Archives de catégorie : Literary

THE WORLD GIVES WAY de Marissa Levien

An unforgettable portrait of a society in freefall, and finding humanity even at the end of it all. Darkly beautiful, bursting with soul and imagination, this stunning sci-fi debut is Station Eleven and The Age of Miracles meets Ted Chiang meets Melancholia, for the literary reader who loves genre-busting, speculative character-driven dramas set “five minutes into the future.”

THE WORLD GIVES WAY
by Marissa Levien
Redhook/Hachette US, September 2021

THE WORLD GIVES WAY is set on a generation ship carrying those wealthy enough have escaped Earth—and the contract workers bound to serve them for the ship’s two-hundred-year journey. Myrra Dal was born an indentured worker on this ship, but her generation will live to see the journey’s end and the expiration of their contracts; she just has to spend the next fifty years serving the powerful Carlyles first. But when Myrra discovers the catastrophic secret the elites have been harboring, everything changes. There’s a crack in the ship’s hull, and everyone on board has two months left to live—if that. Burdened with the secret of a lifetime, and the Carlyles’ infant daughter, she runs—but someone is hot on her trail, and not even the end of the world can stop him.

Marissa Levien is a recent graduate of Stony Brook University’s MFA program. Her work has been published in Slice, LARB PubLab, The Toast, and featured on Glimmer Train‘s Honorable Mentions List. She lives in New York.

MARGREETE’S HARBOR de Eleanor Morse

For readers of Elizabeth Strout, Alice Munro, and Anne Tyler this literary novel traces the life of a family and its matriarch over the course of a decade.

MARGREETE’S HARBOR
by Eleanor Morse
St. Martin’s Press, April 2021

MARGREETE’S HARBOR begins with a fire: a fiercely-independent, thrice-widowed woman living on her own in a rambling house near the Maine coast forgets a hot pan on the stovetop, and nearly burns her place down. When Margreete Bright calls her daughter Liddie to confess, Liddie realizes that her mother can no longer live alone. She, her husband Harry, and their children Eva and Bernie move from a settled life in Michigan across the country to Margreete’s isolated home, and begin a new life. MARGREETE’S HARBOR tells the story of ten years in the history of a family: a novel of small moments, intimate betrayals, arrivals and disappearances. Liddie, a professional cellist, struggles to find space for her music in a marriage that increasingly confines her; Harry’s critical approach to the growing war in Vietnam endangers his new position as a high school history teacher; Bernie and Eva begin to find their own identities as young adults; and Margreete slowly descends into a private world of memories, even as she comes to find a larger purpose in them. This beautiful novel—attuned to the seasons of nature, the internal dynamics of a family, and a nation torn by its contradicting ideals—reveals the largest meanings in the smallest and most secret moments of life.

Eleanor Morse is the author of White Dog Fell from the Sky and An Unexpected Forest, which won the Independent Publisher’s Gold Medalist Award for Best Regional Fiction in the Northeast United States, and was selected as the Winner of the Best Published Fiction by the Maine writers and Publishers Alliance. Morse has taught in adult education programs, in prisons, and in university systems, both in Maine and in southern Africa. She lives on Peaks Island, Maine.

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.