Either/Or by Soren KierkegaardRead about the other entries on the list.
Kierkegaard’s ironies have driven me crazy for many years, but I crave them anyway. Every time I read it, this novel as philosophy or philosophy as novel never stops producing new meanings.
Lori Roy is the author of Bent Road, winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel; Until She Comes Home, finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Let Me Die in His Footsteps, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; and The Disappearing.The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond ChandlerRead about the other entries on the list.
When my second novel was close to coming out, a friend emailed me a link to an article about a research study. In the study, three people, via a computer game, threw a digital ball back and forth. At a certain point, one person was excluded for no apparentreason. Upon studying the physical response of the excluded person, researches found that the need to belong is so strong in human beings that when excluded, they experience a physical pain such that it can be treated with Tylenol. Raymond Chandler, who became a writer after losing his job during the Great Depression, is widely credited with being the founder of the hardboiled crime novel. But I include him here today for his examination of this desperate need to belong, a need most certainly tied to our very survival. Specifically, the need for acceptance and the crushing loneliness when we are denied it is at the heart of The Long Goodbye, the sixth of his seven novels.
David Mogo, Godhunter, is out from Abaddon in July 2019. His internationally published fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Podcastle, The Dark, Mothership Zeta, Omenana, Ozy, Brick Moon Fiction and other periodicals and anthologies. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona, where he teaches writing, and has worked in editorial at Podcastle and Sonora Review.Lagos, Nigeria: Lagoon by Nnedi OkoraforRead about the other entries on the list.
Lagoon, it may be argued, is the prime Lagos SFF novel. An alien ambassador named Ayodele lands in Lagos’s Bar Beach of the early 2000’s, drawing three diverse protagonists with special abilities into a whirlwind journey. The city quickly devolves into chaos then, but Lagos is no stranger to madness, responding with almost extraterrestrial alacrity. This science-fantasy tale of first contact carries Lagos with it, allowing the city’s characteristic dank infrastructure, colourful motley of inhabitants and bustling energy shine, while paying homage to its history and folklore.
Michelle Sacks is the author of the story collection, Stone Baby, and the novels, You Were Made for This and All The Lost Things.Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the BonesRead about the other entries on the list.
Set in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the luminous and lyrical Salvage the Bones is narrated by fourteen-year-old Esch. Poor, motherless and pregnant, Esch lives with her father and her three brothers in the backwoods of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, where life is often harsh and violent, nature brutal and unpredictable. The hurricane looms, but it is only one threat among many. Esch and her family arealmost always hungry, rationing food, stealing supplies. Her father drinks; her older brother Skeetah breeds pitbulls to sell.
Esch, a lover of Greek mythology, is wise beyond her years, a child without a childhood. But the story she’s telling isn’t one of victimhood. Though she doesn’t shy away from the ruthlessness that surrounds her, Esch manages to find its opposite: tenderness and wonder, and the unbreakable bonds of family love.
Caroline Crampton is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the Guardian, the Mail on Sunday and the New Humanist. She has appeared as a broadcaster on Newsnight, Sky News and BBC Radio 4.Thames: Sacred River by Peter AckroydRead about the other entries on the list.
The nearest thing there is to a comprehensive modern biography of the river, packed with fascinating titbits about its literary, artistic and religious connections down the ages. It’s particularly good on the upper reaches of the Thames before it gets to London, where medieval monasteries used to stand at every bend and pilgrims would pass by on their way to the great shrine at Canterbury.
Caroline Louise Walker grew up in Rock Island, Illinois. For her fiction and nonfiction, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Kerouac Project, Jentel Arts and Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences. She holds an MA from NYU.DR. HENRY JEKYLL from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Lewis StevensonRead about the other entries on the list.
Maybe we ask too much of our doctors: to be skilled and brilliant, with gentle bedside manner, and also to be upstanding citizens, strong of heart, guided by an infallible moral compass. No one is perfect. Dr. Jekyll hosts darkness, as do we all, but he is unable tohold his darkness alongside the light.. He divides his identity into all good or all bad, a splitting (as with Borderline Personality Disorder) turned inward. His desire to suppress his shadow side is so colossal, so consuming, that it all but ensures Hyde’s vitality.
