Carry these books around for when sunshine strikes and the perfect reading bench calls your name.
by Joanna Demkiewicz
The winter chill has almost completely dissipated, which means you can finally shed your chunky sweaters and swap your reading corner for one with a garden view. Go outside, folks. Go outside, find a bench, and read a book.
This curated list will help you in finding the perfect reading companion; some you might have missed in March, and some you can pre-order, but all will offer a proper spring escape. One title is being called a contemporary Anna Karenina. A debut explains the unraveling of a woman who is surrounded by people who are always fucking up. Another features the perspective of a violent elephant who tenderly buries his prey (no, seriously). There’s no lack of imagination in these fresh books, and now there is no lack of seating for you to escape into them.
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“A Little Life,” by Hanya Yanagihara
Publisher: Doubleday
Released: March 10, 2015
You better sit down for this one. Hanya Yanagihara, who brought us her blazing debut in 2013, The People in the Trees – a novel based loosely off the life of Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel Prize winner with a disturbing pedophilic habit – doesn’t believe in happy endings. A Little Life follows four male friends after a post-college move from a small Massachusetts town to New York City and their transition into adulthood; Yanagihara follows them for 30 years, beginning with their freshman year in college. The transition is ugly at times, as they learn how quickly habits become addictions and “that success [makes] people boring.” As they grasp for affirmation that their friendship stands the test of time – by the time they reach their 30s, the friends still attend the same shallow parties because “it [is] their way of pretending everything [is] the same” – they realize that a friend’s dark past is what might keep them together.
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“The Tusk That Did The Damage: A Novel,” by Tania James
Publisher: Knopf
Released: March 10, 2014
Although the concept might sound bizarre – to tell a story from the point of view of a wily and feared elephant – Tania James, the critically acclaimed author of Atlas of Unknowns and Aerogrammes, expertly marries the perspectives of several humans and one animal to tell the story of elephant poaching in South India. The elephant, Gravedigger, is the preferred subject for two American documentarians, one of whom is too easily swooned by a corrupt elephant rescuer. Gravedigger, named this for his signature style of burying his victims under dirt and brush, is the preferred prey for a poacher recently released from prison and his younger brother Manu, whose cousin was murdered by the elephant. While intertwining these narratives, James doesn’t preach about animal poaching itself, but instead offers an intimate view of its complexities and the motivations of those involved.
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“Hausfrau: A Novel,” by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Publisher: Random House
Released: March 17, 2015
Poet Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel Hausfrau has been compared to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina for its contemporary exploration of the life of a bored wife and her adulterous urges. Anna (yes, she’s even named Anna) lives in Switzerland with her wealthy banker husband and three children. As a housewife, she erases any agency she could have had as wife and mother – she doesn’t even attempt to open her own bank account or make any friends. Instead, she relies on sexual trysts with strangers – both a vice and weapon of hers. Essbaum’s “study” of contemporary adultery via Anna is less of a power move for women and more of an exploration of a particular emptiness. It’s not Essbaum’s intention to make Anna a fully realized character, but she’s getting there. In her German language class, she questions how the verb “to become” dictates the passive voice: “Whatever it is you do not do it,” she thinks. “It is done to you.”
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“Whisper Hollow,” by Chris Cander
Publisher: Other Press
Released: March 17, 2015
In Whisper Hollow, Pulling us from the early 1910s to the late 1960s, Chris Cander – a poet, novelist, journalist and author of children’s books – drops us into the politics of a small coal-mining town, where the death of a young girl completely changes the life courses of her twin sister Myrthen and a town resident, Alta. After Myrthen’s sister is killed, she turns to God when she can’t shake the guilt she harbors for her involvement. Meanwhile, Alta yearns to work as an artist but instead focuses her energy on her widowed father and raising her siblings. The sacrifice of giving up her art wears on her, and she unhinges further when Myrthen marries the man Alta loves. Later (the novel spans from the early 1910s to the late 1960s), we are introduced to Lidia and her son Gabriel, who is feared by the town’s adults because he speaks his mind. Everyone suspects the knowledge he preaches about the town’s past is a result of devil worship. Whisper Hollow is an ode to small town dynamics, loss and the lies we tell ourselves.
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“The Fine Art of Fucking Up,” by Cate Dicharry
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Release date: April 14, 2015
Cate Dicharry’s debut novel explores the fine art of fucking up through Nina Lanning, a middle-aged administrator at a prestigious visual arts school, who is the one character who seems – at first – to have her shit together. Nina is isolated in that she is constantly exposed to everyone else’s downfalls: her boss is transfixed with an aging romance novel cover model; her husband is preoccupied with a foreign exchange student; her best friend is having a secret relationship with Nina’s longtime crush; and her colleagues (brilliant artists who are also her best friends) like to openly ignore her authority. Despite her flailing friends, colleagues and husband, Nina must soldier on. Dicharry humorously builds a too-familiar cadence of unraveling when it’s finally time for Nina to come undone – think Cate Blanchet’s performance in Blue Jasmine. The Fine Art is a story for anyone needing a reminder that fucking up is indeed human.
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“The Turner House,” by Angela Flournoy
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Release date: April 14, 2015
Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum Angela Flournoy’s first novel examines something very personal to her – the life of a large family living on Yarrow Street in Detroit’s East Side. Although Flournoy did not specifically grow up in Detroit, her father did, and she spent quite a bit of time visiting her grandparents’ Detroit home, observing the woes and revelations of her 13 aunts and uncles. This access informs a pivotal viewpoint of what it’s like to live amongst so many people, in such a large family, and how that affects a person’s motivations and identity. Like two of her favorite writers – Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison – she incorporates the longstanding yet often undocumented belief by some African-Americans in the supernatural. “Haints” (or ghosts) haunt Cha-Cha, one of Flournoy’s main characters, the eldest brother of 13 (yes, just like her father’s family). Lelah and Troy, two other siblings, drive the story forward with their complicated and isolated narratives. The Turner House is a love letter to Detroit, a city too often exploited for its darkness, and to big families.
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“Gutshot: Stories,” by Amelia Gray
Publisher: FSG Originals
Release Date: April 14, 2015
In the February 16, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, you will find one of Amelia Gray’s stories from her newest collection, Gutshot. In this published excerpt, Gray pulls from Greek mythology to rewrite the tired hero tale, and she gets straight to the point. She opens one of her 37 stories (separated into five sections) with, “A man should know how to butcher his own bird.” With her concise writing, we are immediately entangled in her strange and experimental characters. Then, sometimes within two-and-a-half pages, we are asked to move on to the next ones. She offers us fables, bar scenes, surrealism, weird scientists, tortuous gods and the human experience. These stories are not for the faint of heart.
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“Where Women Are Kings,” by Christie Watson
Publisher: Other Press
Release Date: April 28, 2015
At times hauntingly heartbreaking, Christie Watson’s second novel – her first was the 2011 Costa First Novel winner Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away – explores race, family and the complexities of the Western foster system through Elijah, a seven-year-old Nigerian immigrant to London with a mysterious past. The opening chapter reads like a thriller and raises your blood pressure; we discover, right away, that Elijah believes his is a wizard, or rather, that his body is the entry point for a wizard who only wants to do destructive things. After several failed foster-home situations, Elijah finally settles with Nikki and Obi, a couple determined to build a family despite Elijah’s violence. Through their determination, Watson shows us the politics of adoption, the complexities of calling a stranger your son, and the capacity of love.
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Joanna Demkiewicz is The Riveter‘s co-founder and executive editor. Find her on Twitter at @yanna_dem.
