4 Books to Get Excited About
[image description: a Black woman in overalls standing in front of a large bookshelf full of books.]
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February was a good book mail month! Nearly all the books that have arrived on my doorstep have been from small presses and they’re killing it! Seriously, I dare anyone to read the descriptions on these books and tell me they don’t sound good.
Here are four books that I got early copies of and am SUPER excited to see published in the near future.
Night Rooms by Gina Nutt
Synopsis:
“In a horror movie, an infected character may hide a bite or rash, an urge, an unwellness. She might withdraw or act out, or behave as if nothing is the matter, nothing has happened. Any course of action opposite saying how she feels suggests suffering privately is preferable to the anticipated betrayal of being cast out.”
Night Rooms is a poetic, intimate collection of personal essays that weaves together fragmented images from horror films and cultural tropes to meditate on anxiety and depression, suicide, body image, identity, grief, and survival.
Whether competing in shopping mall beauty pageants, reflecting on childhood monsters and ballet lessons, or recounting dark cultural ephemera while facing grief and authenticity in the digital age, Gina Nutt’s shifting style echoes the sub-genres that Night Rooms highlights—spirit-haunted slow burns, possession tales, slashers, and revenge films with a feminist bent.
Refracting life through the lens of horror films, Night Rooms masterfully leaps between reality and movies, past and present—because the “final girl’s” story is ultimately a survival story told another way.
I see books described as “haunting” all the time, but this one really is. Gina Nutt articulates so well things I find myself wondering about all the time: the nature of morbid curiosity, my being drawn to cemeteries, horror movie tropes, early 2000s girlhood, and more. Her mind fascinates me.
The book is also written in an interesting style. In the same way there are jump scares in horror movies and you figure out the monster’s causes and motivations as you go, so too are her essays. At first they appear to merely jump around, leaving you to braid the loose threads of ideas together as you read, but as you go it makes more sense. Like a movie with good pacing, she only gives you as much information as you need at the time and the magic is in the slow reveal.
Coming March 23rd!
Lexicon by Allison Joseph
Synopsis:
Lexicon is a worthy successor to Allison Joseph's award-winning breakthrough, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman. This time around, this self-professed "barefaced woman" is setting her sighs/sights on language and what it does for and with and to her. Joseph loves language, making it her slippery passion in poems about childhood griefs and fashion faux pas, movie musicals and empty airports, "rules" for writing and rules for reading. Though Joseph loves language, it doesn't always love her back--but in her wise, readable, and imaginative way, she persists while documenting the minefields of racism and sexism. Joseph finds joy in the most unlikely of places, and in Lexicon, her adoration for the written word lets us see those places in sharp and evocative relief. All hail this bounty, this Lexicon!
I love seeing poets have fun on the page and that’s exactly what Allison Joseph is doing in this collection. She plays with classical forms and structures by turning them on their heads. She has fun with repetition, sometimes beginning and ending the poem with the same line, using it in two different contexts and literally bringing the poem full circle. Her work is an embodiment of the “learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist” ethos.
I enjoyed this collection so much that I’ll be writing a full review for one of my magazine clients. Stay tuned for that!
Coming April 27th!
Low Country: A Southern Memoir by J. Nicole Jones
Synopsis:
The Glass Castle meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this incandescent debut memoir of one family's changing fortunes in the Low Country of South Carolina, a tale inseparable from the region's storms and shipwrecks, ghosts and folklore.
J. Nicole Jones is the only daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, a family that grew rich building the hotels and seafood restaurants that draw tourists to Myrtle Beach. But at home, she is surrounded by violence and capriciousness: a grandfather who beats his wife, a barman father who dreams of being a country music star. At one time, Jones's parents can barely afford groceries; at another, her volatile grandfather presents her with a fur coat.
After a girlhood of extreme wealth and deep debt, of ghosts and folklore, of cruel men and unwanted spectacle, Jones finds herself face to face with an explosive possibility concerning her long-abused grandmother that she can neither speak nor shake. And through the lens of her own family's catastrophes and triumphs, Jones pays homage to the landscapes and legends of her childhood home, a region haunted by its history: Eliza Pinckney cultivates indigo, Blackbeard ransacks the coast, and the Gray Man paces the beach, warning of Hurricane Hazel.
Okay, I haven’t gotten to this one yet, but the description says it’s a combination of two of the favorite books from the 2000s, so I’m sold! Also, she had me at Southern folklore and ghosts!
I’m diving into this one soon and I cannot wait.
Coming April 13th!
Slipping: A Novel by Mohamed Kheir
Synopsis:
Under mysterious circumstances, Seif, a struggling journalist, is introduced to a source for a new story: a former exile with an encyclopedic knowledge of the country's obscure, magical spaces. Together--as tourist and guide--they step into a world hidden in plain sight. In Alexandria, they wait as trains bear down on them at the intersection of several busy lines; they follow a set of stairs down to the edge of the Nile and cross the water on foot; and down south, they sit before a bare cave wall, a cinema of private visions. What begins as a fantastical excursion through a fractured nation quickly winds its way inward, as Seif begins to piece together the mysteries of his own past, including what happened to Alya, his girlfriend with the gift of singing sounds. Seif alone confronts the interconnectedness of his own traumas with Egypt's following the Arab Spring and its hallucinatory days of revolutionary potential.
Musical and parabolic, Slipping seeks nothing less than to accept the world in all its mystery. An innovative novel that searches for meaning within the haze of trauma, it generously portrays the overlooked miracles of everyday life, and attempts to reconcile past failures--both personal and societal--with a daunting future. Delicately translated from Arabic by Robin Moger, this is a profound introduction to the imagination of Mohamed Kheir, one of the most exciting writers working in Egypt today.
I haven’t gotten to this one yet either (I try to read the advance copies in the order they’re coming out) but I’m super looking forward to it. Not only am I fascinated by the premise, I’m growing my library of books about the Middle East, so getting my hands on a novel that’s been translated from Arabic to English is a treat. And can we just talk about how pretty that cover is??
Coming June 8th!
I’ll be sharing full reviews of all of these new books over the next three months, so stay tuned! I can’t wait to tell you more.
In the meantime, if you already know you want to preorder any of these titles, please do so using my Bookshop link. It’s a great way to support indie bookstores and this blog––a win-win! Preorder now and you’ll have a treat for yourself later––a triple win. :)
