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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Missives from Another World: Literature of Parallel Universes
“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times.”—Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
“And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house’/And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife.’”—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980)
1.By the release of their 17th album, Everyday Chemistry, in 1984, The Beatles had been wandering for years in a musical wilderness. Their last cohesive venture had been 1972’s Ultraviolet Catastrophe, but the '70s were mostly unkind to the Beatles—an output composed of two cover albums of musicians like Ben E. King and Elvis Presley, rightly derided by critics as filler. Meanwhile, The Rolling Stones released their brilliant final album before Keith Richards’s death; the disco-inflected 1978 Some Girls which marked them as the last greats of the British Invasion. By contrast, The Beatles’s Master Class and Master Class II were recorded separately and spliced together by engineers at Apple Studies; a two-star Rolling Stone review from 1977 arguing that “Lennon and McCartney don’t even appear in the same room with each other. Their new music is a cynical ploy by a band for whom it would have perhaps been better to have divorced sometime around Abby Road or Let it Be.”
Maybe it was the attempt on John Lennon’s life in 1980, or the newfound optimism following the election of Walter Mondale, but by the time the Fab Five properly reunited to record Everyday Chemistry there was a rediscovered vitality. All of that engineering work from the last two albums actually served them well as they reentered the studio; true to its title with its connotations of combination and separation, catalyst and reaction, Everyday Chemistry would borrow from the digital manipulations of Krautrock bands like Kraftwerk, and the synthesizer-heavy experimentation of Talking Heads. The Beatles may have missed punk, but they weren’t going to miss New Wave.
With a nod to the Beatlemania of two decades before, Lennon and Paul McCartney sampled their own past songs, now overlaid with flourishes of electronic music, the album sounding like a guitar-heavy version of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s avant-garde classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. A formula that would define this reconstituted version of the band, now committed to digital production, and whose influences are seen from Jay Z’s Lennon-produced The Grey Album, to the tracks George Harrison played with James Mercer in Broken Bells.
By asking Eno to produce their new album, The Beatles signaled that they were once-again interested in producing pop that didn’t just pander. Always pioneers in sound effects, the modulation on Revolver, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, and Ultraviolet Catastrophe were a decidedly lo-fi affair, but by the era of the Macintosh, the Beatles had discovered the computer. Speaking to Greil Marcus in 1998, Ringo Starr said “You know, we were always more than anything a couple of kids, but John was always into gizmos, and something about that box got his attention, still does.” Billy Preston, officially the band’s pianist since Ultraviolet Catastrophe, was also a zealous convert to digital technology. In Marcus’s Won’t Get Fooled Again: Constructing Classic Rock, Preston told the critic that “They were a bar band, right? Long before I met them, but I was a boogie-woogie guy too, so it was always copacetic. You wouldn’t think we’d necessarily dig all that space stuff, but I think the band got new life with that album.” From the nostalgic haziness of the opening track “Four Guys” to the idiosyncratic closing of “Mr. Gator’s Swamp Jamboree,” Everyday Chemistry was a strange, beautiful, and triumphant reemergence of The Beatles.
2.Such a history may seem unusual to you, because undoubtedly you are a citizen of the same dimension that I am. Unless you’re a brave chrononaut who has somehow twisted the strictures of ontological reality, who has ruptured the space-time continuum and easily slides between parallel universes, your Beatles back-catalog must look exactly the same as mine. And yet Everyday Chemistry exists as a ghostly artifact in our reality, a digital spirit uploaded to the Internet in 2009 by some creative weirdo, who cobbled together an imagined Beatles album from the fragments of their solo careers. A bit of Wings here, some of the Plastic Ono Band there, samplings from All Things Must Pass and Sentimental Journey, edited together into a masterful version of what could have been.
Most of my narrative above is my own riffing, but claims that the album is from a parallel universe are part of the mythmaking that makes listening to the record so eerie. “Now this is where the story becomes slightly more unbelievable,” the pseudonymous “discoverer” James Richards writes. Everyday Chemistry is a seamlessly edited mashup done in the manner of Girl Talk or Danger Mouse, but its ingenious creator made a parallel universe origin of Everyday Chemistry the central conceit. Richards claims that a tape of the album was swiped after he fell into a vortex in the California desert and was gifted Everyday Chemistry by an inter-dimensional Beatles fan.
At Medium, John Kerrison jokes that “inter-dimensional travel probably isn’t the exact truth” behind Everyday Chemistry, even if the album is “actually pretty decent.” Kerrison finds that whoever created the album is not going to reveal their identity anytime soon. Unless of course it actually is from a parallel universe. While I mostly think that that’s probably not the truth, I'll admit that anytime I listen to Everyday Chemistry I get a little charged frisson, a spooky spark up my spine. It’s true that Everyday Chemistry is kind of good, and it’s also true that part of me wants to believe. Listening to the album is like finding a red rock from Mars framed by white snow in your yard—a disquieting interjection from an alien world into the mundanity of our lives.
Part of what strikes me as so evocative about this meme that mixes science fiction, urban legend, and rock 'n' roll hagiography, is that we’re not just reading about a parallel universe, but the evidence of its existence is listenable right now. Tales of parallel universes—with their evocation of “What if our world was different from how it is right now?”—is the natural concern of all fiction. All literature imagines alternate worlds. But the parallel universe story makes such a concern explicit, makes it obvious. Such narratives rely upon the cognitive ability to not accept the current state of things, to conjecture and wonder at the possibility that our lives could be different from how we experience them in the present.
Such stories are surprisingly antique, as in Livy’s History of Rome written a century before the Common Era, in which he conjectured about “What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in a war with Alexander?” Even earlier than Livy, and the Greek father of history Herodotus hypothesized about what the implications would have been had there been a Persian victory at Marathon. Such questions are built into how women and men experience our lives. Everyone asks themselves how things would be different had different choices been made—what if you’d moved to Milwaukee instead of Philly, majored in art history rather than finance, asked Rob out for a date instead of Phil?
Alternate history is that narrative writ large. Such stories have been told for a long time. In the 11th century there was Peter Damian’s De Divina Omnipotentia, which imagined a reality where Romulus and Remus had never been suckled by a she-wolf and the Republic was never founded. In 1490, Joanot Martorell’s romance Tirant lo Blanch, perhaps the greatest work ever written in the Iberian Romance language of Valencian, envisioned a conquering errant knight who recaptures Constantinople from the Ottomans. Medieval Europeans were traumatized as the cross was toppled from the dome of the Hagia Sophia, but in Martorell’s imagination a Brittany-born knight is gracious enough so that “A few days after he was made emperor he had the Moorish sultan and the Grand Turk released from prison.” What followed was a “peace and a truce for one hundred one years,” his former enemies “so content that they said they would come to his aid against the entire world.” Written only 37 years after Mehmed II’s sacking of Orthodoxy’s capital, Tirant lo Blanch presents a Christian poet playing out a desired reality different from the one in which he actually found himself.
