Literary fiction: the best-written recent releases I
Read the opening pages of our picks below
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—The best-written recent releases in speculative fiction and nonfiction.
—Han Smith, Nina Schuyler, and Arreshy Young answer our questions on style.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—’It was one of those nights for Anthony Carter, forty-two, two years unemployed, two years separated from his wife and stepdaughter, six months into cocaine sobriety and recently moved into his late parents’ apartment on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, when to be alone with his thoughts, alone with his losses, was not survivable, so he did what he always did—hit the streets, meaning hit the bars on Lenox’: our first pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. The full list of books considered is below.
—’If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009. With a time machine, a photo lost to the internet, a Daft Punk record’: our next pick.
—’Against the deep red of the western sky the whole figure gives the unsettling impression of having arrived here, in these melancholy mountains, from the world beyond’: our final pick for now.
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BOOKS CONSIDERED
That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz by Malachy Tallack
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg; translated by Jack Rockwell & Julia Kornberg
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter
Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe
Rental House by Weike Wang
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe
The Party by Tessa Hadley
Killing Time by Alan Bennett
Gliff by Ali Smith
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Nobody's Empire by Stuart Murdoch
Pearly Everlasting by Tammy Armstrong
The Bone Picker by Devon A. Mihesuah
Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
Women's Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery
The Vow by Jude Berman
Sound Museum by Poupeh Missaghi
The Heartbeat Library by Laura Imai Messina; translated by Lucy Rand
DIS//INTEGRATION by William Melvin Kelley
Blood Test by Charles Baxter
Water Finds A Way by Meghan Perry
Lazarus Man by Richard Price
Time of the Child by Niall Williams
City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht
Alive in the Merciful Country by A.L. Kennedy
Our first pick from these is
ANGELS
SPRING 2008
It was one of those nights for Anthony Carter, forty-two, two years unemployed, two years separated from his wife and stepdaughter, six months into cocaine sobriety and recently moved into his late parents’ apartment on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, when to be alone with his thoughts, alone with his losses, was not survivable, so he did what he always did—hit the streets, meaning hit the bars on Lenox, one after the other, finding this one too ghetto, that one too Scandinavian-tourist, this one too loud, that one too quiet, on and on, taking just a few sips of his drink in each one, dropping dollars and heading out for the next establishment like an 80-proof Goldilocks, thinking maybe this next place, this next random conversation would be the trigger for some kind of epiphany that would show him a new way to be, but it was all part of a routine that never led him anywhere but back to the apartment, this he knew, this he had learned over and over, but maybe-this-time is a drug, you-never-know is a drug, so out the door he went.
*
One of the bars he gravitated to now and then was Beso, a small slightly grimy spot on Lenox off 123rd, the clientele a mixed bag of old-timers, younger arrivistes to the area both Black and white, and single straight women who felt at ease in here because of its vaguely gay vibe . . .
On this night, the place was quiet; just two model-handsome young men talking to each other at the short end of the bar and a softly plump light-skinned younger woman, straw-sipping something peach-colored, who couldn’t stop looking at them.
The men only had eyes for each other, and small-talking to the bartender, as he already knew, was like chatting up a vending machine.
One of the problems he had with living alone was all that talking to himself, talking without speaking and occasionally deluding himself into thinking that he was actually talking to someone else.
He ordered his drink then set himself up three stools away from her.
“I went there too,” he said, chin-tilting to the Fordham Rams logo on her pullover.
“What?”
“Fordham. I went . . .”
“No, this is my cousin’s sweater,” she said looking past him.
“What year did he graduate?”
“She. Didn’t.”
“Me neither, I thought there were better things to do with my time.” Anthony just saying it to say it.
“Like what.”
“What?” Momentarily unable to recall what he said last. Then, “I wish I could remember.” Then, “Anthony.”
“Andrea.” Saying her name as if she wasn’t sure of it. Either because she just didn’t care, or was too naive to clock that they were a couple, she threw a smile to the men in the corner, one of them politely smiling back before returning to his conversation.
With the talk going nowhere, Anthony, as he sometimes wound up doing, concocted a more interesting history for himself. “After Fordham, I went to a clown college down in Florida.”
“For real?”
“For real. But I had to drop out because I was too claustrophobic to get into that mini-car with all the others.”
“What others?”
“The, you know, clowns?”
Then, looking at him for the first time since he sat down, “Tell me a joke.”
“Clowns don’t tell jokes,” he said, thinking, I just did. And gave up.
*
In this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, gives us razor-sharp anatomy of an ever-changing Harlem.
East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. As the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing.
