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Contemporary Fiction Views: Reading as antidote [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-08
As an antidote to running down the street screaming, I've been dipping in and out of books and old issues of The New Yorker this week. The latter can yield lovely breaks from our current reality, from essays on Wilkie Collins and Edith Wharton (the latter by Franzen of all people) to reviews of two books on Buster Keaton.
Meanwhile, there are new treasures waiting to be discovered. Links to some of this week's published fiction are to The Literate Lizard, while descriptions are from the publishers.
Big Chief by Jon Hickey
There, There meets The Night Watchman in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past.
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.
But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation’s descent into violence.
Ultrazone by Mark Terrill, Francis Poole
William S. Burroughs is dead and buried, but he can find no rest. His ghost is roaming the backstreets of Tangier in search of a missing manuscript. During his chaotic years there in the 1950s Burroughs not only wrote Naked Lunch, he also spewed out a mass of much darker material he then lost — hundreds of pages in which he wrestled with his demons. He fears his longtime nemesis, the Ugly Spirit, has been lurking in those pages ever since — and is now emerging from its slumber.
To help him find and destroy the infected manuscript before the Ugly Spirit can spread its evil in the world, Burroughs enlists fellow ghosts and old Tangier pros Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, Joseph Dean and Brian Jones, as well as an inept witch, an elderly sorcerer, and a gang of macaque monkeys. Their adventures — often comic, sometimes ghastly — involve vanishing corpses, a magic carpet, giant black centipedes—and a word virus about to go pandemic.
The Float Test by Lynn Steger Strong
The Kenner siblings are at odds. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can’t write, maybe because she’s lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters’ friends. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever—if only they could trust each other.
A family story is, of course, only as honest as the person telling it. This family story in particular is fraught with secrets about kids and sex and jobs and why the Kenner matriarch had a gun in her underwear drawer. The biggest secret of all though is the secret of what happened between Jude and Fred to create such a rift between the two once-close middle sisters. Over the course of a sweltering Florida summer, the Kenner siblings will revisit what it means to be a family and, if they are smart and kind and lucky, come out on the other side better for having each other.
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk
To outside observers, Linda’s life might seem drab. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless room she rents in a garage on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion: taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. Linda's secret is that she's sexually attracted to planes: Their intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages and powerful engines make her feel a way that no human lover ever could. She believes her destiny is to someday “marry” one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite Linda with her soulmate plane for eternity.
Linda is used to hiding her true nature, but when her coworker, Karina, invites her to a quarterly Vision Board Brunch, Linda sees a chance both to get closer to her work friend, and to nudge the universe on behalf of her destiny. However, as the vision boards seem to manifest items more quickly—and more literally—than Linda had expected, the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of her control, and she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy or launching herself headlong toward her greatest dream.
Audition by Katie Kitamura
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her – and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.
A Girl Is Lost in Her Century, Looking for Her Father by Gonçalo M. Tavares
Amid a landscape of rubble, skeletal figures, and helplessness in Europe post-World War II, a girl and a man wander among the ruins.
Hanna, a 12-year-old girl with Down's Syndrome, is looking for her father. Marius, her companion, seems to be hiding from something. Aided by a simple instruction card, Hanna explores what it is to be human.
City of Fiction by Yu Hua
In the early 20th century, China is a land undergoing a momentous social and cultural shift, with a thousand-year-old empire crumbling and the nation on the brink of modernity. Against this backdrop, a quiet man from the North embarks on a perilous journey to a Southern city in the grip of a savage snowstorm. He carries with him a newborn baby: he is looking for the child’s mother and a city that isn’t there.
I Want to Die in My Boots by Natalie Appleton
I Want to Die in My Boots is the untold story of Belle Jane, the woman who ran one of Canada’s largest cattle thieving rings in the 1920s, who brilliantly broke every taboo, took the names of five different husbands, and nearly followed the tragic end of her great hero, the outlaw queen Belle Starr.
Dark and daring, meticulously researched and mostly true, I Want to Die in My Boots is a lyrical, unconventional literary novel that gives voice to the unheard in a long-forgotten world. After leaving Montana for a third husband and the ranch she’d always wanted, Belle settles in Saskatchewan, before spending her final years in Penticton, reading tarot cards for strangers.
No Names by Greg Hewett
Mike and Pete were "no names," two working-class boys lost in the shuffle of their stratified town, brought together by their love of music. By 1978, their punk band was blazing across the underground scene. Now, in 1993, Mike is a hermit living alone on a dot of an island in the North Atlantic. When a mysterious letter from an unlikely fan named Isaac arrives, he's pulled right back into the pain he’s spent over a decade running from.
Isaac longs for an escape from his lonely teenage life. A chance discovery of the No Names’ only album catapults him into an obsession with the godlike rockers and the tantalizing possibility of connection.
The Creation of Half-Broken People by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
A nameless woman [is] plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.
Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.
In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. But City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster's acclaimed New York Trilogy, and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics.
Now the wait is over.
Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed
Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah’s help. Laboring in the warmth of a Scottish summer, Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough—and then things go terribly wrong. Joe Mungo Reed’s intricately crafted novel expands from this extraordinary event, drawing together the stories of four lives reckoning with what it means to take fate into their own hands, moving from the last days of civilization on Earth through the birth of another on Mars.
Roban lives in the Colony, one of the first generation born to this sterile new outpost, where he is consumed by longing for the lost wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face an uncertain future in a world that is falling apart. Andrew is a politician running to be Scotland’s First Minister. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph, if only he can persuade people to band together. For his starkly rationalist daughter Kenzie, this idealism doesn’t offer the hard tools needed to keep the rising floods at bay. And so, she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond—in contravention of all Andrew stands for.
Hail Mary: Stories by Funmi Fetto
nine Nigerian women discover what it means to confront traditional expectations that have held them hostage for too long.
Meet Ifeoma. She’s been ready to leave her violent husband for some time, but her plans for a quiet departure take an unexpectedly gruesome turn...
Nkechi a housemaid for a rich Lagos family, bears the weight of her Madam's wrath when she discovers her husband's dark secret.
In London, Riliwa meets Mary, a guardian angel full of advice, wisdom and practical support as she navigates her unfamiliar new home. But it soon becomes clear that Mary’s kindness comes at a price.
Little Lazarus by Michael Bible
Little Lazarus is the story of two clairvoyant tortoises who bear witness to centuries of human suffering.
Teenagers Francois and Eleanor are lonely and wild in the small Southern town of Harmony that promises them nothing but more of the same: nothing. They attempt to escape their mundane existence and dysfunctional families but succeed only in finding each other. And that seems to be enough. Until one drunken night driving down a country road changes the course of their lives.
As Francois and Eleanor tell their stories in parallel sections, another larger story unfolds, told through the lives of two tortoises, Lazarus and Little Lazarus. Their respective journeys across continents constitute a tour of the human heart itself in all its manifestations. Their caretakers range from a billionaire intent on achieving immortality, to a series of mute men passing down the same seersucker suit through generations, to a dog named Pony at the end of the world.
My Documents by Kevin Nguyen
The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.
Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.
Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.
Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
A woman learns the incredible story of a real-life American Kingdom—and her family’s ties to it—in this enthralling novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand.
Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can.
But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.
It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.
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