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Contemporary Fiction Views: Cross-pollinating my reading [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-01
A smattering of this week's new fiction, with links to The Literate Lizard, the independent online bookstore of Readers and Book Lovers' own debtorsprison, and descriptions from the publishers.
I'm going back to an upcoming historical novel with implications for today, and Stephen Graham Jones's latest, Buffalo Hunter Hunter, which is both horror and historical with implications for today. It also is powerful storytelling. I am smitten, and not just because he also treasures Louise Erdrich and James Welch. This is after reading two memoirs by chefs, which were as varied in tone as the difference between sweet and savory.
For yourself, read wide and read deep. Consider it a gift from you to you. Cross-pollinate genres, authors, ideas, stories whenever and however you can. And, as always, don't let the bastards get you down.
A Man With No Title by Xavier Le Clerc
Mohand-Said Ait-Taleb is an enigma. Living in France but ravaged by memories of the war in Algeria, he has withdrawn into his own world, away from his wife and children. When his son Xavier discovers articles by Albert Camus describing the appalling conditions his father grew up in, he starts to piece together the story of his life.
Xavier retraces the steps of this dignified, illiterate and strong-willed man: from Kabylia – where starving children, like Mohand-Said, fought with dogs for scraps – to the metal factory in Normandy, where his father would spend the rest of his days, consumed with providing for his family. It is there that Xavier discovers his love of books. When he breaks with conservative family traditions and confesses his attraction to men, Xavier will find which doors slam closed and which will open.
The Harmattan Winds by Sylvain Trudel
Hidden in the reeds floating on a pond next to the highway, a woman finds a baby bobbing in a shopping basket. Adopted by the Francoeurs, Hugues remains an outsider in his semi-family. At the same time, Habéké is adopted by a Canadian family and brought to Quebec after his own family dies of famine in Ethiopia. On the margins of their small town, the boys become sworn brothers, searching for their roots, desperate to return to exile, to a paradise called Ityopia.
My Own Dear People by Dwight Thompson
A young Jamaican man struggles to overcome toxic masculinity—his culture’s and his own—in this Caribbean coming-of-age novel.
In Montego Bay, Jamaica, teenager Nyjah Messado witnesses a brutal assault by some of the boys in his circle of friends. Torn between the masculine code at his private all boys’ school and his own conscience, Nyjah fails to intervene, and comes of age haunted by the guilt of his inaction.
A Hole in the Story by Ken Kalfus
At his desk one day, prominent Washington commentator Adam Zweig receives a text message. “Btw want to give you a heads-up abt some breaking news,” it reads. “Call soonest.” These are the early rumblings of an eventual media storm generated by small-town reporter Valerie Iovine, who has gone public with her account of sexual harassment at the hands of esteemed editor and liberal icon Max Lieberthol. Twenty years have passed since the incident, and though Adam wasn’t directly involved, he quickly finds himself implicated and entangled, his career under imminent threat.
Adam has never forgotten his history with Valerie: as former colleagues, their workplace collaboration had gradually tipped into a mutual romantic attraction. Or so he believed. Confronted by the claims against his former boss and a growing awareness of rampant sexism in his industry, Adam, who had always thought of himself as progressive, is forced to challenge his own assumptions over the years. What once seemed incidental becomes sinister; what once seemed like a blundering encounter helped derail a young woman’s promising career.
Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell
Isolated from society, Emily Brontë and her siblings spend their days inventing elaborate fictional realms or roaming the wild moors above their family home in Yorkshire. When the time comes for them to venture out into the world to earn a living, each of them struggles to adapt, but for Emily the change is catastrophic. Torn from the landscape to which she has become so passionately bound, she is simply unable to function.
To the outside world, Emily Brontë appears taciturn and unexceptional, but beneath the surface her mind is in a creative ferment. A violent phenomenon is about to burst forth that will fuse her imaginary world with the landscape of her beloved Yorkshire and change the literary world forever.
A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire
The residents of a desolate town nestled in the Ecuadorian Andes are forced to reckon with the legend of Mildred, a girl wronged by the town years ago.
Cocuán, a desolate town nestled between the hot jungle and the frigid Andes, is about to slip away from memory. This is where Mildred was born, and where everything she had — her animals, her home, her lands — was taken from her after her mother’s death. Years later, a series of strange events, disappearances, and outbursts of collective delirium will force its residents to reckon with the legend of old Mildred. Once again, they will feel the shadow of death that has hung over the town ever since she was wronged. The voices of nine characters — Mildred, Ezequiel, Agustina, Manzi, Carmen, Víctor, Baltasar, Hermosina, and Filatelio — tell us of the past and present of that doomed place and Mildred's fate.
