writer
Hotline by Benjamin Percy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have a supernatural affinity for grisly vampire stories, so I would call Benjamin Percy’s HOTLINE a guilty pleasure. However, no guilt was felt, so I’ll just call it a pleasure. Gory, sneaky, and brilliantly leveraging the haunted quality of Midwestern decay, this is one you can gulp down all in one go. Drink up!
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Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
SWIM HOME TO THE VANISHED journeys to a place that feels inescapable, bizarre, unknowable, and yet instinctually familiar. Multilayered and surreal, this novel challenges perception and resonates viscerally with feelings that most of us resist, bury, or look away from. Animal and human, living and dead, enemy and relative, obliterating and welcoming–these lines blur from beginning to end in the keen disorientation of grief that has claws, gills, and teeth. A sensational debut.
Basham’s narrative threads are knotted up tight, daring us to tug at them to see what yields.
We need more books like this: literary experiences that demand an active intellectual and emotional investment from the reader to reach understanding.
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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Why don’t we have more epistolary novels? The experience of Virginia Evans’ THE CORRESPONDENT is a satisfying puzzle, reminding us that the communications we leave behind, no matter how incidental, are echoes. They reflect the broad brushstrokes of who we are. Our messages to and from other people all shape us incrementally and this novel captures that so deftly, and in a way that feels very alive.
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Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror by Lincoln Michel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Five enthusiastic stars for Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror. Literary rockstars stalk this creepy little pink book with glowing eyes and slippery turns. The best horror holds fear, beauty, sickness, humor, and truth altogether at once, and that’s exactly what this collection does. So many surprises. Each brief story is like a little scream. This book is what would happen if Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark grew up and got an MFA. (But no less darkly pleasurable.)
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The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A gentle but powerful essay that will endure. I like to think we’ll look back on it and say, “This was part of what realigned the thinking, strengthened the people’s hearts, and spurred the creativite call to arms to make the changes that we did. And look what it’s done. Look at our beautiful world.”
All Flourishing is Mutual.
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Vigil by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
VIGIL brings us more Saunders ghosts and not-ghost-ghostlike things, but this time in a hyper-intimate scope that reminds me both of Our Town and A Christmas Carol but is something else entirely. I laughed aloud and fought back tears, nodded in familiarity, and sparked with rage. Such a challenging moral confrontation of a book that also remains viscerally grounded. I’m thirsty for true originality and strangeness in my reading. VIGIL delivers it in spades.
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The Forest on the Edge of Time by Jasmin Kirkbride
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Jasmin Kirkbride’s THE FOREST ON THE EDGE OF TIME is wonderfully ambitious. This is a book that believes anything could be possible, and in that way it functions as its own piece of time travel, rewriting the script of our future thinking to have faith in small, persistent, collective actions. The technology is fantastically quirky and the emotion real… I like how well Kirkbride captures the way banality and sustained effort are just as key to transformative breakthroughs as genius is. Lovely book.
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The Great Work by Sheldon Costa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The weird weird West comes for a grieving man and the nephew he didn’t know he had in Sheldon Costa’s THE GREAT WORK. This book reads as a classic western adventure with a dash of the arcane and one gigantic salamander who may be the key to immortality or perhaps mankind’s reckoning as he slimes his way through the nightmares of madmen, utopians, fortune-seekers, and militants. Especially enjoyed the exploration of intense platonic love as the emotional groundwork of this story with massive philosophical stakes.
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Honey by Isabel Banta
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Isabel Banta’s HONEY brings us back to those covers of YM and Seventeen when the age of teen pop stars sold us the music of Britney, Christina, and all the rest. In the story of her lead character Amber Young, Banta synthesizes so much about that era. The way adolescents were commodified and marketed. The way their sexuality was simultaneously manufactured, policed, begged for, and ruthlessly criticized. The ravenous fans, paparazzi, and executives all looking for their piece of the star. As her characters messily find their way into adulthood backstage, Banta affirms a message we never got to hear at the turn of the millennium: a woman’s body and all its expressions of desire are not the moral property of anyone but herself.
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Playground by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The blurb on the center of the paperback cover for Richard Powers’ novel PLAYGROUND says “Prepare to be awed.” And all I have to say is… PREPARE TO BE AWED.
Language to ease into like the warm waves of a tropical sea. Hurt that stings like Chicago sleet on a chapped face. Astonishing storytelling that had me holding back tears, rocketing through the final hundred pages completely unaware of what was happening around me. Makes the monstrous triumphs of technology very personal–Powers has put us all on a clock. I was awed.
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