text:
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
By Leslie Jamison
A Year in Reading: Kaulie Lewis
Kaulie Lewis
For the last two years, I've felt like I've forgotten how to read well, much less write about it, as it's become harder to find the space and quiet to do much more than simply let sentences (and tweets, and news alerts, etc. etc.) wash over me. I'm not alone in this, I know, but it's been a lonely experience; literature has always been my tether to the world, and it feels like that tether's dangerously frayed.
A couple of times this year I've tried to bridge the growing distance between my literary life and daily reality by tackling fiction and nonfiction that feels closer to the world in which I live, commonly known as Texas. Sometimes it's worked — I read Philipp Meyer's The Son in the spring and found it a pulpy, compulsive, enjoyable novel of the Lone Star State, complete with oil booms and bits of Cherokee and careful descriptions of the Hill Country, my actual home, and the Llano Estacado, my spiritual one. But sometimes the strategy's fallen short: I tried and tried again and still failed to get very far into Lawrence Wright's God Save Texas. I've finally decided the failures stem from my weariness of being told what Texas means (in the Year of Beto everyone had thoughts about this, most of them irritating.) I'm much more interested in what it feels like to live here right now — messy, mostly, and full of contradictions.
The most interesting, life-giving reading I did this year felt far removed from both the news cycle and Texas. The Vegetarian by Han Kang was a dark fantasy world I lived for a few days and a book that made me think about my sisters and our struggles, shared and separate, to be in the world. It's a dreamlike, unsettling novel; I wish I could read it for the first time again, but I think I'd be a little scared. Sheila Heti's Motherhood was something else entirely, a beautiful stream-of-consciousness blur of home-grown philosophy and indecision. Essentially a novel of the in-between, Motherhood is hard to sum up, but I know that I loved it. And then Madeline Miller's Circe was completely different again, all classical coolness and familiar myths made a little less familiar. I tripped over the language more than once, but I ended the novel with a deep sense of gratitude for the gift of humanity in all its transience, fragility and damage.
That fragility and damage also came to mind when reading The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, though it was balanced by both outrage and sheer entertainment. Starring Timothy Leary, Nixon, and a staggering amount of LSD, the story's all true but feels like it can't be. And in a strange accident of timing, I read The Most Dangerous Man alongside Leslie Jamison's The Recovering. While in many ways they couldn't be more different — the first is a fast-paced, drug-fueled portrait of "the high priest of LSD," the second an introspective, interrogating look at the stories we use to understand, celebrate and condemn addiction — both helped shape my understanding of our culture's relationship to substance use and abuse.
It wasn't all serious this year, though. There's some reading that's just fun all the way through, something it took me a while to remember. One of the 2018 reading experiences I'll hold onto longest was tearing through all of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch as part of a desperate (and doomed) attempt to understand my boyfriend's World Cup mania and general Arsenal addiction. I've since given up, but I kept the book, and the Fever Pitch experiment has served as a surprising reminder of literature's ability to connect us.
It's that note I'm ending the year on and that I hope will bring me back into the bookish fold in 2019. I just pressed Andrew Martin's Early Work into a friend's hands, knowing she'll enjoy this playful, quick-reading novel with a dark heart; a novel where all the young beautiful writers talk a little too fast and a little too well, telling jokes and making mistakes that are familiar but just far enough removed. Soon we'll meet up to talk about it, but for now I'm starting Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights and my list for 2019.
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Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
A Year in Reading: Anna Wiener
Anna Wiener
I spent a lot of this year trying to write a book: lying on the floor, making spaghetti, chewing on my fingernails, staring at the wall, reading. I wanted to figure some things out, and surrounded myself with books that I thought would help. Instead of reading them, I got distracted. I read an endless number of articles and essays about politics, technology, politics and technology. I stuffed my brain with information. Wikipedia. I was thinking about Yelp culture and V.C. culture, so I read a lot of Yelp reviews, and a lot of tweets from venture capitalists and nascent venture capitalists. Medium posts. Hacker News.
After a while, this became boring, and I remembered how to read for pleasure. I read, or reread: Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay; Things I Don't Want to Know; Stone Arabia; Asymmetry; Housekeeping; Fierce Attachments; The Maples Stories; Twilight of the Superheroes; Talk Stories; To the Lighthouse; Mating; Imperial San Francisco; The Book of Daniel; White Noise; The Fire Next Time; Close to the Machine. Essays from Happiness, and The Essential Ellen Willis, and The White Album, and Discontent and Its Civilizations, and The Earth Dies Streaming. This Boy's Life and Stop-Time. I meant to reread Leaving the Atocha Station, but it fell into the bathtub; fine. 10:04. A stack of books about Silicon Valley history, many of which I did not finish; a lot of them told the same stories.
I read a 1971 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, and the free e-book preview of The Devil Wears Prada, and some, but not all, of The Odyssey, the Emily Wilson translation. I got stoned before bed and read What Was the Hipster?––? I read Eileen and The Recovering and And Now We Have Everything and The Golden State and Chemistry and The Boatbuilder and Normal People and Breaking and Entering and Notes of a Native Son and Bright Lights, Big City and Heartburn and That Kind of Mother and How Fiction Works and Motherhood and Early Work and My Duck Is Your Duck and The Cost of Living and Who Is Rich? and The Mars Room. Some more pleasurable than others but all, or most, satisfying in their own ways.
I read the Amazon reviews for popular memoirs and regretted doing that. I did not read much poetry, and I regret that, too.
A few weeks ago, I read What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions, and No Regrets: Three Discussions. Five discussions! Not enough. I was very grateful for No Regrets, which felt both incomplete and expansive. Reading it was clarifying across multiple axes.
I wish I'd read more this year, or read with more direction, or at the very least kept track. I wish I'd read fewer books published within my lifetime. I wish I'd had more conversations. Staring at the wall is a solitary pursuit. I didn't really figure out what I hoped to understand, namely: time. Time? I asked everyone. Time??? (Structure? Ha-ha.) Whatever. It's fine. Not everything has to be a puzzle, and not everything has a solution. Time did pass.
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The Millions Top 10
The Millions Top Ten: October 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for October.
On List
Lost Empress
The Incendiaries
The Ensemble
Warlight
Killing Commendatore
Only the lightest, feather soft jostling on the top half of our list this month, as R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries trades places with Tommy Orange's There There. From there, things get more interesting. First, two books graduated to our Hall of Fame: Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad and Leslie Jamison's The Recovering. It's the first time either author has had the honor, and this move freed up two new spaces on the list.
One of those spaces was filled by Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which rejoins our rankings in ninth position after taking a one-month hiatus.
The other space was filled by Haruki Murakami's Killing Commendatore, which our own Hannah Gersen described as a "new novel … about a freshly divorced painter who moves to the mountains, where he finds an eerie and powerful painting called 'Killing Commendatore.'" Of course, when it comes to Murakami, simple descriptions belie subtle unsettlement. "Mysteries proliferate," Gersen continues, "and you will keep reading—not because you are expecting resolution but because it's Murakami, and you're under his spell."
Of the five "near misses" this month, four appeared in our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview. The Practicing Stoic, which did not, is Ward Farnsworth's "idiosyncratic, strange, yet convincing and useful volume," according to Ed Simon, offering a novel corrective to the popular understanding of Stoicism. "The Practicing Stoic is one of many philosophical self-help books, contending with the primordial question: 'How am I to live?'" Simon continues as he situates it within the context of several others in the canon. Additionally, Stoicism itself proves valuable in how it "help[s] us cope with the ever-mounting anxieties of postmodernity, the daily thrum of Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, the queasy push notifications and the indignities of being a cog in the shaky edifice of late capitalism (or whatever)."
Next month two more spots should open on our list for two newcomers, and there's only one way to find out which.
This month's near misses included: Severance, The Golden State, Lake Success, The Practicing Stoic, and What We Were Promised. See Also: Last month's list.
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for September.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Pulitzer-winner Andrew Sean Greer holds this month's top spot with his latest novel, Less. Two more months of strong sales and he'll ascend to our Hall of Fame, just as Leslie Jamison (The Recovering) and Ahmed Saadawi (Frankenstein in Baghdad) seem poised to do in October.
One of two newcomers this month is Esi Edugyan, whose Booker-shortlisted novel Washington Black is based on a famous 19th-century criminal case and tells the story of an 11-year-old slave's incredible journey from the cane fields of the Caribbean to the Arctic, London, and Morocco. "In its rich details and finely tuned ear for language," wrote Martha Anne Toll for our site last week, "the book creates a virtual world, immersing the reader in antebellum America and Canada as well as in Victorian England."
Edugyan is joined on our list by Kate Atkinson, whose new period novel Transcription focuses on a female spy, recruited by MI5 at age 18 to monitor fascist sympathizers. "As a fangirl of both the virtuosic Life After Life and of her Jackson Brody detective novels, I barely need to see a review to get excited about a new Atkinson novel," wrote Sonya Chung in our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview, and evidently her feelings are shared by many Millions readers alike.
Spots for both books were opened when Warlight and The Mars Room dropped from our ranks. Elsewhere on the list, shuffling abounds. The Overstory rose to second position after being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and There There rose as well after being longlisted for the National Book Award.
