re 2015 books
list from tob /on radar, to be read, possibles for next year's tournament.
-nzl: ...............
-muppetlove • 7 hours ago The books I'm looking out for this year. seem promising enough, though I was mostly wrong with my short list predictions this year. I mostly ignored short story collections. I'm sorry if these were mentioned already. I haven't read the comments yet!
Also, I must mention the Millions book preview (& another will be available for the second half of the year): themillions.com/2015/01/most-anticipated-the-great-2015-book-preview.html
I've heard a new Kiese Laymon novel is happening - on his website! <<< /oh. Long Division author. <
Under Major Domo Minor - deWitt <
Mislaid - Zink /Nell Zink. ~Wallcreeper. fr Dorothy Bks. <
Interesting Facts - Adam Johnson (though this will be stories //author of big two volume book I have as galley?)
Laughing Monsters - Johnson /Denis. y. seen this./ Dead Lands - Benajmin Percy Last Flight of Poxl West - Torday
Loving Day - Mat Johnson Blood Drenched Beard - Galera I Am Radar - Larsen Tusk That Did the Damage - James
Get In Trouble - Link Country of Ice Cream Star - Newman Bonita Avenue - Buwalda Mermaids in Paradise - Millet
The Fishermen - Obioma Among the Ten Thousand Things - Pierpont Aquarium - Vann Armada - Ernest Cline
Turner House - Flournoy City on Fire - Hallberg Go Set A Watchman - Lee Fifth Heart - Simmons Half Brother - LeCraw Sweetland - Crummey
Making Nice - Sumell Medicine Walk - Wagamese Mountain Story - Lansens Amnesia - Carey Last Word - Kureishi
Lost Boys Symphony - Ferguson [Mark. debut novel.] The Marvels - Selznick (possible YA choice?)
Only Ones - Dibbell /Julian? who wrote re ~ web ~ rwisdom? no. Carrola DIbbell veteran music critic. punk-rock science fiction. most original mother-daughter story.
Animals - Kiefer /hm? int bcs title <<< y sounds good ~ hist violence ish. past of crime, now runs wildlife sanctuary.. just pub 23Mar << read sample.
Infernal - Doten /Mark. pub Febr. "Doten has written a .. mad riposte to the collaboratively written Internet text— the Wiki, wh doesn't document facts so much as it documents the process by which 'facts' are generated and then perpetually overwritten." /y good/—Harper's << look up Harpers article. int in reading abt this. <<< ok fr bk descrip below, am now pretty int to read. << read sample.
/not *re* wikis ~ but -"The natural order one year--what we thought was the natural order--is overturned, the next it's proved just one out of many possible arrangements." A mad assemblage of obsessive characters, most named after familiar 'dramatis personae' from the war on terror--characters crippled by blindspots and narcissism--stitch together narratives and meta-narratives in the face of this dislocating truth. -the use of a small boy as the voices of the pertinent personnel involved in the War on Terror is pitch-perfect, it is a most unlikely page turner. {az cmmts}
{bk descrip:} early years Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. powerful shadowy U.S. govt group summon fr his prison cell /an Iraqi?/ interrogator . and fr vaults a forgotten hideous torture apparatus wh extracts “perfect confessions”: over four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each tries tell his her own story. Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg /int/, others less fmlr, each w role in world shaped by the war on terror, each wanting tell: This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be.
After Birth - Albert {Elisa. oh author Bk of Dahlia. (one of?) novels nrrtvs I most related to. <<<
The Trace - Gander {New Directions. two prvs novels. from Va.}
I Refuse - Petterson /Per. am int. oh the title too./
Green Road - Enright /title. enright..? Anne. irish read re in Nyr bk v ~freeflow ~joycean/
Our Souls At Night - Haruf /cadence? ah: Your Face Tomorrow/ /kent haruf, colorado. d.1914.