In the 19th century, the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne did something similar, albeit for different ideological aims. His overlooked “P.’s Correspondence” from his 1846 Mosses from an Old Manse is credibly the first alternate history story written in English. An epistolary narrative where the titular character, designated by only his first initial, writes about all the still-living Romantic luminaries he encounters in a parallel version of Victorian London. Lord Byron has become a corpulent, gouty, conservative killjoy; Percy Shelley has rejected radical atheism for a staunch commitment to the Church of England; Napoleon Bonaparte skulks the streets of London, embarrassed and vanquished while kept guard by two police officers; and John Keats has lived into a wise seniority where he alone seems to hold to the old Romantic faith that so animated and inspired Hawthorne. P. is a character for whom the “past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often productive of curious results,” a description of alternate history in general. Hawthorne’s is a message about the risks of counter-revolution, but also an encomium for the utopian light exemplified by Keats, for whom there remains so “deep and tender a spirit of humanity.”
Alternate history’s tone is often melancholic, if not dystopian. An exercise in this world might not be great, but think of how much worse it could be. Think of authors like Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle or Robert Harris in Fatherland, both exploring the common trope of imagining a different outcome to the second world war. Such novels present Adolf Hitler running rough-shod over the entire globe, crossing the English Channel and ultimately the Atlantic. Such narratives highlight the ways in which the evils of fascism haven’t been as vanquished as was hoped, but also as a cautionary parable about what was narrowly averted. In his own indomitable amphetamine-and-psychosis-kind-of-way, Dick expresses something fundamental about the interrogative that defines alternative history, not the “What?” but the “What if?” He asks “Can anyone alter fate?...our lives, our world, hanging on it.”
Such novels often trade in the horror of an Axis victory or the catastrophe of Pickett’s Charge breaking through that Confederate high-water line in that quiet, hilly field in Pennsylvania. Some of the most popular alternate history depicts a dark and dystopian reality in which polished Nazi jack-boots stomp across muddy English puddles and Confederate generals hang their ugly flag from the dome of the Capital building; where an American Kristallnacht rages across the Midwest, or emancipation never happens. Gavriel Rosenfeld in his study The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism argues that such stories serves a solemn purpose, that the genre has a “unique ability to provide insights into the dynamics of remembrance.” Rosenfeld argues that alternate history, far from offering impious or prurient fascination with evil, memorializes those regimes’ victims, generating imaginative empathy across the boundaries of history and between the forks of branching universes.
Philip Roth in The Plot Against America and Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union imagine and explore richly textured versions of the 20th century. With eerie prescience, Roth’s 2004 novel reimagines the genre by focusing on the personal experience of the author himself, interpolating his own childhood biography into a larger narrative about the rise of a nativist, racist, sexist, antisemitic American fascism facilitated through the machinations of a foreign authoritarian government. Chabon’s novel is in a parallel universe a few stops over, but examines the traumas of our past century with a similar eye towards the power of the counterfactual, building an incredibly detailed alternate reality in which Sitka, Alaska, is a massive metropolis composed of Jewish refugees from Europe. Such is the confused potentiality that defines our lives, both collective and otherwise; an apt description of our shared predicament could be appropriated from Chabon’s character Meyer Landsman: “He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was.”
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For Rosenfeld, the form “resists easy classification. It transcends traditional cultural categories, being simultaneously a sub-field of history, a sub-genre of science fiction, and a mode of expression that can easily assume literary, cinematic, dramatic or analytical forms.” More than just that, I’d suggest that these narratives says something fundamental about how we tell stories, where contradiction and the counter-factual vie in our understanding, the fog from parallel universes just visible at the corners of our sight, fingerprints from lives never lived smudged across all of those precious things which we hold onto.
While long the purview of geeky enthusiasts, with their multiverses and retconning, alternate history has been embraced by academic historians for whom such conjecture has traditionally been antithetical to the sober plodding of their discipline. In history no experiment can ever be replicated, for it is we who live in said experiment—which is forever ongoing. Temporality and causality remain a tricky metaphysical affair, and it’s hard to say how history would have turned out if particular events had happened differently. Nonetheless, true to its ancient origins in the conjectures of Herodotus and Livy, some scholars engage in “counterfactual history,” a variety of Gedankenexperiment that plays the tape backwards.
Economist Niall Ferguson has advocated for counterfactuals; arguing that they demonstrate that history doesn’t necessarily follow any predetermined course. Writing in his edited collection Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, Fergusson claims that the “past—like real life chess, or indeed any other game—is different; it does not have a predetermined end. There is no author, divine or otherwise; only characters, and (unlike in a game) a great deal too many of them.“
Seriously considering counterfactual history as a means of historiographical analysis arguably goes back to John Squire’s 1931 anthology If it Had Happened Otherwise. That volume included contributions by Hilaire Belloc, who true to his monarchist sympathies imagines a very much non-decapitated Louis XVI returning to the Bourbon throne; his friend G.K. Chesterton enumerating the details of a marriage between Don John of Austria and Mary Queen of Scots; and none-other-than future prime minister Winston Churchill writing a doubly-recursive alternate history entitled “If Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg,“ narrated from the perspective of a historian in a parallel universe in which the Confederacy was victorious, who roughly imagines a different version of our history.
Churchill concludes the account with his desired reunification of the English speaking peoples, a massive British, Yankee, and Southern empire stopping the Teutonic menace during the Great War. As with so much of Lost Cause fantasy, especially in the realm of alternate history (including Newt Gingerich’s atrocious Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War—yes that Newt Gingerich), Churchill's was a pernicious revisionism, obstinate fantasizing that posits the Civil War as being about something other than slavery. Churchill’s imaginary Robert E. Lee simply abolishes slavery upon the conclusion of the war, even while the historical general fought in defense of the continuation and expansion of that wicked institution. Yet ever the Victorian Tory, Churchill can’t help but extol a generalized chivalry, with something of his ideal character being implicit in his description of Lee’s march into Washington, D.C. and Abraham Lincoln’s rapid abandonment of the capital. The president had “preserved the poise and dignity of a nation…He was never greater than in the hour of fatal defeat.“ In counterfactual history, Churchill had been cosplaying dramatic steadfastness while facing invasion before he’d actually have to do it.
Counterfactuals raise the question of where exactly these parallel universes are supposed to be, these uncannily familiar storylines that seem as if they inhabit the space at the edge of our vision for a duration as long as an eye-blink. Like a dream where unfamiliar rooms are discovered in one’s own house, the alternate history has a spooky quality to it, and the mere existence of such conjecture forces us to confront profound metaphysical questions about determinism and free-will, agency and the arc of history. Did you really have a choice on whether or not you would move to Philly or Milwaukee? Was art history ever a possibility? Maybe Phil was always going to be your date.
