Archives de catégorie : Literary

FIRE SEASON de Leyna Krow

A feminist novel upending the archetypal « western » in the vein of The Sisters Brothers meets Inland, set in 1889 in Washington Territory on the heels of a great fire about an inadvertently dangerous psychic and the two conmen she meets on her path to redemption.

FIRE SEASON
by Leyna Krow
‎Viking, Summer 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

For the citizens of Spokane Falls, a fire that destroyed their frontier boomtown was no disaster; it was an opportunity. Set in 1889 in Washington Territory on the heels of this event, FIRE SEASON tells the story of three characters who seize big opportunities the fire brings, though in different ways and to different ends. Barton Heydale, manager of the city bank, uses the ensuing chaos to embark on schemes of fraud, forgery, and kidnapping. Quake Auchenbaucher, a conman, suddenly finds his career in manipulation jeopardized. And there’s Roslyn Beck, an alcoholic prostitute with the ability to see the future and with whom both men fall madly and dangerously in love. Unbeknownst to them, she has a deviant influence that, for better or worse, can change the world. As their paths collide, diverge, and collide again, these three come to terms with their own needs for power, greed, and control — leading one to total ruin, one to heartbreak, and one, ultimately, to redemption.
In the incandescent, genre-bending spirit of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary, or Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, with notes of Ottessa Moshfegh’s quick wit and wicked imagination, FIRE SEASON is playful, creepily magical, and historical, yes, but not in the traditional sense. The setting is a darkly whimsical approximation of what the Pacific Northwest was like at the end of the 19th century, and the characters may seem better suited to the modern literary fabulism of someone like Aimee Bender or Kelly Link than the wild west.

Leyna Krow’s first collection I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel.

Photo credit: Young Kwak

AUTOPORTRAIT de Jesse Ball

A literary self-portrait in which the author’s entire life is revealed through the brief moments of accident, absurdity, and loss which have made it.

AUTOPORTRAIT
by Jesse Ball
‎ Catapult, TBD 2022
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Photo by James Foster

Inspired by Édouard Levé’s novel of the same title and format, Jesse Ball haswritten a slim, uninterrupted stream of compact reflections with no obvious order, that brilliantly construct AUTOPORTRAIT. These reflections range from the mundane, the crude, and the crass, to the mysterious, poignant and the brutally beautiful. With spare prose, marked by its humility and precision, Jesse Ball has rendered life, memory, and existence so vividly there are many places where the reader wonders if it is their own existence being described. The novel, which borrows its name from Levé’s, and which preceded Levé’s final work published mere weeks before his tragic suicide, deals with similar themes in a similar register. However, Ball’s voice is entirely his own, and the speaker of this novel is frighteningly honest, while inspiring a deep, tender fondness. Among the many treasures of this piece, Ball includes comments on his difficult upbringing, his marriages, his drug use, his teaching and pedagogy, the things he likes about cats and rats, and the things he adores about gullies and sumps.
Ambitious, serious, witty, and provocative, Jesse Ball’s latest work is a disciplined novel that chronicles the chaos of a life. AUTOPORTRAIT, both through its form and its content, suggests that human beings are made up of contradictions, and encourages us to contradict ourselves more often.

Jesse Ball is the author of fourteen books. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2018 Gordon Burn Prize, the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and is a 2017 Granta Best Young American Novelist. Ball has also been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

RIVER SPIRIT de Leila Aboulela

A masterful, adventurous new novel set in nineteenth-century Sudan from Caine Prizewinning, New York Times Notable author Leila Aboulela.

RIVER SPIRIT
by Leila Aboulela
Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2023

