August 12, 2023
This week there is a plethora of styles and genres: a dystopian pandemic novel; an old-school fictional biography; a tale of exile; a college lampoon; and short, short, short provocative fiction. These writers, including one first novelist, investigate the nature of homeland, loss, aging, happiness, and the future of our world. Take your pick.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Prophet
By Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald
Published by Grove Press
Macdonald, whose H Is for Hawk set the bar for nature memoirs, decided during COVID that they would write a pandemic novel. The result was a collaboration with Sin Blaché, a California horror writer living in Ireland, written via the internet and endless phone calls, until their page-turning story was finished, and they finally met in person. It stars an unlikely duo of an American intelligence officer and an ex-MI6 agent, in a mash-up of spy thriller, sci-fi, and gay romance. Nostalgia becomes weaponized, exploring themes of: “love, loss, hope, nationhood, and the ways we recruit the past for our own ends.” It’s unlike anything you’ll read this season.
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The Romantic
By William Boyd
Published by Knopf
Twenty years ago in Any Human Heart, Boyd penned the fictional biography of a man’s life throughout the 20th century. He uses the form again in The Romantic, the remarkable story of Cashel Greville Ross whose life spans the greater portion of the 19th century. Moving between Ireland, Oxford, the army in Britain and India, with grave injury at the Battle of Waterloo, Italy, and meetings with Byron and Shelley, Burton and Speke, Boyd creates a finely detailed, old-fashioned (he has been compared to Trollope) portrait of man. It is a magisterial accomplishment with the backdrop of historical events placing Cashel in context of his time, always searching for his place in the world.
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Hangman
By Maya Binyam
Published by Fsg
Binyam’s first novel is an impressively confident debut, following another man’s search for home. As the novel opens, we find ourselves in Rachel Cusk territory with an unnamed narrator on a plane. A fifty-five-year-old Black man is returning to his African homeland, after over two decades, to search for his brother. The author is, it seems, deliberately vague on details and identities, favoring instead to write a novel that is a universal comment on the consequences of migration, and the dislocated feeling of those who leave home only to come back a stranger. A powerful message sparely told.
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The English Experience
By Julie Schumacher
Published by Knopf
As the school year looms, we return to the academic satire. Like Jane Smiley before her, Julie Schumacher sets her story in the American Midwest. Her bumbling, lovable hero, Professor Fitger, who starred in the first two novels of this comic trilogy (Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Experience) is approached to lead a student trip to London. Schumacher (the first woman to win the Thurber Prize for American Humor) follows our dear Fitger chaperoning eleven students with problems of their own (psychological, medical, romantic, and otherwise) on an “Experience: Abroad”—even the name of the program is funny.
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I Hear You’re Rich
By Diane Williams
Published by Soho Press
Williams, founder of the literary journal NOON, is known as “the godmother of flash fiction” and her work has appeared in many periodicals including the New Yorker. She crystallizes a moment in time, a feeling, a situation in a few paragraphs which demand rereading. Often the brief tales are full of questions that put the onus on the reader to decipher the author’s intention. In “Zwhip—Zwhip,” an unhappy woman watches her son play as she contemplates her future; in “Live a Little,” a husband is caught between “ardor and rage,” for his wife. Many stories describe unsettled domestic situations. All of them are cryptic and poetic.
