Archives de catégorie : Literary

SONGS IN URSA MAJOR de Emma Brodie

Inspired by the often-overlooked romance between Joni Mitchell and James Taylor that preceded the release of Mitchell’s seminal album Blue, this electrifying story is equal parts tender and tough as it uncovers the forgotten relationship of fictional pop stars Jane Quinn and Jesse Reid. The pair’s paths cross in the summer of 1969, resulting in a complicated romance that unfolds in tandem with their unpredictable careers.

SONGS IN URSA MAJOR
by Emma Brodie
Knopf, June 2021

Jane Quinn is a street-smart, young, blonde with music in her blood: raised a stone’s throw from the beachfront Bayleen Island Folk Fest, Jane’s mother was a songwriter who was tragically robbed of proper credit for her work. Jane writes the music and fronts the small time local rock band Harpoon, while her guitarist writes the lyrics. It’s 1969, and this year’s Folk Fest is rabid for the appearance of Jesse Reid, the tall, soft-spoken singer with a baritone voice that’s made him the heir apparent of folk rock. When Jesse crashes his motorcycle en route to the concert, Harpoon takes the stage in his place, and Jane’s confident soaring vocals steal the show. As Jane prepares to settle back into Island life with her cousin, aunt, and grandmother, her work as a caregiver soon thrusts her into the path of none other than Jesse Reid, in town recovering from the near-fatal crash. Romance blossoms between Jane and Jesse just as Jane embarks on her recording career, with Jesse acting as a guardian angel as she contends with the rampant sexism in the industry. With Jesse’s encouragement, Jane begins to write her own lyrics, and the world begins to take notice when Harpoon go on tour as Jesse’s opener. Just as Jane is beginning to carve out a legacy for herself in the shadow of Jesse’s fame, she realizes that Jesse is battling heroin addiction and overnight everything she is building unravels. Jane wants honesty from Jesse, but she’s keeping a secret of her own and the resulting turmoil ultimately adds fodder to her confessional groundbreaking album Songs in Ursa Major.

Emma Brodie is an Executive Editor at Little Brown’s Voracious imprint. In her ten years in book publishing, she’s worked at Trident Media Group, William Morrow, and Clarkson Potter, where she authored over twenty gift books and games, including the bestselling Punderdome, Deal or Duel, Come As You Aren’t, and Dear Jane. Emma is a longtime contributor to HuffPost and a faculty member at Catapult, Co.

THE ACTUAL STAR de Monica Byrne

An original and ambitious novel about three characters reincarnated over two thousand years, from the collapse of the ancient Maya to a post-apocalyptic utopia, centered on the disappearance of one teenage tourist in a cave deep in the Belizean jungle in the year 2012.

THE ACTUAL STAR
by Monica Byrne
Harper Voyager, Fall 2021

Credit: Donald E. Byrne

A large, multi-layered speculative work, with three interwoven parts, one set in the world of the ancient Maya a thousand years ago (in which teen-age twins prepare to ascend the throne of their city-state, only to be toppled in a coup), one set in the present day (in which a young woman named Leah becomes fascinated by a cave complex in Belize), and one set a thousand years in the future (in which a new world religion has grown up, worshiping the memory of Leah’s disappearance in the cave). Each of the three stories is powerful in its own way. The world view of the pre-conquest Maya is persuasively evoked in vibrant, sensuous colors, in chapters that are based on extensive research. In the present-day story, Leah is a compelling mystic figure, a surprising yet satisfying first saint for a new world religion. And the future story is a magnificent feat of world-building, with a genuinely original vision of a post-climate-apocalypse, post-capitalist society of wanderers. Braided together, the three stories create profound resonances, with a cast of complex characters who we come to realize are reincarnations of earlier selves; with echoes of Christian theology and history; and with themes of human sacrifice, bloodletting, utopias, and parallel worlds. THE ACTUAL STAR is a rich, complex, challenging and satisfying work.

Monica Byrne graduated from the Clarion Workshop in 2008, where she studied with Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, and Kelly Link. Her debut novel, The Girl in the Road, was published in 2014. It won the Tiptree Award and was listed for the Kitschie, Locus, and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She has performed original monologues twice at TED, hosted a technology series for ViceUK, and spoken across the US on futurism and science fiction. Her short stories and essays have been published in The Baffler, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Wired, Tor.com, Electric Velocipede, Fantasy Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Electric Literature, and Glimmer Train. She has written five plays produced in Durham, NC, one of which, What Every Girl Should Know, has been performed from Berkeley to Dublin.