The frustration of the counterfactual must always be that since history is unrepeatable, not only is it impossible to know how things would be altered, but we can’t even tell if they could be. How can one know what the impact of any one event may be, what the implications are for something happening slightly different at Marathon, or at Lepanto, or at Culloden, or Yorktown? All those butterflies fluttering their wings, and so on. Maybe Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss in Candide is right, maybe this really is the best of all possible worlds, though five minutes on Twitter should make one despair at such optimist bromides. Which is in part why alternate history is so evocative—it’s the alternate, stupid. James Richards found that other world easily, apparently there is a wormhole in the California desert that takes you to some parallel universe where scores of Beatles albums are available. But for all of those who don’t have access to the eternal jukebox, where exactly are these parallel realities supposed to be?
Quantum mechanics, the discipline that explains objects at the level of subatomic particles, has long produced surreal conclusions. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle proves that it’s impossible to have complete knowledge of both the location and the momentum of particles; Louis de Broglie's wave-particle duality explains subatomic motion with the simultaneous mechanics of both particle and wave; and Erwin Schrödinger’s fabled cat, who is simultaneously dead and alive, was a means of demonstrating the paradoxical nature of quantum supposition, whereby an atom can be both decayed and not at the same time. The so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is comfortable with such paradoxes, trading in probabilities and the faith that observation is often that which makes something so. At the center of the Copenhagen Interpretation is how we are to interpret that which physicists call the “collapse of the wave-function,“ the moment at which an observation is made and something is measured as either a wave or a particle, decayed or not. For advocates of the orthodox Copenhagen Interpretation, the wave-function exists in blissful indeterminacy until measured, being both one thing and the other until we collapse it.
For a Pentagon-employed physicist in 1957 named Hugh Everett, such uncertainty was unacceptable. That a particle could be both decayed and not at the same time was nonsensical, a violation of that fundamental logical axiom of non-contradiction. If Everett thought that the Copenhagen Interpretation was bollocks, then he had no misgivings about parallel universes, for the physicist would argue that rather than something being both one thing and its opposite at the same time, it’s actually correct to surmise that the universe has split into two branching forks. In Schrödinger’s fabled thought-experiment, a very much not sub-atomic cat is imprisoned in some sadist’s box, where the release of a poison gas is connected to whether an individual radioactive atomic nucleus has decayed or not. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, that cat is somehow dead and alive since the nucleus is under the purview of quantum law, and can exist in indeterminacy as both decayed and not until it is observed and the wave-function collapses. Everett had a more parsimonious conclusion—in one universe the cat was purring and licking his paws, and in an unlucky dimension right next door all four fury legs were rigid and straight-up in the air. No weirder than the Copenhagen Interpretation, and maybe less so. Writing of Everett’s solution, the physicist David Deutsch in his book The Fabric of Reality claims that “Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.“
Maybe mathematically that’s the case, but I still want to know where those other universes are? Whither in wardrobe or wormhole, it feels like Narnia should be a locale more accessible than in just the equations of quantum theorists. For myriad people who congregate in the more eccentric corners of the labyrinth that is the Internet, the answer to where those gardens of forking paths can be found is elementary—we’re all from them originally. Those who believe in something called the “Mandela Effect" believe they’re originally from another dimension, and that you probably are as well. Named after people on Internet message boards who claim to have memories of South African president Nelson Mandela’s funeral in the early ’80s (he died in 2013), whole online communities are dedicated to enumerating subtle differences between our current timeline and wherever they’re originally from. Things like recalling a comedy about a genii starring Sinbad called Shazaam! or the ursine family from the The Berenstain Bears spelling their surname “Berenstein“ (I think that I’m actually from that dimension).
Everett’s calculations concern minuscule differences; the many-worlds interpretation deals in issues of momentum and location of subatomic particles. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a universe where the Berenstain bears have a different last name—in a multiverse of infinite possibility all possibilities are by definition actual things—but that universe’s off-ramp is a few more exits down the highway. This doesn’t stop believers in the Mandela Effect from comparing notes on their perambulations among the corners and byways of our infinite multiverse, recalling memories from places and times as close as your own life and as distant as another universe. Looking out my window I can’t see the Prudential Center anymore, and for a second I wonder if it ever really existed, before realizing that it’s only fog.
Have some sympathy for those of us who remember Kit-Kat bars as being spelled with a dash, or Casablanca having the line "Play it again, Sam." Something is lost in this universe of ours, here where whatever demiurge has decided to delete that line. Belief in the Mandela Effect illuminates our own alterity, our own discomfort in this universe or any other—a sense of alienness, of offness. The Mandela Effect is when our shoes pinch and our socks are slightly mismatched, when we could swear that we didn’t leave our keys in the freezer. And of course the Mandela Effect is the result of simply misremembering. A deeper truth is that existence can sometimes feel so oft-putting that we might as well be from a parallel universe. Those other dimensions convey the promise of another world, of another reality. That just because things are done this way where we live now, doesn’t mean that they’re done this way everywhere. Or that they must always be done this way here, either.
What’s moving about Everyday Chemistry is that those expertly mixed songs are missives from a different reality, recordings from a separate, better universe. The album is a tangible reminder that things are different in other places, like the fictional novel at the center of K. Chess’s brilliant new novel Famous Men Who Never Lived, which imagines thousands of refugees from a parallel universe find a home in our own. In that novel, the main character clutches onto a science fiction classic called The Pyronauts, a work of literature non-existent in our reality. The Pyronauts, like Everyday Chemistry, betrays a fascinating truth about parallel universes. We may look for physical, tangible, touchable proof of the existence of such places, but literature is all the proof we need. Art is verification that another world isn’t just possible, but already exists. All literature is from a parallel universe and all fiction is alternate history.
Whether or not the Beatles recorded Everyday Chemistry, the album itself exists; if The Pyronauts is written not in our universe, then one only need transcribe it so as to read it. In the introduction to my collection The Anthology of Babel, I refer to “imagined literature;" an approach towards “probing the metaphysics of this strange thing that we call fiction, this use of invented language which is comprehensible and yet where reality does not literally support the representation.” Every fiction is an epistle from a different reality, even Hugh Everett would tell you that somewhere a real Jay Gatsby pined for Daisy Buchanan, that a few universes over Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy were actually married, and somewhere Mrs. Dalloway is always buying the flowers herself. The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Mrs. Dalloway are all, in their own way, alternate histories as well.
