July 19, 2025
The dog days of summer make it difficult to thrive (packed, steamy subways; hot asphalt; over-air-conditioned offices and stores). So, as we rise to the challenge to get through this month, one might turn to novels about being and persistence. A young orphan girl turns to forgery as a path to freedom in 19th century England; a favorite Nigerian writer peoples her book with a plethora of engaging characters striving and trying to survive; a teenage boy tries to fit in with his peers while controlling his rising panic; a woman looks back on a traumatic turning point in her life; and a Chinese American wife and mother tries to make sense of two life-changing revelations.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Original
By NELL STEVENS
Published by W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
This is a sleeper you shouldn’t miss. An orphaned English girl in the late 1880s is sent to live with well-to-do relations and becomes close to her cousin, Charles. An artist, he teaches Grace how to look at art and to paint. He goes off to sea, disappearing for many years. Upon his return, it is unclear if it is really him. Meanwhile, she has become a copyist—Courbet, Botticelli, Vermeer—and has secretly found a financial outlet for her work. This is, as the title suggests, a wholly original work about art forgery, imposters, what is real, whether it matters, and the lengths one must go to survive. The ending is a shocker.
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Pan
By MICHAEL CLUNE
Published by PENGUIN PRESS
Clune’s promising first novel introduces readers to a teenage boy ridden with anxiety and phobias. (The author’s White Out describes his addiction and eventual recovery from heroin.) Nicholas can feel his panic attacks coming on and has learned to control them by breathing into a paper bag. He comes to believe that the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body, causing the attacks. Nicholas and his best friend Ty gain admittance into a clique of high schoolers who meet each day in The Barn to experiment with sex and drugs. One wonders if/how Nicholas will survive. His anxiety is contagious as you read breathlessly to learn his fate.
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Girl, 1983
By LINN ULLMANN
Published by W. W. NORTON
Translated by Martin Aitken
Raw and honest, Ullmann’s autobiographical novel relives one day in 1983, when she was sixteen, over and over again. Now, as a woman in her mid-50s she is still trying to put this experience into perspective. A Frenchman she met in an elevator in New York invited her to Paris to be photographed, promising publication in French Vogue. Despite her mother’s (famous actress Liv) concern, she flies off and (as one might expect) the situation becomes more complicated. He is a sexual predator and has other underage girls in his studio, accompanied by a lecherous colleague. A gorgeous stylist, Ullmann’s writing is as moody and hazy as the moment when she actually lived this.
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Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
By KATIE YEE
Published by SUMMIT BOOKS
Yee is a 2021-2022 alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, so it is a pleasure to call out her debut novel. Her Chinese American protagonist, married with children, is a charming narrator, even as she dissembles under the weight of two enormous revelations: “When my husband told me about Maggie we were out, kidless, at a nice Indian restaurant…”—an affair confessed amid the all-you-can eat naan and sag paneer. Shortly after, she is diagnosed with breast cancer. (She even names her tumor Maggie.) Her journey through grief and acceptance to hopefulness as her life upends is more hilarious than one would expect. Yee’s gifts of comic writing are on full display.
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Necessary Fiction
By ELOGHOSA OSUNDE
Published by RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Nigerian novelist Osunde states, “It is always the right time to think about how free we want to be, to engage thoroughly with love and its importance, to find who to walk through life with, whether by blood or choice.” In their aptly titled novel, Osunde has created over 20 characters across the cultural landscape of urban Lagos, loving, living, connecting, striving, proving that the stories we tell ourselves to live are ‘necessary.’ As Ziz, who was thrown out of the house at a young age says, “You have to know where to stop before life stops you.”
