February 17, 2024
This week we dig deep into lives real and imagined, past and present: three memoirs, one in verse; a posthumous essay collection; and of course, fiction—a Black Chicago poet’s historical novel with a hint of the supernatural.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Ours
By Phillip B. Williams
Published by Viking
An enigmatic Black woman with supernatural powers, Saint, wants to purchase a plot of land in a new development in St. Louis in the mid-1800s. Despite the sale being illegal (due to racist laws of the time), her extraordinary wad of cash is convincing. As a growing number of formerly enslaved people buy into the community, they name the town Ours, commemorating the place where a young Black boy had been felled by bullets. Williams’s luscious novel traces Saint’s journey as the Civil War approaches, and the growing number of residents become unsettled by her witchcraft. A poet’s grace with language infuses this fiction which asks, “what is freedom?”
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Splinters
By Leslie Jamison
Published by Little, Brown and Company
Jamison displays the clear-eyed observations we’ve come to expect from her special brand of self-examination. Life took her by surprise when her marriage fell apart, and she found herself raising a daughter alone. “Writing [this memoir] was like carving scrimshaw from my own bones,” she tells us. The emotional journey she takes to reconcile her circumstances gives us a privileged glimpse into a woman remaking her life with an uncertain future ahead. It also conveys the sheer joy of raising her daughter.
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Ten Bridges I've Burnt
By Brontez Purnell
Published by MCD
Coming off a great success with the novel 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, performance artist Purnell crafts his autobiography in poetry. Acclaimed by the San Francisco Guardian for his “raw tongue of flame,” his outrageous, always irreverent, and entertaining verses are the perfect medium to recount his life story. Mindful of leaving his birthplace in Alabama for Oakland, he is eminently quotable concerning his accomplishments and mistakes, and always unapologetically sexy. “My willful optimism has always operated on the belief that the show must go on.”
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Molly
By Blake Butler
Published by Powerhouse Books
Blake Butler has created a tenderly urgent memoir recounting the life of his late wife, poet Molly Brodak. Known for penning literary thrillers and a graphic novel about insomnia, here Butler creates a beautiful portrait of a complicated life steeped in grief, wonder, and compassion. From accounts of her passion for writing and fanciful baking (including a cake decorated with an octopus eating flowers) to details of her bank robber father and her experience undergoing brain surgery, you won’t soon forget Molly or this loving record of a life.
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The Bloodied Nightgown
By Joan Acocella
Published by FSG
The world of letters lost a distinguished writer earlier this year when Joan Acocella passed away. The great critic, well known for her dance and book reviews, wrote primarily for the NYRB and the New Yorker, from which these essays are gathered. They profile such disparate characters as Pliny the Younger, Agatha Christie, Richard Pryor, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (hence the nightgown of the title). Acocella “was schooled by teachers who believed in Eliot’s rule—forget personality…” but she never could separate the life and art of her subjects. Revel in her affable prose, as she brings you inside her astute mind.
