Selected Reading: Fiction
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The Metaphysical Touch
by Sylvia Brownrigg
As its title suggests, The Metaphysical Touch is a kind of disembodied romance, in which boy meets girl on an entirely abstract basis. Even a decade ago, Sylvia Brownrigg's debut might have taken the form of an epistolary novel. Nowadays, though, such virtual flirtations take place on the Internet, which is exactly where Brownrigg's lovers meet. One of them, Emily "Pi" Piper, is a philosophy grad student who loses everything--including, alas, her dissertation on Kant--to the great Oakland-Berkeley blaze of 1991. The other, a depressive Oblomovian type named JD, is busily uploading an extended suicide note, which even he recognizes as a melodramatic move: "I do know how self-indulgent this is, by the way. Writing and posting all this, treating the world on the Net like it's my therapist."Caracol Beach
by Eliseo Alberto
A crazed Cuban veteran, unable to commit suicide, goes in search of someone to do the deed for him. Original and rich character development, precise and musical in its language, a novel that readers cannot put down.Contains all the ellements of a Greek tragedy with rock 'n' roll rhythm. This exceptional novel is not only an indictment of war but also an accurate rendering of human traits: frailty, dignity, love, and the right to love.
About the Author Eliseo Alberto (b. Havana, Cuba) has written poetry, children's books, novels, and scrips for movies.
White Oleander: A Novel
by Janet Fitch
Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitch's engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self-pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrid's boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes.The Sea Came in at Midnight
by Steve Erickson
God invented millennia for writers like Steve Erickson. Erickson's previous books have buried L.A.'s freeways in sand, set bonfires in Paris streets, and hitched along for the 1996 presidential campaign. In terms of madness, doom, and sheer human folly, what could possibly be left? Plenty, as it turns out. As The Sea Came in at Midnight opens, 17-year-old Kristin works in a Japanese "memory hotel," where despite her so-so looks she's in high demand. As an American, "Kristin represents the Western annihilation of ancient Japanese memory and therefore its master and possessor, a red bomb in one hand, a red bottle of soda pop in the other." After one of her best clients expires in the booth, she finally tells him her own story--which turns out to be quite a tale, involving escape from a millennial suicide cult and nude solitary confinement at the behest of a man known only as the Occupant. Add in the novel's other threads, which span 40 years and include a dream cartographer, a chaos-based calendar, time capsules, and both real and faked snuff films, and you have a heady mixture indeed. Fans of Erickson's unsettling, dreamlike style are legion, and they won't be disappointed in his latest take on the End Time, Blade Runner-style. But in a way, the millennium is beside the point; with a plot like this one, a mere flipping of digits seems so much apocalyptic icing on the cake. Combing a lyrical surrealism with a jittery, jump-cut technique, Erickson writes like the 21st-century heir of Pynchon and DeLillo. --Chloe ByrneHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
by J. K. Rowling, Mary Grandpre (Illustrator)
For most children, summer vacation is something to look forward to. But not for our 13-year-old hero, who's forced to spend his summers with an aunt, uncle, and cousin who detest him. The third book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series catapults into action when the young wizard "accidentally" causes the Dursleys' dreadful visitor Aunt Marge to inflate like a monstrous balloon and drift up to the ceiling. Fearing punishment from Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon (and from officials at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry who strictly forbid students to cast spells in the nonmagic world of Muggles), Harry lunges out into the darkness with his heavy trunk and his owl Hedwig.Elements of Style
by William Strunk, E. B. White
A masterpiece in the art of clear and concise writing, and an exemplar of the principles it explains. ---Celestina; Or, the Tragi-Comedy of Calisto and Melibea
by Fernando De Rojas, Eric Bentley (Editor)
The author, Fernando Rojas , March 4, 1999 I am very proud of this book I wrote this tragi-comedy as a warning to young lovers about the perils of love and lust. While I meant this book to be instructive, it is also entertaining.Dead Philadelphians
by Frank J. Frost
This is a thriller that leaves you with good feelings. A young Greek American commits the almost perfect crime, leading to many trials, adventures, the discovery of his heritage and ethnicity, steamy sex, and a very satisfying conclusion. The portrait of Greek village life is very warm and sympathetic (in contrast to Kazantzakis'). The dialogue is perfect. I look forward to the movie. I might even look up the author's scholarly work.Lazarus Rumba
by Ernesto Mestre
The New York Times Book Review, Megan Harlan ...[a] marvelous, somewhat unruly first novel.... Mestre's symphonic imagination proves mesmerizing.
Close Range: Wyoming Stories
by Annie Proulx
With the very first sentence of the first story in this remarkable collection, Annie Proulx demonstrates what makes her great: images sharp as paper cuts conveyed in language so imaginative and compressed it's just this side of poetry; a sense of character so specific it takes only a sentence to establish a whole life; and the underlying promise of something utterly unexpected waiting just up ahead.Another World
by Pat Barker
The Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road) established Pat Barker as one of the most powerful and versatile novelists writing today. Her eighth novel, Another World, is a powerful and complex tale of family, memory, illness, and war. Haunted by memories of the First World War, Geordie is dying of cancer, while his grandson Nick, haunted by the violence of families past (and present), struggles with his thoroughly modern marriage: angry stepchildren, exhausting toddler, miserably pregnant wife. Wracked by guilt, Geordie relives his brother's death in the trenches and his mother's grieving verdict: "It should have been you." Uncovering the intimate and public reach of Geordie's history, Nick is forced up against the "power of old wounds to leak into the present" and the paradoxical fragility--or pliancy--of personal memory. Weaving into her fictional worlds some of the most disturbing images of contemporary Britain--including that of "an older boy taking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead, eager for the atrocity to come"--Barker draws her themes together into a remarkable, sometimes ruthless, study of family life and death. --Vicky Lebeau, Amazon.co.ukCarter Clay
by Elizabeth Evans
"This is before the accident. No one is dead yet." Elizabeth Evans begins her debut novel, Carter Clay, with a prologue so chilling it's hard to imagine she'll be able to maintain the high-octane tension for another 400 pages. That she does is a testament both to her prose and to the power of her central characters: 12-year-old Jersey Alitz, her maternal grandmother, M.B., and the title character, a Vietnam veteran who is the catalyst for both tragedy and transformation.
The Best American Short Stories of the Century
by John Updike (Editor), Katrina Kenison (Co-editor)
At age 67, the perennially youthful John Updike may at last qualify as something of an elder statesman. But the Best American Short Stories annual--whose greatest hits package Updike has now assembled--is almost a generation older, having commenced publication in 1915. This staying power allows the hefty Best American Short Stories of the Century to perform double duty. It is, on the one hand, a priceless compendium of American manners and morals--a decade-by-decade survey of how we lived then, and how we live now. Yet Updike very consciously avoided the sociological angle in making his selection. "I tried not to select stories because they illustrated a theme or portion of the national experience," he writes in his introduction, "but because they struck me as lively, beautiful, believable, and, in the human news they brought, important." In this he succeeded: the 55 fictions that made the grade are most notable for their human (rather than merely historical) interest.Buried Onions
by Gary Soto
Eddie can always smell onions in the air--the sharp bitter odor of hopelessness and anger that haunts the poor side of Fresno. "I had a theory about those vapors, which were not released by the sun's heat but by a huge onion buried under the city. This onion made us cry. Tears leapt from our eyelashes and stained our faces." Eddie tries to escape from the poverty and gang society that surrounds him by taking vocational classes and staying away from his old "cholos," (gang friends). But when his cousin is killed, his aunt urges him to seek out and punish the murderer. To avoid the pressure building in his neighborhood, Eddie takes a landscaping job in an affluent suburb. But this too goes awry when his boss's truck is stolen while in his care. In the end, with his money gone and a dangerous gang member stalking him, Eddie's only choice is to join the military and hope that they can give him a better future than the one Fresno seems to offer.
Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison, John F. Callahan (Editor)
Invisible Man, which Ralph Ellison published in 1952, was one of the great debuts in contemporary literature. Alternating phantasmagoria with rock-ribbed realism, it delved into the blackest (and whitest!) corners of the American psyche, and quickly attained the status of legend. Ellison's follow-up, however, seemed truly bedeviled--not only by its monumental predecessor, but by fate itself. First, a large section of the novel went up in flames when the author's house burned in 1967. Then he spent decades reconstructing, revising, and expanding his initial vision. When Ellison died in 1994, he left behind some 2,000 pages of manuscript. Yet this mythical mountain of prose was clearly unfinished, far too sketchy and disjointed to publish. Apparently Ellison's second novel would never appear.Every Dead Thing
by John Connolly
It's a good idea to avoid reading John Connolly's debut novel on a full stomach. His descriptions of mutilated murder victims give him honorary membership in the gore wars club. Every Dead Thing is a fast-paced piece of fiction from an author whose regular stomping ground is as a journalist for the Irish Times.NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker was busy boozing at Tom's Oak Tavern when his wife Susan, and young daughter Jennifer were mutilated by a killer called the Traveling Man. Consumed by guilt and alcoholism, Charlie soon lost his job, and almost his sanity. Several months on he is sober and ready to get his life back in order. Charlie takes up private investigating. One of his first cases involves the disappearance of a woman called Catherine Demeter. At first this puzzle seems unrelated to the Traveling Man--but Charlie has a gut feeling that the slayer is pulling the strings. "I dreamed of Catherine Demeter surrounded by darkness and flames and the bones of dead children. And I knew then that some terrible blackness had descended upon her."
L.A. Breakdown
by Lou Mathews
...Mathews keeps the reader so firmly focused on horsepower, hand-rubbed black lacquer paint jobs and custom pinstripes that the small epiphanies that unfold here really do sneak up, as surprising and pungent as burning oil.A riveting portrait of Los Angeles hot rod culture of the early 1960's and the effects it casts on the people caught up in it.
Lovers for a Day
by Ivan Klima, Gerald Turner (Translator)
Ranging over nearly three decades, the stories collected in Ivan Klíma's Lovers for a Day offer a fine cross section of the Czech writer's career. Yet the book also traces the misunderstandings and frustrations, the hopes and disenchantments of an entire nation--where, ironically enough, Klíma's creations were banned until the mid-1990s. How does this fictional barometer work? The earlier tales, which tend toward dissections of private life, seldom mention the Communist regime--yet their protagonists are so thoroughly warped by political circumstance that even love becomes an avatar of control and constraint. In the later, post-perestroika stories, Klíma's characters explore their newfound freedom. Yet that, too, turns out to be something of a mixed bag, in both the public and private sector. No wonder the judge in "It's Raining Out" finds his new beat--divorce court--nearly as dispiriting as the old regime's political trials:Louse
by David Grand
What if Howard Hughes ruled his corporate empire from a chrome-and-glass citadel, served by problem gamblers who've been enslaved so they can pay off their debts? Louse is only partly the answer to that question. It's also a deft piece of corporate satire, an Orwellian fable about absolute power, even a kind of religious allegory. Author David Grand's remarkable first novel follows Herman Q. Louse, valet to the invalid, germ-phobic billionaire Herbert Horatio Blackwell, as he navigates the conspiracy-ridden world Blackwell has constructed in the middle of the Nevada desert. Louse's story is interspersed with snippets of memos, bulletins, press releases, and public confessions--Grand's modern version of groupthink--all of which provide a darkly comic counterpoint to the novel's growing intrigue. There are more twists and turns in this book than in your average Hollywood thriller, yet somehow the plot--as well-oiled as it is--becomes hardly the point. Louse is a chilling look at the fate of the individual in a collectivized world, as appropriate to today's corporate drones as to the denizens of Orwell's 1984.The Charterhouse of Parma
by Henri Stendhal, Richard Howard (Translator)
Officer, diplomat, spy, journalist, and intermittent genius, Marie Henri Beyle employed more than 200 aliases in the course of his crowded career. His most famous moniker, however, was Stendhal, which he affixed to his greatest work, The Charterhouse of Parma. The author spent a mere seven weeks cranking out this marvel in 1838, setting the fictional equivalent of a land-speed record. To be honest, there are occasional signs of haste, during which he clearly bypassed le mot juste in favor of narrative zing. So what? Stendhal at his sloppiest is still wittier, and wiser about human behavior, than just about any writer you could name. No wonder so meticulous a stylist as Paul Valéry was happy to forgive his sins against French grammar: "We should never be finished with Stendhal. I can think of no greater praise than that."Zwilling's Dream: A Novel
by Ross Feld
Joel Zwilling doesn't want to be a writer anymore. After his wife and daughter die in a car crash, he gives up a promising career as a novelist and moves to Cincinnati to quietly raise his son. Years later, when a desperate actor digs up Zwilling's first book and gets the money to make a movie of it, Zwilling's carefully rebuilt life begins to collapse. Forced to relive long-buried memories, he is suddenly made aware of the half-truths at the foundations of his marriage and his relationship with his son, Nate. Feld movingly portrays a man who feels that, in order to survive, he must deny his essence. When circumstances prod Zwilling into recognizing his true nature, he finally comes to terms with his loss and begins writing again. This is an intricate novel that strings together the perspectives of various people in Zwilling's life, including his wife, his son, and the actor who foists unwanted introspection on him, to illuminate the man's emotions with their understanding. Bonnie Johnston
Sinatraland
by Sam Kashner
In a stunning debut novel, Sam Kashner tells the story of "Finkie" Finkelstein, businessman from New Jersey, and lovingly obsessed fan of Frank Sinatra.A good read; well researched. A strong inference that the great singer and arbiter of public taste hadd mob connections and a strong inference is gained that Frank was connected in some way with JFK's assasination! A fascinating cultural scouring written in epistolary style that grabbed me.
Interpreter of Maladies: Stories
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Mr. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut collection. Take for example Shoba and Shukumar, the young couple in "A Temporary Matter" whose marriage is crumbling in the wake of a stillborn child. Or Miranda in "Sexy," who is involved in a hopeless affair with a married man. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. His fare on this particular day are Mr. and Mrs. Das--first-generation Americans of Indian descent--and their children. During the course of the afternoon, Mr. Kapasi becomes enamored of Mrs. Das and then becomes her unwilling confidante when she reads too much into his profession. "I told you because of your talents," she informs him after divulging a startling secret.Fleur De Leigh's Life of Crime: A Novel
by Diane Leslie
This gently comic first novel, set in Beverly Hills during the late 1950s, is narrated by a 10-year-old. Convincing depictions of a small child's mental state are one of the hardest tasks an adult fiction writer can pull off, and Diane Leslie's accomplished portrait of Fleur de Leigh is one of the better efforts in '90s fiction. While this girl has her occasional moments of adult retrospection, it bears noting that her showbiz parents have been determined to raise her as if she were a miniature adult--which, in their case, means ignoring her for long stretches of time but offering occasional insincere displays of affection. Her mother, the star of the Charmian Leigh Radio Mystery Half-Hour, aspires to a career in film or television; she even goes so far as to book a regular appointment with her shrink, not for the benefits of psychoanalysis but because "David O. Selznick had the appointment before hers. He was an important connection and this was Charmian's way to connect." Her father, meanwhile, is off producing game shows, and brings her along to one broadcast--not to show her what he does for a living but so she can help fill the studio audience. Left to fend for herself, with nominal assistance from the string of nannies that passes through the house, Fleur winds up doing things like collecting seashells or reading with a flashlight under the covers only "because I liked pretending I was a normal American child."Having Everything: A Novel
by John L'Heureux
Had Diogenes lived today, instead of searching for an honest man, he would have been swinging his lantern in hopes of hitting a well-balanced psychiatrist. Or so fiction would generally have one believe. Psychiatrists in novels generally fall into one of two categories: they are either cold, insensitive, and all-around clueless when it comes to their nearest and dearest (see Fear of Flying's Benjamin Wing) or they are wackier than their patients--often in dark and twisted ways. Philip Tate, the hero of John L'Heureux's Having Everything, belongs to this second group. Married to a beautiful woman, the father of two terrific children, and recently appointed to a prestigious position at Harvard Medical School, Tate would seem to have an ideal existence. Too ideal, of course, or there'd be nothing to write a novel about:
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