Intimacy on YouTube, a book-length essay exploring immigration, and a story collection about eels and eating disorders.
By Daley Farr, Ann Mayhew, Celia Mattison, Elizabeth Callen, Sarah Waller, and Annie Metcalf
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli
Coffee House Press
Out: 4/4/2017
Prompted by her work as a translator for undocumented children seeking legal status, Valeria Luiselli’s new book-length essay carefully dissects our accepted narratives about race, nation, and immigration.
In this stark overview of the ongoing injustices experienced by immigrants, the future remains unclear for undocumented children trying to stay in the United States; throughout the book, Luiselli herself grapples with uncertainty, as her own daughter demands an “end” to the stories from court that Luiselli tells at home. While Tell Me How It Ends begins as an examination of these issues in 2014, Luiselli relates a broader understanding of the international policies and systemic influences that caused the crisis in the first place. She also offers narratives of hope; TIIA (Teen Immigrant Integration Association), the organization developed by Luiselli’s students at Hofstra University, is springing into action even now, providing key support for young people whose stability is perhaps even more threatened than when they arrived in this country through community engagement opportunities, English classes, civil liberties education, and more.
Tell Me How It Ends is a damning but deeply humane indictment of the narratives with which we’ve built America, both the stories we keep hidden and those we use to justify our cruelty. The experiences of the children Luiselli interviews demand that we complicate our own roles in the immigration crisis’s continent-wide affect; we can’t rewrite what these children have been through, but we must pursue more compassionate, more just stories of our own.
—Daley Farr
Not One Day by Anne Garréta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
Deep Vellum
Out: 4/11/17
A member of the Oulipo, a group of writers who work under self-imposed constraints, Anne Garréta wrote Not One Day with the goal of spending “not one day without a woman.” She applied constrictive rules of time, technology, and technique to challenge herself to “write something different”; in this case, her memories of various women from her past.
The result, as translated by Emma Ramadan, is stunning. Each section of Not One Day focuses on a different woman, all memorable for the various feelings they invoke: lust, love, disgust. The second-person perspective allows Garréta to slip seamlessly between past and present, enhancing the theme of memory. The book also functions as a celebration of queer relationships: “You are the only ones to see the desire that is not allowed, in what is not said aloud.” The prose is thrilling, intense, and often literally erotic. Despite her declared discomfort with confessional writing, Garréta has a knack for making the reader feel as if they are reading something not meant to be read by strangers.
And therein lies the genius of Garréta and Not One Day. A twist at the end, and a glance back at the introduction, adds another layer to the experience. Garréta states in the beginning, “You would like to offer [the readers] what you expect they desire. So you have resolved, at the very least, to pretend … to subject yourself to the discipline of confessional writing.” Not One Day is not merely a study of memory and desire; Garréta has had greater intentions all along. This searingly beautiful book stands out in its ability to reveal and disrupt the desires — and expectations — readers have of writers.
—Ann Mayhew
Fen by Daisy Johnson
Graywolf Press
Out: 5/2/17
Daisy Johnson’s debut is a rich collection of stories that take place in the same gothic British wetlands, known simply as the Fen. She begins with the creation of the village in the Fen, and the droves of eels that resist eradication. Builders begin to suspect something otherworldly is at work, that something has compelled the eels to starve themselves rather than become a sustainable food source, but continue to burn them en masse and drain their habitat. The violence and vengeance that christen the land becomes a key part of Johnson’s landscape and its accompanying mythology, which Johnson renders beautifully in slippery, folkloric prose.
Female sexuality and adolescence dominate the Fen, where women’s experiences have mythic consequences. A girl watches her sister develop an eating disorder and not just waste away, but transform; a widow regrets her husband’s return when she discovers his language has become physically abusive — any word he utters causes her intense nausea, nosebleeds, and pain. In all of these stories, the Fen is a central character, somehow responsible for the collective strange behaviors of the creatures and objects that seem to have grown out of the land.
This collection is uneven — some stories lack depth, with characters often feeling too much like flat archetypes of the fables she’s working from — but the truly inventive, haunting stories outnumber the merely above-average. Johnson’s writing is consistently strong, moving deftly from haunting and elegiac to bizarrely comic. Fen is a remarkable debut and hopefully the start of a promising career.
—Celia Mattison
One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul
Picador
Out: 5/2/17
In one of the essays that make up her debut collection, BuzzFeed writer Scacchi Koul recounts the backlash she faced early last year, when she took to Twitter to solicit freelance pitches from writers who “are not white and not male.” She was immediately met with vitriolic threats of sexual violence and death. But, Koul refused — and with this collection still refuses — to give in.
“We are deeply afraid of making marginalized voices stronger, because we think it makes privileged ones that much weaker,” she writes. “It doesn’t mean they’re the only people you choose, but they are the ones we ignore the most.”
In each essay, Koul is smart, sharp and searingly funny. Though she writes about seemingly disparate topics — the aforementioned Twitter backlash, her young niece who often passes as white, the pain of enduring a bikini wax — she deftly weaves them together to create both a cohesive narrative of her life as the daughter of Indian immigrants in Canada (“a land of ice and casual racism”) and an insightful, incisive commentary on race, gender, and contemporary culture.
Throughout the book, she is humorous without relying on gags, wry without causticness, and touching without being saccharine. One Day is a stellar debut from a wildly talented writer who has much to say — and hopefully more work to come.
