Tag: novel

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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Q&A with Staci Greason: ‘All the Girls in Town’ and Making the Grief Bearable

by Christine Sneed

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My first encounter with Staci Greason’s writing was in the fall of 2020 after we met at an online feature-script retreat organized by CineStory, a screenwriting-focused arts organization. I read her screenplay Treed and was particularly impressed by her assured comic touch and her ability to write about complex themes—environmental conservation and marital anomie, in this case—without being heavyhanded. She had also written Treed as a novel—albeit with a different title, The Last Great American Housewife. Soon after we met at the retreat, Greason, who has also acted, sold a different novel, All the Girls in Town, to indie publisher […]

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‘When I Sing, Mountains Dance’ by Irene Solà: Trouble in the Landscape

by Maura Krause

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In the age of the Anthropocene, Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (216 pages; Graywolf Press; translated by Mara Faye Lethem) is a salve. Its texture is smooth yet it’s laced with herbaceous pungency. In a magically rendered translation from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, Solà’s second novel offers up healing for those who care to find it. Set in the Pyrenees near Spain’s border with France, this marvelous book loosely traces one family’s tragedies and how they seep into the lives of others in their close-knit village. These troubles are refracted by the landscape, witnessed by unusual […]

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‘Getting Clean with Stevie Green’ by Swan Huntley: A Decluttered Life

by Sophia Carr

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These days, the story of a woman attempting to get her life together as she approaches middle age has become a familiar trope. However, Getting Clean with Stevie Green (304 pages; Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), the latest novel by Swan Huntley, feels unique even as it tells the story of thirty-seven-year-old Stevie’s journey to live the life she envisions for herself. This is no small task for Stevie, a professional in the cutthroat business of decluttering people’s homes, as she must deal with addiction and mental illness while coming to terms with her sexuality and navigating the  shifting dynamics of […]

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‘The Boy with a Bird in His Chest’ by Emme Lund: Like the Best Fables

by Maura Krause

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The last few years have seen queer and trans literature receive a long-overdue upswing in both publication and attention. Emme Lund’s first novel, The Boy with a Bird in His Chest (320 pages; Atria Books), takes a well-earned place among its siblings, while shimmering brightly with its own unique brilliance. Lund’s lyrical and fabulist-leaning tale is the story of Owen Tanner, a boy with a java sparrow living in a hole behind his ribs. Born during the worst spring flood in Morning, Montana, Owen is supposed to be lucky. Yet the beginning of his life seems anything but. According to […]

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