For Jekyll, Hyde is the embodiment of Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse”—the backlash of an all-consuming desire to snuff out our ugliest impulses, thoughts, or desires. There is no intermediary between id and superego, no integration of his shadow side. He terrifies himself. And yet, as Settembrini tells rest-cure devotee Hans Castorp, in and on The Magic Mountain: “Fear and euphoria aren’t mutually exclusive.”
For those who feel that a day is simply too long a time-span for a piece of fiction, there is always Nicholson Baker’s novella The Mezzanine, set during a mere lunch-hour and garlanded with footnotes upon footnotes. It’s a dazzling feat of both compression and expansion that – despite its workaday office setting and diminutive canvas – is on more than nodding terms with the modernist adventures of Woolf and Joyce.Read about the other entries on the list.
Herman Koch is the best-selling author of The Dinner. His new novel is The Ditch. Booklist on The Ditch: “A compelling exploration by a master stylist of what jealousy and distrust can do even to a solid relationship.”The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018).Read about the other entries on the list.
In Nunez's award-winning novel, the girlfriend of a deceased famous author puts most of her criticisms of her late lover aside to survive as an individual while contending with Wives One, Two,and Three. Which of the four women is most entitled to be the author's true heir? The one who has inspired his best work, or the one who gets stuck with his Great Dane?
Rebecca Scherm, Unbecoming (Penguin)Read about the other entries on the list.
This Edgar-nominated first novel reveals its true core to the reader slowly and skillfully. When we first meet Grace she’s working for a less than upstanding dealer in high-value tchotchkes. Grace is very good at her job, but she doesn’t care about it. We know she’s running from something or someone, since she’s calling herself Julie and keeping everyone at an almost rude distance. Scenes from her current life are woven into her past as an all-American small-town girl who did an unforgivable thing that sent two men to jail. One of them has just been paroled and he’s looking for her, causing upheaval in her carefully ordered fake life.
At Publishers Weekly she tagged ten essential books about contemporary artists, including:Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah ThorntonRead about the other entries on the list.
In Seven Days in the Art World, an investigation-slash-ethnography of art world spaces—an auction house, a studio, an art fair, the Turner Prize, an art-school critique, and the Venice Biennale—Thorton thoughtfully transcribes what she first sees in the (highly elite) spaces of world that, as she writes, is “so diverse, opaque, and downright secretive, it is impossible to be truly comprehensive.”
James Collins, Beginner’s GreekRead about the other entries on the list.
According to Jon Michaud in The New Yorker:
I’m just finishing James Collins’s Beginner’s Greek, an elegant, page-turning début novel of thwarted desire that reads like one of Jane Austen’s books retold by Mark Helprin. In the first chapter, the affable but chronically passive hero, Peter Russell, finds himself seated next to the woman of his dreams on a transcontinental flight. They talk; he gets her number; he promptly loses it. Years later, they meet again, but by then, she has become involved with Peter’s best friend. Collins’s light, observant style carries the reader over the numerous implausiblities and coincidences required by his romantic plot. It’s a perfect summer read.
Louise Candlish was born in Hexham, Northumberland, and grew up in the Midlands town of Northampton. She studied English at University College London and worked as an illustrated books editor and copywriter before writing fiction. Her novels include the thriller Our House, winner of the British Book Awards 2019 Crime & Thriller Book of the Year, and the new book, Those People.Alternate Side by Anna QuindlenRead about the other entries on the list.
Not crime fiction, but rather a masterly portrait of a group of residents on the Upper West Side, whose relationships are considerably less solid than they’ve been tempted to believe. On the surface, the ultimate goal of Nora and Charlie is an assigned parking space—so far so white-middle-class New York—but just as this is achieved far more profound aspects of life are found to be disintegrating.
Underground by Haruki MurakamiRead about the other books on the list.
I knew nothing of the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attack that left 12 people dead and I had never heard of Aum, the doomsday cult responsible. In his 1997 book, Murakami first records the testimony of victims, then speaks to those on the other side of the story: encouraging cult members to question their motivations. Some left Aum, some have remained devoted, many are still in denial about their guru’s involvement. The result is a series of separate interviews that allow the reader to consider multiple perspectives.
A Study in Honor: A Novel (The Janet Watson Chronicles)Read about the other entries on the list.
This futuristic feminist spin on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest creation follows Dr. Janet Watson's not-so-triumphant return to Washington D.C. after being shot caring for wounded soldiers in America's New Civil War. Now, with a prosthetic arm and without a purpose or a place to stay, she falls into depression. That all changes when she meets government agent Sara Holmes.
Barbara Bourland is the author of the critically acclaimed I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, a Refinery29 Best Book of 2017 and an Irish Independent Book of the Year, and the newly released Fake Like Me.The Outsider, Richard WrightRead about the other entries on the list.
This is the book Wright wrote this after he left the communist party and became a nihilist, and this book is steeped in expositions of race, class, and political relations like no other work of twentieth-century fiction.His protagonist, Cross Damon, is alienated, angry, and does not change. Damon doesn’t believe that money will change his life, but he knows that power would, and his rage at being made so powerless by a society that hates and devalues anyone who with skin that is not white metastasizes until he kills four people, and then later dies. People didn’t like this book at the time it was published because it has extremely long passages about existential despair, but that is exactly why I love it.
Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award - and the Political Book Awards Biography of the Year. Her other non-fiction books are the acclaimed cultural histories Heroes and Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions. Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award. In 2017 she published her first novel Peculiar Ground, which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Another free spirit, but a happier one, is Dougal Douglas (or perhaps Douglas Dougal – nothing about him, including his name, is pin-downable) the curly haired charmer whoRead about the other entries on the list.makes his disruptive appearance in a suburban small business in Muriel Spark’s scintillating comic take on the Faust legend, The Ballad of Peckham Rye. On Dougal’s forehead there are two bumps – traces, he explains, of his sawn-off horns. Is he teasing? Impossible to tell. Certainly Spark is. She hints that Dougal is the devil, but what he brings is not damnation, but ridicule. Sleazy office romances, venal crime, and all the absurd trivia of working life are raked over in this modern fable. Spark’s wit is acidic, but her story sets the dreary lives of secretaries and salesmen glittering, touched by the uncanny charisma of an early 60s Pan.
Janna King is a screenwriter, playwright, and director. She has written TV movies and series for Lifetime and The Hallmark Channel, King World and more. Her two short films, “Mourning Glory” and “The Break Up,” which she wrote, directed and produced, were official selections at several film festivals.Until the Day I Die, by Emily CarpenterRead about the other entries on the list.
This novel also tackles the subject of grief and its devastating effect. When Erin’s husband dies suddenly, she is determined to keep her college-bound daughter Shorie and the family’s thrivingtech business on track. But all those around her worry that she’s falling apart, and they stage an intervention that sends her to a luxury rehab retreat on a remote Caribbean island. Alternating points of view from Erin and Shorie offer insight into the two women’s states of mind and their undeniable love for each other, despite mother-daughter thorniness. From the start, Carpenter sets the stage for conspiracies that raise their ugly heads as the pages turn. Shorie investigates those she believes are out to sabotage her mother and the business while Erin ultimately fights for her life at a tropical jungle “wellness sanctuary” that’s hair-raising instead of healing.
father, the editor, writer, critic and academic Karl Miller.Total Chaos by Jean-Claude IzzoRead about the other entries on the list.
Fathers are largely absent from Izzo’s brilliant and shamefully neglected Marseille Trilogy, but there’s a fine cameo in the first of the series, Total Chaos. Mouloud is a migrant from Algeria to France, and nervously watched his three motherless children grow up in Marseille. But the eldest, a postgraduate student called Laila, has gone missing and is subsequently found murdered. Mouloud’s desperation is unbearable.
The Book Thief: The relationship between young Liesel and her adopted father, Hans Hubermann, is in many ways the heartbeat that makes this entire book pulse. While Mama addresses Liesel only as saumensch (roughly translated to the highly flattering moniker of “pig-man”), and is quick to offer a slap across the face, Hans, or Papa, adores Liesel, playing his accordion for her and teaching her to read in a series of secret, late-night sessions. Hans Hubermann’s soft and understated brand of strength shines throughout Markus Zusak’s novel as a positive force in the otherwise harrowing and tragic setting of Nazi Germany.Read about the other entries on the list.
his father. At LitHub he tagged four good Bad Dad memoirs, including:Alison Bechdel, Fun HomeRead about the other entries on the list.
