Archives de catégorie : Fiction

JESOLO de Tanja Raich

A dissection of family and motherhood – biting and with piercing wit

JESOLO
by Tanja Raich
Blessing, March 2019

Children are not an issue for Andrea. She has a job that is OK. For many years she has been in a relationship with Georg which is OK. And every year they have a nice holiday in Jesolo. As far as the future is concerned, Andrea doesn’t want to commit herself, but Georg would like a foundation for a life together. There seems to be no way out of this dilemma. Upon returning from a holiday together everything changes – Andrea is pregnant. Torn either way, Andrea decides to keep the child – and in doing so makes one compromise after the other: she takes out a loan although she never wanted to borrow money from the bank; she moves into the house of her parents-in-law although she never wanted to live under one roof with them. Andrea is showered with advice and forced into a maternal role she never saw as hers and cannot identify with.

Tanja Raich has published in various literature magazines and anthologies and has been awarded a number of prizes and scholarships, including the Start-Stipendium of the Austrian Federal Chancellery for her « Jesolo » project, the Frontiere – Grenzen literature prize, the Rom-Stipendium of the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the Exil-Literaturpreis.

BLIND de Christine Brand

His world is dark. He is blind. But he has heard her scream – and his senses have never yet deceived him

BLIND
(Blind)
by Christine Brand
Blanvalet, March 2019

Nathaniel hears a scream, then he is cut off. He has just been speaking to a woman on the phone. The anonymous app Be my Eyes connected the two and the woman has been helping Nathaniel choose the right shirt. Nathaniel may be blind, but the scream sounded unmistakable. What if something has happened to the woman? Nathaniel is certain of one thing: a crime must have been committed. Yet no one believes him, there is no proof, no clues. Together with a friend, journalist Milla, Nathaniel sets out to look for the truth. What he doesn’t realise is that for the woman he could be her only chance – or her doom…

Christine Brand is an editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a reporter for Swiss television and a crime reporter. Her time in court and her research and reports on police work have given her deeper insights into the world of justice and criminology. BLIND is her debut novel.

IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE de Lauren E. Oakes

Eloquent, insightful, and deeply heartening, IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE is a case for hope in a warming world

IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE
by The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World
by Lauren E. Oakes
Basic Books, November 2018 

Where mountains meet ocean in Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago, white skeletons of dead yellow cedar trees stand in stark contrast to the verdant landscape of old-growth forests. Researchers spent nearly three decades deciphering the cause of the majestic species’ mysterious death: the culprit, they discovered, was neither pathogen nor pest, but instead climate change. In the wake of this discovery, Lauren Oakes, a young scientist, wondered if what the people in this region were experiencing—whatever ways they were finding to cope with their rapidly changing environment and the loss of this sacred tree—might be a scrying glass into the future.
IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE is her six-year-long attempt to answer what happens after the trees die, not only to uncover the future of a handful of magnificent forests, but what lessons could be translated to people in other parts of the planet, where other tree graveyards have become frighteningly common. It chronicles her adventures along the outer coast of southeast Alaska, into various communities spread across the archipelago, and into labs and offices at Stanford University. From thousands of plant measurements, she discovered forests flourishing again in time. From hours of interviews with loggers, naturalists, native Tlingit weavers, and others who value this tree, she found a disparate community of people developing new relationships with the emerging environment.
IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE is a story about finding faith—not of the religious variety—but in the possibility for adaptation and action. Against a backdrop of dying forests and in a scientific profession plagued with pessimism, Oakes became an unexpected optimist. Part Lab Girl, part Into the Wild, THE CANARY TREE is an unforgettable story of science, natural history, and personal discovery.

Lauren E. Oakes is an ecologist and human-natural systems scientist. She is a lecturer in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She earned her PhD from Stanford University’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources and her bachelor’s degree from Brown. She has written about her research for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and her work has been profiled by the Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic, and Christian Science Monitor, among other outlets.

THE CREEP de Michael LaPointe

A journalist with a history of bending the facts uncovers a story about a medical breakthrough so astonishing it needs no embellishment—but behind the game-changing science lies a gruesome secret.

THE CREEP
by Michael LaPointe
Random House Canada, June 2021

A respected byline in the culture pages of the venerable New York magazine The Bystander, journalist Whitney Chase grapples with a mysterious compulsion to enhance her coverage with intriguing untruths and undetectable white lies. She calls it « the creep »–an overpowering need to improve the story in the telling. And she has a particular genius for getting away with it. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Whitney yearns to transition from profiling rock stars and novelists to covering the stories that « really matter. » When a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with a potentially massive story about a game-changing medical discovery, Whitney believes she’s finally found a story that doesn’t need any enhancement. The brilliant and charismatic doctor behind the breakthrough claims she’s found « the Holy Grail of medical science »: a synthetic blood substitute that, if viable, promises to save millions of lives, and make her corporate backers rich beyond measure. But when Whitney’s investigation of this apparent medical miracle puts her on the trail of a string of grisly fatalities across the country, she becomes inexorably tied to a much darker and more nefarious story than even she could imagine.
Set against the ramp-up to the US invasion of Iraq and the decline of print journalism, Michael LaPointe’s panoramic, ingeniously plotted debut paints an affecting portrait of an increasingly unequal twenty-first century, exploring how deceitfulness, self-enhancement, and confidently delivered lies can be transfused into fact and constitute a broader violence against the social fabric and public trust.

Michael LaPointe’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. He writes the « Dice Roll » column for The Paris Review. His fiction has appeared in The Walrus and Hazlitt. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Awards, the Journey Prize, and the Digital Publishing Awards, and his fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories. He lives in Toronto.

THE VEXATIONS de Caitlin Horrocks

A kaleidoscopic debut novel about love, family, genius, and the madness of art, circling the life of eccentric composer Erik Satie and La Belle Époque Paris, from a writer who is « wildly entertaining » (San Francisco Chronicle), « startlingly ingenious » (Boston Globe), and « impressively sharp » (New York Times Book Review)

THE VEXATIONS
by Caitlin Horrocks
Little, Brown, July 2019

Erik Satie begins life with every possible advantage. But after the dual blows of his mother’s early death and his father’s breakdown upend his childhood, Erik and his younger siblings—Louise and Conrad—are scattered. Later, as an ambitious young composer, Erik flings himself into the Parisian art scene, aiming for greatness but achieving only notoriety. As the years, then decades, pass, he alienates those in his circle as often as he inspires them, lashing out at friends and lovers like Claude Debussy and Suzanne Valadon. Only Louise and Conrad are steadfast allies. Together they strive to maintain their faith in their brother’s talent and hold fast the badly frayed threads of family. But in a journey that will take her from Normandy to Paris to Argentina, Louise is rocked by a severe loss that ultimately forces her into a reckoning with how Erik—obsessed with his art and hungry for fame—will never be the brother she’s wished for.
With her buoyant, vivid reimagination of an iconic artist’s eventful life, Caitlin Horrocks has written a captivating and ceaselessly entertaining novel about the tenacious bonds of family and the costs of greatness, both to ourselves and to those we love.

Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collection This Is Not Your City, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Tin House, One Story, and other journals and anthologies. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. She is the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review and teaches at Grand Valley State University, and occasionally in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.