I See You've Called in Dead by John Kenney
The Office meets Six Feet Under meets About a Boy in this coming-of-middle-age tale about having a second chance to write your life’s story.
Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.
As Bud awaits his fate at work, his life hangs in the balance. Given another shot by his boss and encouraged by his best friend, Tim, a worldly and wise former art dealer, Bud starts to attend the wakes and funerals of strangers to learn how to live.
Attila by Aliocha Coll (see below)
Attila the Hun, reimagined as a visionary leader, contemplates the fate of his people at the gates of Rome. His son, Quijote, is caught between empires and ideals, forced to choose between his father's vision of a Hunnic utopia and the decaying allure of Roman civilization. As Rome burns, Quijote journeys through both real and surreal landscapes, encountering psychedelic visions, mystical revelations, and existential dilemmas.
Quijote's journey blurs the lines between past and future, uniting Biblical, Classical, and Buddhist traditions while moving between planes of existence.
Attila by Javier Serena (see above)
From the author of Last Words on Earth — a reimagining of Roberto Bolaño’s life — comes a book articulating the final years of Aliocha Coll, one of Spain’s most innovative writers as he completes his masterpiece, Attila (also available from Open Letter Books).
Living alone in Paris, estranged from his family, suffering from heartbreak and possibly madness, Alioscha Coll works with saintly intensity on what will be his final manuscript: Attila. Once the final words have been written, he vows to end his life, convinced that his existence will lose all purpose.
Told through the viewpoint of a literary critic and journalist, Attila expands Javier Serena’s investigation into artists who remained dedicated to their art, to their aesthetic vision in the face of complete dismissal by the publishing world and reading public. In the case of Last Words on Earth and Ricardo Funes (the stand-in for Bolaño in that novel), things work out and he briefly becomes the star of the literary world — could the same happen for Alioscha Coll?
Our City That Year by Geetanjali Shree
In an unnamed city in India, violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen, friends and colleagues turn against each other. Hospital beds fill up and classrooms empty out. Curfews are imposed. Residents flee en masse.
Three intellectuals find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Shruti, a creative writer, spends her time writing and rewriting the same sentence. Hanif is sidelined by his academic department for his own beliefs. And Sharad finds it increasingly difficult to connect with Hanif, his childhood friend. The only one left to bear witness is the novel’s unnamed narrator, who hurries to transcribe everything that’s happening.
Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü
An unnamed writer embarks on an obsessive journey through Europe, drawn to the gravesites of her literary idols— Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka — putting her life, her writing, and her politics in conversation with theirs.
Untethered and spirit-like herself, she moves among European cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and Belgrade. At times there are companions — lovers and others — but she remains steadfast in her solitude. As she is uncannily drawn to Pavese’s suicide, her journey transmutes passion for literature into desire for meaning.
The Night Trembles by Nadia Terranova
Two stories converge in the aftermath of the devastating 1908 earthquake in Sicily and Calabria: a young woman sees a chance to avoid her impending arranged marriage and a boy manages to escape from the influence of an abusive mother on the verge of madness.
“There is something stronger than pain, and that is habit.” Eleven-year-old Nicola knows this well. Each night he is tied up in the cellar by his mother, the wife of Calabria’s biggest bergamot producer. There he waits for the sun to rise, and with it a sliver of freedom. On the other side of the sea, Barbara has just arrived in Messina and plans to escape her father, who pulls her towards marriage with a man she does not love. Liberty will be granted to both, but it will come at a very high price.
The Snares by Rav Grewal-Kök
In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former Naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency — one with greater-than-usual powers and fewer-than-usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination — men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and moral qualms mount, he is drawn further and further away from his wife and two young daughters. When he makes a critical mistake at work, he is left vulnerable to shadowy figures in the intelligence world who seek to use him in their own, still more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn’t . . .
Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory by Iddo Gefe
Here’s a sweet comic novel for fans of Etgar Keret and Aimee Bender about a family’s tech startup that’s based on a miracle invention (it’s a souped up vacuum cleaner) that turns sand into rain clouds and creates family havoc and possible love for Eli Lilienblum, Sarai Lilienblum’s twenty-something son.
Our story opens with Mrs. Lilienblum discovered drinking a martini in a crater in the Israeli desert. Eli, her adult son, tries to understand what happened to his wacky mother, while he also tackles the legend of a missing hiker named McMurphy, and whether he might be in love with Tamara, a visitor to his family’s hostel on the edge of a crater.
The story races forward as the Lilienblum family builds a company around Eli’s mother’s invention and makes comedy out of startup culture, the obsession with company valuation and funding, the secrets families keep, romantic and family love–all with humor, warmth and compassion.
