April 6, 2024
Two story collections, witty psychological suspense, and corruption on Park Avenue make up the fiction offerings this week. Essays from a Scotswoman about her life with a poet herald April’s National Poetry Month. Please see here for some new and recent volumes of poetry we are highlighting this month.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
-
.
Table for Two
By AMOR TOWLES
Published by VIKING
Here are six short stories set in New York City and a novella that picks up the character Evelyn Ross from The Rules of Civility, who will also feature in Towles’s next novel. He has said that the most important thing in fiction is to “make the reader feel like they are living the experience of the book.” His work does just that. Characters feel like friends, no matter how different their backgrounds. The title indicates the frequent state of the stories, whether through intimate conversations or explorations of marriage. And don’t miss the adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow now streaming.
-
.
Atta Boy
By CALLY FIEDOREK
Published by UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
One of our Emerging Writer Fellowship alumni at The Center for Fiction makes her debut with a trenchant novel about contemporary New York Society. Rudy is introduced to a very different world from the one he grew up in when he is ousted from the family bar business and becomes a Park Avenue night doorman in a legendary apartment building. We follow his transformation from ‘boy from Queens’ to becoming enmeshed with the family of millionaire Jake Cohen whose taxi business is in trouble. Fiordek’s smart take on white-collar crime, and the collision of classes is nothing less than a perfect social commentary on the disparities of wealth.
.
-
.
A Better World
By SARAH LANGAN
Published by ATRIA BOOKS
Set in a privileged community called Plymouth Valley, Langan’s new novel, like the subtly harrowing Good Neighbors, plops her characters into a tempest of insulated insiders seeking protection from a world imploding due to climate change. This South Dakota enclave is distrustful of the incoming Brooklyn Farmer family and, as pages turn, we as readers become distrustful of this closed society. Have the Farmers made a very serious mistake? Matriarch Linda, who offers medical attention to the smug residents, becomes increasingly suspicious as the town, outwardly a perfect and perfectly safe environment, appears more and more sinister. Something is rotten in Plymouth Valley. Have fun finding out what.
-
.
I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both
By MARIAH STOVALL
Published by SOFT SKULL PRESS
Stovall’s impressive debut perfectly captures the angst-ridden condition of an estranged all-consuming friendship. Khaki and Fiona were inseparable until they weren’t. Now ten years later Khaki receives an invitation to celebrate Fiona’s adoption of a little girl. Will she go? ’80s music and more current offerings form the background mixtape of their fraught relationship as we explore Khaki and Fiona’s past and present. Stovall’s work is included in the terrific anthology Black Punk Now and she was a panelist in a recent program at The Center for this essay collection—watch for the event to be posted on our website this summer to see how good she is!
.
-
.
Notes from the Henhouse
By ELSPETH BARKER
Published by SCRIBNER
The author’s late-in-life debut was favorite at The Center. Barker’s characteristic caustic wit is again on display in this marvelous collection of essays, just in time for National Poetry Month. The pieces about her beloved husband, the English poet George Barker, their Norfolk farmhouse life, and widowhood are particularly poignant. In “Cherubim” she bemoans the loss of her children’s innocence as they grow apart from her even as they drive her crazy. The cover shows the Scottish-born author in a cozy kitchen filled to the brim with cups, bowls, papers, and kitty—a disheveled but immediately inviting chaos of life.