In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, one of the greatest chroniclers of life in urban America, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster.
RECOMMENDED
El Norte
If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009. With a time machine, a photo lost to the internet, a Daft Punk record.
I have little certainty about the past, except that it was hot. This was, above all else, the primordial quality of a Nordelta summer. The heat and the kids on the street, burning the asphalt of our dystopian suburb every Saturday morning, generating the je ne sais quoi that belongs only to January and only to gated communities. Like Darwinian monkeys, Nordelta boys played on their bikes and gave out first kisses, while Nordelta girls stole cigarettes and partied, devoted to their death drive, until Pitu fell into a coma and they calmed down a bit and stopped buying drugs. In the afternoon, the sun came down on El Norte, and my peers slept the least deserved siestas in the world before going out. The streets were calmer then, and the asphalt hurt less.
As for me, if I ever did make it out, I almost never saw anybody, and I was always bathing, all the time. Out on Nordelta’s streets, I could feel the earth settling on my heels and in a spot behind my elbows, sand getting into my teeth whenever I bit my tongue and inside my panties when I walked slowly, so that arriving home at the end of the day, I had an absurd need to get the dirt off me.
I am not asleep
I am not asleep
I am not asleep
The words that I spoke in the bath only became spiritual with time, made mystical by the bored insistence of custom. A prayer, a sacrament. I sang it with my eyes closed, always to the same tune, the same chords, the same minimalist, contentless repetition that gave some meaning to being fourteen and always so sleepy, with so little motivation to go out.
I am not asleep
I am not asleep
I
am not asleep.
Then I put the stopper in the drain and I waited, watching my feet. An act of contemplation: how pointy, how round. I noted how poorly painted my nails were and the strangeness of my clumsy stomach, always moving in different ways, following the anxiety of my breath. I liked to wash the depths of my body, to rinse my hands over and over, to try to outdo my last bath and see how unpolluted I could really become.
Sometimes I applied conditioner and closed my eyes, or threw in one of those bath bombs that Dad had brought back from the US, watching the wasteland of water and detergent as it started to resemble a pre-Raphaelite painting. The one in which Ophelia dies, the one Mom had put up on the fridge in May that looked like a Complot clothing ad. Then I’d submerge myself completely and let the water seep into all the electric tubes of my brain. I liked the weird, salty feeling that the chemicals gave to the water, my temples hardened by the artificial smell. And above all, the water. I counted on my fingers, reciting: I am not asleep. I am not asleep. I am not asleep. I came up to breathe and then did it again. Reborn every time, pure and childlike, bright, anew.
"Berlin Atomized is the world bridged, coupled, and made fast—by the latest lost generation and by Julia Kornberg's border-and-genre-crossing talent, as restless as a flame." —Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Jewish Book Award winning The Netanyahus
A kinetic, globetrotting novel following three siblings—Jewish and downwardly mobile—from 2001 to 2034, as they come of age against the major crises of the 21st century.
I. THE GUESTHOUSE FOR GENTLEMEN
The view is obscured by clouds of steam from the locomotive that trail along the platform. To see everything we must look beneath them, let ourselves be momentarily blinded by the grey haze, until the vision that emerges after this trial run is sharp, incisive and all-seeing.
Then we shall catch sight of the platform flagstones, squares overgrown with the stalks of feeble little plants – a space trying at any cost to keep order and symmetry.
Soon after, a left shoe appears on them, brown, leather, not brand new, and is immediately joined by a second, right shoe; this one looks even shabbier – its toe is rather scuffed, and there are some lighter patches on the upper. For a moment the shoes stand still, indecisively, but then the left one advances. This movement briefly exposes a black cotton sock beneath a trouser leg. Black recurs in the tails of an unbuttoned wool coat; the day is warm. A small hand, pale and bloodless, holds a brown leather suitcase; the weight has caused the veins to tense, and now they indicate their source, somewhere deep inside the bowels of the sleeve. Under the coat we glimpse a flannel jacket of rather poor quality, slightly crumpled by the long journey and marked by tiny bright dots of some non-specific impurity – the world’s chaff. The white collar of a shirt is visible too, the button-on kind, evidently changed quite recently, because its whiteness is fresher than the white of the actual shirt and contrasts with the sallow tone of the traveller’s face. Pale eyes, eyebrows and eyelashes make this face look unhealthy. Against the deep red of the western sky the whole figure gives the unsettling impression of having arrived here, in these melancholy mountains, from the world beyond.
*
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
“A folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.” –The New York Times Book Review
The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas
September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.
A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature boldness, inventiveness, humor, and bravura.