A heady, inventive, fantastical novel about the nature of memory and the difficulty of confronting trauma.
SUBDIVISION
by J. Robert Lennon
Graywolf Press, April 2021
An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse’s owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life. Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. A lovelorn truck driver…a mysterious child…a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, SUBDIVISION is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called “a master of the dark arts.” With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of Broken River, J. Robert Lennon continues his exploration of the mysteries of perception and memory.
“An askew, uncanny―and consistently compelling―novel about memory, dislocation, and trauma. . . . [Lennon’s] tone is surreal and the result sometimes, à la Kafka, darkly funny. The novel features elements of the picaresque . . . , but it also has the everyday-suburban-made-strange-and-luminous quality of Steven Millhauser and the gleefully absurd, improvised feel of César Aira. . . . Sharp, inventive―and disorienting in all the good ways.”―Kirkus Reviews, starred review
J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and eight novels, including Mailman, Castle, Familiar, and Broken River. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, and he lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches writing at Cornell University.
These new and collected essays from the acclaimed naturalist Barry Lopez—his final undertaking—represent the culmination of a lifetime’s thought in service of our relationship with wilderness, and with each other. Here, his collected essays offer a unifying vision; his drive to reconnect the cultural and the natural is unflinching, and major, never-published pieces offer profound commentary on topics that veer from the autobiographical—his abuse as a child—to the evolution of his views on the untamed. His classic prose, like the arctic landscape he elegized, remains as ever: “spare, balanced, extended…” It has been said that Barry Lopez understood what we gain when we accept the enormity of what we don’t know; these essays hinge on that tantalizing concept.
Hailed as “brilliant” (New York Times Book Review) and “wildly talented” (Chicago Tribune), New York Times bestselling writer Lily King has received widespread acclaim for her fiction. Her novel Euphoria (over 500,000 copies sold worldwide) was a breakout success, while, more recently, her novel Writers & Lovers was an instant New York Times bestseller, earned rapturous reviews, and was selected for numerous best of the year lists. Now the inimitable Lily King returns with her first-ever collection, including several never-beforepublished stories. Spanning over two decades of her life as a writer, King’s thoughtfully curated work elegantly explores her trademark themes of love, family, career, and loss.
The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man. But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own. Ingrid’s very existence is proof of a white man’s crime, and that man’s mother will do anything—even kill—to ensure the truth remains buried.