Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2022 Adult Fiction

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN de Griffin Hansbury

A gorgeous novel about what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amidst constantly changing social norms.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN
by Griffin Hansbury
W.W. Norton, Fall 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the summer of 1984, teenage Mel becomes entranced with the trans woman who appears in her blue-collar American town. Through the world-expanding time she spends with the woman, Sylvia, and the changes of adolescence, Mel soon discovers she is not the girl she thought she was—in fact, she might not be a girl at all. In the wake of this revelation, Mel navigates gender, sexuality, and an intense friendship with her childhood best friend in a hostile time and place for both girls and queers.
Moving back and forth to 2019, Mel has become Max, a middle-aged trans man. He returns to his hometown in the wake of his mother’s death, still reeling from his own politically-incorrect, gender-related scandal at his workplace, and bearing the burden of guilt from that pivotal teenage summer. As he reunites with his wayward older sister, spends time with his preteen great-niece and reckons with his past, Max works to come to terms with what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amidst constantly changing social norms.

Griffin Hansbury is the acclaimed author of Vanishing New York (Dey Street, 2017), based on the celebrated blog written under the pen name Jeremiah Moss. As Hansbury he is the author of The Nostalgist, a novel, and Day For Night, a collection of poems. A two-time NYFA fellow, his writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and online for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Salon, and The New York Review of Books.

MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES de Sabina Murray

From the PEN/Faulkner award winning pioneer of “ironic gothic” (Washington Post) comes a wry and spooky set of ghost stories, replete with original illustrations.

MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES
by Sabina Murray
Grove Atlantic, March 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Since her acclaimed novel A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Sabina Murray has been celebrated for her mastery of the gothic. Now in MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES, she returns to the genre, bringing readers to haunted sites from a West Sutralian convent school to the moors of England to the shores of Cape Cod in ten strange tales that are layered, meta, and unforgettable.
From a twisted recasting of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, to an actor who dies for his art only to haunt his mother’s house, to the titular “Muckross Abbey,” an Irish chieftain burial site cursed by the specter of a flesh-eating groom—in this collection Murray gives us painters, writers, historians, and nuns all confronting the otherworldly in fantastically creepy ways. With notes of Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley, now drawn into the present, these macabre stories are sure to captivate and chill.

Sabina Murray is the author of the novels The Human Zoo, Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Slow Burn, and Valiant Gentlemen, as well as two short story collections, the Pen/Faulkner Award winning The Caprices, and Tales of the New World. She grew up in Australia and the Philippines and is currently a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a UMass Research and Creativity Award, and a Fred R. Brown Literary Award from the University of Pittsburgh, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe, and a Michener Fellow at UT Austin. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and a Norwegian Amanda Award.

CINEMA LOVE de Jiaming Tang

Pachinko meets Brokeback Mountain in Jiaming Tang’s sweeping debut, which follows the lives of rural gay men in China and the women who marry them. Combining the grit and heart of How Much of These Hills is Gold with the intricate and moving character work of The Leavers, CINEMA LOVE marks the arrival of a preternaturally gifted new voice in fiction.

CINEMA LOVE
by Jiaming Tang
Publication TBD
(via Neon Literary)

For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meager existence in New York City’s Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented The Workers’ Cinema: a theater where gay men cruised for love.
While classic war films played, Old Second and his fellow countrymen (many in arranged marriages) found intimacy in the privacy of the Workers’ Cinema’s screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men—guarding their secrets, guiding them on their love lives, and finding her own happiness with the projectionist.
However, Old Second’s passion for his lover, Shun-Er, left Shun-Er’s young wife Yan Hua in the cold, and a desperate move to hold onto her husband set in motion a series of haunting events—causing the deaths of Shun-Er and the projectionist and propelling Yan Hua, Old Second, and Bao Mei towards an uncertain future in America.
Spanning three timelines—contemporary New York, late ‘80s Chinatown, and post-socialist China—CINEMA LOVE is a voice-driven, tender epic that bridges the interior landscapes of the disenfranchised with the physical, and sometimes foreign, spaces they inhabit.

Jiaming Tang is a queer immigrant writer based in Brooklyn and works in editorial at Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Scribner. He holds an MFA from The University of Alabama and his writing has appeared in such publications as AGNI, LitHub, Joyland Magazine, The Masters Review, Epiphany Literary Magazine (where he won a “Breakout 8” Writer’s Award), and elsewhere.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES de Sheila Heti

A habitual diarist radically compresses and reorders ten years of life, asking not how a person should be, but how a person is.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Spring 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

“A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically. Perhaps this would help me identify patterns and repetitions. How many times had I written, I hate him, for example? With the sentences untethered from narrative, I started to see the self in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. As I returned to the project over the years, it grew into something more novelistic. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences, to introduce some rhythm and beauty. When I was asked about a work of fiction that could be serialized, I thought of these diaries: The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction, and what is a more fundamental mode of serialization than the alphabet? After some editing, here is the result.” —Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century.” She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

HAPPINESS FALLS d’Angie Kim

The ingenious, twisty, emotionally absorbing story of a father who goes missing and his family’s desperate search to find him—a novel as suspenseful as it is moving—by the Edgar and International Thriller Writers Award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

HAPPINESS FALLS
by Angie Kim
Random House, Fall 2023
(via Writers House)

We didn’t call the police right away. When Adam Parkson doesn’t come home from a walk in the local nature reserve, his family doesn’t think much of it. He must’ve turned off his phone. Or his battery died. Or he probably stopped for an errand—but doing what exactly? Soon more questions arise and it becomes clear to Adam’s wife and children that he is missing. Or is he?
What follows is a ticking-clock story of shocking twists and fascinating questions about what defines us and who we really are. A mystery, a family drama, a novel of profound philosophical inquiry, HAPPINESS FALLS updates and expands the missing person story, turning inside out our expectations of the crime novel.

“Angie Kim has written that rare book that can change your entire outlook on the world. Part page-turning mystery, part meditation on the power of expectation, HAPPINESS FALLS will both open your eyes and tear your heart apart.” —Janelle Brown, bestselling author of I’ll Be You, Pretty Things, and Watch Me Disappear

“Angie Kim’s HAPPINESS FALLS is an exhilarating literary tour de force—one part mystery, one part family drama, one part interrogation of the meaning of happiness, it will introduce you to extraordinary characters whose lives will leave you forever changed. An incredible achievement.” —Danielle Trussoni, bestselling author of Angelology

“Angie Kim’s HAPPINESS FALLS is a sublime literary mystery that is a mesmerizing update to the missing person story, a layered and innovative exploration of family, love, happiness and race. With dazzling intellectual range and tremendous warmth, Kim makes us fall in love with this close-knit family while spinning her suspenseful and twisty tale. A gorgeous read that grips both heart and mind.” —Jean Kwok, bestselling author of Girl in Translation, Mambo in Chinatown, and Searching for Sylvie Lee

Angie Kim is a Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and debut author of the international bestseller and Edgar winner Miracle Creek, named a “Best Book of the Year” by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show, among others. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour, and numerous literary journals.