Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE GREAT MAN THEORY de Teddy Wayne

Teddy Wayne’s latest novel, Taxi Driver as told by Noah Baumbach, is scalding, uneasily comic, and full of pathos.

THE GREAT MAN THEORY
by Teddy Wayne
Bloomsbury, August 2022
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

THE GREAT MAN THEORY tells the story of a downwardly mobile, divorced, fortysomething dad named Paul. He is a writer and English lecturer who lives in the wealthy enclave of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and he doesn’t like what’s happening to the bubble in which he lives nor what’s happening politically in the outside world. He is under contract to write a manifesto for a small publishing house, essays whose resentment for the political priorities of the modern world are filled with his fury and stubbornly unheralded talent.
But then Paul’s tenuous grasp on a good life slips further, and the reader begins descent along with Paul. As his fortunes disintegrate, and as he tallies up grievances in the face of one pointedly contemporary humiliation after another, his focus on a notorious right-wing TV propogandist intensifies. In this deviously popular commentator’s bogus proclamations he sees the malignant influence that forms the core of our warped cultural standards.
Seeing his own prospects fade then vanish, Paul is determined to make a final stand that will, in his addled projections, somehow redeem and enlarge his small life: he will dramatize and make indelibly public the private injustices he has withstood. And he wishes to do so on this popular TV propagandist’s show.
In his fifth and most stylistically mature and provocative novel, Teddy Wayne has written a tightly wound, variously scathing, relentlessly absorbing social story about a form of desperation and exasperation-fueled radicalization (from the Left). With flare and layers of thwarted empathy, Teddy offers up a decidedly modern anti-hero who deserves an immediate, dubious place in the canon of disappointing maleness.

Teddy Wayne is the author of Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s.

THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN de Molly Lynch

A mother vanishes from her bed one night while her husband is asleep beside her, their six-year-old son in the next room.

THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN
by Molly Lynch
Catapult, February 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Ada is from Montreal and has been living reluctantly in the American Midwest. Across the country and around the world, mothers have begun to spontaneously wander away from their homes. When Ada comes through the kitchen door two weeks later, filthy and slightly feral, the mystery of her absence intensifies. She has no memory of being gone at all.
THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN is an intimate portrait of Ada’s life in the lead-up to her disappearance—her small stresses and pleasures, her catastrophic, often absurd visions of the future as she listens to news stories about oppression and ecological collapse. She also feels drawn magnetically into a small patch of forest behind her son’s school, and she has a growing obsession with reports about a missing mother from nearby.
With Ada gone, Danny’s life loses its center. He goes through text messages and memories, recalling painful and passionate times with Ada, and her adverse relationship with the United States. But nothing, including the speculations of federal agents, provides an answer as to where Ada and the other mothers might be going.
Desperate to make sense of what happened to her after she returns, Ada imagines that she transformed into the forest itself. As the boundary between her imagination and experience blurs, the distance between her and Danny grows.
THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN is at once a play on ancient myths of metamorphosis, an allegory of motherhood at a time when the future is hard to see and easy to fear, and a love story riven by an unaccountable absence.

Molly Lynch is a Canadian writer living in Michigan. Her stories have been published in The Walrus, Joyland, The New Quarterly, Grain, and more. She has been a fiction finalist for the National Magazine Awards of Canada and the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize. She received her MFA from Johns Hopkins and now teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan. This is her first novel.

LOVE TIMES INFINITY de Lane Clarke

A complicated—and often hilarious—love story about a Black high schooler’s experience with friends, family, and identity.

LOVE TIMES INFINITY
by Lane Clarke
Poppy/Little, Brown BFYR, July 2022
(via Park & Fine)

Navigating junior year, Michie is struggling to answer the question of who she is for her scholarship essays, the only chance she has at making it into Brown as a first-generation college student. Or maybe it’s not so much that Michie doesn’t know who she is as it is that she doesn’t like who she is: having been estranged from her mother from the age of five and surrendered to her grandmother, Michie has made an art of hiding, especially from herself. After all, if her own mother doesn’t think she’s worthy of love, who will?
Then a new student—basketball superstar Derek de la Rosa—enrolls in her school and enlists Michie as a tutor to catch up in Spanish class, turning Michie’s life upside down. Because, Derek? He is very cute, very talented, very popular, and very much has his eye on Michie, no matter how invisible she thinks she is.
When Michie’s mother reaches out to make amends, and with her scholarship essay deadline looming, Michie will have to decide if she wants to reopen old wounds or close the door on her past once and for all. And as she spends more time with Derek, she will have to figure out how close she can risk getting to him, and how much of her heart she is willing to share. Because while Michie may not know who she is, she’s starting to realize who she wants to become—if only she can take the chance: on Derek, on herself, and on her future.

