Archives de catégorie : Literary

THIN GIRLS de Diane Clarke

An understanding and dissection of young women’s emotions, friendships and rivalries

THIN GIRLS
by Diana Clarke
HarperCollins, Publication summer 2020

Diana Clarke is a recent MFA graduate of Purdue, where Roxane Gay was her advisor.

“Diana Clarke is a fiercely intelligent writer who wields words like weapons and tells stories of great importance. THIN GIRLS is a deeply necessary novel, its subject troubling and true, but Clarke’s wit and humor keep this tale from sinking, and instead make it an engrossing, beguiling delight to read. We are witnessing the start of a long, successful career.” Roxane Gay
Rose and Lily Winters are twins. Born to disinterested, uninvolved parents they rely on each other even more than twins usually do. They’re so close their bond is almost magical – they can taste each other’s emotions, and have a fierce need to protect and balance each other…when Rose stops eating, Lily starts… when Lily starts eating, Rose stops… But when their social standings at school start to differ, Rose becomes anorexic and Lily continues eating—overeating—everything that Rose wouldn’t and couldn’t. At the start of the story, Rose is living in a rehabilitation clinic and Lily is her sole visitor and the only connection to a normal life. But Rose has no desire to make real progress in her recovery or live that normal life, it’s as if she were waiting to die. When Lily joins a bizarre dieting cult Rose realizes that she is the only person who can help her and to do that she finally must get better herself.
THIN GIRLS powerfully depicts the world of eating disorders and what it means to recover from them but at its center it is first and foremost a story about sisterhood, love, and lifelong friendships. It is a dark, visceral, painful and truly beautiful.

THE COYOTES OF CARTHAGE de Steven Wright

A sharp and urgent debut from a gifted young lawyer and fiction writer

THE COYOTES OF CARTHAGE
by Steven Wright
Ecco, April 2020

*Sold in a four-way auction for six figures*

Toussaint Andre Ross has one more shot. Despite being a successful African-American political consultant, his aggressive tactics have tarnished his firm’s reputation. Now his boss and mentor Mrs. Fitz, who plucked him from juvenile incarceration and shepherded his career, is exiling him to the boondocks of South Carolina with $250,000 of dark money to introduce a ballot initiative on behalf of a mining company. The goal: to manipulate the locals into voting in favor of the sale of pristine public land to the highest bidder.
Dre arrives in God-fearing, flag-waving Carthage County, an area America’s New Economy has left behind, with only Mrs. Fitz’s well-meaning yet naïve grandson Brendan on his « team. » A local is needed as a strawman to collect signatures, and Dre hires blue-collar couple, oafish Tyler Lee and his pious wife Chalene, to act as the initiative’s public face.
Under Dre’s cynical direction, a land grab is disguised as a righteous fight for faith and liberty. As lines are crossed and lives ruined, Dre’s increasingly cutthroat campaign threatens the last remnants of his own humanity and the very soul of Carthage County.
A piercing portrait of our fragile democracy and one man’s unraveling, THE COYOTES OF CARTHAGE may very well be the political novel of our times.

STEVEN WRIGHT is a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, where he co-directs the Wisconsin Innocence Project. From 2007-2012 he served as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice. He has written numerous essays about race, criminal justice, and election law for the New York Review of Books. Steven is a 2014 graduate of the MFA program at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison and holds a Masters of Arts in Writing from the Johns Hopkins University.

A haunting world of secrets and obsessions

GHOSTS OF THE MISSING
by Kathleen Donohoe
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt February 2020

In the vein of The Lovely Bones and The Little Friend, Ghosts of the Missing follows the mysterious disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl during a town parade and the reverberations of this tragedy throughout the town.
On Saturday, October 28, 1995, a girl vanished. She was not a child particularly prized in town…When questioned by reporters, those who’d known Rowan described her as ‘quiet’ and ‘loner’ and ‘shy’ and even ‘awkward.’ Words for pity.
Culleton, New York has a long history—of writers, of artists, and of unsolved mysteries. It’s where Adair grew up before she moved to Brooklyn to try to make it as an artist. But after years away from her hometown and little to show for it, Adair decides to return. She moves back in to Moye House, the old mansion, and current writer’s retreat, imbued with her family’s legacy. Ciaran is a writer staying at Moye House in the hopes of finally solving the mystery of what happened to Rowan Kinnane—his sister, and Adair’s childhood best friend. As the two begin investigating, secrets long buried rise to the surface, complicating their sense of themselves and their understanding of what happened on that fateful day.
With her “knack for capturing heartbreaking moments with a gripping simplicity” (Village Voice), Kathleen Donohoe lures us into and shows just how far people will go in order to find the truth.

Kathleen Donohoe’s stories and essays have appeared in The Recorder, New York Stories, and Washington Square Review. She serves on the Board of Irish American Writers & Artists. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

ATTRACTION de Ruby Porter

                                       ‘A melancholic and haunting meditation on postcolonial guilt

                                                                           ATTRACTION
                                                                                By Ruby Porter
                                                                                                                    Text publishingr, May 2019

In lyrical fragments, Ruby Porter explores what it means to be and to belong, to create and to destroy.
ATTRACTION is a meditative novel of connection, inheritance and the stories we tell ourselves.
Three women are on a road trip, navigating the motorways of the North Island of New Zealand, their relationships with one another, and the country’s colonial history. Our narrator doesn’t know where she stands with Ilana, her not-quite girlfriend. She has a complex history with her best friend, Ashi. She’s haunted by the memory of her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend. And her period is late. Ruby Porter was born in 1993 and is a tutor of creative writing at the University of Auckland. She has been published in Geometry Journal, Aotearotica, Spinoff and Wireless, and a selection of her poetry is available on NZEPC. In 2018                                                                   she  won the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Contest.

AUF DEM SEIL de Terézia Mora

Is life an eternal balancing act?

Auf dem Seil
by Terézia Mora
Luchterhand, September 2019

Darius Kopp threatened to break his misfortune. Three years have passed since his wife, Flora, his great love, died. The IT expert traveled through Europe with Flora’s ashes and finally landed in Sicily. One day his unexpected 17-year-old niece appears there. The girl is on her own and does not give way to him anymore. Lorelei needs Darius’ help – and he needs her. With her he goes back to Berlin. And learn to measure your (c)Peter Van Felbert                                          happiness by what you can and can not change by your own will.