Meanwhile, if you'll turn your attention to this month's "near misses" below, you'll see The Golden State, the debut novel from Lydia Kiesling, our intrepid editor. Longtime readers of this site are no doubt familiar with Lydia's brand of antic, incisive writing – she's one of the few authors who've made me laugh and tear up in the same piece – but prepared as I was, I'll admit this book floored me in the best way. Not only is it an engrossing depiction of a very particular parent's mind, but it's also an exploration of what it means to connect with others, raise them, be influenced and repulsed by them, as well as overwhelmed by them alike. As a bonus, there's also an absolutely ruthless and necessary skewering of modern university administrative work, and the entire story vibrates with an extreme sense of place. I cannot wait to read what Lydia writes next and in the meantime I encourage you all to check this one out.
This month's near misses included: Severance, The Practicing Stoic, and The Golden State. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: August 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for August.
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The Mars Room
"I have to watch I don't get arrogant," said Andrew Sean Greer after a Guardian reporter asked him how he's changed since winning the Pulitzer for his latest novel, Less. Will he be able to stave off arrogance now that he's held first position in our Top Ten for two months, though? Bet smart.
So, we bid farewell to two titles ascending to our Hall of Fame this month – The Immortalists and My Favorite Thing is Monsters – and we welcome two newcomers in their place – The Incendiaries and The Mars Room.
Much praise has been heaped upon The Incendiaries, not least of all Celeste Ng's compliment on R.O. Kwon's "dazzlingly acrobatic prose." That admiration might be topped only by Michael Lindgren's review of The Mars Room in which he called Rachel Kushner "the most vital and interesting American novelist working today." The point is obvious. Golden rules are hard to find these days, but maybe it's enough to say that Millions readers always have good taste.
State of California native Tommy Orange's There There earned a place on the 7-title shortlist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize this month, and the debut also moved up a spot from ninth to eight on our list. Will that momentum carry it up again next month? Be sure to check back and find out in October. On and on we go.
Next to Orange's novel on our list in ninth position is Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which earned Man Booker longlist recognition last July. Month's end is when we'll see if it makes the next round of cuts. List long or short, Ondaatje's no stranger to any kind.
This month's near misses included: Severance, Circe, What We Were Promised, An American Marriage, and Some Trick. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: July 2018
Nick Moran | 1
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for July.
The Immortalists
My Favorite Thing is Monsters
Reflecting on the Great 2018 Book Preview – the first of the year, not the more recent Second-Half preview – it's interesting to note that of the first six titles we highlighted, four of them have made appearances in our Top Ten. For six months, Jamie Quatro's Fire Sermon and Denis Johnson's The Largesse of the Sea Maiden hung around our list; this month they graduate to the Hall of Fame. On their heels, Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad holds fifth position this month, and in two months' time will likely join Quatro and Johnson in our Hall. Also, among the "near misses" listed at the bottom of this post, you'll find Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny, a French story which "tells of good help gone bad," as our own Matt Seidel put it months ago. From a certain perspective, it's wild that 66% of the first half dozen books we flagged last January have resonated so much with our audience. In fact, of the 10 titles on this month's list, 70% of them appeared on that first Book Preview. Put simply: Millions readers, we're here for y'all. Trust us.
(For the record, the three titles currently on our Top Ten which did not appear in our Book Preview last January: Less, The Overstory and My Favorite Thing is Monsters.)
Three new titles joined our list after Quatro and Johnson's books moved on to our Hall of Fame and Tayari Jones's An American Marriage dropped out. The newcomers are Aja Gabel's The Ensemble, Tommy Orange's There There, and Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which hold the sixth, ninth and tenth positions this month, respectively.
In a preview for our site, Millions editor Lydia Kiesling recommended readers get "a taste of Gabel's prose [by] read[ing] her Best American Essays-notable piece on grief and eating ortolans in France," and noted that "Orange's novel has been called a 'new kind of American epic' by the New York Times." Meanwhile staffer Claire Cameron, while writing about Michael Ondaatje's latest, mused, "If only Anthony Minghella were still with us to make the movie."
Overall it's clear that the Book Preview foretells Top Ten placements. Next month at least two spots should open up for new titles. Will those new books come from our latest Second-Half Preview? Based on the numbers, it looks likely.
This month's near misses included: Circe, Some Trick, The Mars Room, and The Perfect Nanny. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: June 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for June.
Fire Sermon
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Three books are off to our Hall of Fame this month, but one of them is completely blank, which I believe is a first for our site. Back in November 2017, in Hannah Gersen's Gift Guide for Readers and Writers, she noted the benefits of the 5-Year Diary's design:
The design is unique in that every page represents one day and is divided into five parts, with each part representing one year. So, when you write your entry for Feb 1, you can look back at Feb 1 of the previous year to see what you were doing/writing/reading/thinking/weathering. I think it's especially useful for writers because if you use the space to track writing and reading projects (as I often do), it's a great way to gauge your long-term progress.
Accompanying the Diary are two works from Carmen Maria Machado and Jesmyn Ward.
Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties was the darling of our most recent Year in Reading series, picked by seven participants – Jamel Brinkley, Morgan Jerkins, Rakesh Satyal, Julie Buntin, Lidia Yuknavitch, Louise Erdrich and Jeff VanderMeer – who together sang a chorus of Buy this Book, Buy this Book, Buy this Book. Over the chorus came Nathan Goldman, who wrote in his review for our site that "for all its darkness, Her Body and Other Parties is also a beautiful evocation of women's—especially queer women's—lives, in all their fullness, vitality, and complex joy. Formally daring, achingly moving, wildly weird, and startling in its visceral and aesthetic impact, Machado's work is unlike any other." Evidently, Millions readers dug the tune.
Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing was also well-received, drawing praise from four of the seven Year in Reading participants linked above, as well as from Kima Jones and Sarah Smarsh. In her review for our site, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim observed that "Ward's fiction is about inherited trauma in a deeply divided society, where the oppressor and the oppressed share a legacy" and she also pointed to the other works invoked within the text. "By invoking [Toni] Morrison and [William] Faulkner for new readers," Ibrahim wrote, "Ward excavates not only the suffering of her characters, but also the long tradition of fiction about slavery, fiction that grapples with racial injustice that extends into the present."
Elsewhere on our list this month, My Favorite Thing is Monsters returns after a monthlong hiatus, and newcomers An American Marriage and The Overstory fill our ninth and tenth spots, respectively. In the weeks ahead, we'll publish our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview, and surely several of those upcoming titles will be reflected on our July list. Get ready.
This month's near misses included: The Mars Room, Pachinko, Warlight, The Odyssey, and The World Goes On. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: May 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for May.
5 Year Diary
Her Body and Other Parties
Sing, Unburied, Sing
It's surprising that this is the first time John McPhee's sent a work to our site's Hall of Fame, which recognizes books that have made appearances on our Top 10 for more than six months. McPhee, whose Draft No. 4 attains that honor this month, has published more than three dozen books. To have only one ascend to our hallowed halls surely reveals more about us than him, no? Well, an honor is an honor regardless of past injustice. Going forward, consider this my call to action: go read Oranges and learn all about the absolute madmen who grew grapefruits and limes on the branches of orange trees.
With one newly opened spot on this month's list and one title dropping out of favor from last month's, we welcome two newcomers. First there's Less by Andrew Sean Greer, who just won the Pulitzer, and second there's Lost Empress by Sergio De La Pava, who years ago won something even more coveted than an award: a glowing profile from our own Garth Risk Hallberg. Writing at the time about De La Pava's breakout, A Naked Singularity, which ultimately made it to our Hall of Fame, Hallberg recalled getting hooked on a big self-published book despite his initial skepticism, and in spite of the book's superficial flaws.
A good big novel lives or dies at a level far removed from considerations of teachable "craft" — the level Henry James and Michel Houellebecq gesture toward when they speak, in different contexts, of "intensity." … And at that level, A Naked Singularity is, if not a masterpiece, then certainly a roaring success.
Fast forward six years and De La Pava's returned with another 600+ page novel. Plus ça change…
Elsewhere on our list, the top two titles retained their positions, The Immortalists rose two spots, Sing, Unburied, Sing dropped two more, and books by Ahmed Saadawi, Denis Johnson, and Leslie Jamison jostled around a bit. Altogether that part isn't terribly eventful, but next month we'll see three spots open up, and that's where the fun should really begin. Stay tuned.
This month's near misses included: An American Marriage, The Overstory, The Mars Room, and Pachinko. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: April 2018
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we've been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you've been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you'll find our Millions Top Ten list for April.
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
We sent both Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach and Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere to our Hall of Fame this month. It's the second time Egan has attained this honor – her last novel A Visit from the Goon Squad reached the Hall in 2011. Egan joins twelve other authors who've had two works ascend to our Hall of Fame, and if the current pace holds true we can expect her third book to reach some time in 2025. If you're keeping track at home, we've now had thirteen authors send two books to our list; four have sent three; and then David Mitchell has sent four.
The rest of our list shifted up the ranks accordingly. Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties moved from third to second position; John McPhee's Draft No. 4 from fourth to third. You get the idea.
Two very different books fill the open spots on this month's list.
Occupying ninth position is The Recovering, Leslie Jamison's sweeping exploration of addiction and those who grapple with it. The hefty volume was recently hailed by Michael Bourne as "a welcome corrective to the popular image of addiction as a gritty battle for the addict's soul and recovery as a heroic feat of derring-do." He noted that Jamison's gifts are on display, and that the book "shimmers throughout." However Bourne was not without some criticism. The work could've used more "ruthless editing," and "there is little in The Recovering that wouldn't be twice as compelling in a book half as long," Bourne wrote.
Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad claimed the tenth spot after several months among the near misses. The book, which was translated for English readers by Jonathan Wright, was recently shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. (While on the topic of honorifics, it had previously made an appearance on Lydia Kiesling's Year in Reading.) In our Great 2018 Book Preview, I looked ahead to Saadawi's latest:
The long-awaited English translation of the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 gives American readers the opportunity to read Saadawi's haunting, bleak, and darkly comic take on Iraqi life in 2008. Or, as Saadawi himself put it in interview for Arab Lit, he set out to write "the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone."
