February 10, 2024
This Valentine’s issue of our newsletter presents two books about love in its various iterations, both happy and sad, always complicated. See more picks on our Bookstore website. Also highlighted this week are a posthumous story collection set in the Jim Crow South; a foxy folktale set in China; and Lucy Sante’s much anticipated memoir.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Book of Love
By Kelly Link
Published by Penguin Random House
Much loved for her fantasy- and horror-inflected short stories, Link finally graces us with her first novel—and it is a doozy. Perfect for a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day reading. Three high schoolers vanish from Lovesend, Massachusetts: “The moon is full. Isn’t that proof of something? That things can disappear and then come back again?” opines Laura’s (one of the disappeared) sister. Link’s novel is full of mystery, some dread, and love, too, as the trio is given tasks to accomplish before they can return to their previous lives. Link’s impish magic is akin to the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, and equally engaging.
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Neighbors and Other Stories
By Diane Oliver
Published by Grove/Atlantic
Oliver’s own life story is a short one: after publishing a handful of stories she died at the age of 22 in a motorcycle accident while enrolled at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Growing up in the Jim Crow era in North Carolina she experienced the toxic racism that informed her fiction. The title story, which won a 1967 O. Henry Award, concerns breaking the color barrier as a first-grader integrates into a white school. “Hope he don’t mind being spit on,” says a neighbor. Oliver’s social commentary and psychological portraits are dazzling, and we are thrilled to help celebrate the little-known work of this gifted Black feminist.
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The Fox Wife
By Yangsze Choo
Published by Henry Holt & Co.
Using tales of foxes who shapeshift into humans as a catalyst for her novel, Choo concocts a captivating fable set in 1900s China during the Qing dynasty. Bao, a detective fascinated by fox lore, is assigned to solve the crime of the frozen body of a courtesan left in front of a restaurant. Snow, meanwhile, rides a train across Manchuria to Japan in search of a Manchu photographer who murdered her daughter. (“China was being devoured…like a roast pig” by Russia and Japan at the time.) Such imagination and style! Their converging story lines, and the overlapping worlds of spirits, humans, and animals make for an entrancing read.
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Love Novel
By Ivana Sajkoa
Published by Biblioasis
Translated by Mima Simić
Croatian novelist Sajko paints a portrait of a marriage that is definitely not all hearts and flowers. The young couple have a wretched apartment, a new baby, and little income. Their fiery relationship threatens to implode as the wife scrambles for thankless acting jobs, and her husband writes unpublishable articles while flirting with political activism. But not to worry—our author rises above the cheerless setting with sparkling prose and surprising emotional depth. Don’t miss the translator’s note about finding the right words. This novel of gritty realism packs a punch to the gut that is well worth your time. I hope the baby makes it out!
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I Heard Her Call My Name
By Lucy Sante
Published by Penguin Press
“I began my gender transition in mid-February 2021, when a shaft of light appeared in my subterranean cavern and I was able to see the whole prospect of my life at once.” Sante is well-known for her books about Manhattan (Low Life; Nineteen Reservoirs). Always entertaining and edifying, her powerfully honest memoir combines the story of becoming her true self in her mid-sixties, and that of her writing life. The two strands create a thoroughly humane book that will resonate with anyone struggling to become their own best self. Sante’s journey through gender and identity should become a classic of our times.