In her opening chapter, Alison Bechdel describes her father as “an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of decor” (potentially an alliterative reference to Geoffrey Wolff’s 1979 The Duke of Deception, itself a fantastic Bad Dad memoir). These titles refer to her father’s knack for home restoration, but also to his ability to maintain a double life: despite his marriage and three children, he was a gay man who had a particular interest in teenage boys.
Given these circumstances and her abundant skill, telling a linear, narratively boilerplate story would have made for a great book on its own. Instead, however, Bechdel opts for a delightfully complex structure—one that is self-consciously literary and deeply self-referential, with each narrative recursion adding more metaphorical and emotional nuance. Anyone who came of age in a library will see themselves in Bechdel to some extent, and those who did so due to family circumstances won’t be able to put her down.
Michael Niemann's latest Valentin Vermeulen thriller is No Right Way.The Foreign Correspondent, Alan FurstRead about the other entries on the list.
Refugees aren’t just a recent global phenomenon. Historically, every war has generated streams of refugees. It’s not an accident that the original Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted in 1951, to address the complicated refugee situation left by World War II. Alan Furst has made a career of writing spy novels that all take place at the threshold of World War II. But the seeds for all his novels were sown with World War I and the failure to settle the question of global hegemony in 1919. The twenty years of crisis that followed produced its own refugee crisis, and Furst captures the essence of it in 1938 Paris. This novel revolves around Italian refugees who fled the Mussolini regime to Paris and are publishing an underground newspaper that’s smuggled into Italy to giveItalians the real news. Carlo Weisz, the new editor, after the Italian secret police agents assassinate the previous one, finds himself the target of pretty much every intelligence agency that’s active in Paris. The refugees in this novel have a professional background, lawyers, journalists, businessmen. They find themselves reduced to working menial jobs to make ends meet. Only Weisz is lucky enough to work in his chosen profession. The secret police agents after them, but the French authorities aren’t yet interested in protecting the refugees because Italy hasn’t officially thrown in its lot with Germany. In a way, this novel represents the flip side of Havana Libre. There’s the same desire to put undermine a regime from the relative safety of exile, although the existence of the Italian refugees in pre-war France seems more precarious than that of the Cuban emigres in Miami. But the story of having one’s life disrupted, of having to take jobs well below one’s qualifications are similar. A quote that stuck with me was “…spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren’t all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets.”
International Short Story Prize, and The Report was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta.
According to Queeney by Beryl BainbridgeRead about the other entries on the list.
In this brilliant novel, Bainbridge imagines the year 1764, when Samuel Johnson met the Thrale family and became a regular houseguest at their home in then-rural Southwark. In the novel, Hester Thrale gives him his own room, which he often doesn’t leave. The scenes of the household functioning around the resident irascible genius are priceless.
Whitney Scharer holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals including New Flash Fiction Review, Cimarron Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. Her first novel, The Age of Light, based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was published by Little, Brown (US) and Picador (UK) in February, 2019, and is forthcoming from over a dozen other countries. She lives with her husband and daughter in Arlington, MA.
Paris to the MoonRead about the other entries on the list.
Read Janet Flanner [Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939], and then read Adam Gopnik, her modern-day heir. Gopnik moved to Paris with his wife and infant son, and documented their adventures in the New Yorker with humor and tenderness. The book reads like a love letter to the city, and will leave you yearning to become an ex-pat yourself.
his stories. His first novel, Cooper’s Promise, in some ways is still the most autobiographical of his novels, though he was never an American deserter adrift in Africa. But he was in The Mining Pan bar and he did meet Lulay and he did stowaway on a barge that landed him in an African jail.Istanbul Passage by Joseph KanonRead about the other entries on the list.
During World War II, Istanbul was a center of international espionage. In Istanbul Passage, Joseph Kanon sets the story in theimmediate aftermath of the war when the espionage community is beginning to pack up. An American businessman, Leon Bauer, has been drawn into their shadowy world by doing odd jobs to support the Allied effort. He’s asked to make one last exchange, which goes fatally awry. An American diplomat cum spy is killed, and Leon ends up hiding a possible war criminal wanted by both the Americans and Russians. Confronted with shifting loyalties and moral uncertainty, it’s the story of a man swept up in the dawn of the Cold War.
Eliane Glaser is a writer, a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University, an associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and a BBC radio producer. Her books include Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life and, most recently, Anti-Politics: On the Demonization of Ideology, Authority and the State.Our discomfort with the notion that a chosen few hold sway makes it easier to find depictions of bad leadership than positive exemplars.Read about the other entries on the list.Novels, from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote portray leaders as capricious, deranged and, well, quixotic. Likewise, in The Mirror for Magistrates, a Tudor collection of poems, the ghosts of eminent statesmen recount their misdeeds and comeuppances while gazing ruefully at their own reflections. The poems were intended as cautionary tales for others keen to don the mantle of power.
One of her ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:The Girl in the Picture by Denise ChongRead about the other entries on the list.
As a journalist, I was so impressed by how extensively Denise Chong researched this work of nonfiction. This is the story of the young girl who was photographed running naked in horror after her village was napalmed during the war, and who came to symbolize for the world its utter disaster and devastating toll. It is a moving story of love, perseverance, and belief.
Robert Watson Literary Prize at The Greensboro Review, and was a finalist for Indiana Review's 2016 Fiction Prize. She's a columnist for Literary Hub and her work has appeared or is upcoming at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Literary Hub, Volume 1 Brooklyn, OSU's The Journal, Catapult, Bennington Review, Portland Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award.
My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta (2014).Read about the other entries on the list.
This is a deep dive into the body and mind of a singular author who manipulates text on the page to almost tactile effect. She writes powerfully about memory, yes, but she also reminds readers what it's like to inhabit a body. The essays in the book are interspersed with historical material about the Cascade tribe, one of two indigenous tribes in Washuta's heritage.
Merle's Door by Ted KerasoteRead about the other entries on the list.
Kerasote tells the story of his fateful camping trip which resulted in him meeting a Lab who was living free in the wild. A bond is formed, but after taking the dog—named Merle—home, Kerasote discovers he must give his new pet the best of both worlds.
Shalini Boland is a USA Today bestselling author of psychological thrillers The Girl from the Sea, The Best Friend, The Millionaire's Wife, and The Child Next Door. She lives in Dorset, England with her husband, two children, and their cheeky terrier mix.The Detective Kim Stone Series, by Angela MarsonsRead about the other entries on the list.
Book 1 in the series, Silent Scream, is a crime mystery that draws you in straight away. This is in part due to the unconventional and abrasive main character, DI Kim Stone, whose own story is emotionally tangled up with her latest case. With an abruptmanner that often borders on downright rude, I really shouldn’t have liked Stone, but I found that I absolutely loved her, rooting for her every step of the way, my heart in my mouth as the body count rose. The plot is intricate, and fast-moving, the writing deft and smooth. I also laughed out loud on more than one occasion which balanced out the darker and more grisly aspects.
Stone is a complex woman, who has virtually no filter and isn’t afraid to says it like it is. She’s suffered trauma in her past, but instead of holding her back, it spurs her on. Stone’s character arc deepens through the series and far from sliding into predictability, author Angela Marsons builds on the foundation of book 1 to create a character—along with an outstanding supporting cast—that readers will truly care about.
English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, and Three Daughters of Eve. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better.An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo IshiguroRead about the other entries on the list.
Set in post-second World War Japan, this is a masterfully written novel by the British-Japanese author about ageing, solitude, art, memory, and the endless tricks it plays on our minds … Ishiguro is the kind of writer who each time asks the reader to trust him, come along for a walk in an unknown territory, and if need be, change perspective. But he does all this with an unwavering modesty and quiet intelligence that only further contributes to his literary strength.
Brian Evenson is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the winner of the International Horror Guild Award and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and his work has been named in Time Out New York’s top books.Ill Will by Dan ChaonRead about the other entries on the list.
Chaon is one of those authors who never disappoints. Dustin, a psychologist, has an off-kilter patient trying to convince him that a series of drownings are the work of a serial killer. As he reluctantly embarks on an amateur investigation, his ability to distinguish the truth becomes more and more vexed. Add to that Rusty, his adopted brother who was imprisoned for years for killing Dustin’s parents and who is just getting out, and Ill Will becomes a complex and beautifully chilling story about damage caused by the stories we tell ourselves so as not to see how things really are.
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