier. Color reproductions of the cards introduce each chapter, making the book, if not exactly Kindle-proof, then at least uncommonly handsome. (Garth) The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth: Gabriel Roth’s debut novel follows Eric Muller from his lonely high school days as a computer geek to his millionaire success in Silicon Valley as a computer geek. Slightly disoriented by his newfound abilities to make money and bed women, Muller wryly observes his life as if he is that same awkward teenager trapped in a dream life. When he falls in love with Maya, a beautiful woman with a mysterious past, he must choose between the desire to emotionally (and literally) hack into it, or to trust his good fortune. (Janet) 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 Argentine 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) August: Night Film by Marisha Pessl: Pessl’s first novel since Special Topics in Calamity Physics, her celebrated 2006 debut, concerns a David Lynchish filmmaker whose daughter has died in Lower Manhattan under suspicious circumstances. Soon, reporter Scott McGrath has launched an investigation that will take him to the heart of the auteur’s secretive empire: his cult following, his whacked-out body of work, and his near impenetrable upstate compound. With interpolated web pages and documents and Vanity Fair articles, the novel’s a hot pop mess, but in the special way of a latter-day Kanye West album or a movie co-directed by Charlie Kaufman and Michael Bay, and the climax alone—a 65-page haunted-house tour-de-force—is worth the price of admission. (Garth) Cannonball by Joseph McElroy: McElroy was writing the lights out in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, and in the last few years has been rediscovered by a younger generation of readers, who justly class him with Thomas Pynchon—a writer of a wildly different sensibility, but a similar, world-devouring ambition. Hell, he even did a Year in Reading. If 2011’s Night Soul is any indication, McElroy’s can still intrigue, baffle, and stop the heart, often all at once. This, his first novel in many a moon, concerns the Iraq War, among other things, and it’s hard to think of an author more suited to reimagining the subject. (Garth) Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat: The author of a string of heartbreaking novels about the strife-torn Caribbean nation of Haiti, including The Farming of Bones and The Dew Breaker, Danticat here tells the story of a young motherless girl whose poverty-stricken father considers giving her away a wealthier family. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as “magical as a folk tale and as effective and devastating as a newsreel,” the novel paints a stark portrait of village life in Haiti. (Michael)   Remember How I Told You I Loved You?  by Gillian Linden: Gillian Linden’s debut collection of linked stories follows a young woman through college, careers, love affairs and marriages— “from delayed adolescence to (delayed) adulthood.” The publisher, Little A (Amazon’s new literary fiction imprint), describes the collection as “a sharp and intimate take on romance and infidelity, trust and betrayal,” written in a “deadpan narrative, cool and precise.”  Linden’s story “Pests” was recently published in The Paris Review.   Linden will join the ranks of several talented literary writers that Little A has published since its launch in March — including A.L. Kennedy, Shawn Vestal, and Jenny Davidson. (Sonya) The Infatuations by Javier Marias: Marias’s only competitor for the title of Spain’s Most Important Living Writer may be Enrique Vila-Matas. Each of his last few books with New Directions, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, set a new high-water mark—most recently, the mammoth trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. Now he’s made the jump to Knopf, which means you’re about to hear a lot about him. And deservedly so, it would seem: The Infatuations has already been called "great literature" in Spain and "perhaps his best novel" in the U.K. Is there any reason on earth you wouldn’t want to read the greatest novel of Spain’s greatest living writer? Of course there isn’t. Now get thee to a bookshop! (Garth) The Color Master by Aimee Bender: Ogres, tiger-mending and playing at prostitution—yep, it’s time for Aimee Bender to once again enchant us with her whimsical and magical fiction.  Her next story collection comes out just three years after the publication of her bestselling novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and it looks like the book is a return to form for Bender.  Publishers Weekly says that even the tales that resemble children’s storybooks “are haunted by a taut, sardonic melancholy,” noting that her “mood pieces” about female friendship are the strongest of the bunch. (Edan) Elect H. Mouse State Judge by Nelly Reifler: To Kafka’s “Josephine, the Mouse-Singer” and Bolaño’s “Police Rat” and Mrs. Frisby and that one A.M. Homes story where the kid gets it on with a Barbie doll, we must now add Nelly Reifler’s first novel. It’s a fast-paced caper—politician’s kids get abducted, private eyes go searching—but with a major twist: H. Mouse is a mouse, and both perps and dicks are dolls. Shrewdly, Reifler serves this concoction neat; what could have been cheap thrills give way to weirder and more surprising effects. (Garth) The Rathbones by Janice Clark: The Rathbones is the most sui generis debut you’re likely to encounter this year. Think Moby-Dick directed by David Lynch from a screenplay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez...with Charles Addams doing the set design and The Decembrists supplying the chanteys. Initially the story of the last surviving member of an eccentric 19th-Century whaling dynasty, it becomes the story of that dynasty itself. I should also say that this was the single most exciting thing I read in manuscript in graduate school, where the author and I studied together. Clark writes a beautiful prose line, and the story, like the ocean, get deeper, richer, and stranger the farther out you go.  (Garth) A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories by Robert Walser: For a long time, Walser addicts—which is to say, pretty much anyone who has come into contact with this intoxicating writer—had to make do with the novel Jakob van Gunten (but what a novel!) and a slim edition of selected stories. But, half a century after his death, the Swiss master of smallness and obscurity is finally getting the treatment he deserves. Microscripts was one of the best books I read in 2012. The tireless Susan Bernofsky has also given us versions of The Tanners, The Assistant, and a collection of Berlin Stories. In this volume, Damion Searls translates a group of stories about school life—also the engine of much of Jakob van Gunten’s exquisite comedy. (Garth) Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain: Lately, it's seemed that the “literary” first novel had become a genre unto itself: a certain page-limit, a certain definition of scope, a certain set of problems, modestly conceived and modestly transcended. If so, Crain’s stately, wry, and generous first novel breaks the mold. Certainly, there’s a classic coming-of-age narrative here. But as the back-cover blurbs attest, the adventures of American Jacob Putnam in Czechoslovakia right after the Iron Curtain’s fall recall Henry James as much as they do Ben Lerner. Crain’s broad social canvas and his deep interest in the lives of other people are marks of distinction.  (Garth) The Novel: An Alternative History (1600-1800) by Steven Moore: The first volume of Moore’s magisterial survey advanced a theory of the novel as inherently experimental and multicultural, and much older than is generally acknowledged. It’s not that Jane Austen moves to the margins and Gertrude Stein to the center, but that Austen and Stein become recognizably part of the same story. And though Moore hews closer, necessarily, to synopsis than to close-reading, his project is an invaluable desk reference for the catholic reader. In volume 2, he turns his sights to the era that inspired the argument in the first place, a period that begins with Don Quixote. (Garth) The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: At The Age, Cameron Woodhead writes: “With The Sound of Things Falling, Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has created a story that can be appreciated purely for the dramatic way it dives into the black hole of his country's past—the drug cartels and paramilitaries that scarred a generation—although the supple thought-weave of the prose won't be lost on anyone with a taste for more reflective fiction.” Woodhead also compares Vasquez to Graham Greene, W.G. Sebald, and Robert Bolaño—all writers who give us an expansive sense of a country’s history and legacy through the lives of compelling individuals. The protagonist is a Colombian lawyer named Antonio whose memory takes him back to a long-ago acquaintance with the ex-pilot Ricardo LaVerde and a series of mysterious (and yes, violent) occurrences. Vásquez, who is 40, has published four previous novels, but prefers to not count the first two, which he wrote in his early 20s; so “officially,” Sound is his third novel. (Sonya) The Virgins by Pamela Erens: This smart, unsettling novel is narrated by a middle-aged man obsessed by the star-crossed love affair of two classmates at his boarding school thirty years ago. Erens, author of one previous novel, The Understory, displays an uncanny gift for writing honestly about pot-toking, hormone-addled adolescents while granting them the full range of human emotion one expects from a novel for adults. The novel is from indie press Tin House Books, a spinoff of the well-known literary magazine that has quietly built a reputation as a home for first-rate literary fiction. (Michael) The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood: Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of British journalist Serena Mackesy, and The Wicked Girls is her dark and beautifully executed first novel. In the mid-eighties, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time and become friends. By the end of the day, a younger child has died at their hands. Twenty-five years later, with new lives and changed identities, the two women encounter one another in a seaside town where a serial killer is active. A haunting meditation on crime and punishment. (Emily) The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd: Loyd, formerly the fiction editor at Playboy, moves to the other side of the desk with a first novel of elegant intensity. A young widow in Brooklyn has bought her apartment building, and so become an accidental landlord. Or do people still say landlady? At any rate, her straitened existence is challenged by the arrival of a fascinating new tenant, with emotional transformation the ultimate issue. Loyd’s burnished, spare sentences conceal hidden volumes of emotion, and in its different moods, the book may put readers in mind of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland or of a more hopeful version of Claire Messud’s recent The Woman Upstairs. (Garth) Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: Sayrafiezadeh’s acclaimed memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, chronicled a childhood being raised by an Iranian father and American Jewish mother united by an extreme devotion to the Socialist Workers Party. Three years later, Sayrafiezadeh, whose fiction has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other places, publishes his first short story collection. The everyday trials of his characters, some of them grappling with the rippling effects of a nameless war (“this could be any war, or perhaps the next war,” Sayrafiezadeh told The New Yorker) “are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange.” (Elizabeth) The Hypothetic Girl by Elizabeth Cohen: From Other Press, a collection of stories that “captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection” via tales about the bizarre and inarguably ubiquitous world of online dating.  Says Amazon: “With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird.”  For anyone who’s been submerged in this wonderful weird search, these stories are likely to ring a therapeutic bell.  Or, in some cases perhaps, a gong.  