Talking To Ourselves - Neuman [Spanish-Argentine writer Andrés Neuman. considers our defenses against loss] *int <<<<
Sympathizer - Nguyen [Viet Thanh Nguyen's THE SYMPATHIZER, a post-Vietnam-War novel]
Seventh Day - Hua [yu hua chinese author]
Diver's Clothes Lie Empty - Vida /? vendela .. Believer co-editor Vida. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. oh tob? y: www.themorningnews.org/tob/2008/Round1Match2.php
Familiar - Danielewski /hm int bcs title. oh author of House of Leaves./ First Bad Man - July /eh if miranda/ Making of Zombie Wars - Hemon /oskar/
Outline - Cusk [Rachel.A woman writer goes to Athens] Untwine - Danticat God Help the Child - Morrison Buried Giant - Ishiguro Strangeness in My Mind - Pamuk
Satin Island - McCarthy /Cormac must be/ The Discreet Hero - Llosa /Maria Vargas?/ Dust That Falls From Dreams - Bernieres /Louis de. Corellis Mandolin/
Purity - Franzen The Harder They Come - Boyle /right TC. saw a rvw nytimes/ Let Me Be Frank With You -Ford
Heart Goes Last - Atwood Early Warning - Smiley The Children's Crusade - Packer /Ann. Saint Mazie - Attenberg [Jami. The Middlesteins]
Fates and Furies - Groff /Lauren of Arcadia. and Monsters of Templeton.// Find Me - van den Berg /Laura who did cmmtry here w Elliott//
God in Ruins - Atkinson /kate. ok. will focus on {son of Life After Life main char Ursula Todd} Teddy, would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband, father, as navigates 20th c./
Slade House - Mitchell /Dvd. oh right read re. short, cnnxns w Bone Clocks./ Green on Blue - Ackerman /judge here in opening round. re army./
Confession of the Lioness - Mia Couto /tob ~ last yr./
Welcome to Braggsville - [T Geronimo] Johnson Delicious Foods - Hannaham The Sellout - Beatty
mentioned in earlier match cmmts: West of Sunset - Stewart O'Nan. re FSF (as narrator?) his last yrs.
-amycrea: Just finished Welcome to Braggsville, and I think it's going to cause a lot of conversation. (I liked it a lot.)
-amateur reader: I love a year that brings us Braggsville AND Delicious Foods AND The Sellout.
-sophronisba: That is my vote for the play-in round.
-muppetlove: YES I can't wait for these three. I was thinking of a play-in round too for these three just yesterday, at least to give all three of them a CHANCE (and the new Kiese Laymon if it is released sometime this year.)
//why wh do these three hv in common?
-amateur reader: I'd be a bit uncomfortable with that. I don't want it to be a niche. I say throw 'em all in the mix. :-) //what niche? ~ Afr diaspora (also queer? prob no. and speculative fict? ~ but nots sci fi.) *
-sophronisba: No, I see your point.
* metropolarity.net/2015/03/alex-reviews-elysium-by-jennifer-marie-brissett/ » Book searching while black can be a traumatic experience. Throw in gay and ... for QPOC interested in reading compelling, otherworldly, righteous sci-fi and spec-fic written by one of our own, featuring us as lead characters. /besides giving info below, int re Elysium. <<<<< read this rvw.
a lot of thoughtful & intriguing fiction coming out this year from writers in the African diaspora that I’m anticipating giddily:
T. Geronimo Johnson’s “Welcome to Braggsville”, Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout” and James Hannaham’s “Delicious Foods” for starters. /ok./ while those stories will quite well fill a certain desire for me to read weirdish, darkly comic, transcendent black penned spec-fic that doesn’t support a monolithic view of black life, none of them are specifically science fiction.
-Alcoholic Synonymous to nzle: How To Be Both! //by Ali Smith, who won tob in 2006. but other winners hv competed again, right? well yes just this tob Dvd Mitchell./ I read the George-painter version, though. Imagine all the judges reading the alternating versions.
Long shot as it could turn out to be horrible (see: Only Revolutions), but Mark Z. Danielewski's new one The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May sounds kind of amazing. //and per wkp vol 2 will be "Into the Forest" /mm.
-- AmberBug @ ShelfNotes : Reading that one [The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May s ]now and so far it has his name ALL over it. I haven't gotten too far but really liking it. I could see many people comparing this to House of Leaves, which I think would be wrong. I don't think he was going for that same feeling, this feels a bit more literary to me.