Alternate history functions to do what the best of literature more generally does—provide a wormhole to a different reality. That fiction engenders a deep empathy for other people is true, and important, but it’s not simply a vehicle to enter different minds—but different worlds as well. Fiction allows us to be chrononauts, to feel empathy for parallel universes, for different realities. Such a thing as fiction is simply another artifact from another dimension; literature is but a fragment from a universe that is not our own. We are haunted by our other lives, ghosts of misfortune averted, spirits of opportunities rejected, so that fiction is not simply the experience of another, but a deep human connection with those differing versions on the paths of our forked parallel lives.
Image credit: Unsplash/Kelly Sikkema.
Curios
NPR offers a nifty gallery that accompanies the publication of this quirky collection: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.The Coen Brothers have signed on to helm the film version of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The big-screen version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found (though it's reportedly been in the works for years).Elsewhere in book-to-movie news, Ian McEwen is pleased with the film version of his novel Atonement.Poet and critic Reginald Shepherd reflects on becoming a blogger. "Until a couple of years ago, I barely knew what a blog was, and certainly had never seen one," he writes. But it proved quite fruitful: "it sometimes seems that my blog has done more to raise my profile than all my more-than-fifteen years of copious publishing put together."Five reasons not to give up books (the paper ones, as opposed the digital counterparts.)I think it's an ad for a video game, but this video contains some masterful soccer kung fu.None of us at The Millions is affiliated with Princeton, but this list of the school's most influential alums is interesting in a random sort of way.The new half-hour HBO show In Treatment is a free podcast at the iTunes store. The show stars Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist and each episode represents a single session with one of five patients.The writers' strike is over. The resulting carnage on the schedules for all your favorite shows is laid out here.
The Notables
This year's New York Times Notable Books of the Year is out. At 100 titles, the list is more of a catalog of the noteworthy than a distinction. Looking at the fiction, it appears that some of these books crossed our radar as well:The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta: A most anticipated book.After Dark by Haruki Murakami: Ben's review.Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo: A most anticipated book.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: A most anticipated book.Exit Ghost by Philip Roth: A most anticipated book.Falling Man by Don Delillo: Tempering Expectations for the Great 9/11 NovelThe Gathering by Anne Enright: Underdog Enright Lands the 2007 BookerHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling: Harry Potter is Dead, Long Live Harry Potter; Top Potter Town Gets Prize, Boy-Wizard Bragging Rights; Professor Trelawney Examines Her Tea Leaves; A Potter Post Mortem; A History of MagicHouse of Meetings by Martin Amis: A most anticipated book.In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar: The Booker shortlistKnots by Nuruddin Farah: A most anticipated book.Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard: National Book Award FinalistOn Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan: Booker shortlistThe Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid: Booker shortlistRemainder by Tom McCarthy: Andrew's reviewSavage Detectives by Roberto Bolano: A most anticipated book; Why Bolano MattersThen We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris: A most anticipated bookTree of Smoke by Denis Johnson: Garth's reviewTwenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis: Emily's reviewVarieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis: National Book Award FinalistWhat is the What by Dave Eggers: Garth's review.The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon: Max's review; Garth's review.
The Myth of the 9/11 Novel
On this sad anniversary, USA Today trots out the now tired question, asking for, as if we're all looking for it, the mythical novel that will explain and place into context the tragedy of six years ago. In this case, USA Today points out the uninspiring sales of "novels inspired by 9/11" as compared to their non-fiction counterparts, but the subtext of these articles, and there have been many in many venues over the years, is twofold.First is that the serious novel's driving function is to make sense of our complicated world, to distill it to its essence so that years from now, when a young man asks how 9/11 felt, an old man can wordlessly slip a book into his hand. Second is this idea that every major event requires the culture to produce innumerable artifacts that are explicitly about that event. There are hundreds of films and TV shows that are primarily about 9/11, but where, the culture watchers ask, are all the novels?I wrote about this several months ago, when the publication of Don Delillo's Falling Man led several to seek the "9/11 novel" (Falling Man deemed to have failed in this respect), and I still believe what I wrote then.I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a "9/11 novel." Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world. For example, even Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is set in an alternate universe in which a temporary Jewish homeland has been set up in Alaska, is a "9/11 novel" in that it has internalized the post-9/11 sensibilities of shadowy government meddling in the Middle East and the feeling of an impending global and religiously motivated conflict. To expect a novel to explicitly place 9/11 into a context that offers us all some greater understanding of it is to misunderstand how fiction works.There may never be a so-called "defining 9/11 novel," but there are already many 9/11 novels, some more explicitly about 9/11 than others but all internalizing that event to one degree or another. Still, since it seems likely that we will not satisfactorily settle on the one anointed 9/11 novel, writers will have a topic to dust off every year when this anniversary rolls around.
Inter Alia #1: Notes Toward a Sporadic Column
I'm still working out my relationship with the blog as a critical organ... I guess, in a way, we all are. My thoughts, as visitors to this site may have noticed, tend equally toward the associative and the forensic. And yet, as a gift to you, the reader, I'd like to carve out a space in which I can share some of my less strenuously worked-out thoughts about the state of the art of fiction, and about culture more generally. (Lucky me, you're probably thinking.)These "ideas," if I can call them that, may turn out on closer inspection to be completely bogus. And yet I'm feeling the need sporadically to turn the power of the blog as an instrument of feedback away from such epiphenomenal questions as, "Doesn't John Colapinto seem weirdly peevish and thin-skinned this week" and toward less sexy developments that may still have some bearing on American culture a year from now... or a decade from now. That is, I propose to engineer a column on literature here at The Millions that advances beyond "link-bait," even as it stays brief, casual, and interactive. I want to invite other writers working online, or stuck in the cubicle farm, to pick up on and respond to my less topical provocations, here or elsewhere, just as they might respond to a public gaffe by a former child star, or a book review in The New Republic.I'd like to call this column "Inter Alia," which is Latin for "among other things." It will appear irregularly, like a meteor shower (or perhaps more likely, an unwanted guest). It will be about the length of what follows.Inter Alia 1: Genre MadnessI'm going to raise a few questions, by way of experiment, about the continued relevance (or irrelevance) of notions of genre. It seems to me that the canonization of Philip K. Dick by the Library of America is a healthy development, and not just because it encourages snobs like me to consider speculative fiction alongside the main body of "realism" in our reading lives. It is also (I think) a manifestation of a long trend, with younger American writers gleefully sinking their teeth into the pop tropes of what was previously dismissed as "genre fiction," and "genre" writers like Dick being hailed for their literary merit. (Let's set aside for the sake of argument the high-low brinksmanship of Modernists like Joyce and Borges, similar in degree but different in kind). Kelly Link's Small Beer Press, e.g., has done a lot to remind us that the postmodern leveling of "high" and "low" culture distinctions is not just political - it can be fun. Simultaneously, "Literary Fiction," as Gerald Howard and others have argued, is moving from being a descriptor to being a genre in and of itself, with its own generic conventions. Call it lit-fic: a label no more a guarantor (or compromiser) of literary value than is "Western," or "Sci Fi."Michael Chabon, it seems to me, is one of several 40-ish writers working toward a unified-field theory that harmonizes the best of lit-fic and its discontents. And yet, notwithstanding the wisdom of John Leonard, who suggested at a panel recently that getting too hung up on a book's genre is a form of stupidity, I find myself struggling with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. On one hand, it's a staggering feat of imagination, and often a great read. On the other, the stylized cliffhanger chapter endings (cribbed from gumshoe novels and children's books and Saturday matinees), the sometimes cartoony dogpile of figurative language, the comic book characterization, and the almost parodically rococo plot seem to me to obscure the promise of a brilliant premise: an alternative postwar history that turns Alaska into a Jewish homeland.This may be nigglingly small-minded, and would be a mere footnote to a longer review. Chabon clearly invested years in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and has taken significant risks, and I think he deserves a wide readership. But I want to be honest about my reading experience. If this were a children's book, like Summerland, or a melancholy lieder, like The Final Solution, I might swallow my resistance. But Chabon wants me to take to heart the adult sufferings of his hero, Meyer Landsman, and this particular book's generic patrimony interferes with my ability to do so. I keep feeling dismissed from the suspension of disbelief, like Adam and Eve booted from the garden. I keep feeling reminded of the book qua book. Am I just hung up in an old-fashioned need to classify, as I once accused Michiko Kakutani of being? Or are there certain compositional principles underlying the successful genre mash-up, the way a mash-up mp3 requires that two songs have affinities of key and tempo? And if so, how do writers put them into practice? How do readers evaluate a genre-straddling book by the standards of one genre without using the other as an alibi? Discuss.
