Tag Archives: Lorrie Moore

Short Stories in September Roundup: Alexie, Donoghue, Groff Anthology, Houston, McCracken, Moore, Svoboda, Walker

By Rebecca Foster on October 7, 2024 | 15 Comments

I gave myself an extra week to finish up the story collections I was in the middle of, so I’ve managed to read 13 during this challenge to self (including my first and second posts). Again I’m borrowing Marcie’s five-sentence review format to keep things simple.

The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (1993)

There are 22 stories in this fairly short book, so most top out at no more than 10 pages: little slices of life on and around the reservation at Spokane, Washington. Some central characters recur, such as Victor, Thomas Builds-the-Fire and James Many Horses, but there are so many tales that I couldn’t keep track of them across the book even though I read it quickly. My favourite was “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” in which Victor and Thomas fly out to collect the ashes of Victor’s father. Some of the longer titles give a sense of the tone: “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock” and “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation.” I couldn’t help but think of it as a so-so rehearsal for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian because a similar cast of drunks, jokers, relatives and basketball players populates the stories and a comparable voice prevails. (University library)

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue (2002)

The title story is about Mary Toft – I thought of making her hoax the subject of a Three on a Theme post because I actually have two novels about her downloaded from NetGalley and Edelweiss (Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki and Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer), but the facts as conveyed here don’t seem like nearly enough to fuel a whole book, so I doubt I’ll read those. Donoghue has a good eye for historical curios and incidents and an academic’s gift for research, yet not many of these 17 stories, most of which are in the third person, rise above the novelty. Many protagonists are British or Irish women who were a footnote in the historical record: an animal rights activist, a lord’s daughter, a cult leader, a blind poet, a medieval rioter, a suspected witch. There are mild homoerotic touches, too. I enjoyed “Come, Gentle Night,” about John Ruskin’s honeymoon, and “Cured,” which reveals a terrifying surgical means of controlling women’s moods but, as I found with Astray and Learned by Heart, Donoghue sometimes lets documented details overwhelm other elements of a narrative. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)

The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff (2023)

Hard to convey the variety of this 20-story anthology in a concise way because they run the gamut from realist (Nigerian homosexuality in “Happy Is a Doing Word” by Arinze Ifeakandu; Irish gangsters in “The Blackhills” by Eamon McGuinness) to absurd (Ling Ma’s “Office Hours” has academics passing through closet doors into a dream space; the title of Catherine Lacey’s “Man Mountain” is literal; “Ira and the Whale” is Rachel B. Glaser’s gay version of the Jonah legend). Also difficult to encapsulate my reaction, because for every story I would happily have seen expanded into a novel (the gloomy character study “The Locksmith” by Grey Wolfe LaJoie, the teenage friends’ coming-of-age in “After Hours at the Acacia Park Pool” by the marvellous Kirstin Valdez Quade), there was another I thought might never end (“Dream Man” by Cristina Rivera-Garza and “Temporary Housing” by Kathleen Alcott). Three are in translation. I admired Lisa Taddeo’s tale of grief and revenge, “Wisconsin,” and Naomi Shuyama-Gómez’s creepy Colombian-set “The Commander’s Teeth.” But my two favourites were probably “Me, Rory, and Aurora” by Jonas Eika (Danish), which combines an uneasy threesome, the plight of the unhoused and a downright chilling Ishiguro-esque ending; and “Xífù,” K-Ming Chang’s funny, morbid take on daughter/mother-in-law relations in China. (PDF review copy)

Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston (1998)

The novel-in-stories is about Lucy, a photographer in her early thirties with a penchant for falling for the wrong men – alcoholics or misogynists or ones who aren’t available. When she’s not working she’s thrill-seeking: rafting in Colorado, travelling in the Amazon, sailing in the Caribbean, or gliding. “Everything good I’ve gotten in life I’ve gotten by plunging in,” she boasts, to which a friend replies, “Sure, and everything bad you’ve gotten in your life you’ve gotten by plunging in.” Ultimately she ‘settles down’ on the Colorado ranch she inherits from her grandmother with a dog, making this – based on what I learned from the autobiographical essays in Deep Creek – even more autofiction for Houston than her debut, Cowboys Are My Weakness, was. Although the final magic realist touch of having her child-self come to her with a box of photographs of traumatic memories is overdone, the themes of accepting vulnerability, seeking to freeze time and creating a home for yourself resonated, and the title story, about the death of Lucy’s mother, is a brilliant and heart-wrenching standalone. (Secondhand – British Red Cross, Berwick)

