6 Books I'm Excited About Right Now
[image description: stacks of multiple copies of the same book, as though at a bookstore]
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As of this writing, I have a little less than three weeks until my book manuscript is due at my publisher’s. I’m not freaking out, you’re freaking out! Okay, I’m freaking out a little. Not because I’m running behind but because I have no idea what my editor will think. (I hope she loves it!)
In part thanks to the book, I’ve written more this calendar year than any previous year of my life. I’ve also read considerably less this year than I have in previous years. At the moment, I’m on track to read 115 books this year, down from 175. I realize 115 books is still a lot, though reading 60 fewer books than in previous years is quite a change.
I don’t want it to sound like I’m having to choose between reading and writing because I think it’s really important for writers to be voracious readers. But I do realize there are only so many hours in a day and I’ve been using some of the hours I might normally use for reading on writing instead. I wonder if all writers feel this way.
The reason I bring it up is that there are half a dozen books that I’m super excited to read that I haven’t gotten to yet. Some have just recently come out and others will be published between now and the end of 2021.
Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy by Amorak Huey
Synopsis:
Drawing on fictional characters, cultural figures, and personal stories in this collection of poetry, Huey deftly weaves an intergenerational tale about coming of age as a boy in the twentieth century and becoming a father in the twenty-first. In a collection built around the narrative structure of a joke, the poems’ speakers reflect on the complex intersections of childhood, war, love, pop culture, and parenting. From Southwestern deserts to the flatlands of Indiana to the post-9/11 landscape of New York, Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy deconstructs the enduring notion of American patriarchy and explores the delineations between collective and individual memory. Playful and profound, nostalgic but not naïve, these poems trace a masterful journey of personal discovery and fatherly love.
A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress by Alison Hawthorne Deming
Synopsis:
Part memoir, part elegy, part cultural history, A Woven World reflects upon and celebrates the fading crafts, cottage industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations.
The desire to create is the cornerstone of civilization. But as we move into a world where machine manufacturing has nearly usurped craft, Alison Hawthorne Deming resists the erasure of our shared history of handiwork with this appeal for embracing continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change.
Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of our founding communities, and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent’s “sardine” dress, Deming turned to the industries of her ancestors, both the dressmakers and designers in Manhattan in the nineteenth century and the fishermen on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2,500 residents, where the dignity of work and the bounty of the sea ruled for hundreds of years. Reweaving the fabric of those lives, A Woven World gives presence on the page to the people, places, and practices, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament becomes a song of praise and a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart
Synopsis:
In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. “Only a Russian could do that," says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.”
A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is an Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death from radiation sickness; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent who climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano.
As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.
While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy.
Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some Things in Between by Padgett Powell
Synopsis:
The first collection of nonfiction by "one of the few truly important American writers of our time" (Sam Lipsyte).
Gathering pieces written during the past three decades, Indigo ranges widely in subject matter and tone, opening with “Cleve Dean,” which takes Padgett Powell to Sweden for the World Armwrestling Federation Championships, through to its closing title piece, which charts Powell’s lifelong fascination with the endangered indigo snake, “a thinking snake,” and his obsession with seeing one in the wild.
“Some things in between” include an autobiographical piece about growing up in the segregated and newly integrated South and tributes to writers Powell has known, among them Donald Barthelme, who “changed the aesthetic of short fiction in America for the second half of the twentieth century,” and Peter Taylor, who briefly lived in Gainesville, Florida, where Powell taught for thirty-five years. There are also homages to other admired writers: Flannery O’Connor, “the goddesshead”; Denis Johnson, with his “hard honest comedy”; and William Trevor, whose Collected Stories provides “the most literary bang for the buck in the English world.”
A throughline in many of the pieces is the American South—the college teacher who introduced Powell to Faulkner; the city of New Orleans, which “can render the improbable possible”; and the seductions of gumbo, sometimes cooked with squirrel meat. Also here is an elegy for Spode, Powell’s beloved pit bull: “I had a dog not afraid, it gave me great cheer and blustery vicarious happiness.”
In addressing the craft of fiction, Powell ventures that “writing is controlled whimsy.” His idiosyncratic playfulness brings this collection to vivid life, while his boundless curiosity and respect for the truth keep it on course. As Pete Dexter writes in his foreword to Indigo, “He is still the best, even if not the best-known, writer of his generation.”
Dark Tourist: Essays by Hasanthika Sirisena
Synopsis:
Dark tourism—visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others—takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena’s stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father’s stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka—the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner—to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.
Deftly blending reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir, Sirisena pieces together facets of her own sometimes-fractured self to find wider resonances with the human universals of love, sex, family, and art—and with language’s ability to both fail and save us. Dark Tourist becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.
Pity the Beast by Robin McLean
Synopsis:
'I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.' Alden Jones
Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy; Joy Williams; and Charles Portis; Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory.
With detours through time; space; and myth; not to mention into the minds of a pack of philosophical mules Pity the Beast heralds the arrival of a major force in American letters. It is a novel that turns our assumptions about the West; masculinity; good and evil; and the very nature of storytelling onto their heads; with an eye to the cosmic as well as the comic. It urges us to write our stories anew—if we want to avoid becoming beasts ourselves.
I’m really looking forward to digging into all these, so stay tuned for reviews to come!
If you want to dive in now, or as soon as the books are available, you can buy them online from Bookshop. It’s an Amazon alternative that supports indie bookstores and this blog. A win-win!