Tempering Expectations for the Great 9/11 Novel
Jerome Weeks has published a long, thoughtful essay asking why all the talk about our culture needing a great "9/11 novel." Don Delillo has this discussion back in the book pages with his new book, Falling Man, though Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Deborah Eisenberg's collection Twilight of the Superheroes among several others are examples of so-called "9/11 fiction." Weeks writes:Why do we expect our writers to produce the "Great 9/11 novel" anyway? Has there ever been a "great" Pearl Harbor novel -- the event most often compared to the Towers' collapse? From Here to Eternity is about all that memory can conjure up, and it surely doesn't qualify as great.I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a "9/11 novel." Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world. For example, even Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is set in an alternate universe in which a temporary Jewish homeland has been set up in Alaska, is a "9/11 novel" in that it has internalized the post-9/11 sensibilities of shadowy government meddling in the Middle East and the feeling of an impending global and religiously motivated conflict. To expect a novel to explicitly place 9/11 into a context that offers us all some greater understanding of it is to misunderstand how fiction works, as Jerome Weeks implies. What we are really looking for (as ever) is a defining novel of our time.
Hard-Boiled on Ice: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
It should come as no surprise that Michael Chabon, with his latest novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has delivered a high concept work of genre fiction. That's par for the course for Chabon. More broadly speaking, Union's detective novel form will be familiar, but Chabon has made it his own by superimposing the story on a rewritten history, one in which the world's Jewish population was offered a temporary homeland in Alaska following World War II. The conceit is taken from a plan that was actually floated in the late 1930s but never actually went anywhere.But though Chabon has crafted an entire alternate universe to explore, one that seemed to me would be rich with narrative possibilities when I first heard about the book, he uses it instead as little more than backdrop for a detective story of fairly straightforward construction. Not unlike bustling Bangkok provides the colorful backdrop for John Burdett's mystery novels, not unlike Michael Connelly's L.A. or George Pelecanos' D.C. As with many detective novels, both well-crafted and pulp, it is the setting that sets Union apart.Though more ambitious conceptually than his previous work, Union isn't exactly new territory for Chabon. His Pulitzer winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay invents The Escapist, a superhero that captures the public consciousness during the 20th century alongside Superman and Batman. While that's not as impressive an imaginative feat as moving a whole people to the snowy hinterland, it frees Chabon to take his readers from Prague to New York City with a memorable interlude in Antarctica. Kavalier & Clay spans decades and incorporates the century's wars and social movements. In Union we are stuck in the crumbling neighborhoods of Sitka, where a dull grayness follows the action. Through fog, snow, and grime our hero Detective Meyer Landsman plods in his pursuit of a murderer.In many ways Landsman is cut from a familiar "hard-boiled" mold. He is divorced, borderline alcoholic, and living in a fleabag hotel. Though ostensibly washed up, Landsman is preternaturally good at what he does, and Landsman's nearly superhuman powers of observation allow Chabon to unleash a flurry of descriptors and minutia upon every character we meet. "His herringbone trousers are stained with egg yolk, acid, tar, epoxy fixative, sealing wax, green paint, mastodon blood." "His skin is as pale as a page of commentary. His hat perches on his lap, a black cake on a black dish." Elsewhere, the prose is peppered with Yiddish, the preferred tongue of Jewish Alaska.Landsman isn't all hard bitten though. He seems to swing between bravado and self-pity. After Landsman is made aware of a murder that his occurred in his hotel, the murder that is the crux of the book's plot, he must investigate a tunnel leading from the basement, and Chabon takes the opportunity to lay out Landsman's internal contradictions:Landsman is a tough guy in his way, given to the taking of chances. He has been called hard-boiled and foolhardy, a momzer, a crazy son of a bitch. He has faced down shtarkers and psychopaths, been shot at, beaten, frozen, burned. He has pursued suspects between the flashing walls of urban firefights and deep into bear country. Heights, crowds, snakes, burning houses, dogs schooled to hate the smell of a policeman, he has shrugged them all off or he has functioned in spite of them. But when he finds himself in lightless or confined spaces, something in the animal core of Meyer Landsman convulses. No one but his ex-wife knows it, but Detective Meyer Landsman is afraid of the dark.Landsman is, indeed, afraid of the dark, but the darkness is just another demon that haunts him, like the break up of his marriage to Inspector Bina Gelbfish (who has recently become Landsman's boss), and the death of his sister Naomi.But whatever clinical diagnosis fits the brooding Landsman, this book is not a character study, it is a mystery novel. Initially, the dead man appears to be an anonymous junkie, but, as if to justify Chabon's alternate universe, the conspiracy that surrounds the death only grows until we see its global implications.This all dovetails with the overarching predicament of the Alaskan Jews. Their settlement up north was never meant to be permanent, and now, in the present day, political machinations have led to the impending "Reversion" that will set them wandering once again.It was this conceit that had me salivating for this book, but instead Union amounts to a 432-page detective story, colorful and filled with dazzling prose, but weighed down by a clunky plot that schleps along and attempts to live up to Chabon's grand premise.