Hailed as “a versatile prose stylist” (New York Times) whose work “shows the rich possibilities of living in the West with different, non-Western, ways of knowing and thinking” (Sunday Herald), Leila Aboulela has been longlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) multiple times and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. She has been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, Aminatta Forna, and Anthony Marra, among others, for her rich and nuanced novels depicting Islamic spiritual and political life.
Her new novel, RIVER SPIRIT, is a compulsive and searching look at the complex relationship between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. A spellbinding and addictive narrative of the years leading up to the brutal British conquest of Sudan in 1898, it colorfully narrates a story of the individuals who fought for and against Gordon of Khartoum—the British general who defended the city against the Sudanese during the 1884 siege of Khartoum—and the self-anointed Mahdi, Sufi religious leader of Sudan. Told mesmerizingly in a chorus of the vivid women and men who fought for and against these two leaders—including an orphaned young enslaved woman, her unlikely suitor and guardian, a military rebel, and two ferocious mothers—this page-turning novel delivers up a complex portrait of the “tragic Victorian hero” who ultimately proved a disappointment to the Sudanese who trusted him, and an obstacle to the thousands of men and women who—against the odds and for a brief time—gained independence from all foreign rule through their will-power, subterfuge, and sacrifice.
A fascinating immersion into Sudanese history written by one of its own, Aboulela’s latest novel examines the trials of war and the dynamism of human courage through the voices of society’s most unexpected heroes.

Leila Aboulela is the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her novels include The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator (longlisted for the Orange Prize), Minaret, and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.

AVALON de Nell Zink

From one of America’s most original voices comes a profound and singular story about a young woman searching for her place in the world.

AVALON
by Nell Zink
Knopf, June 2022
(via Writers House)

After her mother joins a Buddhist colony and dies, Bran’s southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. Raised by her “common-law-stepfather” on Bourdon Farms—a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang—Bran spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she were born to a different family. And then she meets Peter—a beautiful, troubled, and charming trainwreck of a college student from the east coast—who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, she searches for meaning in her own surroundings—attending disastrous dance recitals, house-sitting for strangers, and writing scripts for student films. She knows how to survive, but her happiness depends on learning to call the shots.
Exceedingly rich, brilliantly observed, and delivered with Zink’s masterful humor, AVALON is the irresistible story of one teenager’s reckoning with society at large, and the ways art and desire can clarify all that goes overlooked and cast aside.

Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, Nicotine, and Doxology, and her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper’s. She lives near Berlin, Germany.

MELANCTHA de Wayétu Moore

A masterful work of magical realism which follows the life of a West African immigrant girl living in the US who discovers that she can breathe underwater.

MELANCTHA
by Wayétu Moore
Viking, Fall 2022
(via Writers House)

Melanctha is dealing with relentless bullying from her middle school classmates when she meets Habila, a sea witch in the vein of Mami Wata (an ancient West-African mythological figure who drowns civilians so she won’t be alone). Habila first coerces Melanctha to drown her bully. He is the first of two men throughout her life who she hypnotizes with help of a family heirloom. As Habila pushes Melanctha further, encouraging her to use her power to rid the world of evil men, Melanctha discovers that the use of this power has a catch.
As the novel unfolds in three parts: “small girl,” “gronah girl,” and “woman,” we see Melanctha come of age and enter adulthood, while the narrative voice takes on a unique style in each part to coincide with each phase of her life. This wrenching story is a complex exploration of the many faces and stages of a woman’s power, and what happens when she decides that she does not want to use it for good.
Moore invites her readers to carefully consider how racism and misogyny overwhelmingly encourage Black women to act out a pathology of perpetual forgiveness by presenting it as a seemingly necessary means of survival. By showing what can happen when a remarkably strong woman goes against the grain and chooses to seek justice and dole out punishment on her own terms, rather than do what is expected of her, MELANCTHA offers a revolutionary alternative to this insidious aspect of our culture.
Through her brilliant weaving of history, myth, cultural criticism, and the supernatural, Moore’s writing resonates with readers of contemporary greats Imbolo Mbue, Naomi Alderman, Marlon James, Yaa Gyasi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and recalls classic writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison.

Wayétu Moore is the author of She Would Be King, which was a Sarah Jessica Parker Book Club selection, a BEA Buzz Panel Book and a #1 Indie Next Pick, and the memoir The Dragons, The Giant, The Women. She is the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit organization that encourages reading among children of countries with low literacy rates and underrepresented cultures by publishing culturally relevant books that speak to their truths, and by creating bookstores and reading corners that serve their communities. Her first bookstore opened in Monrovia, Liberia in 2015. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, The Rumpus, The Atlantic Magazine and other publications, and she has been featured in Vogue, The Economist Magazine, NPR, NBC, BET and ABC, among others.