BARBARA HOFFERT

Winners and sinners

BARBARA HOFFERT — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:06:13 GMT

Barth, Bolaño, Roth, Morrison, and more
Ah, fall, when Nobel Prize winners are announced — and, now, when past winners turn up with more good reading.

HISTORY LESSON: Sarah Vowell looks back at Puritan life in The Wordy Shipmates.

Fiction
Ah, fall, when Nobel Prize winners are announced — and, now, when past winners turn up with more good reading. It’s A Mercy (Knopf; November 14) that TONI MORRISON has chosen to revisit the emotional territory of Beloved; her latest recounts a 1680s Anglo-Dutch trader’s cancellation of a debt in exchange for a slave girl whose mother wished her a better life. Everyone’s having a good time in JOSÉ SARAMAGO’s Death with Interruptions (Harcourt; October 6), since Death has decided that she needs a break.

More prize winners going for another gold: in PHILIP ROTH’s Indignation (Houghton Mifflin; September 16), a young man fleeing 1950s Newark — and his overwhelming father — encounters college life in far-off Ohio. Remember The Witches of Eastwick? They’re now The Widows of Eastwick (Knopf; October 30), courtesy of JOHN UPDIKE. Recent Booker Award winner ANNE ENRIGHT offers a story collection with Yesterday’s Weather (Grove; September 16). PER PETTERSON follows up his IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize winner, Out Stealing Horses, with To Siberia (Graywolf; September 30), in which two Danish children watch the Nazis march in.

Now that the late ROBERTO BOLAÑO has caught our attention, it’s time we read his masterpiece, 2666 (Farrar Straus Giroux; November 11), a complex tale of murder in Santa Teresa (read: Juárez) that will appear in a single-volume hardcover and a three-volume paperback. CARLOS FUENTES offers cozy vignettes in Happy Families (Random House; September 23); a ship called the Ibis floats across AMITAV GHOSH’s Sea of Poppies (Farrar Straus Giroux; October 14) en route to the Opium Wars.

And now for something completely different. In The Given Day (Morrow; September 23), DENNIS LEHANE moves away from crime fiction to paint a stark portrait of post–World War I Boston. And FRANCINE PROSE’s Goldengrove (HarperCollins; September 16), the study of a 13-year-old’s relationship with her drowned sister’s boyfriend, is not acid satire.

Stalin biographer SIMON MONTEFIORE revisits early-20th-century Russia in the debut novel Sashenka (Simon & Schuster; November 11); noted journalist IAN BURUMA also tries out fiction with The China Lover (Penguin Press; September 18), reimagining the life of film star Yoshiko Yamaguchi. Speaking of fictionalized lives: who knew that WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS and JACK KEROUAC got together to re-create friend Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer? The novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove; November 1), is appearing only now.

Booked up

BARBARA HOFFERT — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:25:37 GMT

Several shelves’ worth of summer reads
Summertime, and the reading is easy.

Joyce Carrol Oates

Summertime, and the reading is easy. But not every summer volume is a throwaway beach book, quickly skimmed and quickly forgotten. Herewith, promising, (mostly) substantive reads in all genres.

Fiction
Take PAUL AUSTER’s Man in the Dark (Holt, August 19), set in an alternate America where the Iraq War never happened and states are bloodily seceding after the disputed 2000 election. Meanwhile, retired book critic August Brill mourns the loss of his wife and the murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend.

JOYCE CAROL OATES reconfigures the JonBenet Ramsay case in My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (Ecco, July 1), which centers on a murdered nine year old whose figure-skating triumphs fed the ambitions of her social-climbing parents — and pushed her brother into the shadows. In Yale law professor STEPHEN L. CARTER’s third novel, Palace Council (Knopf, July 8), which plows politically murky waters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, African-American writer Eddie Wesley discovers a corpse in the park and follows up a conspiracy that leads straight to the White House.

Novels by veterans can be expected to make big noises, but a few debuts this summer will likely add to the din. Written over 30 years, SELDEN EDWARDS’s The Little Book (Dutton, August 14) dumps ’70s rock star Wheeler Burden in late 19th-century Vienna, where he tangles with Freud, Mahler, and growing anti-Semitism. The narrator of ANDREW DAVIDSON’s The Gargoyle (Doubleday, August 5), horribly burned in a car crash, finds the will to live (and not a little craziness) when a woman who sculpts gargoyles enters his hospital room and announces that they were lovers in medieval Germany.

In CATHERINE O’FLYNN’s What Was Lost (Holt, June 24), longlisted for several major British prizes, the disappearance of a solitary child at a mall is blamed on a young man who had befriended her. Dr. Leo Liebenstein hunts desperately for his wife — not the imposter who looks exactly like her — in RIVKA GALCHEN’s Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, June 3). And Pen Award–winning journalist KIRA SALAK will surely have something interesting to say about her profession in The White Mary (Holt, August 1), the story of a war correspondent knocked sideways by the death of a colleague she had worshipped.

Making book

BARBARA HOFFERT — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:08:29 GMT

Spring Arts Preview: Fiction, non-fiction, and poetry
This spring brings exciting story collections from established authors and hot newcomers.

LAUGH LINES: Keith Gessen’s comic debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, is about three Harvard boys.

