Archives de catégorie : Literary

OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING de Shubha Sunder

A novel in varied conversations, this sharp, nuanced debut follows a young Bangalorean woman as she begins life after college in post-9/11 America, seeking to define a place for herself amid the daily, often unwitting attempts of those who would define it for her.

OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING
by Shubha Sunder
Graywolf Press, Winter 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

It’s 2006 in Cambridge, Mass., and Pavitra wants a room with a view, a place where she will feel free and able to write the novel she began during her last year at a small college in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia. She has taken a job as a physics teacher at a wealthy private school and lives with the elderly mother of a local landlord whose rented apartments are just beyond her reach. The conversations with the people she encounters over the course of the next year, while she is in Optional Practical Training status (a visa category for international students who want to stay an additional twelve months after graduation), stir her awareness of assumptions—about who belongs and who does not—and categories both racial and cultural that barely registered in her earlier life, though now she finds them everywhere, including in herself.
Among the people who shape Pavitra’s days are students who, along with their parents, expect to be spoon-fed and promised success; a college roommate now in law school, as welcoming and unaware as ever; a young Indian cousin who shows up in the middle of winter in slippery shoes; her landlord, bombastic and understanding in equal measure, not at all what he seems. Pavitra rarely speaks about herself, but we readers see and feel, through her interactions with others, the formation of her identity as a young woman, immigrant, teacher, and writer.
Building on Indian traditions of oral storytelling and in dialogue with novels like Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Anna Burns’s Milkman, OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING expands the discussion of how America frames collective and individual identity, enriching our awareness of the kinds of space we leave for one another as we move through our lives. A trenchant meditation on the dream of “home” – its pull and its distortions – OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING carries us into internal worlds hitherto unseen, marking a singular voice in American fiction.

Shubha Sunder’s first book, Boomtown Girl, a collection of short stories set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, won the St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming in April 2023 from Black Lawrence Press. Stories from this collection have appeared in The Common, Narrative Magazine, Slice, and other journals, and were shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories. Awards in support of her work include a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a City of Boston Artist Fellowship, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences as well as the Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Boston with her family.

BUTTER de Gayl Jones

A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares.

BUTTER:
Novellas, Stories, and Fragments
by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press, April 2023

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyperrealist to the mystical, in intricate multipart stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.
Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico, and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas; about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film, and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society.

Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan. Her landmark books include Corregidora, Eva’s Man, The Healing (a National Book Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Palmares (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction), and most recently, The Birdcatcher (National Book Award finalist).

THE BIRDCATCHER de Gayl Jones

Legendary writer Gayl Jones returns with a stunning new novel about Black American artists in exile

THE BIRDCATCHER
by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press, September 2022

Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is publishing again. In the wake of her long-awaited fifth novel, Palmares, The Birdcatcher is another singular achievement, a return to the circles of her National Book Award finalist, The Healing.
Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island.
A study in Black women’s creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships, this work from Jones shows off her range and insight into the vicissitudes of all human nature—rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

“Jones continues her marvelous run after last year’s Pulitzer finalist Palmares with the gloriously demented story of an artist who keeps trying to kill her husband . . . . Jones, implicitly defiant, draws deeply from classic and global literature—a well-placed reference to Cervantes’s windmills leaves the reader’s head spinning. And like one of Amanda’s inventive novels, this one ends on a surprising and playful turn. It ought to be required reading.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“The remarkable latest release by acclaimed novelist and poet Jones . . . Her prose is captivating, at moments coolly observational and at others profoundly intimate; the delicate balance is the mark of a truly great storyteller. An intriguing, tightly crafted, and insightful meditation on creativity and complicated friendships.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

“Jones’ mercurial, often inscrutable body of work delivers yet another change-up to readers’ expectations.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Gayl Jones constructs a novel that is part mystery, part thriller, and wholly captivating. . . . a shining segment of the American literary canon has been restored.”
—Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement UK

“Brilliant and incendiary, Jones’s pairing of tragedy with dark humor cuts to the bone.”
—O. Magazine

“[A novel with] the plush scenery of a travelogue, the misshapen soul of a noir, and the anarchic spirit of a trickster tale.”
—The New Yorker

TIANANMEN SQUARE de Lai Wen

A truly remarkable novel about coming to see the world as it is, TIANANMEN SQUARE is the story of one girl’s life growing up in the China of the 1970s and 80s, as well as the story of the events in 1989 that give the novel its name: the hope and idealism of a generation of young students, their heroism and courage, and the price that some of them paid.

