October 5, 2024
We begin the month of October with five award-winning authors. A Booker Prize winner gives us the full life of a queer, biracial British man. A Swedish novelist returns with a mother/son tale featuring elements of mystery, science fiction, and fantasy. A family story of indigenous people caught in the economic crash of 2008 will be launched by The Center. A celebrated Black writer presents an investigative work that combines history, memoir, and fiction to make sense of slavery. The fertile imagination of Spain’s most lauded contemporary filmmaker brings his words to the page. These last two resist categorization as their authors look for new ways to tell stories—from life and from history.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Mighty Red
By Louise Erdrich
Published by HarperCollins
Erdrich’s The Beet Queen (1986) was set in the 1930s. We find ourselves once again in North Dakota amongst beet farmers during the 2008 financial crisis. Crystal hauls beets for the Geists and has no love toward that family, especially their son Gary. But Gary wants to marry Kismet (Crystal and Martin’s daughter), as does Hugo, a more bookish type. Unsettling secrets, Martin’s disappearance, an upcoming wedding, and the ravaging effects of climate change disturb these characters’ insulated prairie life by the mighty Red River. Erdrich consistently fills her absorbing books with colorful characters, spiritual longing, and an intense love for the land. It is another literary victory.
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Our Evenings
By Alan Hollinghurst
Published by Random House
Our Evenings traces the full arc of an unconventional man’s life. Dave Wyn has a white mother and an absent Burmese father and is attracted to boys. His education at public school by way of a scholarship and the patronage of a wealthy family forms his early years. We meet his mother who is in a same-sex relationship as well, still not accepted in ’60s U.K. We are introduced to his lovers, his career as a theatre actor, and follow the racial, sexual, and class tensions he faces throughout his life. Rising to a shocking finale, it is scene by scene perhaps the author’s best yet.
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Ixelles
By Johannes Anyuru
Published by Two Lines Press
Translated by Nichola Smalley
In Anyuru’s (a CLMP Firecracker Award-winner) novel, Ruth works at the Agency which she says is “about constructing a game with language that writes the client’s needs into the story of time itself.” Because of a new assignment, she and her son, Em, are forced to return to Antwerp, the place where her husband disappeared when she was still pregnant. When Ruth discovers a recording of his voice, they speculate that he could still be alive. This Borgesian work by a Swedish poet and playwright (whose father is from Uganda) is atmospheric, provocative, and truly original.
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Slaveroad
By John Edgar Wideman
Published by Scribner
Wideman’s new book defies categorization—is it history? Memoir? Fiction? In these twenty-some pieces he contemplates the way slavery persists, continuing to haunt us. He introduces us to a touchstone figure in the form of William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of slaves who became a missionary in Africa at the close of the 19th century. In addition he includes a heartbreaking phone call with his son who is at the bedside of Wideman’s dying ex-wife, and reconnects with his brother who has been imprisoned for four decades. This is a book of great sensitivity—blending genres into a poetic and meditative work.
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The Last Dream
By Pedro Almodóvar
Published by Harpervia
Translated by Frank Wynne
Here are twelve stories from the Oscar-winning Spanish film director which are as surprising, tender, and playful as his films. The collection presents “a fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little cryptic.” Vampires and Jesus are both featured, as is a porn star in “Confessions of a Sex Symbol.” The title story is a poignant piece about the death of his mother and becoming a storyteller, in which he says, “reality needs to be complemented by fiction to make life easier.” I heartily agree. (Note: His new film is his first in English—The Room Next Door, based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel, What Are You Going Through.)
