Literary fiction: the best-written recent releases III

Read the opening pages of our picks below

In today’s issue:

—‘Of all the humanlike species who stood up on two feet, who roamed the earth for the last one million years, Bruno said that the Neanderthal’s braincase was way out in front, at a whopping 1,800 cubic centimeters. I pictured a king of the road, way out in front’: our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. Our previous picks are here and here, where you can also find the list of books considered.

—’I always knew that I was ungrateful. My parents prophesied it early on, and I never denied it’: and our next pick. This was a strong month for well-written fiction.

If you’d like us to consider your own recent release or a work you’ve serialised on Substack, sign up for a paid subscription via the button below and email a copy of your book to auraist@substack.com. If we pick your submission we’ll invite you to write an article on prose style that will be included in the published collection of these pieces.

A paid subscription also gives readers access to our full archive, including exclusive masterclasses on prose style. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you for getting behind Auraist and helping to support fine writing and writers.

Or you can join the 20k discerning readers who’ve followed us or subscribed for free access. Please note, though, that after two weeks posts are only available to paid subscribers.

You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.

We offer a number of benefits to Substackers who recommend or restack Auraist, starting with a six-month complimentary paid subscription. If you’d like to help spread the word about the only publication set up to champion beautiful prose, just email us at the above address.

---

I THE DELIGHTS OF SOLITUDE

NEANDERTHALS WERE PRONE TO DEPRESSION, he said.

He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.

Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.

Reading this part of Bruno’s email, scanning from “man” to “touch” to “leaf” to “fire,” I pictured a 1950s greaser in a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket as he touches a lit match to the tip of his Camel cigarette, and inhales. The greaser leans against a wall—because that is what greasers do, they lean and loiter—and then he exhales.

Bruno Lacombe told Pascal, in these emails I was secretly reading, that the Neanderthals had very large brains.

Or at least their skulls were very large, and we can safely infer that their skulls were likely filled, Bruno said, with brains. He talked about the impressive size of a Thal’s braincase using modern metaphors, comparing them to motorcycle engines, which were also measured, he noted, for their displacement. Of all the humanlike species who stood up on two feet, who roamed the earth for the last one million years, Bruno said that the Neanderthal’s braincase was way out in front, at a whopping 1,800 cubic centimeters.

I pictured a king of the road, way out in front.

I saw his leather vest, his big gut, legs extended, engineers’ boots resting on roomy and chromed forward-mounted foot pegs. His chopper is fitted with ape hangers that he can barely reach, and which he pretends are not making his arms tired, are not causing terrible shooting pains to his lumbar region.

We know from their skulls, Bruno said, that Neanderthals had enormous faces.

I pictured Joan Crawford, that scale of face: dramatic, brutal, compelling.

And thereafter, in the natural history museum in my mind, the one I was creating as I read Bruno’s emails, its dioramas populated by figures in loincloths, with yellow teeth and matted hair, all these ancient people Bruno described—the men too—they all had Joan Crawford’s face.

They had her fair skin and her flaming red hair. A propensity for red hair, Bruno said, had been identified as a genetic trait of the Thal, as scientific advancements in gene mapping were made. And beyond such work, such proof, Bruno said, we might employ our natural intuition to suppose that like typical redheads, the Neanderthals’ emotions were strong and acute, spanning the heights and depths.

A few more things, Bruno wrote to Pascal, that we now know about Neanderthals: They were good at math. They did not enjoy crowds. They had strong stomachs and were not especially prone to ulcers, but their diet of constant barbecue did its damage as it would to anyone’s gut. They were extra vulnerable to tooth decay and gum disease. And they had overdeveloped jaws, wonderfully capable of chewing gristle and cartilage but inefficient for softer fare, a jaw that was overkill. Bruno described the jaw of the Neanderthal as a feature of pathos for its overdevelopment, the burden of a square jaw. He talked about sunk costs, as if the body were a capital investment, a fixed investment, the parts of the body like machines bolted to a factory floor, equipment that had been purchased and could not be resold. The Neanderthal jaw was a sunk cost.

Still, the Thal’s heavy bones and sturdy, heat-conserving build were to be admired, Bruno said. Especially compared to the breadstick limbs of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens. (Bruno did not say “breadstick,” but since I was translating, as he was writing these emails in French, I drew from the full breadth of English, a wildly superior language and my native tongue.)

The Thals survived cold very well, he said, if not the eons, or so the story about them goes—a story that we must complicate, he said, if we are to know the truth about the ancient past, if we are to glimpse the truth about this world, now, and how to live in it, how to occupy the present, and where to go tomorrow.

* SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE * LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Time, LitHub, The Millions, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more!

“At last I get to say how deeply, madly, irrecoverably I loved Creation Lake... it was all stylish and cool, and then somehow the book struck a blow to my heart.” —Louise Erdrich, Kirkus Reviews

From Rachel Kushner, a Booker Prize finalist, two-time National Book Award finalist, and “one of the most gifted authors of her generation” (The New York Times Book Review), comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France—a propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark humor.

