March 23, 2024
This week we have novels brimming with hilarity and heartbreak, farce and catastrophe. Each extreme is hard to pull off, but these writers have achieved the delicate balance. Locations and times as diverse as the ancient world; contemporary Brooklyn; 18th-century Puritan New England; and modern-day Lagos serve as the settings. We also include an important look at how race has been categorized and acknowledged, through the lens of writers who have contributed brilliantly to the history of Black literature.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
-
.
Glorious Exploits
By FERDIA LENNON
Published by HENRY HOLT AND CO.
You won’t read anything quite like this totally original debut novel this year. We are in Syracuse, Sicily in the 400s B.C. during the Peloponnesian War. Athenian prisoners have been thrown into a nasty quarry to starve and melt in the sun. Felon and Lampo, two old friends, who sound oddly like contemporary Irishmen, decide to put on a play by Euripides using the prisoners as actors. They have never directed a play before. What could be more ridiculous? Lennon’s first novel combines the sensibilities of Beckett and a Mel Brooks movie with a soupcon of Kevin Barry in a truly delightful and entertaining piece of fiction.
-
.
All the World Beside
By GARRARD CONLEY
Published by RIVERHEAD BOOKS
You might recall Conley from his searing memoir, Boy Erased, about his religious upbringing in Arkansas and the gay conversion therapy he was forced to attend. In his new novel, a utopian Christian settlement in Massachusetts in the 1700s seems an appropriate setting to explore the sort of brainwashing he endured in a Fundamentalist household. A Reverend and one of his followers, both married men, fall into a passionate affair. Like The Scarlet Letter, this novel presents a community that ostracizes ‘the other.’ The taboo of love between two men is brought to life in this dramatic and poignant story.
.
-
.
Worry
By ALEXANDRA TANNER
Published by SCRIBNER
Tanner, an alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, on her first novel: “Worry explores the compulsion to make suffering feel instructive, useful, or fortifying, and shows how damaging it can be.” Anyone who has a sister will relate to the complicated trajectories of sibling relationships. Jules (narcissistic, neurotic) and Poppy (sensitive, full of repressed anger) find themselves unexpectedly living together again in a tiny Brooklyn apartment. Like a cartoon catfight, they end up going at each other constantly. Depression, anxiety, hives, and Jewish guilt worry these two into a completely dysfunctional duo—but underneath it all that sisterhood bond remains. The book is an authentic—and maddeningly funny—roller-coaster ride.
-
.
Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad
By DAMILARE KUKU
Published by HARPER VIA
Strong women, wronged in love, business, and life shine in Kuku’s vibrant first collection of stories. These women anchor a dozen hugely entertaining tales set in contemporary Lagos. Of the madness in the title, Kuku says, “You are mad if you can’t be upfront with people about what you want in a relationship.…” These stories about betrayal do not always end well for the characters, but you’ll be smitten by the audacious voice (the first story sets the tone when a young wife threatens to cut off her husband’s manhood) of a debut that has already taken Nigeria by storm. And her debut novel comes out in July!
.
-
.
The Black Box
By HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
Published by PENGUIN PRESS
Gates adds to his canon of African American scholarship with an essential guide to the literature of Black writers. The ‘black box’ refers to the designation on one’s birth certificate that will identify and follow the newborn throughout life. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others, we see the myriad ways writers have expressed their views about how race affects and delineates their place in society. Through essays, novels, poems, and memoirs Gates underscores the importance of the written word to define a people, past, present, and future.
