Tag: novel

“A book is not interesting to me until it’s impossible for me to write”: Q&A with Robert Glück

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A black and white portrait of the author Robert Glück

A chapter from Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist appeared in the very first issue of ZYZZYVA in 1985. It’s the chapter where Bob, Glück’s avatar and the novel’s narrator, leaves Jack, his lover, in bed and goes to the baths. There, he compares “an orgasm that can be read two ways” to a particular Victorian illusion painting that appears to fluctuate between a woman at a vanity and a skull. We vaguely remember an actual image of said painting from twenty or so pages earlier; the pictures in Jack the Modernist are dispersed, sort of like the pictures in Nadja, […]

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Canterbury Chronicles: “Mercy” by Joan Silber

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Working through the morass of new fiction can be just that. The established names come and go—Pynchon, McEwan—perhaps not talking of Michelangelo, but somehow commodified, even when the authors are assiduously avoiding it. All the more reason to appreciate the subtleties of Joan Silber’s work. Her latest novel, Mercy (Counterpoint; 256 pages), manages to be at once a street-smart account of the perils of shooting heroin as a party game among East Village friends and a Canterbury Tales of a carefully constructed set of characters whose paths cross in seemingly coincidental (but non-Dickensian) ways. The connections depicted, and their consequences, […]

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At the Edge and Then Past It: ‘Audition’ by Pip Adam

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Pip Adam’s boundless and mythic new novel, Audition (Coffee House Press; 217 pages), begins with three giants trapped on a spaceship, exiled from Earth. As they hurtle through space, Alba, Stanley, and Drew speak to each other; if they stop talking, their bodies will resume growing larger and, eventually, break open the ship. This opening section, consisting entirely of dialogue, is disoriented and disorienting. The trio struggles to describe their situation. “Are you getting bigger?” they ask each other. “Were we quiet and time has passed?” They can recall being in a classroom before being put on the spaceship Audition, […]

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Choosing Each Other: Q&A with Jemimah Wei

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When Jemimah Wei and I met as Stegner Fellows in fiction at Stanford in 2023, we became instant friends. And during our time there, I got to workshop what would become her first novel, The Original Daughter (368 pages; Doubleday), a story about betrayal and complicated relationships that won my heart from the start. There’s something magical about watching what was once a Word document become a beautiful, finished book. (The novel’s official publication date is today!) Part coming of age, part coming apart, this book, set in Singapore, charts the course of two unforgettable characters, Gen and Arin, from […]

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The Mystery of the Caves: ‘Our Beautiful Boys’ by Sameer Pandya

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What happened on Friday night? There was a high-school football game, of course; it is America, and our beautiful boys played like young gods! Then they gathered themselves, the quarterback and two running backs, and they went for Indian food, and then to a party with about a hundred other kids, a party within the ruins of a house set off the road and near three caves.  Another story is in the making, an older story, an older question: What happened in the cave?  How did Stanley Kincaid, a troublemaker par excellence, get beat to a pulp and skewered hundreds […]

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Optimizing Doesn’t Equal Thriving: Q&A with Alex Higley

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It can be disorienting to read a novel as good as True Failure (Coffee House Press; 280 pages) is when its bold title archly gestures toward the opposite possibility. Readers of Alex Higley’s third book will instead encounter the work of a writer coming into his full powers as a skilled ironist and cultural critic. True Failure is a moving, fresh, and very funny story about a cast of characters whose quotidian lives and aspirations will seem at once familiar and strange in highly inventive and memorable ways. (Think John Gardner and his dictum that all good fiction has an […]

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The Boy Is a Time Bomb: ‘Saint the Terrifying’ by Joshua Mohr

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I live a quiet life. Wife, family, gym membership—the whole catastrophe. But Joshua Mohr’s latest, Saint the Terrifying (290 pages; The Unnamed Press) offers me—and you, Dear Reader—a day-pass to a world of pain, glory, lust, and limitlessness. It’s a picaresque account of a West Oakland punk rocker on a mission from God (make that Scandinavian deities) to find out who’s been stealing the gear from his starving musician buddies and make them pay for their sins, bigly. At story’s outset, the one-eyed title character is recovering from the death of his alcoholic mother, who had a habit of dancing […]

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What Was Lost Still Remains: ‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak

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How is a goddess erased from history? What can be done to reinstate her? In her stunning new novel, Elif Shafak ponders these questions in reference to Nisaba, the ancient Sumerian goddess of writing. There Are Rivers in the Sky (464 pages; Knopf) is profound and multi-layered, braiding three distinct stories that eventually merge to form the narrative, like tributaries forming a single river. The tale begins with a single raindrop that falls from the sky onto the beard of King Ashurbanipal of Nineveh, who assembled an impressive library that included a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh etched onto […]

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Pet Project: ‘We’ll Prescribe You a Cat’ by Syou Ishida

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Syou Ishida’s amusing but poignant novel-in-stories, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat (translated by E. Madison Shimoda; 304 pages; Berkley) takes place in the fictional Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul in Kyoto. The Japanese clinic’s office on the fifth floor of a building seems to exist in a magical, liminal space, since it doesn’t show up on a phone navigation map or have a numbered street address. Rather, knowledge of the clinic is passed by word of mouth, and the office can be discovered only by those who are truly ready, at that moment, for a cat prescription. Many of […]

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A Gothic Bender: ‘The Empusium’ by Olga Tokarczuk

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Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “in the summer of 1914 the roof of the over-admired European civilization simply fell in.” The conditions that led to the collapse of reason and the death of 16 million people during World War I haunt The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Olga Tokarczuk’s wry new novel (translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones; 320 pages; Riverhead). Set in the fall of 1913, just months before the start of the First World War, the novel’s protagonist Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young engineer arrives at a “consumption free” mountain resort in Görbersdorf, an Alpine town in Prussian Silesia (now […]

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Home as the Uncanny: Q&A with Laura van den Berg

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Laura van den Berg’s eerie latest novel, State of Paradise (224 pages; Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), resembles her other five acclaimed books—most notably an intense short story in I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and her first novel, Find Me, which was set during an epidemic that impacts memory—but deeply forges a path into original, glimmering territory. The book asks, What is real? And what if there are many realities and many ways of getting to them? For seamlessly meshing speculative and autobiographical elements, State of Paradise has been called “speculative autofiction.” (Van den Berg’s story collection Isle of […]

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Q&A with Madelaine Lucas: ‘Thirst for Salt’ and the Roots of Desire

by Valerie Braylovskiy

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Madelaine Lucas’s first novel, Thirst for Salt (272 pages; Tin House Books), centers on an unnamed female narrator and her love for an older man, offering profound reflections on how the absence of affection can still take up space in one’s life. Throughout the story, notions of desire are uprooted by the impermanence of relationships, places, and the self. Lucas writes with a poetic precision that captures the sharp and mellow edges of love, as well as its intersections with grief. Born in Australia, Lucas now lives in New York, where she is senior editor of the literary magazine NOON […]

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