Early Looks at Upcoming Books: Chabon, McEwan, DeLillo, Murakami
If I'm planning on seeing a movie, I don't typically look at reviews of it beforehand. I prefer to go into the experience with an open mind. And even though newspaper movie reviewers don't tend to "spoil" the key plot points, I'd just as well not know anything about the plot so that every twist and turn is unexpected. The same thing goes for book reviews. There have even been times when I've stopped reading a book review halfway in when I realized that I wanted to read the book being reviewed. Setting the review aside, I'll revisit it once the book is complete.And so with early reviews of books I'd like to read trickling in, I'm setting them aside to pour over once I've read the books. At the top of my list is The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. I was able to get my hands on an early copy, and I'll be eagerly jumping in as soon as I finish this week's New Yorker. Bookforum, meanwhile, has already posted its review of the book. In the third paragraph, reviewer Benjamin Anastas writes "The Yiddish Policemen's Union is many things at once: a work of alternate history, a medium-boiled detective story, an exploration of the conundrum of Jewish identity, a meditation on the Zionist experiment, the apotheosis thus far of one writer's influential sensibility." I haven't read further than that, though, as I don't want anything to put a dent into my anticipation.Elsewhere, hungry readers have cracked into some other hotly anticipated novels. Bookdwarf has a look at Ian McEwan's slim new tome On Chesil Beach. She initially calls it an "odd, intimate book," but ultimately gives it her seal of approval, calling it "superb."Anne Fernald landed a copy of Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man and offers up her initial thoughts. The book is yet another entrant in the "9/11 novel" category, but Anne clearly didn't find it hackneyed or overwrought. Instead she calls it "wonderful... excellent but not the very, very best of his work." Later on she declares, "Oh, the marvel of watching DeLillo reveal the poisonous thoughts of an ordinary unhappy woman to us."Finally, Haruki Murakami has a new book, After Dark, on its way. For those who seek them out, early looks at Murakami novels can nearly always be found since his books come out in Japan well in advance of the English translations. One need only find a bilingual reader to share his thoughts in English. An excerpt, however, is harder to come by, but that's what was recently offered up at Condalmo, where Matthew Tiffany recently shared the book's opening sentences.Previously: The above books are just a few of the most anticipated books of 2007.
Quarterly Report: Book Industry Trends
Every three months I've been looking at Barnes & Noble's quarterly conference call to get some insight into recent book industry trends and to see which books the retailer expects to be "big" in the coming months. Here are the highlights from CEO Steve Riggio on the Q4 conference call (courtesy Seeking Alpha):One of the big stories for book retailers this year was a lack of blockbuster titles to get shoppers into stores. "It was a year that produced two titles that garnered significant media attention. But while the lack of traffic producing new releases didn't help our top line, what's important is that our core booklist was solid." I'm not sure which titles he's referring to there - which says something about last year's lack of blockbusters - but I'm guessing one of them was Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.Riggio also noted how customer loyalty programs have made for "a vastly different environment than just three years ago," and he alluded specifically to Amazon Prime, the online retailer's popular shipping offer.Riggio said the chain has high expectations for new books by Lisa Scottoline (Daddy's Girl), Jonathan Kellerman (Obsession), Mary Higgins-Clark (I Heard That Song Before), David Baldacci (Simple Genius), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union), and Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns."The Oprah effect on books continues." Oprah helped make YOU: On A Diet, Bob Greene's Best Life Diet, and The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier. But the really big seller - much to the chagrin of many - was The Secret by Ronda Burn, which Riggio called "probably one of the fastest non-fiction selling books we've had in recent memory."B&N is also looking forward to some new non-fiction titles: Einstein by Walter Isaacson, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? by Lee Iococca, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, and Paula Dean's memoir, It Ain't All About the Cooking.Finally, "we are just beginning to see a wave of books about politics and those related to the 2008 Presidential election at this time and by far, Barak Obama's The Audacity of Hope leads the pack."Previously: Barnes & Noble's third quarter.
The Most Anticipated Books of 2007
As I did in 2005 and 2006, I've decided to open this year looking ahead to some of the exciting or intriguing titles that we'll be talking about over the next few months.Possibly the biggest literary arrival of this young year will be that of Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest later this month. Unfortunately for some fans, the book is not the long hoped for sequel to Harlot's Ghost, a book that Mailer abandoned for this one, according to an interview. With this effort Mailer treads into charged territory, chronicling the early life of Adolf Hitler from the point of view of the devil or something like it. The curious can read an excerpt of the book that appeared in the January issue of Esquire.Also coming right around the corner is House of Meetings by Martin Amis. The book came out in the UK in September where John Banville in The Independent named it a "Book of the Year." The reviews have been generally good. The Observer called it a "compact tour de force." The Guardian was slightly more skeptical saying that the book is "an attempt to compress the past 60 years of Russian history into 200 pages, delivered as the monologue of someone whose name we're never told; an ambitious plan, held together by the sound of a voice."Also this month, Paul Auster's latest book Travels in the Scriptorium comes out. It sounds like another inscrutable, postmodern tale from Auster, this time starring a protagonist named Mr. Blank. In this case, Auster's inward looking tendencies are amplified as the book references many of his previous works. At both Condalmo and Strange Horizons, this particular Auster experiment has been deemed less successful.Louis Begley, author of About Schmidt, has Matters of Honor coming out this month. It starts with three unlikely roommates at Harvard in the 1950s and goes on to trace how the diverging outcomes of their lives came to be. If that sounds like a tired old tale, PW makes the same observation but then brushes it aside: "It's a story covered by everyone from Cheever to Roth, but Begley finds new and wonderful nuances within it."Colum McCann's fourth novel Zoli will hit shelves soon. The book is named for a Roma (or Gypsy) woman in Slovakia who we follow from her harrowing childhood during World War II to her becoming something of local literary celebrity. Through it all, however, she is unable to escape what her heritage signifies in her Communist bloc country. The book has been out for several months in Ireland and the UK where The Guardian hailed McCann's "near pitch-perfect control of character and narrative." For those who want a taste, a pdf excerpt from the book is available.Another big name with a new book out this year is Jane Smiley, whose Ten Days in the Hills arrives in February. Hills is being billed as Smiley's "LA Novel" (note that Jonathan Lethem's "LA Novel" arrives in March). PW sums it all up rather well: "Smiley delivers a delightful, subtly observant sendup of Tinseltown folly, yet she treats her characters, their concern with compelling surfaces and their perpetual quest to capture reality through artifice, with warmth and seriousness. In their shallowness, she finds a kind of profundity." On the other hand, I'm not convinced that the world needs another literary look at the Hollywood-caricature side of LA.February will also see the arrival of Daniel Alarcon's Lost City Radio. This is Alarcon's first novel, following his collection of stories, War by Candlelight, which was a finalist for the 2006 PEN Hemingway Award. Alarcon likely came to many readers' attention in 2003, when his story "City of Clowns" was