Lane Clarke received her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from Virginia Tech, where she received an honorable mention in the 2015 Steger Poetry Prize, administered by Nikki Giovanni. She got her J.D. from Chicago University and now lives in Northern Virginia and practices law in Washington D.C. LOVE TIMES INFINITY is her debut novel.

BEFORE TAKEOFF d’Adi Alsaid

THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR meets JUMANJI when two teens meet and fall in love during a layover-gone-wrong at the Atlanta airport in this thrilling new novel from the author of LET’S GET LOST!

BEFORE TAKEOFF
by Adi Alsaid
Knopf BYR, June 2022
(via Park & Fine)

James and Michelle find themselves in the Atlanta airport on a layover. They couldn’t be more different, but seemingly interminable delays draw them both to a mysterious flashing green light—and each other.
Where James is passive, Michelle is anything but. And she quickly discovers that the flashing green light is actually… a button. Which she presses. Which may or may not unwittingly break the rules of the universe—at least as those rules apply to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta.
Before they can figure up from down, strange, impossible things start happening: snowstorms form inside the B terminal; jungles sprout up in the C terminal; and earthquakes split the ground apart in between. And no matter how hard they try, it seems no one can find a way in or out of the airport. James and Michelle team up to find their families and either escape the airport, or put an end to its chaos—before it’s too late.

Adi Alsaid was born and raised in Mexico City, where he spilled hot sauce on things. Along with writing and traveling the world, Adi has coached high school and elementary school basketball. In addition to Mexico, he has lived in Tel Aviv, Las Vegas, Monterey and Chicago. His previous YA books include Let’s Get Lost, Never Always Sometimes, North of Happy, Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak, and We Didn’t Ask for This.

CAKE EATER d’Allyson Dahlin

An utterly addictive new YA novel from debut author Allyson Dahlin! Set in an alternate future Versailles, social influencer Marie Antoinette and her shy new husband Louis Auguste must right the wrongs of generations, amid rampant misinformation and capitalist propaganda.

CAKE EATER
by Allyson Dahlin
HarperTeen, August 2022
(via Writers House)

The year is 3070, and Marie Antoinette has just arrived at Versailles. Marie is an App sensation, a style icon and a maven of social influence with millions of followers—but here, in the glamorous Franc Kingdom, her job is simply to marry Louis August. Unfortunately, Louis doesn’t seem interested in Marie, making her feel lonelier than ever in this new country. Luckily, Marie has a distraction: opulent soirées and decadent after-parties abound in Versailles.
But beneath the luxurious world lies a sinister underbelly, and a storm hits Versailles that reveals to Marie and Louis the gilded world around them for the cracked facade it truly is—a hideaway for the rich and powerful, while the people outside suffer and starve. Determined to set things right, Louis and Marie must devise a way to right the wrongs of generations past—and outwit those who want to keep them pawns in a deadly game.
CAKE EATER will take readers to a glittering world full of breathless luxuries, deadly secrets, and a thrilling romance that attempts to rewrite history itself.

Allyson Dahlin grew up on a farm in central New York, where she had little to do but read loads of library books and make up magical and slightly creepy stories about the woods and farm animals while pretending to be a witch/homesteader. She studied psychology in college while working as a housekeeper at a motel in Cooperstown. That job involved a lot of boring hours to think up backstories for the guests whose rooms she cleaned. A shawl left on a chair by an aging opera soprano, a stack of old baseball cards left by a Hall of Fame inductee, and the legend of a monster in the lake were all fodder for stories. It was during that time she transformed from a reader and a daydreamer to a writer.