—Elizabeth Callen
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Out: 5/2/17
Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan’s lyrical debut novel resonates with identity, heritage, and the loss of home through the heartbreaking portrait of a Palestinian family’s displacement across four generations.
In 1963, when Salma reads her daughter Alia’s future in a cup of coffee on the eve of Alia’s wedding, she chooses not to share that she sees travel and an unsettled life. The reader is invited into eight Yacoub family members’ perspectives as those predictions come true: Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus, and Alia and her husband Atef move to Kuwait City and build a life with their children Riham, Karam, and Souad. The story follows the family as they are uprooted because of the Six-Day War of 1967 and later Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990; they eventually relocate to Beruit, Paris, and Boston.
Though readers are given only a short glimpse into each character’s thoughts, Alyan’s prose is rife with imagery and depth as she explores the resilience of the human spirit and how homes, once lost, can be imagined and shared in foreign cities. The historical events taking place aren’t riddled with politics but rather touched upon by different ages and cultural perspectives. Most importantly the characters are not reduced to stereotypes as Alyan — who is also a psychologist — examines the complex emotions family members inherit.
In a post-Trump America where refugee and immigrant voices need to be heard, this poignant, timely novel on the Palestinian diaspora is both powerful and paramount.
—Sarah Waller
The Gift by Barbara Browning
Coffee House Press/Emily Books
Out: 5/9/2017
In this disarming and hopeful novel, Barbara Browning explores the role of art in our lives and relationships with humor, warmth, and playful eroticism.
The Gift introduces us to narrator Barbara Anderson (who bears innumerable resemblances to the book’s author) and her practice of creating custom ukulele covers and “hand dances” on YouTube as radical gestures of friendship and love. While exploring the wider world of YouTube song covers, Barbara encounters Sami, an enigmatic musician whose mastery and passion capture her attention. A series of artistic collaborations and “inappropriate intimacies” develop as they get to know each other, but as their friendship grows and Barbara begins to worry about its power over her, the ambiguities of each character’s real identity grow, too.
The mystery of Sami provides much of the novel’s structure, but the book is also full of spirited digressions on performance, family, shame, and the history of gift-giving, each examined with remarkable aplomb in Barbara’s inviting voice. The recurring performances by Barbara’s friend Tye position The Gift within broader theoretical conversations of identity and generosity, and with every performance scene Barbara conveys the experience of live art without condescension or opacity.
Art breeds intimacy in ways we may never have thought possible. Like Barbara says, “I love to have real, corporeal relationships with people.” In this superbly wacky, graceful book, the fictional relationships are worth loving, too.
—Daley Farr
The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld
Milkweed Editions
Out: 5/9/17
In her striking debut short story collection, Dalia Rosenfeld explores identity and love, particularly from a Jewish-American perspective. The people in her stories are searching for their place, literally and metaphorically, within unclear multicultural landscapes and traumatic historic pasts.
The characters in The Worlds We Think We Know are often traveling or dreaming of it, navigating different languages, or stepping uneasily out of their steady lives. In “Amnon,” one woman becomes lost in Tel Aviv trying to find a lemon; in “Invasions,” a woman seeks connection outside of her marriage with a Yiddish-reading neighbor. Music is also a commonality across the collection. One narrator’s breath is “like the failed note from a broken instrument”; more than one story features a piano teacher.
Rosenfeld’s prose is succinct, with a tone that is both unsettling and honest. While the collection is consistently compelling, the last section stands out in particular. These latter stories, such as “Liliana, Years Later” and “Naftali,” feel more developed, and invoke a stronger visceral reaction with less reliance on mildly quirky situations or wording. These stories encompass the collection’s main themes of uncertainty, love, and heartbreak in a world in which one’s cultural identities are so easily questioned. In “Liliana, Years Later,” the narrator states of her lover, “When in response to a question about his origins, he explained that he was a citizen of the world.” That this relationship ends in heartbreak is telling.
The stories in The Worlds We Think We Know don’t end with answers to the questions their narrators are asking, and like any good story collection, neither does the book. Instead, it illustrates the gray area in which we live, in which national and self identities cannot be easily defined, and offers hope for connection.
—Ann Mayhew
Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Transit Books
Out: 5/16/17
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s award-winning debut novel follows the descendants of one clan leader scattered across twenty-first century Uganda as they deal with the implied repercussions of an old curse. In 1750, Kintu Kidda’s adopted son Kalema dies on a journey, and a shocked Kintu fails to ensure the burial is performed correctly. When Kalema’s true father guesses his son’s fate, disaster swiftly befalls the rest of Kintu’s family. Two and a half centuries later, madness and misfortune stalk his scattered progeny: a young woman haunted by the ghost of her twin, a devout Evangelical man troubled by his twin children, a telecom worker convinced he and his son have HIV, and an aging Atheist who is having strange dreams.
Kintu muses, “If the soul is at conflict … what chance do communities have?” While Makumbi structures her novel around individual characters, these people exist in the context of multiple communities — clan, tribe, class, religion, gender. Characters assign one another to groups as a matter of course, especially using names as their starting point. Certain names denote twinhood, certain suffixes on a name can indicate or obscure a person’s tribal origins. But rather than being a familiar narrative of false assumptions or individual rejection of societal expectations, these communally-dictated identities are instead the key to the characters’ true selves. Makumbi’s characters are compelling as individuals, but it is their shared past and journey toward a shared future that elevate the novel to an epic and enigmatic masterpiece.
—Annie Metcalf