TIANANMEN SQUARE
by Lai Wen
Swift Press, late 2024
(via Emily Randle Editorial & Literary)

It is Beijing in the 1970s, and Lai lives with her parents, grandmother and younger brother in a small flat in a working-class area. Her grandmother is a formidable figure – no-nonsense and uncompromising, but loving towards her granddaughter – while her ageing beauty of a mother snipes at her father, a sunken figure who has taken refuge in his work.
As she grows up, Lai comes to discern the realities of the country she lives is: an early encounter with the police haunts her for years; her father makes her see that his quietness is a reaction to experiences he has lived through; and an old bookseller subtly introduces her to ideas and novels that open her mind to different perspectives. But she also goes through what anyone goes through when young – the ebbs and flows of friendships; troubles and rewards at home and at school; and the first steps and missteps in love.
A gifted student, she is eventually given a scholarship to study at the prestigious Peking University; while there she meets new friends, and starts to get involved in the student protests that have been gathering speed. It is the late 1980s, and change is in the air…
This novel manages to balance both the sense of an individual girl growing up and going through all the changes that every young person goes through – falling in love, realising that grown-ups are people who make mistakes, reckoning with your own character – with the sense of growing up in the China of the time and the tragic events that give the book its title and its culmination.

Lai Wen is a pseudonym. She was born in Beijing in 1970 and left China in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square protests. She now lives in the UK with her husband and two children.

DISTANT SONS de Tim Johnston

Tim Johnston masterfully interweaves past and present to tell a story of violence, vengeance, and remorse. Poetic, compelling, nuanced, profoundly and achingly beautiful.

DISTANT SONS
by Tim Johnston
Algonquin, October 2023
(via Writers House)

DISTANT SONS is set in a small Wisconsin town on the banks of the Mississippi, where, in the 1970s, three young boys vanished in a series of heart-wrenching, still unsolved disappearances. In the present day, a drifter named Sean arrives in town and gets embroiled in the lives of a waitress and her abusive ex, leading him to love—and a dangerous enemy. At his side is Dan Young, who is fleeing the unspoken specters of his past; together, Sean and Dan take up work for Marion Devereaux, an old man long suspected in the disappearances of the boys. Observing them all is Detective Viegas, a woman whose drive to seek justice is impacted by her own father’s failure to solve the 1970s mystery—and the violence once done to her sister.
In DISTANT SONS Tim Johnston masterfully interweaves past and present to tell a story of violence, vengeance, and remorse. It is a minutely observed novel about men and women living in the small towns and forgotten byways of America, of blue collar people working jobs for cash and just getting by day to day. In observing the grace—and the violence—that can result from the smallest crossings of these so often unheralded lives, Tim Johnston elevates a set of characters distinctive from those that populate most literary fiction these days. His protagonists’ concerns and secrets, joys and sorrows are rooted in a profound sense of place and personality that galvanizes the mysteries they encounter. Throughout DISTANT SONS, we are drawn into broader questions of culpability, the way what we do—or fail to do—can long outlive us. And for each, Tim Johnston tenderly interrogates the way we grow around our losses like trees around scars, bending or lifting with each passing year.

Tim Johnston’s most recent novels include Descent and The Current. Both were New York Times, USA Today and Indie bestsellers. He is also the author of short stories that have appeared in New England Review, New Letters, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Double Take, Best Life Magazine, and Narrative Magazine, among others.