You May See A Stranger – Paula Whyman
While I was reading YOU MAY SEE A STRANGER by Paula Whyman, I kept thinking about Carrie Bradshaw and my adventures in accidental homewrecking, and how Whyman’s protagonist Miranda Weber is, on paper, an utter mess in a way even Carrie would never let herself be.
Seventy-seven years later, Sarraute’s writing continues to unnerve and interrogate our readerly expectations.
Oil and Candle – Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
Gabriel Ojeda-Sague describes and deploys ritual forms in order to undo the obscuring magic of privilege.
Stagg knows her strengths as a storyteller and continues to tell the story with lots of dialogue and minimal interiority instead of resorting to numbers, or to the pristine artifice of online forms such as screen-caps and chats.
The Border of Paradise – Esmé Weijun Wang
Consider THE BELL JAR and GIRL, INTERRUPTED. Esmé Weijun Wang’s debut novel THE BORDER OF PARADISE is a different kind of narrative about mental illness.
The Fishermen – Chigozie Obioma
THE FISHERMEN is less an allegory than a story about our desire to fit the past into one.
OBLIVION’s task is a vital one: to recover Russia’s collectively repressed memories of the prison labor camps under Stalin.
Ways to Disappear – Idra Novey
As happens from time to time with critically successful artists, it is almost a fait accompli that the world discovers disparities between the quality of the art and the quality of the creator.
This novel reads like a master-class in workshopped excess, rattling off, with cloying exhaustiveness, every trick in the experimental fiction handbook: abruptly shifting voices, the omission of pronouns, the stylized eschewing of punctuation, relentlessly conspicuous obliquity, semi-ironic deployment of recherché archaisms, etc., etc.
On this Wedding D-day, the characters are balanced on a precipice: Will they move toward a revolution and remake the social order? Will the authoritarian regime hold things together? Or will absolutely everything come crumbling down?