A moving and fast-paced novel narrated by a DeafBlind young man and his new interpreter, an unlikely pair who together embark on a journey of liberation and heroism.
THE SIGN FOR HOME
by Blair Fell
Emily Bestler Books/Atria, Spring 2022
THE SIGN FOR HOME tells the story of Arlo Dilly, a DeafBlind 23-year-old man raised by conservative family members who limit his use of technology. While taking a basic English composition class, Arlo is assigned a new sign language interpreter named Cyril Brewster who is recovering from a romantic breakup and is looking for a new challenge in his career. When Cyril begins to interpret Arlo’s classes he soon realizes that Arlo’s understanding of language, love, and life have been limited, governed, and often censored by iron-fisted guardians. Showing Arlo more of the world and the independence he could have puts Cyril in conflict with Arlo’s family. Against this external conflict of language mediation, we travel inside Arlo’s mind and inside his perceptions of the most important moments of his life, including his own linguistic awakenings, and a heartbreaking memory of first love and first friendship derailed by unspeakable tragedy. When the buried memories are eventually unlocked by a class writing assignment, Arlo convinces Cyril to abandon his own professional ethics to facilitate a forbidden meeting with his old school friends and first love. The narration of The Sign For Home alternates between Arlo’s voice (with its distinctive Deaf syntax) and Cyril’s fast and funny point of view, with dialogue rendered in both standard English and an approximation of American Sign Language structure. The resulting novel is not only unique, but fast-paced, delectable, emotional, and powerful.
Blair Fell has worked as a certified ASL interpreter for 25 years. The first draft of this novel won the Lippman Prize for Creative Writing from the City College of New York. In addition to his work as an interpreter, Blair has written for television shows including Showtime’s wildly successful Queer As Folk, and for public television’s award-winning California Connected. His plays have been produced in multiple venues, and his personal essays have appeared in several prominent publications including Out Magazine, the Huffington Post, Next Magazine, and many others.
THE PARTY YEAR is a an ekphrastic, illuminating tour de force, inspired in part by Cunningham’s own time working on the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. In these pages, fundraising staffer David Hammond travels around the country for donor events, landing everywhere from a trailer in New Hampshire to a Beverly Hills mansion. Hammond is a keen and thoughtful observer, whose reflections on memory and history are interwoven throughout in a flowing counterpoint between past and present, the personal and the larger-than-life. Through intimate, candescent prose, THE PARTY YEAR contemplates the stories and arts that define and bring beauty to our lives.
An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse’s owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life. Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. A lovelorn truck driver…a mysterious child…a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, SUBDIVISION is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called “a master of the dark arts.” With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of 
In her forest-veiled pagan village, Évike is the only woman without power, making her an outcast clearly abandoned by the gods. The villagers blame her corrupted bloodline—her father was a Yehuli man, one of the much-loathed servants of the fanatical king. When soldiers arrive from the Holy Order of Woodsmen to claim a pagan girl for the king’s blood sacrifice, Évike is betrayed by her fellow villagers and surrendered. But when monsters attack the Woodsmen and their captive en route, slaughtering everyone but Évike and the cold, one-eyed captain, they have no choice but to rely on each other. Except he’s no ordinary Woodsman—he’s the disgraced prince, Gáspár Bárány, whose father needs pagan magic to consolidate his power. Gáspár fears that his cruelly zealous brother plans to seize the throne and instigate a violent reign that would damn the pagans and the Yehuli alike. As the son of a reviled foreign queen, Gáspár understands what it’s like to be an outcast, and he and Évike make a tenuous pact to stop his brother. As their mission takes them from the bitter northern tundra to the smog-choked capital, their mutual loathing slowly turns to affection, bound by a shared history of alienation and oppression. However, trust can easily turn to betrayal, and as Évike reconnects with her estranged father and discovers her own hidden magic, she and Gáspár need to decide whose side they’re on, and what they’re willing to give up for a nation that never cared for them at all.
For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, it has pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance, as well as detaining people indefinitely and torturing them. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized, paranoid feature of American politics and security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home. A politically divided country turned the War on Terror into a cultural and then tribal struggle, first on the ideological fringes and ultimately expanding to conquer the Republican Party, often with the timid acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today’s nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era.