---

‘She owned a ridiculously expensive, ridiculously proportioned yet otherwise highly realistic sexdoll that joined us for three-way bouts, a doll designed by someone with a serious knack for shaping thermoplastic elastomer bodies that make you climax shamefully fast. (As you’ll see, it’s now hard not to view our relationship to this doll as similar to the one the hyperdimensional entities have with humans).’

---

The visitor sat at the table eating his little tangerine segments. Whenever things are excessively small, I can’t help but raise my eyebrows and put my hand on my heart, or at least where I presume my heart is. No one has ever had trouble making me stop misbehaving, all they had to do was offer me something miniature.

The visitor is delicate, so very delicate that he practically wafts apart. At first I didn’t notice, because he’s very good at hiding it. Anyone as delicate as the visitor is in grave danger. How easily he might end up in the clutches of some crazy person. My great-grandfather, for instance, was a well-known cult leader. Alas I was not so fortunate as to ever have met him personally. All I have of him is a single photograph showing him at a writing desk, his hair in a severe part, gaze aimed into a visionary future. I also find it fascinating that the sermons he gave were apparently improvised: he would let the Holy Scripture drop onto the pulpit, the beneficent hand of the Lord would make the book fall open at a choice passage, and he would thereby be presented with the subject of his sermon.

My great-grandfather might have put it thus: You have to trust the page that the Holy Book opens to when it falls, and anyway one is merely the servant of the Lord, there is nothing to do but carry out His will.

.

Next to the small town where I have come to rest, as if in a sarcophagus, there is a large mountain, rather like a pyramid, but not, like the actual wonder of the world, able to be sightseen from within, and furthermore capped with snow. One can, if one truly wants to, climb it. I personally refrain—by now the view’s been ruined for me and it’s no longer possible to see as far as I would like. I prefer to remain at the mountain’s feet. Sometimes the mountain’s shadow scares me.

I know everyone in this town but mostly act like I don’t know anyone. Something or other has happened to me on practically every streetcorner by now; various temporal strata are superimposed. There’s always quite a bustling crowd in the Roundel Bar, which is located right near my house; it was originally supposed to be open for only a hundred days, but that hundred has turned into thousands. The waiter changes every week, and each one is more appalling than the last, but they all keep their hair tied up tight on their heads, and even aside from that it’s safe to say there has never been anything interesting to see there. I always knew that I was ungrateful. My parents prophesied it early on, and I never denied it.

The visitor was uncharted territory. He materialized from the void. He got off the train, walked down the platform swinging his suitcases, and our gazes met. It’s not entirely clear to me whether the insane idea to come here was his own. I was standing on the other side of the platform, contemplating departure, or at least wandering around the train station trying to get an overview of all the destinations I might possibly travel to. But I’ve never set foot on a train.

I can’t deny it: the visitor seemed familiar the first time I stared at him through the gold-rimmed lenses of my glasses—or was it he, standing on the other side of the platform, who fixed his eyes warmly on me through the lenses of his, while we both knew we’d come from opposite directions and so would travel onward in opposite directions too, the next day or at the very latest the day after? It was this look from the visitor that burned into my mind and that I’ve been seeking in the looks of other people ever since that moment, and sometimes I find it, today it came from the moderator of a philosophical panel discussion on TV and was aimed at a young French writer.

.

They said on the radio that the animals in the zoo aren’t used to human beings anymore and take flight at the slightest human movement. Especially the flamingoes. The image of people drifting through the zoo while the animals take off for the great wide open is one I find pleasing.

Then came an interview with the head of tourism for the small town (into which I was involuntarily born and where I do not plan to die); he wanted to boost tourism by presenting the little town as a major metropolis. This statement struck me as so nonsensical that I didn’t know what to do with myself. At the Roundel, large flakes from a croissant had been scattered across the bar with its thin plastic coating of fake marble. They glittered gold in the sun. The mountain, the head of tourism went on, was a great attraction already, of course, but the aerial tramway was tottering, the cable cars swinging ominously—renovations were urgently needed.

I didn’t make a habit of going to the bar in the middle of the day but the recent appearance of the visitor had driven me out of the house that morning to take up the search for him.

Outside, people I was only able to perceive as silhouettes walked up and down the streets. I observed a mother resignedly pulling her berserk child by the hand. Sitting at the marble bar, one leg crossed over the other, I imagined that only teeny-tiny people lived in this small town, riding around on teeny-tiny bicycles and tossing down ristrettos from teeny-tiny coffee cups. I had no problem picking up the entire Roundel Bar in my hand, turning it around, and examining it from all sides, while the people sitting on the barstools shrieked and tried to hold on; their teeny-tiny drinks had already fallen, plummeted, and landed on my jeans as little drops. The people, now hanging on for dear life, stared at me with wide minuscule eyes as I tore the Roundel in half down the middle, like a donut. I imagined the small town getting smaller and smaller, shrinking down to a tiny point—I alone remained large, so I no longer fit in it. Then it occurred to me that this was already the situation.

The radio was broadcasting a report about the increasing wave of violence against caregivers. The bartender turned the radio down, and the voices drifted away.

Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction.

“I don't see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave.

When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.