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Contemporary Fiction Views: Can you see me? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-25
Many women, especially as they reach a certain age, feel unseen. In Jane Tara's new novel, Tilda is Visible, is literally becoming invisible.
One morning while at her desk, she notices a little finger is missing. It's actually still there, but no one can see it. Then an ear cannot be seen. Then a thumb. Her longtime doctor, also a woman, lets her know the news. It's a condition that has been known about for centuries, but there is no cure. Some women become completely invisible, some just parts of them.
There is no funding for treatment or a cure because, well, it's a woman's disease.
Tilda co-founded a successful company she and one of her best friends still own. She is divorced and the mother of two grown daughters. She and her two best friends are so close that their four children are tight friends. Tilda checks in a few times a week with an elderly neighbor, a cat lady, who she met during lockdown. She's got a lot going for her. But she's still becoming invisible.
And every other woman she knows feels invisible in one way or another.
The company Tilda operates creates and sells posters, mugs and the like with inspiration sayings.
To Tilda, it's crazy that reprinting bromides has been lucrative. Fara goes meta. A quote about enjoying the little things in life, but they really are the big things, precedes Tilda looking at how much she treasures time now with her daughters and friends. When her girls were growing up, there were school activities, extracurricular activities, tiptoeing around the moods of her now ex-husband, the daily grind of life. She regrets missing more of these special, normal times when they were growing up. But she knows to appreciate every moment of the ones they share now.
As Tilda works through dealing with her condition, one question is there all along. If one cannot be seen, does one continue to exist? To others? To one's deepest sense of self? And why her?
This something women have dealt with for generations, more so now than the last couple generations. If we are not seen, if we are not considered, do we matter?
Oh hell yes we do.
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One of the things this era is teaching me is that it doesn't matter how much I read at any time. What matters is that I read. And that I read what calls out to me. It's something I wish for everyone.
Here are some of this week's new releases, with links to The Literate Lizard and descriptions from the publishers.
Blue Futures, Break Open by Zoë Gadegbeku
Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth—not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island’s seamstress, takes two forms.
She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former lives. Yet, even there, outside of time, the souls are not totally insulated from the world in which they were enslaved. Each time a Black person anywhere is harmed, a piece of Blue Basin disintegrates: an earthquake leaves hundreds of thousands dead, and bricks crumble on the island; when police kill a Black child asleep in her bed, the blue paint on homes throughout the island drips and then runs from the walls.
Lucille must hold the island together, but she struggles to juggle the responsibility of ensuring everyone’s safety while also seeking and losing her own private love. Grounding the story in African folklore and dipping into the rich literary tradition around African people with the power of flight, Zoë Gadegbeku visualizes the destination at the end of the flight and the new life that awaits them.
A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay
When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza
When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail polish: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of more men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems and put a stop to the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
Runaway Horses by Carlo Fruttero
Siena, one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, visited by all discerning travelers to Tuscany, is feverishly preparing for the Palio, a horse race dating back to the Middle Ages held every summer in the center of the town, famously described by Rick Steves as "The World's Most Insane Horse Race". Milanese lawyer Enzo Maggione and his wife Valeria are unwittingly caught up in the maelstrom of plots, counterplots and bribes surrounding the race. They are even witnesses to the violent death of Puddu, the Palio’s most celebrated jockey, found dead the day before the race.
What begins as a listless excursion to a medieval equestrian competition turns into a hallucinatory nightmare for Maggione and his wife, awakening their dormant libido, for each other but, more dangerously, for others in their entourage. The death of the jockey is only one of the mysterious goings-on to be solved. It soon becomes clear that there are no bystanders in the Palio.
The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst
In a small village in England, in the shadow of an ancient abbey nestled between rivers, a young boy is growing up. Daniel is highly intelligent but little understood by his family, and so a secret passion burns inside him—for love, for certainty, and for recognition. His father is a man of grand gestures but few practical skills, and his beautiful mother is attentive but compromised by her own unhappiness and fading ideals.
When Daniel’s father loses his job as the headmaster of the local school, the family is pulled beneath the undertow of his whims, stumbling into a rural life for which they are ill-prepared. The arrival of Philip, a new boy at school, whom Daniel worships with a confused intensity, is his sole solace. Before long, both boys fall under the spell of a charismatic art teacher, setting Daniel on a perilous course that could lead to the betrayal of all he loves.
The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu
Seven struggling customers are given the unique opportunity to take home a "blanket cat" . . . but only for three days, the time it’ll take to change their lives.
A peculiar pet shop in Tokyo has been known to offer customers the unique opportunity to take home one of seven special cats, whose "magic" is never promised, but always received. But there are rules: these cats must be returned after three days. They must eat only the food supplied by the owner, and they must travel to their new homes with a distinctive blanket.
