We The Animals – Justin Torres
This world, through which the reader all-too-quickly passes, is etched cleanly and sparsely, and nonetheless seems complete. Description, dialogue, and the narrator’s own youthful viewpoint create a realm almost tangible, both in the squalor of the low points and the beauty of their family’s wary intimacy.
The Art of Fielding – Chad Harbach
While Harbach successfully captures the elegant, romantic aspects of the game, his attempts to evoke its baser elements are less convincing.
Set two years after 9/11, Amy Waldman’s debut novel opens with a jury presiding over an anonymous contest to select the design for a memorial and chronicles the political and cultural fallout that follows.
Everything Beautiful Began After – Simon Van Booy
Great novelists hand readers the keys and ride shotgun, pointing out turns and exits whenever necessary, but never spoiling the destination. Van Booy is a backseat driver.
Girls in White Dresses – Jennifer Close
Girls in White Dresses is the anti-chicklit. There are no poufy lap dogs or shopping sprees or cosmopolitans. Close’s characters are “chicks” only in the sense that they start out the book newly hatched from college.
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day – Ben Loory
In the first story of Ben Loory’s debut collection, a woman buys a book, takes it home, and is dismayed to learn that it is filled with empty pages. When she comes across a man reading the same book on the metro, her indignation grows. After she protests that he can’t possibly read a blank book, he defends himself: “You can pretend, he says. There’s no law against pretending.”
Stark uses equal parts force and subtlety in reminding us that behind the new-fangled office loft, there’s a decaying wooden water tower, beneath the city we know, there’s an older one.
The successes and misfires of Orientation ultimately hinge on the same thing: trusting the reader. When Orozco trusts his readers to orient themselves within the diverse structures and psychologies of his stories, they are copiously rewarded. When he does not, however, the stories start showing off, overcompensating, explaining themselves too forcefully.
American Masculine – Shann Ray
The Montana men of Shann Ray’s debut collection American Masculine: Stories drink and hunt, wrestle steers and reckon with fathers who beat their wives. They are Northern Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine-Sioux, and white. They are men shouldering troubled pasts.
Daughters of the Revolution – Carolyn Cooke
This novel brought back a nostalgic draft of the feeling I associate with discovering literature, when reading was a process of constant blossoming, feeling like my mind was being tended by the deceptively gentle hand of a master of immense talent and wisdom. It’s not a feeling I have very often as an adult reader, and it’s a gift.