The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (2021)

McCracken is terrific in short forms: The Hero of This Book, a novella, was one of my top books of 2022, and I also loved her previous story collection, Thunderstruck. Five of these dozen stories are taken from different points in the lives of Jack and Sadie, English and American academics (who I inevitably read as McCracken and her husband, Edward Carey) who come from large-family zaniness versus claustrophobic mother–daughter melancholy. I kept thinking that McCracken’s are just the sorts of scenarios Lucy and Olive would have told stories about in Tell Me Everything: accidents, misfortunes; random connections. Travel is a major element in many of the stories, including to Denmark (in the title story) and Amsterdam. I couldn’t decide whether I preferred the Jack-and-Sadie material or the rest, but I had a favourite from each: “The Irish Wedding” cracked me up as much as it did Sadie with the accidental use of crass American slang, while “Proof,” about a man communing with his father despite his early dementia, is set on a boat trip I’ve made (in 2004!) to see puffins on the Treshnish islands of Scotland. (Secondhand – Dogs Trust charity shop, Marlborough)

Like Life by Lorrie Moore (1990)

Compared to Birds of America, this feels a little dated and the plots are overall less memorable. Still, the eight stories of Moore’s second collection are chewy with insight into relationships and the mindsets of youngish and middle-aged women, and there’s an effortless wry wit to her turns of phrase. Her exasperated would-be feminist characters remind me of Helen Simpson’s, while the cheese-selling protagonist of “Joy” made me think of an early Carol Shields story; and who knew a “cute meet” (aka a meet-cute) was a thing back then? New York City contrasts with the Midwest, most notably in “You’re Ugly, Too” and “The Jewish Hunter.” The title story, which comes last, crafts a weirdly muted dystopia built around shortages and marital misery; I preferred the (comparative lightness) of “Vissi d’Arte,” about a lonely playwright, and “Places to Look for Your Mind,” in which an empty-nest entrepreneur hosts an aimless young Englishman her daughter met on her study abroad year. (Secondhand – Bark charity shop, Berwick)

The Long Swim by Terese Svoboda (2023)

These 44 stories, mostly of flash fiction length, combine the grit of Denis Johnson with the bite of Flannery O’Connor. Siblings squabble over a late parent’s effects or wishes, marriages go wrong, the movie business isn’t as glittering as it’s cracked up to be, and drugs and alcohol complicate everything. The settings range through North America and the Caribbean, with a couple of forays to Europe. There are no speech marks and, whether the narrative is in first person or third, all the voices are genuine and distinctive yet flow together admirably. Svoboda has a poet-like talent for compact, zingy lines; two favourites were “my laziness is born of generalized-looking-to-get-specific grief, like an atom trying to make salt” (“Niagara”) and “Ditziness, a kind of Morse code of shriek-and-stop, erupts around the girls” (“Orphan Shop”).

Winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Published by University of Massachusetts Press. With thanks to the author for the free PDF copy for review.

In Love and Trouble by Alice Walker (1973)

I’d only ever read The Color Purple, so when I spotted this in a bookshop on our Northumberland holiday it felt like a good excuse to try something else by Walker. I had actually encountered one of the stronger stories before: “Everyday Use” is in the Close Company Virago anthology. In these Southern scenes (“a hate-filled state complete with magnolias, tornadoes and broken-tongued field hands”), Black women oppressed by fathers and partners gain what few advantages they can through deception or folk medicine. I liked “Entertaining God,” which opens with a boy abducting a gorilla from a zoo, and “To Hell with Dying,” about a friendship with an elderly neighbour in cotton country. Setting, style, characters; nothing drew me to any of the others or made me think I’ll read Walker again in the future. (Secondhand – Berrydin Books, Berwick)

Which of these would you read?

