August 31, 2024
This week’s books, three of which we will celebrate with events at The Center, investigate the myriad ways literature explores connections: a poet falls dangerously ill separating his mind from his body; an author juxtaposes her ambition to write a great novel with her efforts to support her family; a spy hopes her past is never connected to her present; a Haitian writer’s sensitive essays connect her experiences and influences to form a nonfiction Bildungsroman; and a woman who thought she’d escaped her past fears someone has connected the dots to expose her.
Featured Books
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Small Rain
By GARTH GREENWELL
Published by FSG
Greenwell (Cleanness) has taken a big leap with his new novel, plunging the reader into his narrator’s experience—both frighteningly and lovingly. “…we got lucky, [the doctor] said, because your tear starts below the kidneys.” To find oneself in an ICU in excruciating pain from an aortic tear during the pandemic is a horrific scenario. In Greenwell’s sensitive hands, the novel progresses over a few short days, describing the isolation of a life-threatening medical condition, and how the protagonist’s life as a healthy man, a poet with a loving partner, changed in an instant. It is harrowing and beautiful, and the author’s best yet.
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Colored Television
By DANZY SENNA
Published by RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Jane and Lenny, a married couple, are both creative people of color (a novelist and a painter) who bonded over their preoccupation with Blackness, as well as their shared hatred of various things. The completion of Jane’s second novel—an opus a decade in the making—would ensure tenure and help them financially (Lenny’s paintings rarely sell). But if, instead, she accepted an opportunity to write for Hollywood, would that make her a sellout? What follows is an excruciatingly funny and true exploration of biracial identity. Revisiting this subject (Caucasia), Senna wryly but realistically outlines the challenges this family faces. It is a page-turner about art and life in living color.
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Creation Lake
By RACHEL KUSHNER
Published by SCRIBNER
Sadie Smith is not her real name. The protagonist in Kushner’s (The Mars Room) new fiction is an undercover agent with a mission to infiltrate a commune of French political activists. An isolated young woman, she is pretty and seductive (useful for her job) with a Ripley-like cold detachment. (Her lover Lucien is in the dark about her identity and ultimately as disposable as everyone she encounters.) But a shadowy intellectual survivalist idolized by the anarchists manages to catch her interest in this clever twist on the spy novel. As always, Kushner delivers a thought-provoking plot with an ensemble of authentic characters and mood and atmosphere to spare.
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We’re Alone
By EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Published by GRAYWOLF PRESS
The title essay of Danticat’s exceptional new collection refers to the idea that a writer is alone when they write, as is the reader as they read, but one completes the other in an act of intimacy that bonds them together. This is the way one feels when reading Danticat’s work no matter the subject. She brings us into her world, always combining the political and the personal. Her broad range of subjects includes pieces extolling her literary heroes like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, as well as the devastating hurricanes that have hit her beloved Haiti. There is always a confidential magic to her storytelling.
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Madwoman
By CHELSEA BIEKER
Published by LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY
Bieker, whose debut Godshot was shortlisted for The Center’s First Novel Prize, returns with a tale of buried secrets. Growing up with a violent father in Waikiki, it was a miracle Clove survived. Now a housewife and mother of two with a reinvented life, she thought she was safe. “I really had things figured out…. Until the morning I got your letter.” A surprising turn of events could undo Clove’s carefully created life. Madwoman is emotionally intense, and you will read it with bated breath to see how Clove will reconcile her past with her present.
