Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of Karen Russell, Xuan Juliana Wang, Mohammed Hanif, Jayson Greene, and more—that are publishing this week.
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Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Orange World and Other Stories: “The inimitable Russell (Vampires in the Lemon Grove) returns with a story collection that delights in the uncanny, parlaying the deeply fantastical to reflect the basest and most human of our desires. In ‘The Bad Graft,’ an eloping young couple, Angie and Andy, go hiking at Joshua Tree National Park. They’ve arrived during peak pulse event season, when yucca moths swarm and ‘the Joshua tree sheds a fantastic sum of itself.’ This refers to both pollination and a Joshua tree’s so-called Leap, during which Angie becomes the human vessel for the tree’s spirit. In ‘The Tornado Auction,’ Robert Wurman is a former tornado farmer, retired now after decades of raising tornadoes for ‘weather-assisted demolition.’ His spontaneous decision to purchase a young tornado begins to spiral out of control as the tornado grows larger and more destructive, and he is forced to face the ramifications of his choices on his family. And in the title story, a mother desperate to save her child makes a deal with the devil, allowing the devil to breast feed from her in exchange for protection and peace of mind. Each story is impeccably constructed and stunningly imagined, though not all of them land emotionally. Regardless, this is a wonderfully off-kilter collection.”
Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Home Remedies: “Wang’s formidable imagination is on full display in this wide-ranging debut collection about modern Chinese youth. Her characters include artistic and aimless 20-year-olds eking out a living shooting subversive music videos for bands in Beijing (‘Days of Being Mild’); a Chinese-American girl in Paris, who finds her life changed when she begins wearing a dead girl’s clothes (‘Echo of the Moment’); and a struggling writer who receives a mysterious gadget in the mail that ages whatever she puts into it, whether it’s avocadoes, wine, or her cat (‘Future Cat’). Wang plays with form as well, as in ‘Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments,’ written as a catalogue of such ailments as ‘Inappropriate Feelings’ and ‘Bilingual Heartache,’ or ‘Algorithm Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships,’ which allows a computer science–minded Chinese immigrant father to apply his discipline’s techniques to his relationship with his second-generation Chinese-American daughter. One of the best stories in the collection is ‘Vaulting the Sea,’ in which Taoyu, an Olympic hopeful synchronized diver, struggles with complicated feelings for his partner Hai against a greater backdrop of sacrifice, ambition, and tragedy. Though some of the stories’ narrative momentum can’t match the consistently excellent characters, nonetheless Wang proves herself a promising writer with a delightfully playful voice and an uncanny ability to evoke empathy, nostalgia, and wonder.“
Lanny by Max Porter
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Lanny: “In his bold second novel, Porter (Grief Is the Thing with Feathers) combines pastoral, satire, and fable in the entrancing tale of a boy who vanishes from an idyllic British village in the present day. Lanny is an elfin, perpetually singing child ‘more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be.’ He is a mystery to his parents, recent transplants to the picturesque, increasingly fashionable (and expensive) town: the mother is a former actress working on a gruesome novel, and the father’s a yuppie commuting to London. Lanny’s somewhat cloying eccentricity (‘Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?’) captivates a reclusive artist, ‘Mad Pete,’ who gives him drawing lessons, and enchants Dead Papa Toothwort, the town’s ancient and resilient presiding spirit: ‘[The villagers] build new homes, cutting into his belt, and he pops up adapted, to scare and define.’ Toothwort is a mischievous, Green Man–esque deity who prowls the village ‘chew[ing] the noise of the place’ and especially enjoys feasting on Lanny’s song. When Lanny goes missing, the suspicion falls on Mad Pete, and the resulting media blitz turns the village into a ‘hideous ecosystem of voyeurism,’ exposing its rifts and class resentments. In the novel’s satisfying conclusion, Toothwort stages a hallucinatory play that reveals Lanny’s fate. This is a dark and thrilling excavation into a community’s legend-packed soil.”
Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Tears of the Trufflepig: “A near-future picaresque of genetic manipulation, indigenous legend, and organized crime on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Flores’s delirious debut never quite delivers on its imaginative premise. Bellacosa, a freelance South Texas construction equipment locator, gets drafted by journalist Paco Herbert to attend an ‘underground dinner’ where wealthy invitees eat extinct animals that have been recreated through the process of ‘filtering.’ Among the living amusements is a Trufflepig, a ‘piglike reptile’ central to the mythology of the (fictional) Aranaña tribe. Once home, Bellacosa is greeted by his brother, who has just escaped a Mexican syndicate attempting to shrink his head and sell it as an Aranaña artifact. Bellacosa himself is soon kidnapped by a crooked border patrolman and, in the sequence leading to the story’s conclusion, hooked with electrodes to a Trufflepig that transforms his psyche into ‘the memory of all living things.’ Flores’s novel is jam-packed with excitement, but his inability to prioritize his ideas prevents them from cohering into a credible vision of dystopia. Despite this, Flores’s novel shows he has talent and creativity to spare.”
Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Red Birds: “Hanif, Booker-longlisted for A Case of Exploding Mangoes, dives headfirst into an unnamed desert in the present day and the disparate characters stuck in it. Ellie, an American bomber pilot who’s crash-landed, struggles through the desert half-hallucinating until he comes upon a dog. The dog, Mutt, is no stray, but rather the beloved and disgruntled pet of Momo, a shrewd and scheming 15-year-old. Momo lives in a nearby refugee camp with his family, who have been devastated by the disappearance of Momo’s older brother, Ali, who left the camp to work at a mysterious American army outpost that was recently nearby. As Ellie recovers in the camp he was intended to bomb, hoping for rescue and suppressing a major trauma he left back at home in the States, Momo develops a plan to use the American soldier as leverage to get his brother back. Narrated in turns by Ellie, Momo, aid workers, Momo’s mother, and rather beautifully by Mutt, Hanif’s portrait of the surrealism and commonplaceness of America’s wars in Muslim countries is nearly impossible to put down. The camp in particular crackles with humanity, bizarreness, and banality—at one point, Ellie thinks, “I was beginning to like this, people talking earnestly about sewage and cheating spouses, about the need for winter shelters and better ways of teaching math.” The novel manages to remain delightful and unpredictable even in its darkest moments, highlighting the hypocrisies and constant confusions of American intervention abroad.”
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Once More We Saw Stars: “Freelance journalist Greene struggles with the 2015 death of his daughter in this heart-wrenching yet life-affirming memoir. After two-year-old Greta was killed when a brick fell from an eighth-story windowsill in New York City and hit her on the head (also injuring his mother-in-law), Greene and his wife Stacy descended into despair and realized they must pass ‘through some magnificent, terrible threshold together.’ Grasping for solace, the couple attended a retreat at the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts, for people who have lost loved ones, which featured a medium and daily yoga sessions. Afterwards, back home, Greene, jogging through Central Park suddenly felt the world becoming ‘thin, translucent’ and he sensed Greta’s presence. Then, on what would have been their daughter’s third birthday, they tried a New Age healing ceremony in New Mexico that took them on separate vision quests that allowed them to confront and be at peace with their grief. Their second child was born a year later, and Greene movingly writes of the joy he felt holding his newborn son along with the simultaneous metaphysical connection he experienced with Greta. The result is an amazing and inspirational exploration on the meaning of grief and the interconnectedness of love and loss.”
Out East by John Glynn
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Out East: “In this sun-dazed debut memoir about loss, identity, and partying with the preppy set, book editor Glynn turns the magnifying glass on his inner turmoil but never manages to inspire much sympathy for his plight. Raised by happy and loving parents and now working in publishing (currently at Hanover Square), living in TriBeCa, and surrounded by friends, Glynn seems to have it all. Yet, he writes, ‘I was compulsively afraid of dying alone.’ Attempting to escape that torment, Glynn plunked down $2,000 for a summer share in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island in 2013. The weekends of beachy boozing with ‘the girls, the finance guys, and the gays’ are described in detail that will make many readers want to head for Montauk themselves (‘the beaches were sweeping and majestic, and the town had a surfery charm’). As a microcosmic rendition of a lost summer’s drunken rhythms and Glynn’s slowly unfolding realization about his own sexuality, the writing resonates with a shimmery tingle (falling for a man, he felt ‘a kind of giddy, queasy, terrifying downrush’). Glynn’s point of view, however, remains so swaddled in privilege that his emotional distress registers as mere entitlement (‘Not everyone had money, but everyone had access’). Ultimately this is a neatly observed but light story about coming out.”
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