Archives de catégorie : Literary

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.

LES PATRIOTES de Sana Krasikov remporte le Prix du Premier roman étranger 2019 !

Sous la présidence de Gérard de Cortanze, le jury vient de décerner le Prix du Premier roman étranger 2019 à Sana Krasikov pour LES PATRIOTES, paru cet été chez Albin Michel (traduit de l’anglais par Sarah Gurcel).
« Alors que les États-Unis sont frappés par la Grande Dépression, Florence Fein, à seulement 24 ans, quitte Brooklyn pour une ville industrielle de l’Oural, dans la toute jeune URSS. Elle n’y trouvera pas ce qu’elle espérait : un idéal d’indépendance et de liberté. Comme de nombreux Refuzniks, son fils Julian, une fois adulte, émigre aux États-Unis. Des années plus tard, en apprenant l’ouverture des archives du KGB, il revient en Russie et découvre les zones d’ombre de la vie de sa mère. Entremêlant époques et lieux, ce premier roman magistral de Sana Krasikov nous plonge au cœur de l’affrontement Est-Ouest en explorant, à travers le destin de trois générations d’une famille juive, l’histoire méconnue de milliers d’Américains abandonnés par leur pays en pleine terreur stalinienne, et les conséquences de nos choix individuels sur la vie de nos enfants. »

THE LIFE OF THE MIND de Christine Smallwood

A debut novel following an adjunct professor whose days are disrupted by a miscarriage, forcing her to reckon with shame, relationships, the passage of time, the meaning of endings, and the illusion that our minds may free us from our bodies. A witty, intelligent story of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction.

THE LIFE OF THE MIND: A Novel
by Christine Smallwood
Hogarth Press, March 2021

As an adjunct professor of English with a 4-3 course load, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had no idea what else to do but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her partner knows that she’s just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists—Dorothy being the kind of person who begins seeing a second because she’s too conflict-averse to break things off with the first. It’s not so much that Dorothy is ashamed of the miscarriage itself as she is of the sense of purpose the prospect of motherhood had provided, of how much she’d wanted it. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure? (That’s another thing she’s ashamed of.)
In the tradition of Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Rachel Cusk, THE LIFE OF THE MIND is a novel about endings: of youth, of aspirations, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet our minds are all we have to make sense of a world largely out of our control—which is to say a world without us at the center as protagonists; a world where things happen, but there is no plot. And so Dorothy must make do with what she has, as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides. If that sounds depressing, it isn’t; in fact, it’s often hilarious. Most of all, it’s real. In literature—as Dorothy well knows—stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.

Christine Smallwood’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Bookforum, T, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. From 2014-2017 she wrote the “New Books” column for Harper’s, and has been an editor at The Nation. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, is a co-founder of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is a Fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities.