Five great island books that reimagine "The Tempest"

Johanna Stoberock's novels include City of Ghosts and the newly released Pigs. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Better: Culture & Lit, The Wilson Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Front Porch, and the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology. A 2016 runner up for the Italo Calvino Prize, 2012 Jack Straw Fellow, and 2013 Artist Trust GAP awardee, Stoberock has received residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington with her husband and two children.

At LitHub Stoberock tagged "five books that rewrite Prospero and his island, rethinking the man while leaving his magic in place," including:

Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

Part Nabokov’s Pale Fire, part nightmare all its own, this dense, intricate, dazzlingly toxic novel, published in 2013, creates a Prospero character who is dark to his very core. The novel purports to be an account of the life of Nobel Laureate, Norton Perina. Perina is famous for research he conducted on the inhabitants of an island in the South Pacific who seem to have found a way to immortality, but the novel begins with him in jail, in the act of writing his memoirs. The manuscript comes to readers via Ronald Kubodera, a fauning colleague who, through editorial omissions, exculpatory footnotes, and physical interventions, enables Perina in continuing on his noxious path. Perina emerges, ultimately, as a psychotic manipulater who throws a fragile community under the bus for the sake of his obsessions. Whatever magic Perina finds on his island is sacrificed to the wants of this invader from the outside world.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue