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.
Ten Thousand Saints – Eleanor Henderson
The book is less hagiography than Peter Pan, a band of orphans fighting their own way through a land of make-believe
“Separated from his native Nigeria by resentment, time, and trauma, Julius treats the clinically depressed at Columbia-Presbyterian while soberly addressing his own suspicion of a worsening emotional miasma and its many symptoms, including the terrifying return of bedbugs.”
The levels of depravity and viciousness that W. is able to reach through his assessment of Lars and himself truly merit the exalted categories of cosmic, transcendental, and messianic.
The Gospel of Anarchy – Justin Taylor
The Gospel of Anarchy will remind you of the line you toe so you can keep your place in this society. The one under which you sweep your deviant thoughts so your conspecifics won’t see them and think you’re “weird.”
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze – Maaza Mengiste
In a time when revolutions rattle and reinvigorate much of our world, Mengiste’s novel makes a frighteningly real case of the risk inherent in ditching one idol for another.
The Metropolis Case – Matthew Gallaway
“The novel’s ‘melody’ develops in recurring and layering coincidences and connections, while its ‘dissonances’ appear in sudden and unpredictable deaths which jar characters and reader alike. And, more obviously, ‘melody and dissonance’ describe Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, which binds Gallaway’s story and four main characters together across pages and centuries.”
“The character of Black Pat is delightfully written. He goes about his job—of depressing people—by lying on them, or chewing rocks loudly, or tearing apart their household items like any unruly dog does.”
You Know When The Men Are Gone – Siobhan Fallon
“With a deft feel for characterization and pacing, Fallon’s tales carve out a subtle lesson on the psychological impacts of war, even — or especially — as experienced from halfway around the world.”