Look out for an essay from Cohen in July, and an excerpt in early August, at Bloom. (Sonya) September: MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood: MaddAddam concludes the dystopian trilogy that Atwood began ten years ago with Oryx and Crake and continued in 2009 with The Year of the Flood. Booklist calls MaddAddam a “coruscating finale in an ingenious, cautionary trilogy of hubris, fortitude, wisdom, love, and life’s grand obstinacy.” (Emily)     Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon: Since his 1997 comeback, Pynchon’s been uncommonly productive...and, more characteristically, all over the map. I thought Mason & Dixon his best book; Against the Day vastly underrated; and Inherent Vice fun but disposable. Proximity to the present moment can be a telling index of the quality of a Pynchon project, so the setting here—New York’s Silicon Alley on the eve of the dot-com crash—gives one pause. But Pynchon’s ability to “think the present historically” in his last two books was the best thing about them, so maybe he still has much to tell us about the way we live now. (Garth) Doctor Sleep by Stephen King: Thirty-six years later, it’s here: a sequel to The Shining.  Dan Torrance, the tricycle peddling protagonist of the original horror classic, is now middle-age and working in a nursing home in New Hampshire where he uses his ebbing mental powers to comfort the dying.  The story picks up when Dan tries to save Abra Stone, a twelve-year-old girl with gifts like the ones he used to have, who is in danger from a group called The True Knot, which travels the country consuming children with the gift of The Shining. (Kevin) The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri’s second novel (and fourth book) comes heaped with expectations and describes the relationship between two formerly inseparable brothers born in mid-century Calcutta.  The first, Udayan, is drawn into revolutionary politics; the second, Subash, leaves his native country to make a better life for himself as a scientist in the United States.  But tragedy strikes Udayan and Subash returns home where he gets to know Udayan’s former wife and reconnects with childhood memories. (Kevin) Someone by Alice McDermott: An excerpt of Alice McDermott’s new novel, Someone, appeared in the New Yorker as a story of the same name.  The story is about Marie, who is seventeen years old in 1937, when a boy from her Brooklyn neighborhood turns her head, fondles her breast, promises marriage, and then spurns her for a better-looking girl.  In the story, the titular Someone is the person who, Marie's brother promises, will one day love her.  McDermott told The New Yorker's Deborah Treisman that the novel is the story of “one unremarkable woman,” because “novels about unremarkable women, especially those written by unremarkable women, seem a thing of the past.”   Who you calling “unremarkable,” Alice McDermott? (Lydia) Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai: In the last few years, American readers have rapidly awakened to Krasznahorkai’s important place in the republic of world letters. He is one of few working novelists who still aspires to mastery, in the Modernist sense, and each of the three previous novels translated into English has been a masterpiece. Those books were set in Europe and New York. Seiobo, published in Hungarian in 2009, reveals a different side of the Krasznahorkai oeuvre: his decades-long engagement with East Asia. It’s a major feat of editing and translating, and the publication date been pushed back. Those who can’t wait should check out the excerpt in Music & Literature. (Garth) Enon by Paul Harding: Harding’s 2009 debut, Tinkers, won him the Pulitzer Prize and instant acclaim as one of the most profound writers of our time. Enon follows Charlie Crosby, the grandson of Tinkers protagonist George Washington Crosby, through a year of his life after a devastating loss. Inhabiting the same New England landscape so intricately rendered in Tinkers (Enon is the town where George Crosby died), Enon is a story about small moment and big questions. (Janet)   John Updike: The Collected Stories by John Updike: This two-volume collection spans the arc of a life’s work. One hundred and eighty-six stories are presented in their final versions and in definitive order of composition, established for the first time by archival research: from “Ace in the Hole” (1953), written when Updike was still a student at Harvard, to “The Full Glass” from 2008, the final year of his life. In his poem “Spirit of ’76,” written during his final illness and published in The New Yorker three months after his death, Updike wrote: I see clear through to the ultimate page, the silence I dared break for my small time. No piece was easy, but each fell finished, in its shroud of print, into a book-shaped hole. (Emily) Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta: American fiction’s favorite lighthearted chronicler of suburban angst delivers his first collection of short stories since Bad Haircut, his first book, nineteen years ago. In Nine Inches, Perrotta, the author of the Hollywood-friendly novels Little Children and The Leftovers (currently under development as a HBO series), returns to familiar themes of fractured families and the undercurrent of disappointment that lurks just below the placid surface of suburban life. Perrotta knows his way around a punch line, so expect some chuckles to go along with your quiet desperation. (Michael) The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: When it came out in the UK and Ireland this Spring, Coetzee’s new novel was received with an even more potent combination of admiration and confusion than his work is normally met with. Reviewing the book in the Telegraph, Michael Preston asked whether it was “possible to be deeply affected by a book without really knowing what it’s about?” (The fairly obvious answer: yes.) A man and a five year old boy arrive in a sort of refugee camp, where they are assigned new names and ages. The boy speaks in riddles and claims to be able to perform miracles. Together, they search for the boy’s mother, and endure a series of odd bureaucratic encounters. The inscrutable spirit of Kafka has often flickered across Coetzee’s pages, and that spirit seems to loom large here. (Mark) The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell: Daniel Woodrell, a master of “country noir” fiction, makes rare use of autobiography in his new novel, The Maid’s Version.  While growing up in West Plains, Missouri, Woodrell listened to stories his grandmother told about a mysterious dance hall explosion in town in 1928 that killed 39 people.  In the novel, a grandmother tells her grandson about working as a maid for the family that was implicated in the blast but never held responsible.  