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Contemporary Fiction Views: Treasure in dark times [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-04
The world is perilous and there are evil people trying to take things down. But besides loved ones, there is something else helping to keep me sane. Many fascinating books are being published today and coming up, in addition to the ones that have already come out. One of the most astounding ones I've read is some time is a novel I plan to feature next week.
One of the best ways to rejuvenate as we continue to fight the fascists is to visit the library or, if you can, buy from an independent bookstore.
A smattering of this week's new releases, with links to The Literate Lizard and descriptions by the publishers:
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.
Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, can they trust each other enough to protect one another—and the precious seeds in their care? And can they finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together?
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.
In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved?
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
A darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions personal and political.
Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies.
First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone but is sometimes visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose and yet manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters wound up in America: Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student in New York City trying to find deeper meaning by quietly giving away her belongings.
When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up in jail, the family’s upper-class veneer is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a quest to restore the family name to its former glory, but what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Can they bring their old inheritance into a new tomorrow?
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro
The metaphysically disorienting tale of a captain who loses control of her thinking—and her crew—aboard a cargo ship in the Atlantic.
A female captain in a male-dominated field, the unnamed narrator of Ultramarine has secured her success through strict adherence to protocol; she now manages a crew of twenty men and helms her own vessel. Uncharacteristically, one day, she allows her crew to cut the engines and swim in the deep open water. Returning from this moment of leisure, the crew of mariners no longer totals twenty men: now, they are twenty-one.
Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa
Tetra Nova tells the story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century.
The operatic text begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the war’s end. As the voices of Lua and Emi blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next.
Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi in one embodied memory travel across the English language itself to make sense of a history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow.
At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories forward: Emi or Lua.
Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller
From the author of The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, an atmospheric novel about family, friends, and falling in love, as a young man tries to find purpose on a struggling Icelandic cattle farm
Growing up on his family’s cattle farm in western Iceland, young Orri has gained an appreciation for the beauty found in everyday things: the cavorting of a newborn calf, the return of birdsong after a long winter, the steadfast love of a good (or tolerably good) farm dog. But the outer world still beckons, so Orri leaves his no-nonsense Lithuanian Jewish mother and his taciturn father, Pabbi, to attend university in Reykjavík.
Pabbi is no stranger to cycles of life and death, growth and destruction. He is pursued by the memory of a volcanic eruption and its aftermath, and so many years of hardscrabble farming have left their mark. Jaded, and no longer able to find joy in his way of life, Pabbi falls into a depression soon after Orri goes away to school. Orri, feeling adrift and aimless at the end of his first semester, comes home.
For the first time, Pabbi allows Orri to help him run the farm. Despite their conflicting attitudes, Orri and Pabbi must learn to work together. Meanwhile, Orri meets a kindred spirit on the internet: Mihan, a part-time student. Over time—and countless texts and phone calls—their connection deepens. By year’s end, Orri must decide whether he wants to—or should—return to university, and what a future with Mihan would hold, if she’ll have him.
Woodworking by Emily St. James
Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.
Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She's also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty -— and loneliness -— that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others’ expectations.
Rockin' the Bronx by Larry Kirwan
Discover the untold story of 1980s Irish New York, where love, politics, and rock 'n' roll collide in a gritty urban tale that's as passionate as it is poignant.
Rockin’ The Bronx vividly transports readers to the vibrant and chaotic world of 1980s Bronx, where Irish immigrants forged a new community amidst the backdrop of political upheaval and cultural transformation. Larry Kirwan, leader of the revolutionary band Black 47, blends drama, passion, and musical evolution into a narrative that captures the essence of an era defined by its challenges and triumphs.
Through the eyes of characters like the groundbreaking gay hero, a book-loving, hard-hitting immigrant with IRA roots, and the central couple, Seán and Mary, who navigate this raucous landscape, Kirwan explores the intersecting worlds of personal identity and communal struggle.
Set during significant historical moments—the deaths of John Lennon and Bobby Sands, the AIDS crisis, and the birth of new musical movements—this novel not only tells the story of its characters but also of a neighborhood echoing with the rhythms of change. As these Irish immigrants carve out their destinies, they leave behind a legacy of resilience and rebirth, encapsulated in a narrative that moves irrepressibly to the beat of the 1980s.
Universality by Natasha Brown
Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power.
Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.
An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, namely: Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.
I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong
From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?
A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.
Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all.
As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 a.m. fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James, he embraces new roles, too: That of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.
There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.
Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the U.S. for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience -— a period known as Optional Practical Training -— so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel -— to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT -— looking for a room to rent, starting her job -— she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.
Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.
See Friendship by Jeremy Gordon
Ahead of looming layoffs within the ongoing decimation of media, Jacob Goldberg, a culture writer in New York, knows what will save him: a podcast. Not just any podcast, but something that will demonstrate his singular thoughtfulness in an oversaturated, competitive market. When Jacob learns the true, tragic circumstances behind the mysterious death of Seth, one of his best friends from high school, his world is turned completely upside down. But when the dust settles, he realizes he has an idea worth digging into.
