May 15, 2021
As we move into the summer season the choice of reading material can hover between escapism and vital social topics from the headlines. Here is a selection of both: in fiction there is English suspense, Egyptian historical fantasy, a French woman learning to paint, and an Italian woman recreating life after Fascism. In nonfiction we highlight both national and personal stories—an urgent cultural history that confronts police violence in America, and an astonishing new memoir by a Black queer writer.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Unsettled Ground
By CLAIRE FULLER
Published by TIN HOUSE
As anyone who read Bitter Orange can attest, this English writer is a master of creepy psychological novels. Her newest fiction introduces aging twins who never left home and have lived a very insulated life. Cut loose from their mother’s influence (the novel begins as death overcomes her), their lives teeter on the edge and long-buried secrets come to light as their complex family dynamics are revealed. This is a winner.
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A Master of Djinn
By P. DJÈLÍ CLARK
Published by TORDOTCOM
Clark’s recent novella Ring Shout combined the supernatural with the Ku Klux Klan. (Incidentally, look for the TV series coming from director Kasi Lemmons of the film Harriet.) Now Clark begins a new series (“Dead Djinn’s Universe”) with this steampunk sci-fi set in ancient Cairo, in which Egyptian society is threatened with collapse. He manages to balance writing history, speculative fiction, plus a popular blog where he writes about race, and fantastic worlds—a very impressive career.
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Painting Time
By MAYLIS DE KERANGAL
Published by FSG
Translated by Jessica Moore
De Kerangal, who lives in Paris, has written fiction with poetic grace about a heart transplant and a young self-taught cook. The author also has a beautifully illustrated middle grade book coming in the fall. Her new adult novel concerns a young woman‘s coming of age as an artist. Paula Karst studies art at a Brussels institute but what interests her more is the actual craft of painting. Thus she proceeds to build her knowledge abroad culminating in creating reproductions of the historic cave paintings at Lascaux.
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Voices in the Evening
By NATALIA GINZBURG
Published by NEW DIRECTIONS
Translated by D. M. Low
Another welcome reprint of Ginzburg’s novels from New Directions, this one was written in 1961. Colm Tóibín, who characterizes the balance of humor and melancholy in her work perfectly, introduces the new edition. Set in a small Italian town post-WWII, Elsa narrates the story of her family, her neighbors and her village as they reinvent life after the Fascist regime. It is a little gem, a birds-eye view of how people come out from beneath a tortured past with hopes for a better future.
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Punch Me Up to the Gods
By BRIAN BROOME
Published by HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
Growing up in Ohio was not easy for a young Black boy who liked other boys. Not much had changed for decades and the racial tensions were powerful, the segregated neighborhoods impenetrable. Broome’s memoir of that childhood and his eventual escape to a creative life and a burgeoning career as a teacher, poet and screenwriter are in full display in this essential memoir that attests to his gifts as a remarkable storyteller. Poetic yet visceral and unfiltered, his journey is ingeniously woven with lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool.” Read this book!
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America on Fire
By ELIZABETH HINTON
Published by LIVERIGHT
From the 60s to present day, Hinton’s cogent history addresses the difference between riot and rebellion, putting into context the recent events since George Floyd’s murder. What seemed unprecedented to many white Americans has been happening since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in Detroit, Miami, and LA, to name a few. Hinton, one of our most lucid historians, presents the sources of the ongoing struggle to tame police violence and offers ways forward to stem the tide of repetitive events.
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