The novel is “very lyrical and not completely chronological,” Woodrell told an interviewer, “because it’s the story of a family and the after-effects on the family and the grandmother trying to get justice or revenge.” (Bill) Levels of Life by Julian Barnes: Julian Barnes’s new book is not a novel, and not a memoir, and not a collection of essays, although it appears to contain elements of all three.  The collection begins with a brief history of hot air ballooning and the characters involved in its development and lured by its attractions.  Part two is an imagined romance between Sarah Bernhardt, who was in life one of the people from the latter category, and Colonel Frederick Burnaby, intrepid ballooner (who is, incidentally, documented on the delightful website “Great British Nutters”).  In the third part of his new book, Barnes ties these curious introductory portions into a memoir of his profound grief following the loss of Pat Kavanagh, his wife of 30 years. (Lydia) Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker: Last year, Nicholson Baker treated the Internet to a cluster of peculiar, melancholy protest songs about Bradley Manning and the Obama administration’s drone assassination program. The venture was out of character in a way that was, weirdly, entirely characteristic of Baker. The songs appear to have been, at least in part, an aspect of a method writing exercise for his new novel, Traveling Sprinkler—a sort of sequel to 2009’s The Anthologist, in which Paul Chowder sat around having a lot of thoughts about poetry while failing to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. In the new novel, Chowder sits around trying to write protest songs. Very few writers are as interesting as Baker on the theme of men sitting (or standing) around, so this looks promising. (Mark) Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem: Of the greats of his generation, Lethem is one of the few who’s gotten steadily better, novel by novel. Fortress of Solitude is a better book than Motherless Brooklyn, and in my read, Chronic City is even better than that—the highs less high, but the consistency more consistent. It’s also worth noting that Lethem’s always been a political writer (science-fiction being among other things a way of thinking about the possible) and has been more so lately. Expectations for Dissident Gardens, then—a generation-spanning saga centered around Leftists from Sunnyside Queens—should be very, very high. (Garth) Mood Indigo by Boris Vian: Few of Vian’s novels have been translated, but L’Ecume des Jours is appearing in English for the third time, with a third title (Mood Indigo, Froth on the Daydream, Foam of the Daze, take your pick).  Still, we should be grateful for what we are given—Le Monde named L’Ecume number 10 on the 100 best books of the century.  Vian (d. 1959), published under his own name and the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan.  He was a trumpeter in the Hot Club de France, devotee of Duke Ellington, ingester of peyote, consort of Sartre (until Sartre consorted with his wife).  Written in 1947, L’Ecume is a sad, fanciful love story (which, the Harvard Crimson wrote in 1969, read like “perceptions at a stoned-soul picnic,” in a good way).  Mood Indigo received the Michel Gondry film treatment last spring. (Lydia) Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush: The decade-in-the-making follow-up to Mortals (one of our Best Novels of the Millennium) is also a departure. The first of Rush’s books not set in Botswana, it’s shorter by half than either of his previous novels, and when I got a galley in the mail, the jacket copy—comfortable fortysomethings at a Big Chill-style reunion near the start of the Iraq War—made me even more nervous. Was the Rush magic still there? Then my wife started reading it, then started putting it down to laugh, and finally began forcing me to listen to her read whole passages aloud for the sheer pleasure of the phrases. Note to Mr. Rush: You had me at “berserk industry.” (Garth) His Wife Leaves Him by Stephen Dixon: A 600-page depiction of a jilted lover’s interior thoughts might not be your idea of an enjoyable book, but in the hands of a writer as talented as Stephen Dixon, it’s certainly one worth reading. In his own description of the novel, he’s noted that it’s about “a bunch of nouns” such as “love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, writing, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscences, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares, meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving.” Indeed these words convey the complexity of a life rendered whole, of a relationship’s threads and effects laid bare, and of honest memories enlivened by an acute and unrelenting ache. When a relationship dies, all that remains are remembered details, and in the words of Jim Harrison, “death steals everything except our stories.” (Nick) Local Souls by Allan Gurganus: For his first book in a decade, Allan Gurganus returns to the imagined town of Falls, N.C., where he set his first and best-known novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.  His new book, Local Souls, which owes more to Flannery O’Connor than to Nikolai Gogol, is three linked novellas set in the contemporary New South, with its air-conditioning and improved telecommunications, its freer sexuality and looser family ties.  However, some old habits prove hard to break—including adultery, incest and obsession—in these tales that unfold in a Dixiefied version of Winesburg, Ohio. (Bill) Between Friends by Amos Oz: Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz spent three decades living on a kibbutz because city life was not “radical” enough for him and, as he puts it in his new book of stories, Between Friends, he wanted to live among “people with patience and doubts and compassion.” These eight stories, set in the imaginary Kibbutz Yikhat during the 1950s of Oz’s youth, spin around the shortcomings of idealism and the fragility of all utopias.  