Currently reading: I’m not good at picking up short stories in the rest of the year, but I’ve discovered that I really enjoy reviewing them for Shelf Awareness – the length and format of their reviews really suits essay and story collections. So I’m now partway through Save Me, Stranger by Erika Krouse (2025) for an early Shelf Awareness review. Another book I started in Northumberland, Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags by Shena Mackay, I didn’t finish in time for this challenge but will either continue or set aside and pick back up next year. Both are fantastic!

Posted in: Fiction Reviews | Tagged: Alice Walker, Amsterdam, Arinze Ifeakandu, Catherine Lacey, Colorado, Cristina Rivera-Garza, dementia, Denmark, Eamon McGuinness, Edward Carey, Elizabeth McCracken, Emma Donoghue, flash fiction, Grey Wolfe LaJoie, historical fiction, Ireland, John Ruskin, Jonas Eika, Juniper Prize, K-Ming Chang, Kathleen Alcott, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Lauren Groff, Ling Ma, linked short stories, Lisa Taddeo, Lorrie Moore, magic realism, Mary Toft, Midwest, Naomi Shuyama-Gómez, Native Americans, New York City, Pam Houston, puffins, Rachel B. Glaser, Scotland, Sherman Alexie, short stories, Southern fiction, Terese Svoboda, Washington state

#ReadIndies Catch-up: Ansell, Kinard, McNaught, Ponce, Toews and Vara

By Rebecca Foster on February 28, 2024 | 16 Comments

At last, my first dedicated selections for Read Indies month, two of which have been languishing on the shelf since 2022! A few more indie titles will appear in my February roundup tomorrow. I’ve got a huge variety here: an extended essay comparing life among the unhoused in London in the 1980s with the freedom of the open road and the island of Jura; gospel-saturated poems of queer African American life; an exposé of spiritual abuse in a Pentecostal church with branches in England and Nigeria; an Ecuadorian novella obsessed with bodies and sex; a funny yet heartbreaking novel about a zany family trying not to fall apart; and short stories about siblings, adolescence, memory, death and much more. I name the publishers and other books I have on the docket from each one.

Deer Island by Neil Ansell (2013)

My last unread book by Ansell (whose Deep Country, The Last Wilderness, and The Circling Sky I’ve loved) and one that had been out of print for many years, so it was great to hear that Little Toller was reissuing it. Ansell has visited most countries; pressed for a favourite place, he names the Scottish isle of Jura. In memory he returns to a place he hadn’t been in over 20 years. In the early 1980s he lived in London and volunteered with The Simon Community, a homeless charity, for three years. Later that decade, he found himself in the same situation as those he served, squatting in chaotic multi-occupancy London properties. But in between he’d had a magical jaunt to Jura by hitchhiking and motorbike with a girlfriend. And later, when his only sentimental keepsake was stolen from his squat bedroom, he left that lifestyle behind and fled to Jura, haunt of golden eagles and otters; refuge for George Orwell, who experienced his fair share of squalor – Down and Out in Paris and London gets a mention, but Ansell doesn’t belabour a comparison he more than earns. It’s a shame this is so short, but it’s a carefully crafted slice of life, and illustrates a sobering truth: “Security is an illusion.”

With thanks to Little Toller Books for the free copy for review. Deer Island came out in paperback on 27 February.

Little Toller

Also read recently: brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe

Currently reading: The Long Field by Pamela Petro

Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III (2023)

At a confluence of Southern, Black and gay identities, Kinard writes of matriarchal families, of congregations and choirs, of the descendants of enslavers and enslaved living side by side. The layout mattered more than I knew, reading an e-copy: often it is white text on a black page; words form rings or an infinity symbol; erasure poems gray out much of what has come before. “Boomerang” interludes imagine a chorus of fireflies offering commentary – just one of numerous insect metaphors. Mythology also plays a role. “A Tangle of Gorgons,” a sample poem I’d read before, wends its serpentine way across several pages. “Catalog of My Obsessions or Things I Answer to” presents an alphabetical list. For the most part, the poems were longer, wordier and more involved (four pages of notes on the style and allusions) than I tend to prefer, but I could appreciate the religious frame of reference and the alliteration.