featured in the New Yorker debut fiction issue. This new book scored a blurb from Edward P. Jones - "Mr. Alarcon, like the best storytellers, reveals to us that the world we have secreted in our hearts spins in a bigger universe with other hearts just as good and just as bad as our own." - always a good sign.Also in February, a new book will arrive from Nuruddin Farah, quite likely the best known Somali novelist and the winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998. Knots is about Cambara, a Somalian woman who has emigrated to Canada, where a crisis sends her on a journey back to Somalia. Farah is known for his strong female protagonists and this book appears to be no exception. Knots gets a glowing review from PW - "Despite its heavy subject, joy suffuses the novel" - and Farah will likely continue to be discussed as a potential Nobel winner.It would be strange to read a book by Jonathan Lethem that wasn't deeply rooted in his hometown of Brooklyn, but readers will get that chance in March when You Don't Love Me Yet arrives. The book is set in Los Angeles, but, while Fortress of Solitude had some amusing LA moments set in the office of a Hollywood agent, this new book concerns itself with the city's grungier east side neighborhoods, home to a star-crossed indie rock band whose members are classic LA misfits. Early accounts at PW and this bookseller's blog have found the book to be funny and entertaining but not up to par with the author's earlier efforts.If you'll indulge me in allowing a little non-fiction to sneak into this post, please note that William T. Vollmann has a new book coming out in March called Poor People, a rather slim tome, weighing in it at just 464 pages. This is the book that Vollmann mentioned when Ed and Scott saw him read back in spring 2005. From Scott's post: "Vollman is currently working on a book about the experiences of poor people in different countries. He says he asks everyone why they think they are poor, and the answers greatly vary. He says most of the Thais told him it's because they were bad in a previous life. Most of the Mexicans he spoke to told him it was because the rich stole from them."A book by Columbian writer Laura Restrepo will hit American shores in March. Delirium was originally written in 2004 and follows the life of a struggling literature professor who must investigate what has caused his wife to go insane. The book bears an impressive array of blurbs befitting a writer of Restrepo's stature (if not here, then overseas), including raves from Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harold Bloom, and Vikram Seth.We'll also see a new novel from Kurt Andersen co-founder of the influential magazine Spy and host of the public radio show Studio 360. Heyday is set in the mid-19th century and it follows an immigrant, recently arrived on bustling American shores, who falls in with a group heading west, lured by the California Gold Rush. Random House calls the book "an enthralling, old-fashioned yarn interwoven with a bracingly modern novel of ideas." A short story about two of the book's main characters appeared in Metropolis in 2003.Debut novelist Joshua Ferris already has a backer in Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation, who says Then We Came To The End is "a humane and affecting book." Mark also included the novel in his contribution to the Year in Reading series where he said that this "hilarious and gorgeously written novel might just change [his] mind about MFAs." Of course, Mark is fully aware that we all might not share his particular tastes, so he convinced publisher Little, Brown to let him publish the book's first chapter at TEV, where you can now check it out for yourself.Orange Prize winner Lionel Shriver also has a new book coming in March, The Post-Birthday World. PW describes as "impressive if exhausting" this novel that explores what might have been if its children's book illustrator protagonist had given into temptation and pursued an affair. Following the success of Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin and the subsequent re-release of her back catalog, The Post-Birthday World marks her first new effort since hitting the literary big time.The Savage Detectives, originally published in 1998 by the late Roberto Bolano, will arrive in April. The book has already appeared in other languages, which is how Francois of Tabula Rasa came to read it. he shared his reactions with us as a part of the Year in Reading series: "Pure bliss! In turn coming-of-age story, roman noir, literary quest, this is a real tour de force, reminiscent of Julio Cortazar and Jack Kerouac while remaining deeply original. Bolano passed away in 2003. He was fifty years old, and I just can't help thinking about what else might have been coming from him." New Directions, meanwhile, will publish a translation of Bolano's novella Amulet in January.There's not much available yet on Dani Shapiro's new book arriving in April. Buzz Girl notes that Black and White is "about mothers and daughters set in New York and Maine." The book follows Shapiro's well received 2003 book Family History.The biggest literary month of 2007 might be May which will start with the much anticipated, much delayed publication of Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Chabon's first full-length adult novel since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a thriller set in an imaginary world inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt's short-lived plan during WWII to create a Jewish homeland in Alaska, rather than the Middle East. Sounds interesting, no? We've been following this book for quite some time now, as it was originally set to be released nearly a year ago. But Chabon put the brakes on the project when he decided it was moving along too fast.Yet another big name author with a new book out this year is Haruki Murakami, whose book After Dark hits shelves in May. The book was originally published in Japan in 2004, and has already been translated into some other languages, including Dutch. In keeping with the title, the novel tracks a number of nocturnal characters who dwell in Tokyo and have the sorts of encounters that tend to occur in the wee hours of the morning. Murakami's typical melding of dream and reality will be familiar to readers of this new novel as well. Still, I join Scott Esposito in hoping that Murakami breaks new ground with this new book.Also in May: the arrival of Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. Not much available on this one yet, save a stray synopsis or two. The novel begins with a family on a farm in northern California in the 1970s and moves to the casinos of Nevada, at which point a "traumatic event" breaks the family apart. The pieces are put back together in the novel's second part, which takes place "in the stark landscape of south-central France." Like I said, not much to go on just yet.Susanna Moore, best known for her novel In the Cut, has a new book coming out in May. The Big Girls is based on Moore's experience teaching writing in a federal prison in New York, and one early look at the novel found it to be, as one might expect, fairly disturbing. It'll be interesting to see other opinions of what sounds like a very emotionally charged book.The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins will arrive in June. Wiggins' last book, Evidence of Things Unseen, was a National Book Award finalist in 2003. This new book is a historical novel about the Old West photographer Edward Curtis.I'll close the list with two additional non-fiction books that I'm particularly looking forward to. Pete Dexter has a collection of his old newspaper columns coming out called Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage. A number of the columns are from his time in Philadelphia, which should be of particular interest for me, since the city is now my home. In addition, I've always felt that the old school newspaperman's sensibility that Dexter brings to his fiction is one of his most appealing qualities as a writer, so I'm looking forward to getting the opportunity to delve into the pure stuff, as it were. Another journalist whose new collection is, for me, hotly anticipated is Ryszard Kapuscinski. Kapuscinski is a Polish writer who, to me, is unsurpassed in his chronicling of the so-called Third World and its forgotten wars and struggles. I don't yet know what his latest, Travels with Herodotus, will cover, but I know I'll be reading it.While long, this list is by no means exhaustive, so please use the comments to share what you're looking forward to reading in 2007.
