A first novel at once reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner and Lisa Halliday, and yet entirely unlike anything you’ve read before.
THE RED ARROW
by William Brewer
Knopf, Spring 2022
(chez The Gernert Company – voir catalogue)
THE RED ARROW follows an unnamed narrator, a failed novelist deeply in debt to his publisher, on a high-speed train from Rome to Modena, where he is desperate to find the famous Italian physicist whose memoir he’s been ghostwriting, and an whose disappearance in the middle of the project has threatened the narrator and his newly formed family with financial ruin. Moving swiftly and seamlessly through his past—including a chemical spill in West Virginia, a failed New York art career, psychedelic therapy in California, and a luxury beach resort in Sicily—THE RED ARROW contains multitudes: it is at once one of the most authentic descriptions of the experience of depression I’ve ever read, and a joyously earnest celebration of freedom from the toxic power of the ego; a spiraling meditation on time, memory, and the nature of the self; and a novel with the ineffable mystery of a poem, one whose originality lies in admitting that it’s not original at all. For we are each just a cloud of quotations with no fixed center—or, as the Physicist might put it, we are nothing more than interactions, like subatomic particles—and when we’re finally able to let go of the fiction of our discrete selves, all that is left is love.
William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, selected for the Poetry Society of America’s 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, New England Review, The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Sewanee Review, and other journals. Born and raised in West Virginia, he received his MFA in poetry from Columbia, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he is currently a Jones Lecturer. Born in 1989, he lives with his wife in Oakland.
Anna Obata is a biracial teenager living in economically depressed Southern Japan just before the millennium. Left to fend for herself (and to look after her increasingly senile Grandfather) Anna copes with her devastating loneliness by calling upon her strongest inner resource: imagination. This is the story of girl who falls in love with a satellite, yes—but it is also the story of how the human mind attempts to repair itself, no matter the cost, no matter the odds. Told in alternating perspectives by Anna, the satellite, and several others, SATELLITE LOVE is exquisitely strange and refreshingly unconventional.
Eury comes to the Bronx as a girl haunted. Haunted by losing everything in Hurricane Maria–and by an evil spirit, Ato. She fully expects the tragedy that befell her and her family in Puerto Rico to catch up with her in New York. Yet, for a time, she can almost set this fear aside, because there’s this boy . . . Pheus is a golden-voiced, bachata-singing charmer, ready to spend the summer on the beach with his friends, serenading his on-again, off-again flame. That changes when he meets Eury. All he wants is to put a smile on her face and fight off her demons. But some dangers are too powerful for even the strongest love, and as the world threatens to tear them apart, Eury and Pheus must fight for each other and their lives. Featuring contemporary Afro-Latinx characters, this retelling of the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice is perfect for fans of Ibi Zoboi’s Pride and Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper.
The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own. Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true. In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld.
Jingle Jangle, qui sera diffusé sur Netflix cet hiver, sera la première comédie musicale produite par la plateforme. Le film raconte l’histoire de Jeronicus Jangle (Forest Whitaker), un excentrique fabriquant de jouets qui invente des objets fantaisistes et merveilleux. Lorsqu’un ancien protégé (Keegan-Michael Key) le trahit, Jeronicus se referme sur lui-même et seule sa petite-fille, la brillante et aventureuse Journey (Madalen Mills), pourra sauver la situation grâce à une invention magique remarquable qui pourrait bien changer leur vie. Parmi les acteurs du film, nous retrouverons aussi Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose et Keegan-Michael Key.