Two favorite passages:

Ma taught me how to change a tire

the fall before it got real cold one October,

on the plot of dirt the pole beans we call Babel

spiral from, where our boozy station wagon

sat after hobbling home & passing out

in the backyard

(from “Work”)

I left before the door was closed.

I built myself of drowning hymns.

I stole every one to fly.

(from “Icarus Confesses”)

With thanks to Alice James Books for the advanced e-copy for review.

Alice James Books

Also read recently: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali

Immanuel by Matthew McNaught (2022)

“Immanuel was the centre of the world once. Long after it imploded, its gravitational pull remains.” McNaught grew up in an evangelical church in Winchester, England, but by the time he left for university he’d fallen away. Meanwhile, some peers left for Nigeria to become disciples at charismatic preacher TB Joshua’s Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos. It’s obvious to outsiders that this was a cult, but not so to those caught up in it. It took years and repeated allegations for people to wake up to faked healings, sexual abuse, and the ceding of control to a megalomaniac who got rich off of duping and exploiting followers. This book won the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. I admired its blend of journalistic and confessional styles: research, interviews with friends and strangers alike, and reflection on the author’s own loss of faith. He gets to the heart of why people stayed: “A feeling of holding and of being held. A sense of fellowship and interdependence … the rare moments of transcendence … It was nice to be a superorganism.” This gripped me from page one, but its wider appeal strikes me as limited. For me, it was the perfect chance to think about how I might write about traditions I grew up in and spurned.

With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the proof copy for review.

Fitzcarraldo Editions

Currently reading: Intervals by Marianne Brooker

Up next: Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce (2020; 2024)

[Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker]

Like other short works I’ve read by Hispanic women authors (Die, My Love, September and the Night, In Vitro), this Ecuadorian novella is intense, fragmentary, and obsessed with the female body and psyche. The unnamed narrator, a woman separated from her husband and freed from inhibitions, gives in to her substance and sex addictions – “For me, anything that isn’t falling in love has never merited much attention. That giddiness from proximity or bodies”. I was reminded of A Spy in the House of Love in that she flits compulsively from one lover to another, but Ponce is much more explicit than Nin. At least at the start, the sex scenes are almost constant and described in graphic detail. The narrator meets her lovers in warehouses and caves. Literal holes/orifices and blood are profuse, but also symbolically weighty, with fear of pregnancy also featuring heavily. I was impressed at how Booker rendered the stream-of-consciousness approach, which involves several-page paragraphs and metaphors of moths and moss. I wouldn’t say this was a pleasant book to spend time with, but the style and vocabulary made it worthy of note.

With thanks to Dead Ink for the free copy for review. Blood Red was first published in English by Restless Books in the USA in 2022.

Dead Ink

Up next: Sinking Bell by Bojan Louis

Fight Night by Miriam Toews (2022)

I knew from All My Puny Sorrows that Canadian author Miriam Toews has a knack for combining humour and heartbreak. I can’t believe it took me since 2015 to read another of her novels. Once again, there seems to be a strong autobiographical element and suicide in the family is part of the backstory. Although abandonment and failure haunt these three female generations, we see everything through a child’s point-of-view, which turns life into a jolly adventure. Swiv’s mother, an underemployed actress, is heavily pregnant with “Gord”; her father is out of the picture. Swiv has been expelled, which gives her plenty of time with Grandma Elvira, who makes friends with everyone she meets but, alas, is crumbling physically. Luckily, Swiv knows just how to keep her going with nitro spray and compression socks and pills rescued from the floor. Before Gord arrives, Grandma wants one last adventure: a flight from Canada to Fresno, California to see her remaining family. Their trip is a disaster, in hilarious ways. Child narrators are tough to pull off, so kudos to Toews for making eight-year-old Swiv almost completely believable (though a bit too precocious). These characters are all foul-mouthed fighters, with a quick wit and the determination to make their stories matter. You’ll laugh and cry.

With thanks to Faber for the proof copy for review.