CUYAHOGA de Pete Beatty

A spectacularly inventive debut novel that reinvents the tall tale for our times. “Cuyahoga defies all modest description…[it] is ten feet tall if it’s an inch, and it’s a ramshackle joy from start to finish”—Brian Phillips, author of Impossible Owls

CUYAHOGA
by Pete Beatty
Scribner, October 2020

Big Son is what you call a spirit of the times—the times being 1837. Behind his broad shoulders, shining hair, and chuch-organ laugh, Big Son practically made Ohio City all by himself. The feats of this frontier superhero have earned him wonder and whiskey toasts but very little in the way of government dollars. And without money, Big cannot become an honest husband to his beloved Cloe (who might not want to be his honest wife). In pursuit of a steady wage, our hero hits the (dirt) streets of Ohio City and Cleveland. These two cities are locked in a fierce fight to become the first great metropolis of the West. Their rivalry has come to a boil over the building of a bridge across the Cuyahoga River – and Big stumbles right into the kettle. The ensuing misadventure involves elderly terrorists, infrastructure collapse, steamboat races, dental hygiene, wild pigs and several ruined weddings.

Narrating this picaresque is Medium Son, Meed to acquaintances – apprentice coffin maker, almanac author, orphan, and the younger brother of Big. Meed finds himself swept into the tumultuous events too, and he is forced to choose between brotherly love and his own shadowed sense of self. His uncanny voice—plain but profound, colloquial but surprisingly poetic—elevates a slapstick frontier tale into a screwball origin myth for the Rust Belt by evoking the Greek classics, mining the best of recent lit’s vernacular-ized canon, from Lincoln in the Bardo, The Sisters Brothers, The Luminaries, or a Coen brothers prologue, and the adventures of Charles Portis.

Pete Beatty has worked at the University of Chicago Press, Bloomsbury, and many other places, including a driving range behind a Dairy Queen. He has taught at Kent State University and the University of Alabama. His writing has appeared in Vulture, Vice Sports, GQ.com, Deadspin, Baseball Prospectus, Belt Magazine, Cleveland Scene, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. CUYAHOGA is his first book. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with his wife and their two cats.

BENEFACTION de Katie Lattari

An examination of human nature at our truest, and the inhuman lengths some take for success, some take for peace, and others, ultimately, take for justice.

BENEFACTION Book 1
by Katie Lattari
Sourcebooks, Spring 2021

Coral Dunn struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies. She inflicts self-harm to crack the tension within, but she also draws, paints, and writes what she’s feeling for release only as violent as her imagination. When she befriends a fellow artist at the Lupine Valley Arts Collective in northern Maine, she thinks she may have found true respite from her pain. But he has a use for her of his own, and it’s far too late, once he’s mined her deepest vulnerabilities, to escape his plan. Decades later, Audra Colfax is the star Painting MFA student at the Boston Institute for the Visual Arts. A gifted artist like Coral, she too is from the wilds of Maine. There, at her remote family home, she’s put the final touches on her thesis project, “Benefaction.” It’s a vivid collage of Coral’s works found scattered around the property and her own, enmeshed to tell a story of a dark past that ties the two women inextricably. It’s ready for her advisor, the esteemed Max Durant, to come up and review. He won’t know Audra obsessively engineered every last detail of his visit. Or that it had to be him from the start, advising her, so she could get to him by doing what he does best. She’d use what she’s inherited to lure him back to Maine. He has no idea she knows his worst secret, and that it’s the sole reason why he’s been invited.

What comes to light, chapter by spellbinding chapter, is that one grand, grotesque act of selfishness committed by Max as a young man, followed by years of manipulating women for art, has set into motion the machinery of his own fatal undoing. The man should pay for his crimes, and no one is more deserving of revenge than the women to whom he owes his career. Audra is well aware he’s a monster, but she doesn’t know everything that simmers beneath his surface. Spun in alternative points of view across an electric, twisty few days, BENEFACTION is a rallying call of feminist fury; a WHISPER NETWORK or BIG LITTLE LIES for artists; a GONE GIRL tale of atonement underscored by notes of MY DARK VANESSA, set in the woods during hunting season.

Katie Lattari holds a BA and an MA in English from the University of Maine and an MFA in Fiction Writing/Prose from the University of Notre Dame. In 2016 her debut novel AMERICAN VAUDVILLE was published by Mammoth Books, a small literary press; we see BENEFACTION as her commercial breakout.

WHERE THE EDGE IS by Gráinne Murphy

As a sleepy town in rural Ireland starts to wake, a road subsides, trapping an early-morning bus and five passengers inside. Rescue teams struggle and as two are eventually saved, the bus falls deeper into the hole.

WHERE THE EDGE IS
by Gráinne Murphy
Legend Press, September2020

This literary novel by Irish debut author Gráinne Murphy is set in Cork and focuses on the impact of a tragic bus crash on the people left behind. Under the watchful eyes of the media, the lives of three people are teetering on the edge. And for those on the outside, from Nina, the reporter covering the story, to rescue liaison, Tim, and Richie, the driver pulled from the wreckage, each are made to look at themselves under the glare of the spotlight. When their world crumbles beneath their feet, they are forced to choose between what they cling to and what they must let go of. Themes of loss, isolation and despair are key but also what binds us as human beings: empathy, support and hope. This is a story of moving on, of remembering the past and allowing it to shape the future.

Gráinne Murphy lives in Ireland. She previously worked in forensic research and human resources and now works as a copy editor. She has an MPhil in Applied Psychology from University College Cork and an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University.