In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven customers, each of whom is hoping a temporary feline companion will help them escape a certain reality, including a couple struggling with infertility, a middle-aged woman on the run from the police, and two families in very different circumstances simply seeking joy.
But like all their kind, the "blanket cats" are mysterious creatures with unknowable agendas, who delight in confounding expectations. And perhaps what their hosts are looking for isn't really what they need. Three days may not be enough to change a life. But it might just change how you see it.
Show Don't Tell: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld
A funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition—including a story that revisits the main character from Curtis Sittenfeld’s iconic novel Prep—from the New York Times bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy
In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age,” a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “A for Alone,” a married middle-aged artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone without lusting after each other. And in “Lost but Not Forgotten,” Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school.
A new trade paperback edition (Scalzi also has a new novel out today: The Last Colony: An Old Man's War Novel)
How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history?
I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.
Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don't know my tale: How I did what I did — how I did what I had to do — not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. I'm going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try to make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic and wonder, despair and hope. Everything that happened, bringing us to Earth, and Earth out of its captivity. All through my eyes.
It's a story you know. But you don't know it all.
The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker
In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.
Are Jane’s strange experiences related to the overwhelm of single motherhood, or are they the manifestation of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind, and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality—including events in his own life.
Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein
Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. Born in the Jewish enclave of Stepney shortly after his father was executed as a thief, Jacob's whole world is his open-minded mother, Leah. But Jacob’s prospects are forever altered when a light-fingered pickpocket takes Jacob under his wing and teaches him a trade that pays far better than the neighborhood boys could possibly dream.
Striking out on his own, Jacob familiarizes himself with London's highest value neighborhoods while forging his own path in the shadows. But everything changes when he adopts an aspiring teenage thief named Bill Sikes, whose mercurial temper poses a danger to himself and anyone foolish enough to cross him. Along the way, Jacob’s found family expands to include his closest friend, Nancy, and his greatest protégé, the Artful Dodger. But as Bill’s ambition soars and a major robbery goes awry, Jacob is forced to decide what he really stands for—and what a life is worth.
Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley
It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?
Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.
The Talent by Daniel D'Addario
As Hollywood prepares for its most glamorous evening, five actresses compete to see who will claim the top prize.
Adria, a dignified and highly regarded grand dame of the movie industry, is intent on cementing her legacy as one of the greatest thespians of all time, even as the younger generation creeps up quickly behind her. Bitty must keep a nervous breakdown—and an increasingly debilitating alcohol addiction—at bay, as she searches for genuine closeness in an unforgiving landscape. Contessa, a former child star, is determined to make the world, and her leading man, take her seriously. Davina attempts to find her footing in superficial Los Angeles, a far cry from her roots as a serious London stage actress. And Jenny—always the underdog to her rival, Adria—sees this awards season as her personal redemption, a chance to atone for past mistakes and make up for missed opportunities.
The Grand Scheme of Things by Warona Jay
Two unlikely friends hatch an extraordinary scheme to expose the theater world in this wildly entertaining and sharply observed debut novel exploring perception, redemption, and how success shapes us all.
Meet Relebogile Naledi Mpho Moruakgomo. Or, for short, Eddie: an aspiring playwright who dreams of making it big in London’s theater world. But after repeated rejections from white talent agents, Eddie suspects her non-white sounding name might be the problem.
Enter Hugo Lawrence Smith: good looking, well-connected, charismatic and…very white. Stifled by his law degree and looking for a way out of the corporate world, he finds a kindred spirit in Eddie after a chance encounter at a cafe.
Together they devise a plan, one which will see Eddie’s play on stage and Hugo’s name in lights. They send out her script under his name and vow to keep the play’s origins a secret until it reaches critical levels of success. Then they can expose the theater world for its racism and hollow clout-chasing. But as their plan spins wildly out of control, Eddie and Hugo find themselves wondering if their reputations, and their friendship, can survive.
Supersonic by Thomas Kohnstamm
When PTA president Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth petitions to rename a Seattle elementary school after her late grandmother, she ignites a battle over the school’s future and the history of its surrounding neighborhood. Supersonic launches readers into a kaleidoscopic tale of the generations of interrelated families who breathed life into that small, hilltop community.
The story cuts in time from the arrival of white settlers’ ships to the last indigenous landowner fighting to hold on to scraps of his ancestral home and back to the school’s PTA auction. It interweaves an opioid-addicted nineteenth-century con man–cum–civic booster, a disgraced Navy seaman building an airplane that travels faster than sound, a stay-at-home dad hustling to open the city’s first legal weed shop and Sami’s grandmother, a survivor of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, who founded the school’s once-celebrated music program.
