This week, new Stephen King, the newest Nobel winner, and mapping the cosmos.
Easy Death by Daniel Boyd (Hard Case Crime) - Set in December 1951, Boyd’s winning first crime novel will appeal to classic noir aficionados and retro hipsters alike. Bud Sweeney (called “Brother Sweetie” behind his back), local car dealer and Midwestern crime boss, sends several of his henchmen out into a blizzard, one posing as a police officer, to intercept and rob an armored car. WWII vets Eddie and Walter, one white and the other black, make off with the loot, but get into a real mess trying to keep it when they step into an odd subplot involving a formidable female park ranger and her drunken, psychotic boss. The wild narrative jumps back and forth over a 24-hour period before and after the heist.
Loitering: New & Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio (Tin House) - This powerful collection (11 essays from Ophans, plus new and uncollected work) highlights D’Ambrosio’s ability to mine his personal history for painful truths about the frailty of family and the strange quest to understand oneself, and in turn, be understood. In his strongest essays, including an account of a trip to a Russian orphanage, a reminiscence of hopping freight trains, and wrenching family stories, he avoids pathos and uses telling detail to get at some larger truths. In an essay on J.D. Salinger’s short stories, D’Ambrosio (also known for his fiction) writes about the suicide of his youngest brother. In a Russian orphanage, he talks with children who will have a hard road ahead, and conveys that he, too, is making his way in a world full of holes, gaps, and scars.
Street of Thieves by Mathias Enard, trans. from the French by Charlotte Mandell (Open Letter) - Set against a backdrop of rising Islamic extremism, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement, Énard’s (Zone) latest novel is a howling elegy for thwarted youth. The narrator, a young Moroccan called Lakhdar, spends his time in Tangier ogling girls with his friend Bassam and reading French detective novels. After he is caught naked with his cousin Meryem, his father disowns him. Enter Sheikh Nureddin, who offers Lakhdar a job as a bookseller for the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, whose under-the-table titles include pamphlets by Sayyid Qutb (an Egyptian writer and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and ’60s who was executed in 1966 for plotting the assassination of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser), pointing to the group’s nefarious aims.
The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions) - This beautiful and ambitious novel by German writer Erpenbeck (Visitation) explores the many paths life can take. A baby girl dies accidentally in a small Eastern European town during the early years of the 20th century, spinning her family into disarray. But what if she had survived? Divided into five sections, each of which imagines a possible endpoint for the nameless female protagonist, the book begins with her death as an infant in Galicia, in the Hapsburg Empire, and spans nearly a century. The second section finds the teen girl living in wartime Vienna, hungry and rebellious. Her fate will hinge on an anguished stranger whom she meets after a heartbreak of her own. In the third section, she has left Vienna for Moscow, where she is an impassioned Communist worrying about her husband’s arrest and fighting to secure her own place within the party. The story concludes with two more possibilities for her as she continues life in Russia and Berlin.
The Trace by Forrest Gander (New Directions) - Poet and translator Gander's second novel (after As a Friend) begins with a riveting opening scene depicting a gruesome beheading of a faceless character inside a grime-caked bathroom. What follows is seemingly incongruous—tight, eloquently expressed chapters describing a distraught couple's road trip through the barren but seductive desert landscapes of Texas and Mexico, retracing the last steps legendary journalist Amrbose Bierce took before his unsolved death in 1913 while covering the Mexican Revolution. Though Dale and Hoa play at conducting research for Dale's book on Bierce, they mostly spend long hours in the car trying to bridge the crevasse that developed between them following their son's psych ward stint and disappearance. The pair's circumstances go from bad to worse when their rental car breaks down, leaving them panicked and stranded miles from nowhere in the blazing heat without water or cell signal.
Galaxy: Mapping the Cosmos by James Geach (Univ. of Chicago) - Astrophysicist Geach goes an order of magnitude further than the usual popular astronomy title—those full of breathtaking images, but little in the way of context—by giving readers the fascinating stories revealed by those images: how galaxies are created, how they evolve, and what they tell us about our universe. The sheer variety is stunning: "grand design" spirals like our Milky Way; barred spirals; irregular and amorphous galaxies with no discernible structure; dynamic interacting and colliding galaxies where new stars form like popcorn; and quasars, ancient, distant galaxies whose central black holes spew copious amounts of x-ray, ultraviolet, and visible radiation. Living in the Milky Way gives us an insider's view of a typical spiral galaxy, with its broad disc of stars surrounding a bulge or hub of older stars cloaking a supermassive black hole.
