July 1, 2023
What a group of eccentrics we have this week: a surprising challenger to a marriage, a lonely former librarian, an obsessive art-lover, a woman fractured into many selves, and a Norwegian immigrant who turns to murder. There is true crime told through the lens of fiction and nonfiction. And two novels that explore how women recover (or don’t) from trauma. These unique characters, real and imagined, live in stories that demand your attention.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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In the Act
By Rachel Ingalls
Published by New Directions
Cult favorite Ingalls has been called “blissfully deranged” by her publisher. Before there was The Shape of Water or Remarkably Bright Creatures there was Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban about a woman who falls in love with a fish. In this novella, the latest addition to the ND Storybook series, she crafts the story of a rather complicated married couple. Edgar spends most nights in the attic furtively creating a mechanical doll who has warm skin and the ability to talk dirty. When Helen discovers his secret pastime, she is appalled, setting in motion a gothic tale of love, longing, sexual fantasy, and technology. Ingalls posits—who would be your perfect companion?
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The Librarianist
By Patrick deWitt
Published by Ecco
How can you resist a protagonist named Bob Comet? Bob is retired from the local Portland library, divorced with no children, and a likable eccentric. His wife ran off with his best friend long ago and now he volunteers at a senior living establishment. When he finds that Chip (one of the women residents whose mind is nearly gone) is not who he thinks she is, we flash back to see Bob as a lonely child and glimpse his earlier married life. It is utterly charming and extremely touching. Vintage deWitt (French Exit)—each of his books captures wholly original characters, as well as your heart.
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The Art Thief
By Michael Finkel
Published by Knopf
Stéphane Breitweisser is the most notorious art thief in history. His raison d’être was to surround himself with beauty (he never sold any item he pilfered). In less than a decade he amassed well over a billion dollars’ worth of silver, oil paintings, sculpture, and objets d’art that he kept in his mother’s house where he lived with his girlfriend Anne-Catherine. The absolute gall of Breitweisser to brazenly pry off a wall or a pedestal whatever he desired, even when museum guards and tourists were nearby, was astounding. Then he was caught. Their Bonnie and Clyde adventures across Europe make Finkel’s (The Stranger in the Woods) marvelous true crime story of obsession un-put-downable.
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The Daughter Ship
By Boo Trundle
Published by Pantheon
This wonderfully inventive novel is by a writer also known for her music—and the harmonic chorus of narrative voices is not unlike a melodic composition. It put me in mind of Almodóvar’s film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Trundle has plotted a novel about a woman who experienced childhood trauma and is coming apart at the seams. Her coping mechanism is to split herself off into Truitt, Star, and Smooshed Bug to tell the story of inherited damage, questionable parenting, and her Southern ancestors. Give yourself over to the ingenious structure; though dark at its core it is told with wit.
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My Men
By Victoria Kielland
Published by Astra House
Translated by Damion Searls
“This is all I am, this is all I have.” Servant girl Brynhild is only seventeen when she is assaulted by Firstborn. Not comprehending the difference between pain and joy, she welcomed him to her attic room. Later, she flees her home in Norway, heartbroken, and comes to America, only to find the same roles exist, and she has little power as a woman. Based on a true story from the late 19th century, My Men is a fictionalized version of the making of America’s first female serial killer, who piled up over a dozen bodies. The novel won Kielland much praise and impressive sales across Europe.
