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?
Rather than falling into conventional narratives, eco-fiction needs to underscore the need for traditional environmentalism to question its own positions of privilege and provide a space for imagining non-normative paths to sustainability if it is to inspire genuine social justice.
Walsh uses the twister as both a propelling incident in the plot and a pattern for how the book will progress, making the structural choice feel necessary, as the form and the content merge to create an immanent sense of disaster.