In the end, the stories affirm Oz’s long-held belief that both on the kibbutz and throughout the larger Middle East, the only hope lies not in conflict, but in compromise. (Bill) The Brunist Day by Robert Coover: Aside from being a terrific year for first novels, 2013 may be remembered for its efflorescence of major work from the eminences grises of postmodernism. So far, we’ve gotten Gass’s Middle C, Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, and McElroy’s Cannonball. Now Coover, author of a couple of the great postwar novels (e.g., The Public Burning), returns with a thousand-page sequel to his very first book, The Origin of the Brunists. I haven’t been this excited to read new Coover...well, since I started reading Coover. The folks at Dzanc Books should be commended. (Garth) Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway: This isn’t the story of a family business, à la Dombey & Son, but rather a buddy-cop detective vehicle—except the cops aren’t exactly buddies, and most of what gets detected is random violence and existential unease. Ridgway is a brilliant stylist from Ireland, and the early word from the U.K. is that he’s hit his stride here, in a kind of deadpan avant-pop tour of contemporary London. (Garth)   Duplex by Kathryn Davis: Davis’s earlier novel, The Thin Place, is set in a place where the membrane between the real world and the spirit world is extremely thin. Most of her work, which includes six previous novels, sits at this same juncture, combining real and imagined worlds. Duplex is the story of Mary and Eddie, two children growing up in a duplex outside time, while “adulthood”—a world of sorcerers, robots, and slaves—looms ahead. (Janet)   Goat Mountain by David Vann: In his writing across a variety of forms—short stories, novels, memoir, and reportage—David Vann has returned repeatedly to the same deep well of themes: nature, thwarted masculinity, family, and violence. In his third novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy goes on a deer-hunt with his father and grandfather, and things, as they tend to do this writer’s work, take a devastating turn. There’s a rawness and obsessional urgency to Vann’s writing that makes this ongoing project of recasting and development among the most compelling in contemporary literature.  (Mark) At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick: Dolnick’s third novel is about a dark secret that tears apart a boyhood friendship and how the two are brought back together as adults to reckon with what happened long ago.  The jacket copy calls it “a tale of spiritual reckoning, of search and escape, of longing and reaching for redemption—a tale of near hallucinatory power.” Dolnick, who writes for NPR and the New York Times, has also written a Kindle single called Shelf-Love, about his fanaticism for Alice Munro. (Edan) The Traymore Rooms by Norm Sibum: Poet Norm Sibum’s 700-pager should be on the radar of all the maximalism-starved readers who landed A Naked Singularity on our Top 10 list in 2012—though the book might more rightly be likened to something by William Gass or Alexander Theroux. Plot isn’t Sibum’s thing, exactly, but his erudition (considerable), sense of character (eccentric), and mood (quietly splenetic) more than compensate. The novel concerns a group of aging friends who share haunts in downtown Montreal. They talk, fight, love, and try to make sense of a historical moment that has disappointed their youthful hopes. And apart from an overreliance on that contemporary workhorse, the absolute phrase, the prose is a consistent pleasure. (Garth) October: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Tartt said she couldn’t “think of anything worse than having to turn out a book every year. It would be hell.” She seems to have settled into a pattern of turning out a book every ten or eleven years instead. In her third novel, The Goldfinch, a young boy named Theo Decker survives an accident that kills his mother. In the years that follow, he finds himself drawn to things that remind him of her, including a painting that draws him eventually into the art underworld. (Emily) Identical by Scott Turow: Every three years, with metronome-like regularity, bestselling lawyer-author Scott Turow comes out with another well-turned legal thriller set in corruption-rife Kindle County. Three years after 2010’s Innocent, Turow is right on schedule with a new thriller focusing on a pair of identical twins, one a candidate for mayor in Kindle County, the other a convicted murderer just released from prison after serving 25 years for killing his girlfriend. This is Turow country, so nothing is as it seems and the plot turns on a re-investigation of the decades-old murder that sent one of the brothers to prison. (Michael) The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert: Elizabeth Gilbert’s return to fiction (she wrote that little-known memoir called Eat Pray Love) is a sprawling historical novel about Alma Whittaker, the daughter of a botanical explorer, and talented scientist in her own right, and her relationship with Utopian artist Ambrose Pike. As the jacket copy says, “Alma Whittaker is a witness to history, as well as maker of history herself.”  The book spans the globe and two centuries, and it sounds like a big and exciting artistic departure for Gilbert. (Edan) Solo (James Bond) by William Boyd: At this year’s London Book Fair, venerated author William Boyd announced the one-word title of his forthcoming James Bond novel, which reflects the spy’s solitary and unauthorized mission. The book is an authorized sequel to Jeffery Deaver’s novel, Carte Blanche, published in 2011.  At the Book Fair, Boyd said that key action takes place in Africa, the US and Europe, and remarked that Bond “goes on a real mission to real countries and the world he’s in is absolutely 1969. There are no gimmicks, it’s a real spy story.” (Edan) Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III: The four interlocking stories within Andre Dubus III’s sixth book explore the “bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love.” These highs and lows are depicted by Mark, a Massachusetts man who’s recently discovered his wife’s infidelity; by Marla, an overweight young woman who’s just found a lover; by Robert, who’s just betrayed his pregnant wife; and by Devon, a teenager terrorized by a dirty picture she’s posted online, and whose story comprises the collection’s titular novella. (Nick) Cartwheel by Jennifer DuBois: Jennifer DuBois follows her decorated first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, with Cartwheel, a novel with loud echoes of the recent murder trial, conviction and eventual acquittal of Amanda Knox.  Cartwheel’s protagonist, Lily Hayes, is an American arriving in Buenos Aires for a semester abroad.  Five weeks later she’s the prime suspect in her roommate's brutal murder.  Questions arise.  Is Lily guilty?  