.........//incidental via disqus, makes me like her: AmberBug @ ShelfNotes 15 hours ago : Funny story, our parents always bug us about this (having kids) and when we talk about getting a dog (just moved into a house and feel we can accommodate the kind of dog we want) ALL of them talk about how a dog is a HUGE responsibility and do we know what we'd be getting ourselves into. I just don't get it. How is having a dog more expensive and a responsibility than a BABY??? Traditions. I would love to see a change in the way people think of life, it shouldn't be so cut and dry (marriage, house, kids).
-The Lost Child, by Caryl Phillips
Phillips (b 1958 (turned 57 in March) in Carribean island St Kitts) has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles, and his writing is concerned with issues of "origins, belongings and exclusion", as noted by a reviewer of his 2015 novel The Lost Child. he sounds v good. first novel Final Passage 1985.
Dancing in the Dark 2005 imagines the life of Bert Williams (1874—1922), the first black entertainer in the U.S. to achieve the highest levels of fame and fortune, but the story also deals with, in the words of the author's website, "the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture".
www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2015/03/21/book-review-the-lost-child-caryl-phillips/xuNMdk6CEAwfKGHn3fA4uK/story.html
Best known for meditations on the legacy of slavery and colonialism such as “Cambridge” and “A Distant Shore” Caryl Phillips riff on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Hts is like a jazz improvisation: Phillips plucks the themes that resonate most deeply with him and transposes them into a polyphonic narrative set mostly in mid-20th-century England.
His imagined prehistory of Heathcliff frames the modern story. A formerly enslaved woman from the Congo has fetched up in 18th-century Liverpool; destitute and dying, stigmatized as “Crazy Woman,” she remembers the liaison with a married white man that produced the 7-year-old boy who anxiously stands over her.
Written in the elegant, faintly antiquated prose familiar to readers of Phillips’s historical fiction, this prologue takes as a given the speculation of “Wuthering Heights” scholars that Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw’s illegitimate son and refashions the black-haired gypsy boy described by Brontë into an interracial by-product of bustling slave trade.
It’s a jolt when Phillips jumps ahead to the year 1957 in Oxford, where Ronald Johnson is disowning his 20-year-old daughter Monica for her relationship w a graduate student from the West Indies. Only after Monica leaves him and takes their two sons to Leeds do we begin to discern connections, not yet with “Wuthering Heights,” but with the drama of female desperation and madness sketched in the opening chapter /mother of ~Heathcliff/. Four years after moving north, Monica feels overwhelmed by her responsibilities as mother of 10-year-old Ben and 8-year old Tommy.
... Phillips administers another jolt immediately after those words by transporting us to the 19th century for an 18-page monologue by the mortally-ill Emily Brontë, the relevance of which only gradually becomes apparent.
Then it’s back //I like this rvw. tells me wh is in this bk./ to a grim portrait of Monica’s escalating mental illness seen through the eyes of her sons, primarily Ben, who tries to protect the more vulnerable Tommy from the scorn they endure for their poverty and their mother’s instability. Their mixed race is rarely referred to, but always an undercurrent. ...Ben [will] get into Oxford, but only after brutal circumstances have consumed his mother and brother.
The literature of working-class struggle is a venerable tradition in Great Britain, and much of “The Lost Child” appears to easily fit within it. But as Ben’s point of view gives way to Monica’s surreal first-person chronicle of her descent into full-scale insanity, echoes from the prologue and Emily Brontë’s monologue become louder and more insistent. Is fragile, doomed Tommy the eponymous lost child, or is it “the boy who came from the moors” that Emily dreams of — and is that boy Heathcliff or his real-life inspiration: her brother Branwell, who “lived with a ferocity that frightened the gods themselves”?
..these possibilities are either affirmed or negated in the haunting final chapters, which send Mr. Earnshaw to Liverpool to bring his son home, even though we know from everything that has passed before that no home provides lasting shelter from the world.
Phillips employs his multilayered text as a counterpoint to “Wuthering Heights,” expanding the novel’s horizons overseas and across centuries while honoring Brontë’s vision of lives directed by ferocious internal imperatives /y/ as well as external conditions.
His version is less romantic, but just as sorrowful and moving.
/I liked that rvw a lot. v well writ. substantively re book. by: Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at the American Scholar, reviews books for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment