August 30, 2025
To celebrate the first books of the new season, this week you’ll meet a comically entertaining fictional mother; a complex mother whose death sparks a memoir by a revered Indian writer; a writer whose small but essential literary output is being reissued for a new generation; a spunky Indigenous woman determined to make history; and a half-dozen characters with intricate connections from a writer whose novels are like stories and vice versa.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
-
.
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
By RABIH ALAMEDDINE
Published by GROVE PRESS
Alameddine’s new novel tells the story of one man, beginning in 1960 until post-COVID, against the backdrop of unceasing corruption in the Lebanese government. Discover Raja’s life from his childhood in Beirut to his sexual awakening, the death of his father, and his hilarious love-hate relationship with his mother as they throw insults at each other until her long life is over. Always the smart one in the family, Raja teaches philosophy at his old high school and is a lover of cats, books, and men. He survives invasions, explosions and is even kidnapped (rather comically) during the Civil War. You will fall in love with him and his mother, too.
-
.
Plain Pleasures
By JANE BOWLES
Published by PICADOR USA
Bowles is known for her incisive portraits of women coming apart in America and abroad. Her husband Paul may have overshadowed her brief career but her work, beloved by Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, remains a marvel. In the title story, two lonely people living in a tenement have an oddly tender but disastrous dinner date. And in the 1949 “Camp Cataract,” three dysfunctional sisters are staying in a cabin near a waterfall when tragedy occurs. In all these stylish tales, there is alienation, deceptively matter-of-fact prose, and humor dry as a bone. With luck, this publication will expand her status.
.
-
.
Mercy
By JOAN SILBER
Published by COUNTERPOINT
Silber’s newest novel weaves together several generations of characters and their relationship to one another and to fate, choice, and betrayal. In the first section, she captures the gritty, treacherous drug scene of New York City in the ’70s with two friends dabbling with heroin. After Eddie overdoses, Ivan rushes him to the ER, panics, and leaves him there. This desertion, a common theme in Silber’s tenth work of fiction, resonates throughout the coming decades. There are four additional main characters whose lives are also shaped by abandonment, braided into the story. Silber expertly produces a novel of connections and reconnections that will captivate readers.
-
.
To the Moon and Back
By ELIANA RAMAGE
Published by AVID READER PRESS
You’ll instantly get caught up in this sweeping debut novel about one woman’s dream to be the first Native woman in space. Ramage effortlessly crams drama, thrills, heartbreak, queer love, politics, and Cherokee culture into a memorable page-turning read. Steph has been obsessed with becoming an astronaut since her Oklahoma childhood. When she falls for another girl of Cherokee heritage in college, her fanatic passion has a strong affect on their relationship. Then Steph’s younger sister Kayla and her daughter become involved with a group protesting NASA’s research on sacred land. Ramage skillfully pits her characters against one another, juggling history and Indigenous politics, family responsibilities, and the hefty price of ambition.
.
-
.
Mother Mary Comes to Me
By ARUNDHATI ROY
Published by SCRIBNER
Roy brings the eloquence and passion of her award-winning fiction and essays to a scorching portrait of her mother that illuminates the origins of her own political awakening. She writes from a deep place of both grief and the attempt to make sense of their relationship over time, a mother who was both “my shelter and my storm,” a woman “more relentless than the rain….” Roy left home in Kerala, India at 18 for school in Delhi and her mother, Mary, a teacher, lived to the age of 89, “…a diva of her own making.” (Her father was a mostly absent alcoholic.) This is as compelling a mother-daughter memoir as you’ll read.