More importantly, exactly who is Lily Hayes?  “Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page,” the publisher promises, “and its questions about how much we really know about ourselves will linger well beyond.” (Bill) The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna: Aminatta Forna made her name with The Devil That Danced on the Water, her memoir about her father’s execution for treason in Sierra Leone.  In her new novel, The Hired Man, a naive middle-class Englishwoman named Laura arrives with her two teenage children in the Croatian town of Gost, planning to renovate an old house.  She enlists the help of an introspective handyman named Duro, and before long the haunted memories of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s come bubbling up from the past.  Ill-equipped to understand the dark local history, Laura will come to see that there is great power in overcoming the thirst for revenge. (Bill) Heart of Darkness (Illustrated) by Matt Kish: In October 2011, Tin House books published Matt Kish’s Moby Dick in Pictures, with artwork for each page of text taken from the Signet Classic Paperback.  Now, Heart of Darkness will get similar treatment, although this project has 100 illustrations to Moby Dick’s 552.  The New York Post showcased some wonderful images from the upcoming publication. Matt Kish, a librarian by day, prefers “illustrator” to “artist,” he says, “There's a lot of artists out there, they’re real assholes, and if you haven’t gone to art school, if you haven’t had an MFA, if you haven’t had a gallery show, if you cant put together some rambling artist statement, you’re not worthy of that term.”  Looks like art to me. (Lydia) Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips: The creepy-sounding plot of Jayne Anne Phillips’s fifth novel is based on a true-life 1930s story of a con man who insinuated himself into the life of a young, impoverished widow only to murder her and her three children. Like Phillips’s previous novel, Lark & Termite (a 2009 National Book Award Finalist), parts of the story are set in rural West Virginia, where Phillips herself is from. With a reporter protagonist who sets out to investigate the crime after the fact, there are shades of In Cold Blood. (Hannah) At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón: Peruvian native Daniel Alarcón’s stories thrive on equal parts revolution and spectacle, as evidenced in his first collection, War by Candlelight, as well as in his first novel, Lost City Radio, where the emcee of a popular radio show reunites loved ones separated during a recent civil war. In At Night We Walk in Circles, the Whiting Award-winning Best Young American Novelist draws inspiration from stories told to him by prisoners jailed in Lima’s largest prison. Alarcón again situates his novel in a South American state, where the protagonist flounders until he’s cast in a revival of touring play penned the leader of a guerilla theatre troupe. (Anne) The Last Animal by Abby Geni: This debut collection of short stories is thematically linked by characters who “use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss and family life.” Geni, who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, has received early praise from Dan Chaon, who says, “These are sharp, incisive, thoughtful, and utterly original stories” and from Jim Gavin, who calls these stories “Haunting and beautiful.” (Edan) Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books by Claudia Roth Pierpont: Is it strange that an author many wouldn’t hesitate to call the greatest living American writer has yet to be the subject of a major critical work? Pierpont remedies this with a book described as “not a biography…but something more rewarding: an attempt to understand a great writer through his art.” The New Yorker staff writer should prove a fascinating non-biographer: her previous book was Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, and while her current subject has been accused of sexism many times throughout his long career, David Remnick reported that at a celebration of Roth’s eightieth birthday in March, Pierpont “took it upon herself to survey the variety, depth, and complexity of Roth’s female characters — a strong, and convincing, rebuke to years of criticism that the books are misogynistic.” (Elizabeth) How to Read a Novelist by John Freeman: Former Granta editor John Freeman’s first book, The Tyranny of Email, considered the ways that email collapsed great distances between us. In it he argues for a more nuanced and discerning form of communication through conversation—an art form that he showcases in his latest book, How to Read a Novelist. In more than fifty interviews and author profiles of literary titans such as Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, and Doris Lessing, Freeman’s conversations and observations uncover these authors’ obsessions, quirks, and nuances of character as if they’re characters themselves. According to Freeman, a novelist requires observational distance, something to be considered in light of the subject of his first book: “it’s the miraculous distance that I think makes the writers who they are.” (Anne) The Karl Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen: Karl Kraus, as immortalized in Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name, was an incendiary aphorist and, in his one-man journal Die Fackel (The Torch), a critic who rivaled Nietzche for implacability. His influence on the culture of pre- and interwar Austria and Germany can’t be overstated; writers from Broch to Canetti are in his debt. Yet aphorisms are notoriously hard to translate, and to date, no really good volume of Kraus has been available to lay readers in English. Jonathan Franzen’s decision to attempt one is as likely to provoke grousing as most everything he does, but I, for one, salute his berserk industry. (Garth) The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron: Ephron died a year ago and this fall Random House is bringing out a wide-ranging collection of her writing edited by Robert Gottlieb.  The screenplay to When Harry Met Sally will be in there, as will her famous piece on being flat-chested, blog posts on politics and dying, and the screenplay to her last work, Lucky Guy.   (Kevin)   The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble: Drabble’s eighteenth novel—her first since 2006—is set in 1960s London. It centers on Jessica, an anthropology student who, after becoming pregnant during an affair with a married professor, is forced to raise a daughter alone, her own life’s trajectory fracturing as a result. “One thing I have never been very good at is creating ‘good’ mothers,” Drabble said in a 1978 The Paris Review interview. “I’d written books and books before someone pointed out that I was perpetually producing these ‘bad’ mothers.” The “prismatic” novel is told from the perspectives of “the mothers who surround Jess,” examining “unexpected transformations at the heart of motherhood.” (Elizabeth) Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal: Lore Segal is a treasure-house of wit and a power-house of style. Lucinella, reissued as part of Melville House’s Art of the Novella Series, was one of the best books I read in 2009. Now Melville House returns to the well for her first novel since the Pulitzer finalist Shakespeare’s Kitchen. The plot involves a suspicious surge in the incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease among patients (characters from previous Segal novels among them) at a Manhattan emergency room in the period after September 11. Even the catalog copy brims with insight: “terrorist paranoia and end-of-the-world hysteria masks deeper fears about mortality.” You’re welcome, America. (Garth) The Night Guest by Fiona MacFarlane: Penguin Australia is calling Macfarlane “a new voice” and “a writer who comes to us fully formed.”  It’s true that The Night Guest, which will be published in October, is Macfarlane’s debut novel; but she’s been publishing stories for some time now, and here you can read a Q&A about her story “Art Appreciation,” published in The New Yorker this past May.  The Night Guest centers around the mysterious arrival of Frida at the isolated beach house of Ruth, a widow, but “soars above its own suspense to tell us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about ageing, love, trust, dependence, and fear; about processes of colonization; and about things (and people) in places they shouldn’t be.” (Sonya) Every Short Story: 1951-2012 by Alasdair Gray: Exactly what it says on the tin: the comprehensive volume (nearly 1,000 pages!) offers up more than half a century of the Scottish fantasist’s short fiction, including sixteen stories published here for the first time. Known for his dark humor and wild imagination, the stories span the broad range of his fascinating career. Whimsical drawings are interspersed throughout, the stories as much visual works as literary ones. “Illustration and typography play a major part in his work,” says The Guardian. “He doesn’t just write books, he creates them.” It’s probably worth noting, too, that The Guardian has also described Gray as a “a glorious one-man band, the dirty old man of Scottish letters.” (Elizabeth) Personae by Sergio de la Pava: In the wake of A Naked Singularity’s success, the University of Chicago Press is likewise reissuing de la Pava’s self-published second novel, Personae. In most ways, it’s as different from its predecessor as grits from greens—a Cloud Atlas-y series of nested genre pieces covering the whodunit, the interior monologue, and the theater of the absurd. But fans of the earlier book will recognize de la Pava’s fearlessness and wild ambition, along with the ventriloquistic range that made the Jalen Kingg letters so moving. An excerpt is available at The Quarterly Conversation. (Garth) The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson: Winterson’s new novella, published to critical acclaim in the UK last year, takes on the trial of the Lancashire Witches in 1612, when a group of destitute outcasts, mostly women, were put on trial for witchcraft. “What is clear amid the poverty and brutality here,” the critic Arifa Akbar wrote in The Independent, “is that other-worldy evil is far outweighed by the harm that human beings inflict.” (Emily)   The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton: The author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Rehearsal returns with a literary mystery set in 19th century New Zealand. When Walter Moody arrives on the coast of New Zealand, hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields, he stumbles upon a gathering of men who have met in secret to discuss a number of apparently coincidental recent events: on the day when a prostitute was arrested, a rich man disappeared, a down-on-his-luck alcoholic died, and a ship’s captain canceled all of his appointments and fled. The prostitute is connected to all three men, and Moody finds himself drawn into their interlinked lives and fates. (Emily) November: A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor: When Flannery O’Connor was in her early 20s and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she kept a journal which focused on her relationship with her faith. Recently discovered, this journal should be a fascinating prospect for anyone with an interest in O’Connor’s writing, inseparable as it is from her Catholic belief in sin and redemption. It dates from 1946-47, around the time she was writing the stories that would converge into her debut novel Wise Blood. It looks to have been an exercise in bringing herself closer to her God through the act of writing: “I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always fugitive. This way I have it every instant.” (Mark) Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone: Steven Brookman is a brilliant professor at an elite college in New England. Maud Stack is his promising and alluring young student. You know where this is going. Unfortunately, however, Professor Brookman is a married man, and Maud Stack’s passions are “not easily contained or curtailed.” In this tale of infidelity and its affects on human relationships—as well as on the institutions in which they reside—Robert Stone makes clear that almost nothing is black and white, and that when it comes to “the allure of youth” and “the promise of absolution,” all roads may lead to madness. (Nick) A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks: Russell Banks—the author of The Sweet Hereafter and The Darling (among many others) and an acknowledged master chronicler of the tragedies of American life—will publish his first collection of short stories in fifteen years.  