This month's other near misses included: Less, An American Marriage, The Odyssey, The World Goes On, and The Overstory. See Also: Last month's list.
Bottoming Out: On Leslie Jamison's 'The Recovering'
Michael Bourne
The first time she told the story of her recovery from alcohol addiction, Leslie Jamison recalls in her memoir The Recovering, an older man in the front row of the meeting where she was speaking started shouting: "This is boring!"
Jamison is quick to assure us that the man was ill, "losing the parts of his mind that filtered and restrained his speech." Still, diminished though he was, the man had been a pillar of the local recovery community, and even now "he often sounded like our collective id, saying all the things that never got said aloud in meetings." And now he was saying, very loudly, that he was bored.
The moment clearly shook her—it comes up twice in The Recovering—but perhaps she should have paid more attention to what the man was saying. Jamison, author of the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams, is an incisive stylist and has amassed an enormous amount of information and insight on what her subtitle calls "intoxication and its aftermath." But her own recovery story, the spine on which she hangs reams of archival research and reportage, is—well, boring is a little harsh, but it's not enough to carry a 500-page book.
Jamison is what is known in sobriety circles as a "high-bottom drunk." The daughter of a prominent health economist, she earned degrees from Harvard, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale. Along the way, she started drinking. Then she started drinking a lot. In her mid-20s, while on break from her doctoral program, she stopped drinking. A few months later, she started again. Seven months after that, she stopped for good. She was 27 years old and had never been arrested, never lost a job to drinking, never landed in jail or a psych ward, never shot drugs, nor caused bodily harm to another person.
To state the obvious: this isn't a bad thing. Jamison is to be commended for seeking help before she tore up her life, and in truth, her story probably hews closer to the lived experience of most addicts than the lurid tales of junkies shooting up into their genitals that you find in pulpy memoirs and on reality TV. It also hews pretty closely to my own experience. I can't claim Jamison's Ivy League pedigree or her precocious literary success, but, like her, I quit drinking in my 20s, leaving a long trail of "nevers" and "not yets." Even so, addiction, and the years it took me to recover from it, left a blast hole in my life I still grapple with to this day.
So, for the first 100 pages or so, I cheered on The Recovering as a welcome corrective to the popular image of addiction as a gritty battle for the addict's soul and recovery as a heroic feat of derring-do. Jamison offers up instead a quieter story of an addict whose life looks great on the outside—She's in a doctoral program at Yale! She has a debut novel coming out!—but who, unbeknownst to those around her, is slipping deeper and deeper into despair. She sneaks white wine at a B&B where she works and picks endless low-grade fights with her boyfriend until, at a low point, she comes home already drunk and fills a cup with eight shots of whiskey and drinks until she can't remember. "I hadn't set off a bomb in the middle of my own life," she writes. "It had just grown small and curdled. I lived with shame like another organ nestled inside me, swollen with banal regrets."
The Recovering shimmers throughout with lines like that, but 500 pages is a very long time to watch a woman suffer in silence. Perhaps sensing this, Jamison intercuts her story with archival research about other addicts, like singer Billie Holiday and poet John Berryman. Too often, though, stories of lifelong addicts like Holiday, who grew up black and poor and died literally handcuffed to a hospital bed, sit uneasily alongside that of a Harvard-educated novelist who sobered up her 20s without so much as a DWI.
Jamison is, of course, wise to this. "I am precisely the kind of nice upper-middle-class white girl whose relationships to substances has been treated as benign or pitiable—a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than a punishment," she writes, adding: "My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication." But awareness of privilege doesn't blunt its protective force, and in the end the borrowed pathos of the stories of Holiday and Berryman and other writers like Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace never solves the core problem, which is that Jamison's own story lacks the dramatic heft to bear the weight of analysis and research she piles upon it.
Much of this, I suspect, could be resolved by more ruthless editing. There is little in The Recovering that wouldn't be twice as compelling in a book half as long. But I wonder, too, if in her effort to highlight the stories of addiction, Jamison shortchanges another essential element of recovery. Midway through the book, newly sober and stranded at a weeklong writing retreat in a converted tofu factory in small-town Iowa, Jamison stays up until five a.m. obsessively watching an obscure BBC miniseries to distract herself from drinking.
The next morning, desperate, she finds a meeting at a nearby church, where there are only three other people, two of them leather-clad bikers passing through the area. When Jamison tells the group about staying up all night watching the BBC miniseries, "one of the bikers—a huge man with a snake tattooed around his neck—nodded so vigorously [she] was sure he'd say he'd seen that miniseries, too." He hadn't, of course, but as Jamison says, "he knew what it was like when craving tugged you like a puppet."
He knew what it was like.
I've spent decades in church basements listening to people tell their stories, and I can't say I recall the details of more than one or two. I'm a story person, but it wasn't the stories that got me sober. It wasn't anything anyone said, really. It was that for the first time in my life I felt heard, that when I said aloud completely insane things whole rooms full of people nodded along in perfect understanding.
In an afterword, Jamison writes that she "wanted to write a book that worked like a meeting," by which she means that she "needed to include the stories of others alongside [her] own." That's one way of describing how a meeting works, as a series of people telling their stories. I've certainly sat through my share of those, but the meetings that stuck with me, the ones that changed me, were the ones where someone cried out in pain and a room full of people listened.
To my mind, that is the deeper secret to recovery, that force of constructive listening, the almost osmotic process of drawing the pain out of a human being in crisis and allowing it to settle, if only for an hour, in the body of the group. Jamison describes several moments of this kind in The Recovering, like that morning in the Iowa church basement and others later when she meets with a sponsor and begins helping people with less sobriety than herself, but each time she moves on to recount yet another argument with her boyfriend, yet another anecdote about John Berryman.
What drew me to The Empathy Exams was the sense I had of Jamison as being a crackerjack listener, a woman willing to sit without judgment as people told her, for instance, about their experience with Morgellons disease, a crackpot-sounding syndrome in which people believe their bodies are being attacked from within by tiny fibers no one else can see. The Empathy Exams is a book-length feat of constructive listening, and I suppose I came to The Recovering hoping Jamison would do the same for a world I know well. Instead, I got a lot of stories about addicts. Some are absorbing, others less so, but let's face it: ours is a culture awash in addicts' stories. They fill whole shelves at the bookstore and amuse the millions on TV. What we need is what there has never been enough of: more, and better, listening.
Curiosities, New Releases
Tuesday New Release Day: Wolitzer; Castillo; McCallister; Moore; Murnane; Powers; Jamison
Thomas Beckwith
Out this week: The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer; America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo; How to Be Safe by Tom McCallister; See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore; Border Districts by Gerald Murnane; The Overstory by Richard Powers; and The Recovering by Leslie Jamison.
Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today.
April Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)
We wouldn't dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here's what we're looking out for this month — for more April titles, check out our First-Half Preview. Let us know what you're looking forward to in the comments!
(Also, as Millions founder and publisher C. Max Magee wrote recently, you can help ensure that these previews, and all our great books coverage, continue for years to come by lending your support to the site as a member. The Millions has been running for nearly 15 years on a wing and a prayer, and we're incredibly grateful for the love of our recurring readers and current members who help us sustain the work that we do.)