Sometimes good things really do arrive in small packages. This spring brings exciting story collections from established authors and hot newcomers. JHUMPA LAHIRI examines the Bengali-American cultural divide in Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf, April 1); CYNTHIA OZICK tests her characters’ limits in Dictation: A Quartet (Houghton, April 16). Vietnamese-born NAM LE travels far with The Boat (Knopf, May 13). Zimbabwe-based Jesuit UWEM AKPAN, who’s been featured in the New Yorker, honors Africa’s children in Say You’re One of Them (Little, Brown, June 9).

For fiction that thinks big, look to PETER MATTHIESSEN, who condenses his Watson Trilogy into the 917-page Shadow Country (Modern Library, April 8). RICHARDBAUSCH’s Peace (Knopf, April 18) sets three American soldiers on Monte Cassino in 1944, whereas the protagonist of DAVID GUTERSON’s The Other (Knopf, June 6) abandons his easy life for the wilderness. ANDRE DUBUS III’s The Garden of Last Days (Norton, June 2) visits a Florida stripper in September 2001 who entertains men with terror on their minds.

LOUISE ERDRICH’s The Plague of Doves (HarperCollins, April 29) addresses ongoing violence in a North Dakota town; JAMES FREY’s Bright Shiny Morning (HarperCollins, May 13), touted as his first novel, offers characters lost in Los Angeles. In a smaller frame, Elegant Variation blogger MARK SARVAS shows us Harry,Revised (Bloomsbury, April 15) after Harry’s wife’s death, and n + 1 founder KEITH GESSEN investigates the travails of Harvard post-grad life in All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, April 14).

Want an international perspective? In MA JIAN’s Beijing Coma (Farrar, Straus, June 4), a man laid low in Tiananmen Square awakens after 10 years to a new China. In How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Grove, June 10), an award-winning debut from Germany with huge international sales, SASA STANISIC reflects on his homeland, Bosnia-Herzegovina. For historical reading pleasure, try URSULA LE GUIN’s Lavinia (Harcourt, April 21), which fleshes out the character of Aeneas’s Latium wife in Virgil’s Aeneid.

Non-fiction
Spring non-fiction takes a hard look at America with PHILIP GOUREVITCH & ERROL MORRIS’s Abu Ghraib study, Standard Operating Procedure (Penguin Press, May 15), and FAREED ZAKARIA’s views on The Post-American World (Norton, May 28). For historical context, try SEAN WILENTZ’s The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (HarperCollins, May 6). TONY JUDT goes farther: in the 24 previously published essays that make up Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Century (Penguin Press, April 17), he uncovers this century’s roots in its predecessor.

Winter reads

BARBARA HOFFERT — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:52:12 GMT

Novels from Peter Carey and Russell Banks, poetry from Elizabeth Bishop, and advice from Madeleine Albright
Esteemed fiction writers, young stars, the Civil War, the ’60s, and the morass of contemporary geopolitics — it’s all here for reading during winter’s long, dark nights.

RECENT HISTORY: Tahmima Anam’s eagerly awaited debut novel is set during Bangladesh’s 1971 battle for independence.

Esteemed fiction writers, young stars, the Civil War, the ’60s, and the morass of contemporary geopolitics — it’s all here for reading during winter’s long, dark nights.

FICTION
GERALDINE BROOKS wastes no time in the new year, following up her 2006 Pulitzer-winning March with the January 1 release of People of the Book (Viking), which invents a dramatic history for the legendary Sarajevo Haggadah. BERNHARD SCHLINK’s latest is a poignant Homecoming (Pantheon, January 8), though protagonist Peter Debauer’s hunt for a father who vanished during World War II is less closure than rude awakening. The protagonist of LYDIA MILLET’s How the Dead Dream (Counterpoint, January 25) also has a rude awakening: wealth-obsessed real-estate developer T. is reformed by the novel experience of love, even breaking into zoos to sleep companionably with the wolves.

Those same lupine creatures roam free in JIANG RONG’s Wolf Totem (Penguin Press, March 31), currently the most popular reading in China after Mao’s little red book and a memorial to the bond between nomad and Canis lupus in Inner Mongolia, where the pseudonymous author volunteered during the Great Leap Forward. Hapless Briton Chris Carver, a ’60s radical, also volunteered for the revolution way back when, but in HARI KUNZRU’s My Revolutions (Dutton, January 24), he’s lost heart and has been hiding for decades as Michael Frame — a cover that is about to be blown. Stateside in the ’70s, seven-year-old Che doesn’t blow his Weatherman mother’s cover — he hardly knows her — but he does end up on the run with hapless Dial, who’s been drafted by Che’s mom to spirit him away from grandma in Booker Prize winner PETER CAREY’s His Illegal Self (Knopf, February 8).

TAHMIMA ANAM is already turning heads with her debut, A Golden Age (HarperCollins, January 8), which is set during Bangladesh’s 1971 battle for independence. MANIL SURI, who had his own big debut with The Death of Vishnu in 2001, travels back to 1960s Bombay for a tale of obsessive love in The Age of Shiva (Norton, January 28). CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI isn’t content to skip back a few decades; with The Palace of Illusions (Doubleday, February 12), she retells the Mahabharat from the perspective of Panchaali, wife to all five of the Sanskrit epic’s heroic Pandava brothers.