Faber

Also read recently: Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Currently reading: Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown

This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara (2023)

The epigraph is from the two pages of laughter (“Ha!”) in “Real Estate,” one of the stories of Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. Vara shares Moore’s themes, which are the stuff of literary fiction generally – adolescence, friendship, ageing, memory, romantic relationships – but also her tone of dark comedy. The death of a sibling recurs. In “The Irates,” teenage Swati, whose brother died of cancer, and her friend Lydia get phone sales jobs through the Chinese restaurant where they go for egg rolls. In “I, Buffalo,” Sheila tries to hide her alcoholism when her sister Priya comes for a visit with Sheila’s brother-in-law and niece. “The girl” in “You Are Not Alone” is delighted to spend her eighth birthday in Florida with her estranged father, but less so when she learns there’s a stepmother figure in the picture. The women of “Sibyls” look after an elderly neighbour with dementia. The querulous child in “Unknown Unknowns” reminded me of Good Talk by Mira Jacob. My two favourites were the title story, about building a Noah’s Ark replica, and “What Next,” about a woman accompanying her teenage daughter to meet her father for the first time. A few stories didn’t stand out, and while I liked the writing, this didn’t necessarily feel like a cohesive collection.

With thanks to Grove Press UK for the free copy for review. This Is Salvaged came out in paperback in the UK on 1 February.

Grove Atlantic

Up next: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, Home/Land by Rebecca Mead, We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman

Have you discovered any new-to-you independent publishers recently?

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: Alice James Books, Anaïs Nin, California, Canadian literature, child narrator, Dead Ink, dementia, Ecuador, evangelical Christianity, Evangelicalism, Faber, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Gabriela Ponce, George Orwell, Grove Atlantic, homelessness, independent publishers, Jura, Lagos, literature in translation, Little Toller, London, Lorrie Moore, Matthew McNaught, Mira Jacob, Miriam Toews, Neil Ansell, Nigeria, novella, old age, poetry, pregnancy, religion, Sarah Booker, short stories, suicide, travel books, Vauhini Vara, Willie Lee Kinard III

Some 2023 Reading Superlatives

By Rebecca Foster on December 29, 2023 | 25 Comments

Longest book read this year: The Weather Woman by Sally Gardner (457 pages) – not very impressive compared to last year’s 720-page To Paradise. That means I didn’t get through a single doorstopper this year. D’oh!

Shortest book read this year: Pitch Black by Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton (40 pages)

Authors I read the most by this year: Margaret Atwood, Deborah Levy and Brian Turner (3 books each); Amy Bloom, Simone de Beauvoir, Tove Jansson, John Lewis-Stempel, W. Somerset Maugham, L.M. Montgomery and Maggie O’Farrell (2 books each)

Publishers I read the most from: (Setting aside the ubiquitous Penguin and its many imprints) Carcanet (11 books) and Picador/Pan Macmillan (also 11), followed by Canongate (7).

My top author discoveries of the year: Michelle Huneven and Julie Marie Wade

My proudest bookish accomplishment: Helping to launch the Little Free Library in my neighbourhood in May, and curating it through the rest of the year (nearly daily tidying; occasional culling; requesting book donations)

Most pinching-myself bookish moments: Attending the Booker Prize ceremony; interviewing Lydia Davis and Anne Enright over e-mail; singing carols after-hours at Shakespeare and Company in Paris

Books that made me laugh: Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson, The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, two by Katherine Heiny, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood

Books that made me cry: A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney, Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, Family Meal by Bryan Washington

The book that was the most fun to read: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Best book club selections: By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Best last lines encountered this year: “And I stood there holding on to this man as though he were the very last person left on this sweet sad place that we call Earth.” (Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout)

A book that put a song in my head every time I picked it up: Here and Now by Henri Nouwen (Aqualung song here)

Shortest book title encountered: Lo (the poetry collection by Melissa Crowe), followed by Bear, Dirt, Milk and They

Best 2023 book titles: These Envoys of Beauty and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis

Best book titles from other years: I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, The Cats We Meet Along the Way, We All Want Impossible Things

Favourite title and cover combo of the year: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (shame the contents didn’t live up to it!)