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer: Wolitzer is one of those rare novelists who is able to capture the zeitgeist. Her follow up to The Interestings, The Female Persuasion centers around Greer Kadetsky, who is a freshman in college when she meets Faith Frank, an inspiring feminist icon who ignites Greer's passions. After graduation, Greer lands a job at Frank's foundation and things get real. Wolitzer is a master weaver of story lines and in this novel she brings four together as the characters search for purpose in life and love. As the starred review in Publisher's Weekly says, this novel explores, "what it is to both embrace womanhood and suffer because of it." Amen sister. (Claire)
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison: The bestselling author of The Empathy Exams brings us The Recovering, which explores addiction and recovery in America, in particular the stories we tell ourselves about addiction. Jamison also examines the relationship many well-known writers and artists had with addiction, including Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and more. The Recovering has received advance praise from Stephen King, Vivian Gornick, and Anne Fadiman. Chris Kraus described the The Recovering as "a courageous and brilliant example of what nonfiction writing can do." (Zoë)
America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo: As we enter year two of the Donald Trump presidency, Castillo's first novel challenges readers to look beyond the headlines to grasp the human dimension of America's lure to immigrants in this big-hearted family saga about three generations of women who struggle to reconcile the lives they left behind in the Philippines with the ones they are making for themselves in the American suburbs. (Michael)
Circe by Madeline Miller: It took Miller 10 years to write her Orange Prize-winning debut novel, The Song of Achilles. Happily, we only had to wait another five for Circe, even more impressive when one considers that the novel's story covers millennia. Here Miller again invokes the classical world and a massive cast of gods, nymphs, and mortals, but it's all seen through the knowing eyes of Circe, the sea-witch who captures Odysseus and turns men into monsters. (Kaulie)
Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires: A debut collection of stories exploring black identity and middle-class life in so-called "post-racial" America, with storylines ranging from gun violence and depression to lighter matters like a passive-aggressive fight between the mothers of school kids. George Saunders called these stories "vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive." (Lydia)
And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O'Connell: O'Connell's memoir—her first book—is here to remedy the "nobody tells you what it's really like" refrain of new mothers. Giving birth to her son in her 20s, after an unplanned pregnancy, O'Connell chronicles the seismic changes that happened to her body, routine, social life, and existential purpose before she knew what was coming. All the cool moms of literary twitter (including Edan!) are raving. (Janet)
Though I Get Home by YZ Chin: Winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, this debut is a linked collection of stories centering the through-character of Isabella Sin, a young woman from Malaysia who, among other things, is imprisoned for writing pornographic poetry. With titles like "When Starbucks Came" or "A Malaysian Man in Mayor Bloomberg's Silicon Alley," the book navigates Malaysian culture and politics and the way they play out in the lives of individuals. In a starred review, Kirkus calls this a "haunting, surprising, and rebellious collection that contains multitudes." (Lydia)
Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean: You've been reading Dean's reviews and journalism for some time at The Nation, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, The New Yorker, Slate, Salon The New Republic, et alia. Winner of the 2016 NBCC's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Dean is debuting her first book with apt timing: Sharp features intertwining depictions of our most important 20th-century female essayists and cultural critics—Susan Sontag, Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, Rebecca West, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, and others. A hybrid of biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp has been praised and starred by PW as a "stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers." (Sonya)
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee: In addition to receiving a starred review—and being named a Top 10 Essay Collection of Spring 2018—by Publishers Weekly, Chee's essay collection explores a myriad of topics that include identity, the AIDS crisis, Trump, tarot, bookselling, art, activism, and more. Ocean Vuong described the book as "life's wisdom—its hurts, joys and redemptions—salvaged from a great fire." (Zoë)
Disoriental by Négar Djavadi (translated by Tina Kover): From the waiting room of a French fertility clinic, a young woman revisits the stories of generations of her Iranian ancestors culminating in her parents, who brought her to France when she was 10. This French hit, published in English by Europa Editions, is called "a rich, irreverent, kaleidoscopic novel of real originality and power" by Alexander Maksik. (Lydia)
Black Swans by Eve Babitz: Until last year, Babitz was an obscure writer who chronicled hedonistic Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. And then Counterpoint and NYRB Classics began reissuing her memoirs and autofiction, and word of Babitz's unique voice began to spread. In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino wrote, "On the page, Babitz is pure pleasure—a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz." Novelist Catie Disabato asserts that Babitz "isn't the famous men she fucked or the photographs she posed in. She is the five books of memoir and fiction she left behind for young women, freshly moved to Los Angeles, to find." Black Swans is the latest in these recent reissues. Published in 1993, these stories/essays cover everything from the AIDS crisis to learning to tango. And, of course, the Chateau Marmont. (Edan)
Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen: An anthology of essays by 18 excellent writers who are also refugees, including Aleksandar Hemon, Porochista Khakpour, Maaza Mengiste, and Dina Nayeri. In a decade characterized by massive global displacement that seems likely to grow worse, this collection is both a reminder of the lives altered or destroyed by geopolitical happenings, and a gesture of aid: the publisher will donate $25,000 annually to the International Rescue Committee, or 10% of the book's cover price. (Lydia)
The Only Story by Julian Barnes: Give this to Barnes: the Man Booker laureate's not afraid of difficult premises. In his 13th novel, a college student named Paul spends a lazy summer at a tennis club, where he meets a middle-aged woman with two daughters around his age. Soon enough, the two are having an affair, and a flash-forward to a much-older Paul makes clear it upended their lives. (Thom)
How to Be Safe by Tom McCallister: This novel, by the author of The Young Widower's Handbook, is billed as We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Dept. of Speculation—those are two of my favorite books! Also? Tom McCallister…is a man! Although high school English teacher Anna Crawford is quickly exonerated after being named a suspect in a campus shooting, she nevertheless suffers intense scrutiny in the wake of the tragedy. As the jacket copy says, "Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she's somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online." Of the book, novelist Amber Sparks writes, "It's so wonderful—so furious and so funny and urgent and needed in this mad ugly space we're sharing with each other." Author Wiley Cash calls McCallister "an exceptionally talented novelist." (Edan)
Property by Lionel Shriver: This one comes with baggage–the first collection of short fiction by the author of the electrifying We Need to Talk about Kevin, but also Shriver's first published offering since she aired ill-considered views on cultural appropriation at the Brisbane Writer's Festival and later in the pages of The New York Times, impelling many thoughtful responses, like this op-ed by Kaitlyn Greenidge, or this essay by Viet Thanh Nguyen, or this conversation between Rivka Galchen and Anna Holmes, or this recent essay by Kirstin Chen. As for the new book, Kirkus calls the opening novella "stellar," but regrets that "in recent years, Shriver has become something of a scold in both her essays and fiction about what she sees as our overly sensitive, gumption-impaired society, and a handful of these stories are effectively chastising op-eds." (Lydia)
The Banal, Unexceptional Recovering
Carolyn Quimby
"So much of recovery is a fight against exceptionalism—that necessary act of saying, What I've lived has been lived before, will be lived again, is nothing special but still holds meaning, still holds truth." Chris Kraus interviews Leslie Jamison about recovery, memoir, and her forthcoming title, The Recovering, for The Paris Review. Pair with: our interview with Jamison.
Most Anticipated: The Great 2018 Book Preview
Editor | 10
Settle in, folks, because this is one the longest first-half previews we've run in a long while. Putting this together is a labor of love, and while a huge crop of great spring books increases the labor, it also means there is more here for readers to love. We'd never claim to be comprehensive—we know there are far more excellent books on the horizon than one list can hold, which is why we've started doing monthly previews in addition to the semi-annual lists (and look out for the January Poetry Preview, which drops tomorrow). But we feel confident we've put together a fantastic selection of (almost 100!) works of fiction, memoir, and essay to enliven your January through June 2018. What's in here? New fiction by giants like Michael Ondaatje, Helen DeWitt, Lynne Tillman, and John Edgar Wideman. Essays from Zadie Smith, Marilynne Robinson, and Leslie Jamison. Exciting debuts from Nafkote Tamirat, Tommy Orange, and Lillian Li. Thrilling translated work from Leïla Slimani and Clarice Lispector. A new Rachel Kushner. A new Rachel Cusk. The last Denis Johnson. The last William Trevor. The long-awaited Vikram Seth.
As Millions founder and publisher C. Max Magee wrote recently, you can help ensure that these previews, and all our great books coverage, continue for years to come by lending your support to the site as a member. The Millions has been running for nearly 15 years on a wing and a prayer, and we're incredibly grateful for the love of our recurring readers and current members who help us sustain the work that we do.
So don your specs, clear off your TBR surfaces, and prepare for a year that, if nothing else, will be full of good books.
The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani (translated by Sam Taylor): In her Goncourt Prize-winning novel, Slimani gets the bad news out of the way early—on the first page to be exact: "The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds. The doctor said he didn't suffer. The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a gray bag, which they zipped up." Translated from the French by Sam Taylor as The Perfect Nanny—the original title was Chanson Douce, or Lullaby—this taut story about an upper-class couple and the woman they hire to watch their child tells of good help gone bad. (Matt)
Halsey Street by Naima Coster: Coster's debut novel is set in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a rapidly gentrifying corner of Brooklyn. When Penelope Grand leaves a failed art career in Pittsburgh and comes home to Brooklyn to look after her father, she finds her old neighborhood changed beyond recognition. The narrative shifts between Penelope and her mother, Mirella, who abandoned the family to move to the Dominican Republic and longs for reconciliation. A meditation on family, love, gentrification, and home. (Emily)
Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro: Five years after her story collection, I Want to Show You More, drew raves from The New Yorker's James Wood and Dwight Garner at The New York Times, Quatro delivers her debut novel, which follows a married woman's struggle to reconcile a passionate affair with her fierce attachment to her husband and two children. "It's among the most beautiful books I've ever read about longing—for beauty, for sex, for God, for a coherent life," says Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You. (Michael)
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson: Johnson's writing has always had an antiphonal quality to it—the call and response of a man and his conscience, perhaps. In these stories, a dependably motley crew of Johnson protagonists find themselves forced to take stock as mortality comes calling. The writing has a more plangent tone than Angels and Jesus' Son, yet is every bit as edgy. Never afraid to look into the abyss, and never cute about it, Johnson will be missed. Gratefully, sentences like the following, his sentences, will never go away: "How often will you witness a woman kissing an amputation?" R.I.P. (Il'ja)
A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare (translated by John Hodgson): Kadare structures the novel like a psychological detective yarn, but one with some serious existential heft. The story is set physically in Communist Albania in the darkest hours of totalitarian rule, but the action takes place entirely in the head and life of a typically awful Kadare protagonist—Rudian Stefa, a writer. When a young woman from a remote province ends up dead with a provocatively signed copy of Stefa's latest book in her possession, it's time for State Security to get involved. A strong study of the ease and banality of human duplicity. (Il'ja)
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (translated by Jonathan Wright): The long-awaited English translation of the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 gives American readers the opportunity to read Saadawi's haunting, bleak, and darkly comic take on Iraqi life in 2008. Or, as Saadawi himself put it in interview for Arab Lit, he set out to write "the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone." (Check out Saadawi's Year in Reading here.) (Nick M.)
This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins: Wünderkind Jerkins has a background in 19th-century Russian lit and postwar Japanese lit, speaks six languages, works/has worked as editor and assistant literary agent; she writes across many genres—reportage, personal essays, fiction, profiles, interviews, literary criticism, and sports and pop culture pieces; and now we'll be seeing her first book, an essay collection. From the publisher: "This is a book about black women, but it's necessary reading for all Americans." The collected essays will cover topics ranging from "Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don't 'see color'; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of 'the fast-tailed girl' and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the 'Black Girl Magic' movement." (Sonya)
Mouths Don't Speak by Katia D. Ulysse: In Drifting, Ulysse's 2014 story collection, Haitian immigrants struggle through New York City after the 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of their county. In her debut novel, Ulysse revisits that disaster with a clearer and sharper focus. Jacqueline Florestant is mourning her parents, presumed dead after the earthquake, while her ex-Marine husband cares for their young daughter. But the expected losses aren't the most serious, and a trip to freshly-wounded Haiti exposes the way tragedy follows class lines as well as family ones. (Kaulie)
The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith: Smith's The Sky Is Yours, is a blockbuster of major label debuts. The dystopic inventiveness of this genre hybrid sci-fi thriller/coming of age tale/adventure novel has garnered comparisons to Gary Shteyngart, David Mitchell and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. And did I mention? It has dragons, too, circling the crumbling Empire Island, and with them a fire problem (of course), and features a reality TV star from a show called Late Capitalism's Royalty. Victor LaValle calls The Sky Is Yours "a raucous, inventive gem of a debut." Don't just take our word for it, listen to an audio excerpt. (Anne)
Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee: Spanning cultures and continents, Lee's assured debut novel tells the story of two sisters who are bound together and driven apart by the inescapable bonds of family. Miranda is the sensible one, thrust into the role of protector of Lucia, seven years younger, head-strong, and headed for trouble. Their mother emigrated from China to the U.S. after the death of their father, and as the novel unfurls in clear, accessible prose, we follow the sisters on journeys that cover thousands of miles and take us into the deepest recesses of the human heart. Despite its sunny title, this novel never flinches from big and dark issues, including interracial love, mental illness and its treatment, and the dislocations of immigrant life. (Bill)
The Infinite Future by Tim Wirkus: I read this brilliant puzzle-of-a-book last March and I still think about it regularly! The Infinite Future follows a struggling writer, a librarian, and a Mormon historian excommunicated from the church on their search for a reclusive Brazilian science fiction writer. In a starred review, Book Page compares Wirkus to Jonathan Lethem and Ron Currie Jr., and says the book "announces Wirkus as one of the most exciting novelists of his generation." I agree. (Edan)
The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette: With Winnette's fourth novel he proves he's adept at re-appropriating genre conventions in intriguing ways. His previous book, Haint's Stay, is a Western tale jimmyrigged for its own purposes and is at turns both surreal and humorous. Winnette's latest, The Job of the Wasp, takes on the Gothic ghost novel and is set in the potentially creepiest of places—an isolated boarding school for orphaned boys, in the vein of Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten, Jenny Erpenbeck's The Old Child, or even Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. "Witty and grisly" according to Kelly Link, strange and creepy, Job of the Wasp reveals Winnette's "natural talent" says Patrick deWitt. (Anne)
Brass by Xhenet Aliu: In what Publishers Weekly calls a "striking first novel," a daughter searches for answers about the relationship between her parents, a diner waitress from Waterbury, Conn. and a line cook who emigrated from Albania. Aliu writes a story of love, family, and the search for an origin story, set against the decaying backdrop of a post-industrial town. In a starred review, Kirkus writes "Aliu's riveting, sensitive work shines with warmth, clarity, and a generosity of spirit." (Lydia)
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin: Four adolescent sibling in 1960s New York City sneak out to see a psychic, who tells each of them the exact date they will die. They take this information with a grain of salt, and keep it from each other, but Benjamin's novel follows them through the succeeding decades, as their lives alternately intertwine and drift apart, examining how the possible knowledge of their impending death affects how they live. I'm going to break my no-novels-about-New-Yorkers rule for this one. (Janet)
King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich: This historical thriller features an ax-wielding psychopath wreaking havoc in the city of Sazeracs. It's been eight years since Rich moved to New Orleans, and in that time, he's been a keen observer, filing pieces on the city's storied history and changing identity for various publications, not least of all The New York Review of Books. He's certainly paid his dues, which is vitally important since the Big Easy is an historically difficult city for outsiders to nail without resorting to distracting tokenism (a pelican ate my beignet in the Ninth Ward). Fortunately, Rich is better than that. (Nick M.)
The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers: Eggers returns to his person-centered reportage with an account of a Yemeni-American man named Mokhtar Alkhanshali's efforts to revive the Yemeni tradition of coffee production just when war is brewing. A starred Kirkus review calls Eggers's latest "a most improbable and uplifting success story." (Lydia)
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist (translated by Henning Koch): A hit novel by a Swedish poet brought to English-reading audiences by Melville House. This autobiographical novel tells the story of a poet whose girlfriend leaves the world just as their daughter is coming into it–succumbing suddenly to undiagnosed leukemia at 33 weeks. A work of autofiction about grief and survival that Publisher's Weekly calls a "beautiful, raw meditation on earth-shattering personal loss." (Lydia)
Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett: The award-winning British historian (The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War) makes her fiction debut. Narrated by multiple characters, the historical novel spans three centuries and explores the very timely theme of immigration. Walls are erected and cause unforeseen consequences for both the present and futurey. In its starred review, Kirkus said the novel was "stunning for both its historical sweep and its elegant prose." (Carolyn)
Neon in Daylight by Hermione Hoby: A novel about art, loneliness, sex, and restless city life set against the backdrop of Hurricane Sandy-era New York, Neon in Daylight follows a young, adrift English catsitter as she explores the galleries of New York and develops an infatuation with a successful writer and his daughter, a barista and sex-worker. The great Ann Patchett called Hoby "a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty." (Lydia)
This Could Hurt by Jillian Medoff: Medoff works a double shift: when she isn't writing novels, she's working as a management consultant, which means, as her official bio explains, "that she uses phrases like 'driving behavior' and 'increasing ROI' without irony." In her fourth novel, she turns her attention to a milieu she knows very well, the strange and singular world of corporate America: five colleagues in a corporate HR department struggle to find their footing amidst the upheaval and uncertainty of the 2008-2009 economic collapse. (Emily)
The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce: Pierce's first novel is a fascinating and beautifully rendered meditation on ghosts, technology, marriage, and the afterlife. In a near-future world where holograms are beginning to proliferate in every aspect of daily life, a man dies—for a few minutes, from a heart attack, before he's revived—returns with no memory of his time away, and becomes obsessed with mortality and the afterlife. In a world increasingly populated by holograms, what does it mean to "see a ghost?" What if there's no afterlife? On the other hand, what if there is an afterlife, and what if the afterlife has an afterlife? (Emily)
Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates: The follow-up novel by the author of Black Chalk, an NPR Best of the Year selection. Yates's latest "Rashomon-style" literary thriller follows a group of friends up the Hudson, where they are involved in a terrible crime. "I Know What You Did Last Summer"-style, they reconvene years later, with dire consequences. The novel receives the coveted Tana French endorsement: she calls it "darkly, intricately layered, full of pitfalls and switchbacks, smart and funny and moving and merciless." (Lydia)
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez: In her latest novel, Nunez (a Year in Reading alum) ruminates on loss, art, and the unlikely—but necessary—bonds between man and dog. After the suicide of her best friend and mentor, an unnamed, middle-aged writing professor is left Apollo, his beloved, aging Great Dane. Publishers Weekly says the "elegant novel" reflects "the way that, especially in grief, the past is often more vibrant than the present." (Carolyn)
Feel Free by Zadie Smith: In her forthcoming essay collection, Smith provides a critical look at contemporary topics, including art, film, politics, and pop-culture. Feel Free includes many essays previously published in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and it is divided into five sections: In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free. Andrew Solomon described the collection as "a tonic that will help the reader reengage with life." (Zoë)
What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson: One of my favorite literary discoveries of 2017 was that there are two camps of Robinson fans. Are you more Housekeeping or Gilead? To be clear, all of us Housekeeping people claim to have loved her work before the Pulitzer committee agreed. But this new book is a collection of essays where Robinson explores the modern political climate and the mysteries of faith, including, "theological, political, and contemporary themes." Given that the essays come from Robinson's incisive mind, I think there will be more than enough to keep both camps happy. (Claire)
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones: In our greatest tragedies, there is the feeling of no escape—and when the storytelling is just right, we feel consumed by the heartbreak. In Jones's powerful new novel, Celestial and Roy are a married couple with optimism for their future. Early in the book, Jones offers a revelation about Roy's family, but that secret is nothing compared to what happens next: Roy is arrested for a crime he didn't commit, and sentenced to over a decade in prison. An American Marriage arrives in the pained, authentic voices of Celestial, Roy, and Andre—Celestial's longtime friend who moves into the space left by Roy's absence. Life, and love, must go on. When the couple writes "I am innocent" to each other in consecutive letters, we weep for their world—but Jones makes sure that we can't look away. (Nick R.)
The Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer: Nothing is what it seems in VanderMeer's fiction: bears fly, lab-generated protoplasm shapeshifts, and magic undoes science. In this expansion of his acclaimed novel Borne, which largely focused on terrestrial creatures scavenging a post-collapse wasteland, VanderMeer turns his attention upward. Up in the sky, things look a bit different. (Check out his prodigious Year in Reading here.) (Nick M.)
House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara: First made famous in the documentary Paris Is Burning, New York City's House of Xtravaganza is now getting a literary treatment in Cassara's debut novel—one that's already drawing comparisons to Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. The story follows teenage Angel, a young drag queen just coming into her own, as she falls in love, founds her own house and becomes the center of a vibrant—and troubled—community. Critics call it "fierce, tender, and heartbreaking." (Kaulie)
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi: A surreal, metaphysical debut novel dealing with myth, mental health, and fractured selves centering around Ada, a woman from southern Nigeria "born with one foot on the other side." She attends college in the U.S., where several internal voices emerge to pull her this way and that. Library Journal calls this "a gorgeous, unsettling look into the human psyche." (Lydia)
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas: The latest novel from the author of The Listeners follows five women of different station in a small town in Oregon in a U.S. where abortion and IVF have been banned and embryos have been endowed with all the rights of people. A glimpse at the world some of our current lawmakers would like to usher in, one that Maggie Nelson calls "mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring–not to mention a way forward for fiction now." (Lydia)
Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot: In her debut memoir, Mailhot—raised on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in southwestern Canada, presently a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue—grapples with a dual diagnosis of PTSD and Bipolar II disorder, and with the complicated legacy of a dysfunctional family. Sherman Alexie has hailed this book as "an epic take—an Iliad for the indigenous." (Emily)
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday: 2017 Whiting Award winner Halliday has written a novel interweaving the lives of a young American editor and a Kurdistan-bound Iraqi-American man stuck in an immigration holding room in Heathrow airport. Louise Erdrich calls this "a novel of deceptive lightness and a sort of melancholy joy." (Lydia)
Back Talk by Danielle Lazarin: long live the short story, as long as writers like Lazarin are here to keep the form fresh. The collection begins with "Appetite," narrated by nearly 16-year-old Claudia, whose mother died of lung cancer. She might seem all grown up, but "I am still afraid of pain—for myself, for all of us." Lazarin brings us back to a time when story collections were adventures in radical empathy: discrete panels of pained lives, of which we are offered chiseled glimpses. Even in swift tales like "Window Guards," Lazarin has a finely-tuned sense of pacing and presence: "The first time Owen shows me the photograph of the ghost dog, I don't believe it." Short stories are like sideways glances or overheard whispers that become more, and Lazarin makes us believe there's worth in stories that we can steal moments to experience. (Nick R.)
The Château by Paul Goldberg: In Goldberg's debut novel, The Yid, the irrepressible members of a Yiddish acting troupe stage manages a plot to assassinate Joseph Stalin in hopes of averting a deadly Jewish pogrom. In his second novel, the stakes are somewhat lower: a heated election for control of a Florida condo board. Kirkus writes that Goldberg's latest "confirms his status as one of Jewish fiction's liveliest new voices, walking in the shoes of such deadpan provocateurs as Mordecai Richler and Stanley Elkin." (Matt)
The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú: A memoir by a Whiting Award-winner who served as a U.S. border patrol agent. Descended from Mexican immigrants, Cantú spends four years in the border patrol before leaving for civilian life. His book documents his work at the border, and his subsequent quest to discover what happened to a vanished immigrant friend. (Lydia)
Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: If the driving force of Van der Vliet Oloomi's first novel, Fra Keeler, was "pushing narrative to its limits" through unbuilding and decomposition, her second novel, Call Me Zebra, promises to do the same through a madcap and darkly humorous journey of retracing the past to build anew. Bibi Abbas Abbas Hossein is last in a line of autodidacts, anarchists, and atheists, whose family left Iran by way of Spain when she was a child. The book follows Bibi in present day as she returns to Barcelona from the U.S., renames herself Zebra and falls in love. Van der Vliet Oloomi pays homage to a quixotic mix of influences—including Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kathy Acker—in Call Me Zebra, which Kirkus calls "a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it." (Anne)
Some Hell by Patrick Nathan: A man commits suicide, leaving his wife, daughter, and two sons reckoning with their loss. Focused on the twinned narratives of Colin, a middle schooler coming to terms with his sexuality, as well as Diane, his mother who's trying to mend her fractured family, Nathan's debut novel explores the various ways we cope with maturity, parenting, and heartbreak. (Read Nathan's Year in Reading here.) (Nick M.)
The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory: If 2017 was any indication, events in 2018 will try the soul. Some readers like to find escape from uncertain times with dour dystopian prognostications or strained family stories (and there are plenty). But what about something fun? Something with sex (and maybe, eventually, love). Something Roxane Gay called a "charming, warm, sexy gem of a novel….One of the best books I've read in a while." Something so fun and sexy it earned its author a two-book deal (look out for the next book, The Proposal, this fall). Wouldn't it feel good to feel good again? (Lydia)
The Census by Jesse Ball: Novelist Ball's nimble writing embodies the lightness and quickness that Calvino prized (quite literally, too: he pens his novels in a mad dash of days to weeks). And he is prolific, too. Since his previous novel, How to Start a Fire and Why, he has has written about the practice of lucid dreaming and his unique form of pedagogy, as well as a delightfully morbid compendium of Henry King's deaths, with Brian Evenson. Ball's seventh novel, The Census, tells the story of a dying doctor and his concern regarding who will care for his son with Down Syndrome, as they set off together on a cross-country journey. (Anne)
Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman: News of a new Tillman novel is worthy of raising a glass. Men and Apparitions is the follow-up novel to Tillman's brilliant, ambitious American Genius: A Comedy. Men and Apparitions looks closely at our obsession with the image through the perspective of cultural anthropologist Ezekiel "Zeke" Hooper Stark. Norman Rush says, "this book is compelling and bracing and you read many sentences twice to get all the juice there is in them." Sarah Manguso has said she is "grateful" for Tillman's "authentically weird and often indescribable books." I second that. (Anne)
Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith: Police officer Eamon Michael Royce is killed in the line of duty. His pregnant wife, Evi, narrates Eamon's passing with elegiac words: "I think of him making the drive, the gentle peachy July morning light illuminating his last moments, his last heartbeat, his last breath." Months later and wracked with grief, Evi falls for her brother-in-law Dalton: "Backyard-wandering, full-moon pregnant in my turquoise maternity dress and tobacco-colored cowboy boots. I'd lose my way. Dalton would find me. He was always finding me." The sentences in Cross-Smith's moving debut are lifted by a sense of awe and mystery—a style attuned to the graces of this world. Whiskey & Ribbons turns backward and forward in time: we hear Eamon's anxieties about fatherhood, and Dalton's continuous search for meaning in his life. "I am always hot, like I'm on fire," Evi dreams later in the novel, still reliving her husband's death, "burning and gasping for air." In Cross-Smith's novel, the past is never forgotten. (Nick R.)
The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani): In a New Yorker essay on Tawada, author of Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Riva Galchen wrote that "often in [her] work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one's own." Tawada's latest disorienting mythology is set in a Japan ravaged by a catastrophe. If children are the future, what does it presage that, post-disaster, they are emerging from the womb as frail, aged creatures blessed with an uncanny wisdom? (Read her Year in Reading here.) (Matt)
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst: Hollinghurst's sixth novel has already received glowing reviews in the U.K. As the title suggests, the plot hinges on a love affair, and follows two generations of the Sparsholt family, opening in 1940 at Oxford, just before WWII. The Guardian called it "an unashamedly readable novel…indeed it feels occasionally like Hollinghurst is trying to house all the successful elements of his previous books under the roof of one novel." To those of us who adore his books, this sounds heavenly. (Hannah)
The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector (translated by Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser): Since Katrina Dodson published a translation of Lispector's complete stories in 2015, the Brazilian master's popularity has enjoyed a resurgence. Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser's new translation of Lispector's second novel promises to extend interest in the deceased writer's work. It tells the story of Virginia, a sculptor who crafts intricate pieces in marked isolation. This translation marks the first time The Chandelier has ever appeared in English (Ismail).