The Pushcart Prize XXXIX edited by Bill Henderson (Pushcart) - For sheer value, this annual volume tops all others, with more than 60 pieces of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The quality is exceptional; the diversity, ditto. There are scores of contributing editors and more than 20 pages of publications from which the selections are chosen. With such a range and quantity in the mix, readers will get many suggestions for further reading, whatever their taste. Higher-profile contributors include Karen Russell, Louise Glück, Rick Bass, Edward Hoagland, and Russell Banks. The pieces that bookend the anthology are memorable. Emma Duffy-Comparone’s “The Zen Thing,” a fiction debut that first appeared in One Story, follows family dynamics during a beach getaway with blithe incisiveness. Marilyn Hacker’s darker but similarly insightful poem “Ghazal” (from Little Star) examines female identity in a transfixing way. Essential reading, as always.
Jim's Lion by Russell Hoban, illus. by Alexis Deacon (Candlewick) - The late Hoban’s story about a boy battling a mortal illness was first published in 2001. Turning it into a graphic novel is a tricky prospect, but Deacon (who illustrated Hoban’s Soonchild) is fully up to the task. Jim lies in a hospital bed, gravely ill. He knows he may die. The ward nurse, Nurse Bami, an African woman “with tribal scars on her cheeks,” tells Jim that he must search for his finder, the animal in his head “who can bring you back from wherever the doctors send you.” Jim’s finder, it emerges, is a lion, and, in watercolors simultaneously delicate and taut with emotion, Deacon imagines Jim and his lion fighting his sickness. Small panels capture with marvelous powers of invention the hallucinatory nature of sickness. Dreamlike worlds of death threaten to engulf Jim, are beaten back, then gather strength and attack again.
Revival by Stephen King (Scribner) - This spellbinding supernatural thriller from MWA Grand Master King chronicles one man’s efforts to, as narrator Jamie Morton phrases it, “tap into the secrets of the universe.” Charles Jacobs, a Methodist minister in rural Harlow, Maine, loses his faith when his wife and child die in a hideous car accident, but not his obsessive interest in electricity. Over the next 50 years, Jamie—a devoted congregant of Jacobs’s when young, but a wary skeptic as he matures—crosses paths with his friend as the constantly experimenting Jacobs graduates from carnival huckster, to faith healer, and finally to mad scientist convinced that he can harness a “secret electricity” to get a glimpse of “some unknown existence beyond our lives.”
Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish (Tyrant) - Lish's stunning debut novel plumbs the underbelly of New York City, tracing the relationship of Zou Lei, a Chinese immigrant working in a tiny noodle restaurant, and Skinner, an AWOL Iraqi war veteran and wanderer. Enduring stints in prison and homelessness, Zou Lei and Skinner experience life on society’s fringes. Lish destroys the American dream with the struggles his characters face—for Zou Lei, it’s enough to survive: “forget living like an American. It was enough to be free on the streets.” New York City is anything but idyllic; through the perspective of the two protagonists, it is frightening and cruel and alien. Zou Lei and Skinner have their budding relationship tested by insurmountable odds, and their own foibles and peculiarities are rendered with vivid detail. Lish’s prose is at once raw and disciplined, and every word feels necessary.
Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano, trans. from the French by Mark Polizzotti (Yale Univ.) - This set of three newly translated novellas from 2014 Nobel winner Modiano is propitious in timing and format: the collection’s variety gives curious readers a broad introduction to a writer of purposefully narrow scope. Modiano has facetiously admitted to repeatedly writing the same book, usually a meditative investigation winding its ways through the City of Lights to illuminate, though never fully reveal, some lingering mystery from the period of Nazi Occupation. These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano’s approach and the dark romance of his Paris, a city “in which adventure lay right around every street corner.” “Afterimage,” the tautest, most affecting work, is a shadowy tale in which a young writer obsessively catalogs the work of a haunted photographer who “did everything he could to be forgotten.” The title novella, a child’s eye view of the colorful gang of ex-circus performers and crooks who helped raise him, relates the boy’s sense of wonder and confusion amid his charmed, if sordid, surroundings. In the slackest of the three, “Flowers of Ruin,” a sensationalist double suicide case occasions a murky investigation into the gangsters and collaborators who sported “strange names and fake noble titles” during the Occupation.
The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze (Viking) - Tooze, professor of history and codirector of international security studies at Yale University, successfully maps the "emergence of [a] new order of power" from the ashes of WWI. That order was U.S.-centered and had "three major facets—moral authority backed by military power and economic supremacy"—and, Tooze argues, it arose in the context of a "multisided, polycentric search for strategies of pacification and appeasement." America intervened somewhat unwillingly in WWI, after the Eurasian crisis dragged out for several years. Its entry into the war allowed the Entente to secure a victory, but the Treaty of Versailles yielded only a "patchwork world order." The U.S.'s synergy of "exceptionalist ideology" and "Burkean wisdom" gave it a conservative perspective on its future—a perspective that, Tooze argues, clashed immediately with its "pivotal role" in a fragile global economy.