Small Ceremonies by Kyle Edwards
Word on the street is that this is the Tigers' last season. For Tomahawk “Tommy” Shields, an Indigenous, image-obsessed high school student from Winnipeg, the potential loss of his team serves as a stark reminder of his uncertain future. He can't help but feel that each of his peers has some skill or gift that he lacks, yet each of their perceived virtues hides darker truths, too. Clinton is beloved by teachers, but his "good kid" disposition is a desperate attempt not to fall prey to the gang violence in which his older brother has become enmeshed. Floyd has incredible talent on the ice, yet behind that talent lies deep insecurity about his multiracial background. And the adults that populate Tommy's life — his mother, who struggles with schizophrenia; Pete, the team's wayward Zamboni driver; and elders Maggie and Olga — offer a mixture of well-intentioned but often misguided support and serve as a portent of what the future could hold.
Set in Winnipeg's North End, at the border of Canada's eastern woodlands and central prairies, Small Ceremonies follows a community both at the edge of the world and at the center of something much larger than itself.
Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong
Like Dubliners, if Dubliners were "Cat Person" as a feminist mock-epic about a writer's coming of age—and every Dubliner was named Margaret.
A woman pursues the man who cut ahead of her in line. Two nice people report that a child has been left unsupervised at a local beach. Romances, old and new, shift and sour. Following Maggie Armstrong’s intrepid hero, Margaret, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date, and on into midlife and its attendant disillusionment and revelations.
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
A reimagining of Bluebeard — one of the most mythologized serial killers — twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.
The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy — until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.
Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh
Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks’ marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,” they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is quite as it seems.
The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh
Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. No one has heard from his wife, Evelyn, in two decades. She abandoned the family without a trace, and clearly doesn’t want anything to do with Duc, the business, or their kids. But the money has to go to someone. With the help of the shady family lawyer, Duc informs his five estranged adult children that to receive their inheritance, his four daughters must revitalize run-down shops in old-school Little Saigon locations across America: Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia — within a year. But if the first-born (and only) son, Jude, gets married first, everything will go to him.
Each daughter is stuck in a new city, battling gentrification, declining ethnic enclaves, and messy love lives, while struggling to modernize their father’s American dream. Jude wonders if he wants to marry for love or for money — or neither. As Duc’s children scramble to win their inheritance, they begin to learn the real intention behind the inheritance scheme — and the secret their mother kept tucked away in the old fishing tackle box, all along.
The Library of Lost Dollhouses by Elise Hooper
Tildy Barrows, head curator of a beautiful archival library in San Francisco, is meticulously dedicated to the century’s worth of inventory housed in her beloved Beaux Art building. She loves the calm and order in the shelves of books and walls of art. But Tildy’s uneventful life takes an unexpected turn when she, first, learns the library is on the verge of bankruptcy and, second, discovers two exquisite never-before-seen dollhouses. After finding clues hidden within these remarkable miniatures, Tildy starts to believe that Belva Curtis LeFarge, the influential heiress who established the library a century ago, is conveying a significant final message.
With a newfound sense of spontaneity, Tildy sets out to decipher the secret history of the dollhouses, aiming to salvage her cherished library in the process. Her journey to understand introduces her to a world of ambitious and gifted women in Belle Époque Paris, a group of scarred World War I veterans in the English countryside, and Walt Disney’s bustling Burbank studio in the 1950s. As Tildy unravels the mystery, she finds not only inspiring, overlooked history, but also a future for herself.
Flesh by David Szalay
Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor — a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands — as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.
What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story.
Gloria by Andrés Felipe Solano
Centered around a real-life, historic concert at Madison Square Garden, this wide-ranging and nostalgic novel spans two continents and five decades as it charts the interlaced lives of a mother and son in New York City.
It is a bright spring Saturday: April 11, 1970. The famous Argentine singer Sandro is about to become the first Latin American to perform at Madison Square Garden, and Gloria will be one of the lucky attendees at what will be a legendary concert. At just twenty years old, the young woman walks through the electric streets of New York City full of hope and possibility. The disturbing images she recently encountered at her job at a photographic laboratory, the trauma of a father who was murdered when she was a child, and even the long-term prospects of her relationship with Tigre, her irascible boyfriend, are problems for another day. This day should be perfect and should last forever. Which it will, in surprising and unexpected ways.
Five decades later, Gloria’s son reflects on his mother's life and realizes that their formative years — imprinted as they are by sojourns in New York at exactly the same age — are a bridge between generations that draws the pair closer through a shared sense of longing and potential.
Bad Nature by Ariel Courage
Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father.
When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they experience along the way dissuade Hester from her goal?
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