The book is composed of twelve stories, six of which appear for the first time. The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist’s last novel, Lost Memory of Skin, documented the straitened lives of a group of sex offenders living under a Florida causeway. (Lydia) Report from the Interior by Paul Auster: Last year Auster released Winter Journal, a personal history of the author’s own body.  This fall he will publish a companion piece of sorts that depicts the world as he saw it as a child growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s. (Kevin)     The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg: Laura van den Berg brings her mystical touch to her second collection of short stories, following her highly praised first collection, What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us, which was shortlisted for The Frank O’Connor International Award. From a writer who professes to “freaking love coming up with zany plots,” The Isle of Youth delivers with stories of magicians, private detectives, and identity-trading twins. (Hannah)   Hild by Nicola Griffith: Nicola Griffith, British novelist and former poster child for the woes of American immigration policy (in 1998, The Wall Street Journal called her “a lesbian science-fiction writer,” like it's a bad thing).  Her newest novel Hild takes place in seventh-century Britain in the Synod of Whitby, where the people were deciding what kind of Christians to be. The name “Hild” refers to the person we now know as St. Hilda, who presided over the conference during which the Synod debated the relative merits of Celtic and Roman Christianity.  In an interview with her editor, Griffith reported that the source material on St. Hilda is basically limited to five pages in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, so she was compelled to do a ferocious amount of research to recreate the world and customs, if not the life, of this early English figure. (Lydia) Collected Stories by Stefan Zweig: Pushkin Press anointed 2013 as “The Year of Stefan Zweig,” in order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the famed Austrian author’s death by a wartime suicide pact. Zweig’s fictions are oft fueled by seduction, desire, and affairs of the heart, mettle which helped make him an author of international renown during his tumultuous lifetime. Pushkin is singlehandedly attempting to reinvigorate Zweig’s reputation by issuing a series of rereleases and a handful of new translations of his works. An ideal introduction for the unacquainted comes in the form of Zweig’s Collected Stories, featuring twenty-three stories translated by Anthea Bell. (Anne) Beyond: Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow: Speaking of eminences grises... From The March to Homer & Langley to that cover version of Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” that ran in The New Yorker a few years back, Doctorow just keeps swinging. The product description on Amazon is sketchy, but the talk of a main character “speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor [about] the circumstances that have led him to commit a mysterious act” sound downright Beckett-y, while the title makes me secretly hope Doctorow’s returning to science fiction (after suppressing his previous effort, Big as Life). (Garth) A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald: W.G. Sebald’s collection of six essays was originally published in German in 1998, three years before his untimely death.   The collection is an homage to six writers and artists (“colleagues,” he calls them, and “Alemmanic”), all of whom meant something to Sebald: Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, and Jan Peter Tripp.  Already out in the United Kingdom, the essays are apparently solidly in the Sebald tradition—which, as I understand it, defies attribution of stolid nouns like “criticism,” “fiction,” or “biography,” rejoicing instead in the patterns and echoes of what one critic called “half-reality.”  (Lydia) Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball: Chronically saddled with the designation of “experimental author,” Jesse Ball has written three novels, including The Way Through Doors, a book of poems and flash fiction, and a co-written prose poem, each work demonstrating a gift for quiet, powerful prose and a loose relationship with realism. His first hardcover release, Silence Once Begun, tells the story of a man who confesses to a string of crimes in writing, then never speaks during his arrest or interrogation, and the journalist who becomes obsessed with his case. (Janet) On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee: Best known for his haunting stories of Korean history and American immigrant life, Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee tries his hand at speculative fiction, setting his new novel in a dystopian future in which America is in steep decline and urban neighborhoods have been turned into walled labor colonies that provide fresh produce and fish for the surrounding villages where the elite live. In the novel, Fan, a woman laborer, sets out in search of a vanished lover and finds herself crossing the lawless Open Counties, where the government exerts little control and crime is rampant. (Michael) Perfect by Rachel Joyce: Rachel Joyce’s first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was a national bestseller and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  Her highly anticipated second novel has two narratives, one about two boys in the early 1970s and their obsession with the two seconds added to clock time to balance with the movement of the earth, and one about a present-day man who is debilitated by his obsessive-compulsive routines.  Blogger Kate Neilan loved it, saying, “Rachel Joyce should be praised from the rooftops for Perfect; there’s not a thing I’d change about it.” Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus: “With Ben Marcus, as with Beckett, such disruptions are signs of literature itself being stretched and tensed, pressed to express the process of a writer testing his limits,” says David Winters in his Millions review of Marcus’s recent novel The Flame Alphabet. Marcus has long been a champion of experimental writing and innovative uses of language, as demonstrated by the stories he selected for the unmatched Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His forthcoming Leaving the Sea is the first collection of Marcus’s short stories. Expect nothing except more boundary pushing and an exquisite sense of the unexpected. (Anne)