The novel traces their false starts, triumphs, and heartbreaks through the booms and busts of the Yukon gold rush, the jet age, Big Tech, and beyond. By exploring the converging and often clashing personalities that make up the dynamic soul of a place, Supersonic illuminates themes of identity, displacement, destruction, and reinvention that give rise to all great American cities.
Boy by Nicole Galland
Alexander “Sander” Cooke is the most celebrated “boy player” in the Chamberlain’s Men, William Shakespeare’s theatre company. Indeed, Sander’s androgynous beauty and deft portrayal of female roles have made him the toast of London, and his companionship is sought by noblewomen and -men alike. And yet, now at the height of his fame, he teeters on the cusp of adulthood, his future uncertain. Often, he wishes he could stop time and remain a boy forever.
Joan Buckler, Sander’s best friend, also has a dream. Though unschooled, she is whip-smart and fascinated by the snippets of natural philosophy to which she’s been exposed. And while she senses that Sander’s admiration for her is more than mere friendship, Joan’s true passion is knowledge, something that is nearly impossible for her to attain. As a woman, she has no place in the intellectual salons and cultural community of the day; only in disguise can she learn to her heart’s content.
Joan’s covert intellectual endeavors, coupled with Sander’s theatrical triumphs, attract the attention of none other than Francis Bacon: natural philosopher and trusted adviser to Queen Elizabeth. It is through their connection with Bacon—one of the greatest minds of their time—that their lives will be changed forever as they become embroiled in an intricate game of political intrigue that threatens their very survival.
The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler
Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived.
The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert’s café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.
What You Make of Me by Sophie Madeline Dess
On the eve of her first solo show, Ava is feeling defiant. The art gallery acolytes have insisted on writing “explanations” of her paintings for an accompanying catalog, but what do they know of her work? What do they know of her brother, Demetri, whose face echoes across every canvas?
After all, Ava and Demetri have only ever had each other. Abandoned first by their mother, who drowned in the Long Island Sound, and then again by their father, who couldn’t see beyond his grief, each sibling has always been the other’s most ardent supporter: Demetri encouraged Ava’s raw talent as a painter, while Ava pushed Demetri to pursue filmmaking. But as they make their way in New York, the codependency that once sustained them soon threatens to be their undoing. Betrayals mount, fueled by Ava’s reckless acts and her disdain for Demetri’s last-ditch efforts to make something of consequence, but what ultimately and irreversibly tips the scales won’t be found on canvas or film. Because now, at thirty-one, Demetri is dying.
True Failure by Alex Higley
Ben just lost his job, but he won't fess up to his wife Tara. Instead, while he claims to be going to work, he's actually devoting his time to auditioning for the wildly popular reality TV show Big Shot, where he'll be able to pitch his unique entrepreneurial idea. Meanwhile, Tara is lying to the parents of the children at her day care, turning in fabricated accounts of the kids' daily activities. And Marcy, the producer of Big Shot, has told her coworkers she's taking some time to "unplug," the better to avoid explaining her real reasons for getting away from the office . . .
All Our Tomorrows by Amy DeBellis
Janet, Anna, and Gemma lead separate lives, each ground down by the weight of the world they were born into, lost against the dazzling pixelated backdrop of the city. Too young to remember life before the iPhone 4, they think the real world was destroyed long before they were born.
Janet is an underpaid gig therapist who spends her time as a mental health matchmaker, responding to grievance letters from faceless online avatars. Anna is a model-turned-sugar-baby who dissociates during dates with her aging daddy, hoping to save enough not for a Birkin bag, but for the water wars of the near future. And Gemma is a freshman at NYU who aspires to become an influencer, but is so haunted by a recent loss that she can’t even film one video.
And in the comics/graphics novel section:
Self Help by Owen King, Jesse Kellerman
A surreal and colorful world populated with two-faced talk-show hosts, cheerful Finnish mobsters, bloodthirsty white supremacists, snide English butlers, and panther-wielding Euro-trash assassins.
Down-on-his-luck rideshare driver Jerry Hauser’s existence is a bleak one…especially because every fare he picks up tells him how much he looks like uber-successful self-help guru Darren Hart. But after a twist of fate, Jerry is given the chance of a lifetime…which, if he’s not careful, may well end his lifetime. So begins this California noir—a rollicking and gleefully lurid pulp crime story for our time.
Spirited Away Film Comic: All-in-One Edition by Hayao Miyazak
Fantasy and adventure await in this book based on the winner of the 2002 Academy Award® for Best Animated Feature.
Chihiro’s family is moving to a new house, but when they stop on the way to explore an abandoned village, her parents undergo a mysterious transformation and Chihiro is whisked into a world of fantastic spirits ruled over by the sorceress Yubaba. Put to work in a magical bath house for spirits and demons, Chihiro must use all her wits to survive in this strange new place, find a way to free her parents and return to the normal world.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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