Of course, it’s not so simple. Learning the truth -— or at least, the beginning of it -— sends Jacob spiraling. His increasing obsession ultimately leads him back home to Chicago, where he tracks down Lee, a once up-and-coming musician who probably knew Seth best at the end of his life. As his investigation deepens, Jacob's drive to find out the truth -— and whether there’s a deeper story to be told about the fault lines of our memories, life and death on the internet, and the people we never forget—grows into a desperation to discover whether it even matters. If not, can he make it?
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown
(This) exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls, as sweetly vulnerable as they are cunning and tough, coming of age in a gritty postindustrial town in nineties Yorkshire, England.
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace -— the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.
Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, Colwill Brown’s debut novel spans decades as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked and forgotten town into the very center of the world.
Afterward by Bristol Vaudrin
In an unnamed city, a young woman deals with an unspeakable tragedy, and her boyfriend’s subsequent hospitalization.
Torn from her normal routines—coffee, sex, barhopping, and disc golf -— she finds herself in an unfamiliar world of hospital visits and doctor’s appointments, all while navigating an unexpected move to a new apartment and enduring the disapproval of her boyfriend’s mother, as well as the gossip of her friends and coworkers. (Plus the suspicious looks of strangers, and the unbearable strain on her credit card … and did we mention the gossip of her friends and coworkers?) Along the way, she meets every obstacle with … well, not grace, exactly. In fact, pretty much the opposite of grace. Maybe more like bitchiness, truth be told. And all the while, the aftereffects of the tragedy cast a pall over everything she does -— and threaten to destroy everything she has.
Guatemalan Rhapsody: Stories by Jared Lemus
Ranging from a custodian at an underfunded college to a medicine man living in a temple dedicated to San Simon, the patron saint of alcohol and cigarettes, the characters in these stories find themselves at defining moments in their lives, where sacrifices may be required of them, by them, or for them.
In “Saint Dismas,” four orphaned brothers pose as part of a construction crew, stopping cars along the highway and robbing anyone stupid enough foolish enough to hit the brakes. In “Heart Sleeves,” two wannabe tattoo artists take part in a contest, where one of them hopes to win not only first place but also the heart of his best friend’s girlfriend. And, in “Fight Sounds,” a character who fancies himself a Don Juan is swept up in the commotion of an American film crew shooting a movie in his tiny town, until the economic and sexual politics of the place are turned on their head.
Across this collection, Lemus’s characters test their loyalty to family, community, and country, illuminating the ties that both connect us and constrain us. Guatemalan Rhapsody explores how we journey from the circumstances that we are forged by, and whether the ability to change our fortunes lies in our own hands or in those of another.
Remember This by Anthony Giardina
Even though Miranda Rando, a forty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, is making breakthroughs in her biography of a powerful woman artist, she can’t escape the all-commanding presence of her father, Henry. And now that he has written a slightly embarrassing and shockingly successful self-help book, the seventy-year-old playwright is everywhere.
Henry’s sudden rise to prominence—along with his need to grapple with his own religious life—leads him to join a charitable mission to Haiti. There, he meets a young man eager to come to America. But his motivation to help becomes complicated by his disturbing attraction to the boy. It also comes to threaten his relationship with his wife, Lily, a longtime actress who is suddenly experiencing a late triumph on stage.
The Immortal Woman by Su Chang
A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind.
Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white lover, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. Following China’s meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin.
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana
A searing examination of male friendship and the broader social implications of masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness.
Two teenagers leave their small town on a vaguely charted road trip through the northern wilderness, with little more than canned food, second-hand camping gear, and the rifle they buy for reasons neither can articulate. The more they handle the gun, and the farther they get from their parents and peers, girlfriends and online gaming, the less their actions -— and the games, literal and metaphorical, they play -— are bound by the usual constraints. When one decides to harass a young couple they meet on the highway, the encounter leads them down a road from which there’s no coming back.
The Frog in the Throat by Markus Werner (reprint by NYRB Classics)
In a small town in Switzerland, a man named Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends—is being haunted, or harried is more like it, by his father, Klement, recently deceased. In life, after Franz was caught cheating on his wife and forthwith defrocked, Klement called him a disgrace and never spoke to him again; in death, Klement comes to visit him once a month in the form of a frog in the throat.
Part of Franz is urbane and self-aware (unfazed to find himself unfaithful in every sense), but another is inhabited by the voice of this father, a socialist dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents. The same goes for this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life.
The Annotated Great Gatsby: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Boats against the current, we are borne back ceaselessly to The Great Gatsby. Now, in this deluxe annotated anniversary edition, James L. W. West provides running commentary on F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, glossing contexts, language, literary allusions, and contemporary references. Dozens of illustrations and photographs throughout the volume vividly recreate the Jazz Age world of Fitzgerald’s most famous work and chronicle its rich cultural afterlife, encouraging readers to linger in the margins of this deluxe annotated edition.
Drawn from the authoritative Library of America edition of Fitzgerald’s writings. With an introduction by Amor Towles.
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