The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat: It's very easy to love this novel but difficult to describe it. A disarming narrator begins her account from a community with strange rules and obscure ideology located on an unnamed island. While she and her father uneasily bide their time in this not-quite-utopia, she reflects on her upbringing in Boston, and a friendship–with the self-styled leader of the city's community of Ethiopian immigrants–that begins to feel sinister. As the story unfolds, what initially looked like a growing-up story in a semi-comic key becomes a troubling allegory of self-determination and sacrifice. (Lydia)
Let's No One Get Hurt by Jon Pineda: A fifteen-year-old girl named Pearl lives in squalor in a southern swamp with her father and two other men, scavenging for food and getting by any way they can. She meets a rich neighbor boy and starts a relationship, eventually learning that his family holds Pearl's fate in their hands. Publisher's Weekly called it "an evocative novel about the cruelty of children and the costs of poverty in the contemporary South." (Lydia)
The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg: Fairy tales get a feminist spin in this short story collection inspired by Ortberg's most popular Toast column, "Children's Stories Made Horrific." This is not your childhood Cinderella, but one with psychological horror and Ortberg's signature snark. Carmen Maria Machado calls it a cross between, "Terry Pratchett's satirical jocularity and Angela Carter's sinister, shrewd storytelling, and the result is gorgeous, unsettling, splenic, cruel, and wickedly smart." Can't wait to ruin our favorite fables! (Tess)
The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea: Urrea is one of the best public speakers I've ever seen with my 35-year-old eyes, so it's incredible that it's not even the thing he's best at. He's the recipient of an American Book Award and a Pulitzer nominee for The Devil's Highway. His new novel is about the daily life of a multi-generational Mexican-American family in California. Or as he puts it, "an American family—one that happens to speak Spanish and admire the Virgin of Guadalupe." (Janet)
Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala: Nearly 15 years after his critically-acclaimed debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, was published, Iweala is back with a story as deeply troubling. Teenagers Niru and Meredith are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When Niru's secret is accidentally revealed (he's queer), there is unimaginable and unspeakable consequences for both teens. Publishers Weekly's starred review says the "staggering sophomore novel" is "notable both for the raw force of Iweala's prose and the moving, powerful story." (Carolyn)
American Histories: Stories by John Edgar Wideman: Wideman's new book is a nearly fantastical stretching and blurring of conventional literary forms—including history, fiction, philosophy, biography, and deeply felt personal vignettes. We get reimagined conversations between the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the doomed white crusader for racial equality John Brown. We get to crawl inside the mind of a man sitting on the Williamsburg Bridge, ready to jump. We get Wideman pondering deaths in his own family. We meet Jean Michel Basquiat and Nat Turner. What we get, in the end, is a book unlike any other, the work of an American master working at peak form late in a long and magnificent career. (Bill)
Happiness by Aminatta Forna: A novel about what happens when an expert on the habits of foxes and an expert on the trauma of refugees meet in London, one that Paul Yoon raved about it in his Year in Reading: "It is a novel that carries a tremendous sense of the world, where I looked up upon finishing and sensed a shift in what I thought I knew, what I wanted to know. What a gift." In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly says "Forna's latest explores instinct, resilience, and the complexity of human coexistence, reaffirming her reputation for exceptional ability and perspective." (Lydia)
The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa (translated by Edith Grossman): The Nobel Prize winner's latest arrives in translation from the extraordinary Edith Grossman. The Neighborhood is symphonic, a "thriller," if you can call it that, about a detective whose wife gets roped into a debilitating situation. It is set in Llosa's 1990s Peru, and you see this place with its paradox of grayness and color, juxtaposed with spots of blood. Two women married to very affluent men are having a lesbian affair, and one of their husbands, Enrique, is being blackmailed. When he fails to meet a photo magazine editor's demands, he is slandered with photos of an erotic encounter on the front pages of the magazine. These two threads will converge at a point of explosion as is wont with Llosa's novels. While this may not be his best work, it will keep readers reading all the way. (Chigozie)
My Dead Parents by Anya Yurchyshyn: Sometimes truth is more fascinating than fiction. Such is the case with Yurchyshyn's My Dead Parents, which started as an anonymous Tumblr blog where the author posted photos and slivers of her parents' correspondences in an attempt to piece together the mystery of their lives. Yurchyshyn's father was a banker who died in Ukraine in a car "accident" that was possibly a hit when she was 16, and years later, though not many, her mother succumbed to alcoholism. Her parents made an enviously handsome couple, but they lived out Leo Tolstoy's adage of each family being unhappy in its own way. Yurchyshyn's tale is one of curiosity and discovery; it's also an inquiry into grief and numbness. Her Buzzfeed essay, "How I Met My Dead Parents," provides an apt introduction. (Anne)
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas: Year in Reading alum and author of The Oracle of Stamboul explores the history of Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue (site of the famous Cairo Geniza document trove discovered in the nineteenth century) through the story of its generations of Muslim watchmen as gleaned by their modern-day, Berkeley-dwelling scion. Rabih Alameddine calls it "a beautiful, richly textured novel, ambitious and delicately crafted…a joy." (Lydia)
Bury What We Cannot Take by Kirstin Chen: This is an atmospheric novel of betrayal and ardent allegiance to ideology and political choices. When young Ah Liam decides it's virtuous to report the resistance of his grandmother to Maoist rule to the authorities, he unravels his family with his own hands. His decision leads to the family having to flee the country and for them to have to make a decision: leave a fraction of the family behind or face greater harm. With its striking title about the sacrifice (the "burying") of those who are left behind, the novel succeeds in drawing a very striking portrait of this turbulent period of Chinese history. (Chigozie)
Memento Park by Mark Sarvas: Many of us who have been with The Millions for some years surely remember Sarvas's pioneer lit blog, The Elegant Variation—and look forward to his second novel, Memento Park, 10 years after his critically acclaimed Harry, Revised. Memento Park is about art, history, Jewishness, fathers and sons: Joseph O'Neill writes pithily, "A thrilling, ceaselessly intelligent investigation into the crime known as history." So far, Kirkus praises Sarvas for "skillful prose and well-drawn characters." (Sonya)
Wrestling with the Devil by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Famously, Kenyan author Ngugi wrote his Gikuyu novel Devil on the Cross while serving out a prison sentence. (And he did it on toilet paper, no less.) Now, the writer whom Chimamanda Adichie calls "one of the greatest of our time" is releasing a memoir of his prison stay, begun a half-hour before he was finally released. Taking the form of an extended flashback, the memoir begins at the moment of the author's arrest and ends, a year later, when he left prison with a novel draft. (Thom)
Stray City by Chelsey Johnson: Twenty-something artist Andrea ran away from the Midwest to Portland to escape the expectation to be a mother and create a life for herself as a queer artist. Then, confused and hurt by a break-up, she hooked up with a man—and ended up having his child. Chelsey Johnson's debut novel, which comes after a successful run of short stories like the Ploughshares Solo "Escape and Reverse," is a humorous and heartfelt exploration of sexual identity and unconventional families. (Ismail)
America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo: As we enter year two of the Donald Trump presidency, Castillo's first novel challenges readers to look beyond the headlines to grasp the human dimension of America's lure to immigrants in this big-hearted family saga about three generations of Filipina women who struggle to reconcile the lives they left behind in the Philippines with the ones they are making for themselves in the American suburbs. (Michael)
You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld: Is Sittenfeld a serious literary novelist who dabbles in chick lit? Is she a writer of frothy beach reads who happens to have an MFA from Iowa? Do such distinctions still have any meaning in today's fiction market? Readers can decide for themselves when Sittenfeld publishes her first story collection, after five novels that have ranged from her smash debut Prep to American Wife, her critically acclaimed "fictional biography" of former First Lady Laura Bush. (Michael)
Varina by Charles Frazier: Returning to the setting of his NBA winning Cold Mountain, Frazier taps into the American Civil War, specifically the life of Varina Howell Davis, the teenage bride of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. In this personal tragedy set in an epic period of American history, Frazier examines how "being on the wrong side of history carries consequences" regardless of one's personal degree of involvement in the offense. Something to think about. (Il'ja)
Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean: You've been reading Dean's reviews and journalism for some time at The Nation, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, The New Yorker, Slate, Salon The New Republic, et alia. Winner of the 2016 NBCC's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Dean is debuting her first book with apt timing: Sharp features intertwining depictions of our most important 20th-century female essayists and cultural critics—Susan Sontag, Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, Rebecca West, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, and others. A hybrid of biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp has been praised and starred by PW as "stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers." (Sonya)
Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley: Crosley, author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake, returns with a new collection of essays. Ten years removed from her debut, Crosley takes on issues ranging from the pressures of fertility, to swingers, to confronting her own fame. Look Alive promises to be a worthwhile follow-up to Crosley's 2011 collection How Did You Get This Number?. (Ismail)
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis): In this torrential inner monologue out from Oakland publisher Transit Books, a woman reflects on music, politics and her affair with a musician, a pianist obsessed with the 1910 self-portrait painted by Arnold Schoenberg, a haunting, blue-tinted work in which the composer's"expression promised nothing positive for the art of the future, conveyed an anxiety for the future, looked far beyond any definition of the work of art or of the future." (Matt)
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje: From internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient and Divisidero among his other works, this new novel from Ondaatje is set in the decade after World War II. When their parents move to Singapore, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, are left in London under the watchful eye of a mysterious figure called The Moth. As they become immersed in his eccentric circle of friends, they are both protected and educated in confusing ways. The mystery deepens when their mother returns months later without their father, but gives them no explanation. Years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover the story through a journey of facts, recollection, and imagination. If only Anthony Minghella were still with us to make the movie. (Claire)
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner: In her third novel, two-time National Book Award-finalist Kushner writes about a woman named Romy Hall who is serving two consecutive life sentences (plus six years) in a prison in California's Central Valley. The year is 2003, and the Mars Room in the title refers to a strip club in San Francisco where Romy used to dance; according to the jacket copy, Kushner details "the deadpan absurdities of institutional living…with humor and precision." George Saunders calls Kushner "a young master" and Robert Stone wrote that she is "a novelist of the very first order." Check out this short excerpt published by Entertainment Weekly. (Edan)
Some Trick by Helen DeWitt: If you periodically spend afternoons sitting around wondering when you will get to read something new by DeWitt, this is your season. In May we get 13 stories from the brilliant writer who brought us The Last Samurai—one of the best books of this or any millennium—and the evilly good Lightning Rods. In this collection DeWitt will evidently apply her mordant virtuosity to territory ranging from statistics to publishing. (Lydia)
Motherhood by Sheila Heti: Heti's previous two books have created and followed lines of inquiry—with Misha Glouberman she wrote a book of conversational philosophy, The Chairs Are Where People Go. Heti's novel How Should a Person Be? is an early work of autofiction that delves deep into art-making and friendship. Some called it a literary form of reality TV, making James Wood's backhanded assessment of the book as both "unpretentious" and "narcissistic" quite the unintentional compliment. Heti's new novel Motherhood follows in a similar line of existential questioning—the narrator approaches the topic of motherhood, asking not when but if she should endeavor to become a mother at all. (Anne)
That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam: "Just because something is natural doesn't mean it's easy." Priscilla Johnson says those words to Rebecca Stone early in Alam's novel. Rebecca's just given birth to her son Jacob, and the novel's first scene feels both dizzying and precise—a visceral reminder of life's complex surprises. Priscilla is the hospital staffer who most calms Rebecca's anxieties, so much that she asks Priscilla to be Jacob's nanny. A few years later, Priscilla's own pregnancy ends in heartbreak. Rebecca's decision to adopt Andrew is complex: she loves and misses Priscilla, and dearly loves this boy, but is she ready for the reality of raising a black son as a white mother? Alam's sharp narrative asides—lines like "Some percentage of the things she did for the children were actually for her"—carry such weight and truth that we trust his route toward the bigger question of the book: are we ever ready for the pain and joy that life delivers us? (Nick R.)
Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk: Four years since publishing his last novel, Palahniuk returns in the era of fake news, obvious government corruption, and widespread despair. (It's as though the protagonists in his most famous novels were right from the start.) In Adjustment Day, these themes weave together in the form of a mysterious day of reckoning orchestrated by an out of touch, aging group of elected officials. (Nick M.)
Last Stories by William Trevor: Prior to his death in November 2016, Trevor told a friend that the book he was working on would be called Last Stories. That is this book—the last we will ever have from the Irish author. Six of the 10 stories included here have never been published before, and what preview would be sufficient? Perhaps just this: if the engine of accomplished fiction truly is empathy, then you will be hard pressed to uncover a finer practitioner of the core humanity that inspired and inspires this deliberate, and personal, epitaph. RIP. (Il'ja)
MEM by Bethany Morrow In this debut novel set in a speculative past, a Montreal-based scientist discovers a way to extract memories from people, resulting in physical beings, Mems, who are forced to experience the same memory over and over. Complications ensue when one of the Mems, Dolores Extract #1, begins to make and form her own memories. (Hannah)
The Ensemble by Aja Gabel: A novel about art and friendship and the fraught world of accomplished musicians—four young friends who comprise a string quartet. Mat Johnson said Gabel's novel "deserves a standing ovation." For a taste of Gabel's prose, read her Best American Essays-notable piece on grief and eating ortolans in France. (Lydia)
The Lost Empress by Sergio De La Pava: De La Pava's first novel, A Naked Singularity, was the rare self-published novel to receive critical acclaim, including the PEN/Bingham Prize. The Lost Empress is as ambitious as his first, a 672-page doorstopper that takes on both football and the criminal justice system. The novel has a large cast, but centers on two characters: Nina Gill, the daughter of the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and presumed heir to the franchise; and Nuno DeAngeles, "a brilliant criminal mastermind," who gets himself thrown into prison in order to commit a crime. (Hannah)
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley: New York-bred writer Brinkley (and Year in Reading alum) delivers this anticipated debut story collection. Ranging from encounters on the New York subway to a young boy's first encounter with the reality of racial hierarchy, these sensitive and probing stories promise to captivate. If you've read Brinkley's title story "A Lucky Man" in A Public Space, then you know that he's a talent to watch. (Ismail)
Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel: Bullwinkel's stories are fantastic and fabulist feats that (often) address our messy, cumbersome bodies in thrilling and imaginative ways. For example: in lieu of a bra, a man is hired to support a daughter's breasts; a woman whose plastic surgeon, when fixing her eyes, leaves her with a turkey neck (not literally but); twin brothers Gleb and Oleg, surgeon and sculptor, live in a prison infirmary and perform a thumb transplant. A compelling new voice, Bullwinkel has had stories in Tin House, Guernica, and Noon. Her first book, the story collection Belly Up, will be published by A Strange Object. (Anne)
The Pisces by Melissa Broder: You may know Broder because of her incredible So Sad Today tweets. If you do, you won't be surprised to hear about her novel, The Pisces, which follows a Ph.D student in love with a Californian merman. The student, Lucy, has a breakdown after nine years of grad school, which compels her Angeleno sister to invite her to dogsit at her place. On the beach, a merman appears, and Lucy embarks on a romance that seems impossible. (Thom)
Kudos by Rachel Cusk: When I first encountered Cusk's writing in the mid-aughts I wrote her off as an author of potentially tedious domestic drama. I was woefully wrong. It's true Cusk is a chronicler of the domestic: she is as known for her memoirs of motherhood and divorce as she is for her novels, but her writing is innovative, observant, and bold. The New Yorker declared that with the trilogy that her latest novel Kudos completes, Cusk has "renovated" the novel, merging fiction with oral history, retooling its structure. Cusk has said: "I've never treated fiction as a veil or as a thing to hide behind, which perhaps was, not a mistake exactly, but a sort of risky way to live." (Anne)
A Suitable Girl by Vikram Seth: Reportedly delayed by writer's block brought on by a breakup, Seth has finally produced the much-anticipated sequel to his international smash of 1993, A Suitable Boy. That novel, a gargantuan epic set in post-independence India in the 1950s, was a multi-family saga built around the pursuit of a suitable husband in a world of arranged marriages. In the "jump sequel," the original protagonist is now in her 80s and on the prowl for a worthy bride for her favorite grandson. Though best-known for A Suitable Boy, the versatile Seth has produced novels, poetry, opera, a verse novel, a travel book, and a memoir. (Bill)
Florida by Lauren Groff: After collecting fans like Barack Obama with her bestselling novel Fates and Furies, Groff's next book is a collection of short stories that center around Florida, "the landscape, climate, history, and state of mind." Included is "Dogs Go Wolf," the haunting story that appeared in The New Yorker earlier in the year. In a recent interview, Groff gave us the lay of the land: "The collection is a portrait of my own incredible ambivalence about the state where I've lived for twelve years...I love the disappearing natural world, the sunshine, the extraordinary and astonishing beauty of the place as passionately as I hate the heat and moisture and backward politics and the million creatures whose only wish is to kill you." (Claire)
There There by Tommy Orange: Set in Oakland, Orange's novel describes the disparate lives that come together for the Oakland Powwow and what happens to them when they get there. In an extraordinary endorsement, Sherman Alexie writes that Orange's novel "is truly the first book to capture what it means to be an urban Indian—perhaps the first novel ever to celebrate and honor and elevate the joys and losses of urban Indians. You might think I'm exaggerating but this book is so revolutionary—evolutionary—that Native American literature will never be the same." (Lydia)
Upstate by James Wood: It's been 15 years since Wood's first novel, The Book Against God, was published. What was Wood doing in the meantime? Oh, just influencing a generation of novelists from his perch at The New Yorker, where his dissecting reviews also functioned as miniature writing seminars. He also penned a writing manual, How Fiction Works. His sophomore effort concerns the Querry family, who reunite in upstate New York to help a family member cope with depression and to pose the kinds of questions fiction answers best: How do people get through difficulty? What does it mean to be happy? How should we live our lives? (Hannah)
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai: This third novel from the acclaimed author of The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House interlaces the story of an art gallery director whose friends are succumbing to the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Chicago with a mother struggling to find her estranged daughter 30 years later in contemporary Paris. "The Great Believers is by turns funny, harrowing, tender, devastating, and always hugely suspenseful," says Margot Livesey, author of Mercury. (Michael)
Good Trouble by Joseph O'Neill: Frequent New Yorker and Harper's readers will know that O'Neill has been writing a lot of short fiction lately. With the new Good Trouble, the Netherland author now has a full collection, comprised of 11 off-kilter, unsettling stories. Their characters range from a would-be renter in New York who can't get anyone to give him a reference to a poet who can't decide whether or not to sign a petition. (Thom)
Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li: A family chronicle, workplace drama, and love story rolled into one, Li's debut chronicles the universe of the Beijing Duck House restaurant of Rockville, Md., run by a family and long-time employees who intertwine in various ways when disaster strikes. Lorrie Moore raves, "her narratives are complex, mysterious, moving, and surprising." (Lydia)
SICK by Porochista Khakpour: In her much anticipated memoir SICK, Khakpour chronicles her arduous experience with illness, specifically late-stage Lyme disease. She examines her efforts to receive a diagnosis and the psychological and physiological impact of being so sick for so long, including struggles with mental health and addiction. Khakpour's memoir demonstrates the power of survival in the midst of pain and uncertainty. (Zoë)
Fight No More by Lydia Millet: Millet's 2010 collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Eight years later she's released another collection of stories arranged around a real estate broker and their family as they struggle to reconnect. Millet's satire is well-known for it's sharp brutality—and its compassionate humanity. Both sides are on full display here. (Kaulie)
Tonight I'm Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson: Examining the intersection of social media and intimacy, the commercial and the corporeal, the theme of Hodson's essay collection is how we are pushed and pulled by our desire. The Catapult teacher's debut has been called "racingly good…refreshing and welcome" by Maggie Nelson. (Tess)
Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt: On the heels of her critically praised debut, The Daughters, Celt gives us a love-triangle story that, according to the publisher, is "inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core." The protagonist is a young Russian refugee named Zoya who becomes entangled with her boarding school's visiting writer, Leo Orlov, and his imperious wife, Vera. Our own Edan Lepucki praised the novel as "a sexy, brilliant, and gripping novel about the fine line between passion and obsession. I am in awe of Celt's mastery as a prose stylist and storyteller; I can't stop thinking about this amazing book." (Sonya)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Transform traditional trifle into a red velvet Christmas confection by adding vanilla cream cheese filling and seasonal berries.
1. Place the cream cheese and icing sugar in a glass bowl and whisk until smooth.
2. In another glass bowl, whip the cream and vanilla essence until soft peaks form.
3. Whisk a third of the whipped cream into the cream cheese mix and then gently fold in the rest.
4. Place half of the cubed red velvet cake into the base of a trifle bowl and spoon half of the cream cheese filling over it.
5. Scatter the remaining red velvet cake on top of the filling and top with the last of the cream cheese mix.
6. Garnish with fresh seasonal berries and a light dusting of icing sugar.