Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE INDEX OF SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ACTS de Christopher Beha

Through baseball (although not too much!), finance, media, and religion, Christopher Beha traces the passing of the torch from the old establishment to the new meritocracy, exploring how each generation’s failure helped land us where we are today.

THE INDEX OF SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ACTS
by Christopher Beha
Tin House, May 2020

The day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for the Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A data journalist and recent media celebrity―he correctly forecasted every outcome of the 2008 election―Sam knows a few things about predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, things turn complicated. Sam’s assigned a profile of disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle, a liberal lion turned neocon Iraq-war apologist and author of the great works of baseball lore that first sparked Sam’s love of the game (books he now views as childish myth-making to be crushed with his empirical hammer). But Doyle is convincing in person, charming and intelligent. Sam takes a liking to him, and to his daughter, Margo, with whom Sam becomes involved―just as his wife, Lucy, arrives from Wisconsin. It’s a precarious moment for the Doyle family. Kit, the matriarch, lost her investment bank to the financial crisis; Eddie, their son, hasn’t been the same since his second combat tour in Iraq; Eddie’s best friend from childhood, the fantastically successful hedge funder Justin Price, is starting to see cracks in his spotless public image. So while the end of the world might not be arriving, Beha’s characters appear to be headed for apocalypses of their own making.

Christopher Beha is the Executive Editor of Harper’s Magazine. He is the author of a memoir, The Whole Five Feet, and the novels Arts & Entertainments and What Happened to Sophie Wilder. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

THE SWEET TASTE OF MUSCADINES de Pamela Terry

A moving debut novel about the intricacies of family and spirituality, for readers of Pat conroy, Kate Atkinson, Elizabeth Strout or Marilynne Robinson.

THE SWEET TASTE OF MUSCADINES
by Pamela Terry
Ballantine, September 2020

…“The first time Mama died I ran off to hide in the muscadine arbor.”

So begins the story of Lila Bruce-Breedlove. After her mother dies for the second, and very last, time, Lila and her brother, Henry, travel back to their small Southern hometown to find nothing is quite what they expected. Hometowns always hold secrets and when those of Lila’s family are unearthed they prompt a reevaluation of everything she thought to be true, leading Lila and Henry on a journey to places neither ever expected where they learn things are frequently not all they seem. THE SWEET TASTE OF MUSCADINES is set against the backdrops of coastal Maine, the deep South and the Scottish Hebrides. With wit and compassion it faces down the more painful parts of a South that continues to value appearances over truth, and where too often its citizens still struggle to live an honest life with joy. It is a surprising tale of redemption and forgiveness. The Bruce family history is unique, yet universal, and it is not one you will soon forget.

For the past decade Pamela Terry has been the author of the internationally popular blog, FROM THE HOUSE OF EDWARD, which was named one of the top ten home blogs by London’s Daily Telegraph in 2012. A lifelong Southerner, she learned the power of storytelling at a very early age. Pamela lives in Smyrna, Georgia with her songwriter husband, Pat, and their two dogs.

EVERY LAST FEAR de Alex Finlay

Told through multiple points-of-view and alternating between past and present, EVERY LAST FEAR is not only a page-turning intrigue, but also a poignant story about a family managing heartbreak and tragedy, and living through a kind of fame they never wanted to have.

EVERY LAST FEAR
by Alex Finlay
Minotaur, early 2021

When FBI agents arrive at his dorm room, New York University student Matt Pine learns the terrible news: his parents and younger siblings, on vacation in Mexico, have been found dead in their rental home. It’s a horrible blow to Matt, who is already trying to cope with life in the shadow of his older brother’s infamy: seven years ago, Danny Pine was convicted of the murder of a teenage girl in their small Nebraska town, and he’s been in prison ever since. Recently, his case was profiled in a blockbuster documentary that swayed public opinion toward his innocence, but Matt has never believed in Danny’s innocence himself. Now, as the deaths in Mexico appear increasingly suspicious and connected to Danny’s prosecution, Matt must finally unearth the truth behind the crime that sent his brother to prison, and doing so leads him to a shocking conspiracy.

Alex Finlay is the pseudonym of an author who lives in Washington, D.C. Born in Opelika, Alabama, Alex spent his formative years traversing the globe, from a tropical island in the Pacific to a small village in the UK to a remote region in the Far East. But it was on a vacation in Tulum, Mexico that Alex was inspired to write Every Last Fear.

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.

BEE MUSIC de Eileen Garvin

A novel about the families we choose for ourselves, by masterful storyteller Eileen Garvin

BEE MUSIC
by Eileen Garvin
Dutton, pub. date TBD

Alice Holtzman is demographically unfashionable: middle-aged, childless, introverted, and more concerned with a job well done than how she looks doing it. After the sudden death of her husband, she starts having panic attacks. It’s in the grips of one of these attacks that she hits Jake—a troubled, paraplegic teenager with the tallest mohawk in the Pacific Northwest—with her pickup truck. Oh, and did we mention that truck was full of 120,000 restless honeybees? Everyone is surprised when Alice lets Jake move onto her farm, and even more surprised when she hires Harry, a bumbling twenty-something with a sketchy past, to help her with her apiary. When a nefarious pesticide company threatens the local honeybee population, this unlikely trio unites to defend the bees, and, in the process, forge a path out of their respective griefs.

Eileen Garvin was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She completed her B.A. in English at Seattle University, and her M.A. in English at the University of New Mexico. She writes for newspapers, magazines, and websites from Hood River, Oregon, where she lives with her husband.