Chabon Leaves the Internet
Michael Chabon's official Web site doesn't get much attention from the author. He'll post longer items from time to time as well as the occasional cryptic note about the various projects he's working on. Chabon has now, however, decided to pack it in with this Web site business:Lately I have been suffering from Repetitive Strain Injury that makes typing a chore and clicking an agony. As I have been spending less time online I have found that I've lost interest in the web as a whole, and in my site in particular. I'm tired of having to maintain www.michaelchabon.com, but I hate that it gets stale, and so quickly. Yet I don't feel comfortable with or have any interest in getting somebody else to do it for me. So I've decided, not without regret, to take it down, a little at a time, starting with the posting of my monthly Details column.On the other hand, Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union will be arriving in May.
Lots of Michael Chabon News
Michael Chabon has posted some news on his infrequently updated and often cryptic blog. Here's the latest:His forthcoming novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union is "completed and headed for copy-editing." The book will come out in May of 2007 - really looking forward to this one, by the way. You'll recall that late last year the book was postponed until "winter 2007."Chabon talks about a project with the working title "Jews with swords," which is "a projected 16-part serialized novel," or perhaps a graphic novel, since he indicates that it will run in the NY Times Magazine Funny Pages section in January following the Michael Connelly/Seth collaboration (That sounds cool, too). No word on who will provide the art.Update: Obviously I haven't looked at the NY Times Mag lately. It turns out that these comics and serialized novels are separate things that have been running in the magazine. So "Jews with swords" will most likely just be a straight up serialized novel... See the comments of this post for more details.He also provides some movie updates. On the film version of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, he writes: "About to enter the magical estate known as 'principal photography,' in the great city of Pittsburgh." We already knew that thanks to Pinky's update from the scene. Of the film version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, he gives us this update: "Status: Complying With Polite Request To Stop Posting About It On This Website, Already." I guess he got in trouble for his post about it in June.There is also reference to a project called "Snow and the Seven." In July, The Guardian wrote about the project saying, "Snow White is about to be transformed into a martial arts epic with Shaolin monks replacing the seven dwarves of the original Grimm Brothers fairytale." Chabon wrote the script apparently, but it sounds like it's not going very well. "'They love you, but they want to go in another direction.' 'What kind of dir--' 'More of a fun direction.' 'Oh.'" IMdB still lists him as one of the writers, along with two other scribes, but not for long it seems.Finally, Chabon adds some books to his "Reading Ten Books At Once" list:The Cossacks by Leo TolstoyThe Complete Western Stories of Elmore LeonardContingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard RortyYou Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem (Hadn't heard about this. Very cool. Comes out March 13, 2007)A Journey to the End of the Millennium by A.B. Yehoshua
The Most Anticipated Books of 2006 – Part 2
Back in January, I took a look at some of the "most anticipated" books of the year. Well, those books are old news now, but there are some great-looking books on the way. September and October in particular are looking pretty stacked. Please share any relevant links or books I may have missed.July:Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane (New Yorker interview)Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle (Boyle's blog)The Driftless Area by Tom Drury (Drury's story "Path Lights")The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk (a new translation, thanks Bud)America's Report Card by John McNally (Thanks Dan)The Judas Field by Howard Bahr (Thanks J.D.)August:Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (list of stories)Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell (Thanks Dan)Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain (thanks Stephan)September:Moral Disorder by Margaret AtwoodThe Dissident by Nell Freudenberger (Her first novel; following up her collection, Lucky Girls)All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones (very excited about this one - the title story appeared in the New Yorker.)A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon (a first look at the book)The Road by Cormac Mccarthy (a first look)After This by Alice McDermott (PW Review [scroll down])Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (thanks Dan)Smonk by Tom Franklin (thanks Dan)Dead in Desemboque by Eddy Arellano (Thanks Laurie)October:One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (sequel to Case Histories)What is the What by Dave Eggers (based on a true story, excerpted in The Believer - Part 1, 2, 3)Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (The third Frank Bascombe novel - I wrote about it last year.)Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (A big enough deal that the announcement of a publication date came as an Entertainment Weekly exclusive.)Restless by William Boyd (A World War II novel)The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi JulavitsGolem Song by Marc Estrin (thanks Dan)The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke (Thanks Laurie)November:The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro (The title story was in the New Yorker)Soon the Rest Will Fall by Peter Plate (Thanks Laurie)The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross (Thanks Laurie)December:Untitled Thomas Pynchon novel (as confirmed by Ed.)January 2007:Zoli by Colum McCannFlora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Thanks Laurie)February 2007:Knots by Nuruddin Farah (based on "Farah's own recent efforts to reclaim his family's property in Mogadishu, and his experiences trying to negotiate peace among the city's warlords.")May 2007:The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (Posts about the book: 1, 2, 3, 4)Addenda: Books suggested in the comments are being added above.
Book to Movie News: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon provides an update on the progress of a movie version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on his Web site. Somewhat cryptically, he writes "The fate of this project--whether it will move at last from the nebulousness of pre-pre-production into really-truly pre-production, with a budget and cast and everything, will be decided on or around 12 July 2006."He adds that Natalie Portman "is a strong likelihood" to play Rosa, and then provides some quick answers to what will and will not make it into the big-screen version of the book: "Golem: yes. Antarctica: yes. Gay love story: yes. Ruins of World's Fair: no. Long Island: no. Orson Welles: no. Salvador Dali: yes. Loving reference to Betty and Veronica: no. Stan Lee: no."Meanwhile, IMDb as of this writing has very few details about the film. Just that Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliot and The Hours is set to helm and Scott Rudin is the producer. Rudin was also behind the excellent big-screen version of Chabon's novel Wonder Boys.On a somewhat related note, Chabon's next novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is to come out in May of 2007.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Michael Chabon has announced a release date for his next novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, April 11, 2006. As some of you may recall, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union is set in a parallel world in which the Jewish homeland was set up in Alaska rather than Israel, something that president Franklin D. Roosevelt considered during World War II."Also recently posted: cryptic word of a film version of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (recently rereleased with a new cover.) Since Chabon is revealing only the initials of those invloved with the film, it's unclear what exactly is going on. Is it me, or is Chabon getting weirder and weirder? If anyone knows who he's talking about here, please let us know.Previously: What Chabon's been up toUpdate: Kyle in the comments was right, Chabon has updated his post about The Mysteries of Pittsburgh film: "to be written and directed by Rawson Thurber, writer/director of the commercially successful and highly amusing Dodgeball (2004)."Update 2: The Yiddish Policemen's Union has been postponed.Update 3: The Yiddish Policemen's Union will be out in May 2007. pre-order now.