Biggest disappointment: Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza

A 2023 book that everyone was reading but I decided not to: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The worst books I read this year: Monica by Daniel Clowes, They by Kay Dick, Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy and Self-Portrait in Green by Marie Ndiaye (1-star ratings are extremely rare for me; these were this year’s four)

The downright strangest book I read this year: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood

Posted in: Reading habits | Tagged: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Alice Kinsella, Amy Bloom, Anna Vaught, Anne Enright, Anthony Horton, Baek Sehee, Bill Bryson, Bill Buford, Booker Prize, Brian Turner, Bryan Washington, Canongate, Carcanet Press, Catherine Newman, Daniel Clowes, Danielle Evans, Deborah Levy, Elizabeth Strout, Henri Nouwen, John Lewis-Stempel, Julie Marie Wade, Katherine Heiny, Kay Dick, Kelly Weber, L.M. Montgomery, Little Free Library, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Maggie O’Farrell, Margaret Atwood, Marian Engel, Marie NDiaye, Melissa Crowe, Meron Hadero, Michelle Huneven, Nadia Mikail, Paris, Patricia Lockwood, Patrick deWitt, Paul Lynch, Paula Cocozza, Picador, Rob Delaney, Sally Gardner, Shakespeare and Company, Simone de Beauvoir, superlatives, Susan Hill, Tove Jansson, Youme Landowne

Cover Love 2023

By Rebecca Foster on December 20, 2023 | 21 Comments

As I did in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, I’ve picked out some favourite book covers from the past year’s new releases. Gone are the days of mostly flora and fauna covers and abstract faces. Last year it was all about colour blocks and textures, with some partial images of female bodies. This year it’s a more random selection.

Gustave Caillebotte is one of my favourite painters, so I appreciated the use of his simple Bed of Daisies as the cover of Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (though I still think the book could have had a more evocative title, such as The Cherry Orchard).

I lied; there was still a bit of flora and fauna this past year – those daisies, and the abstract trees, bunch of flowers and dangling creatures below:

The cover of Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang reminded me of a bento box or comic strip.

I was also into the swirly lines (often signifying fire) this year:

And these all stood out to me for their use of colours and font (the Acheson and Hull are almost twins):

The sad truth is that for many of the above I liked the covers more than the contents, with exceptions being the Crowe, Napolitano and Patchett.

What cover trends have you noticed this year? Which ones tend to grab your attention?

Posted in: Something Different | Tagged: Alexandra Chang, Ann Napolitano, Ann Patchett, Anne Hull, book covers, Charlotte Eichler, cover love, flora, Gustave Caillebotte, Ina Cariño, Isabel Zapata, Jazmina Barrera, JoeAnn Hart, Kelsey Norris, Lorrie Moore, Melissa Crowe, Mikki Brammer, Nick Acheson, Ron Rash

Book Serendipity, Mid-February to Mid-April

By Rebecca Foster on April 19, 2023 | 21 Comments

I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. The following are in roughly chronological order.

Last time, my biggest set of coincidences was around books set in or about Korea or by Korean authors; this time it was Ghana and Ghanaian authors:

Reading two books set in Ghana at the same time: Fledgling by Hannah Bourne-Taylor and His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie. I had also read a third book set in Ghana, What Napoleon Could Not Do by DK Nnuro, early in the year and then found its title phrase (i.e., “you have done what Napoleon could not do,” an expression of praise) quoted in the Medie! It must be a popular saying there.
Reading two books by young Ghanaian British authors at the same time: Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Maame by Jessica George.

And the rest:

An overweight male character with gout in Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom and The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph.

I’d never heard of “shoegaze music” before I saw it in Michelle Zauner’s bio at the back of Crying in H Mart, but then I also saw it mentioned in Pulling the Chariot of the Sun by Shane McCrae.

Sheila Heti’s writing on motherhood is quoted in Without Children by Peggy O’Donnell Heffington and In Vitro by Isabel Zapata. Before long I got back into her novel Pure Colour. A quote from another of her books (How Should a Person Be?) is one of the epigraphs to Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

Reading two Mexican books about motherhood at the same time: Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel and In Vitro by Isabel Zapata.

Two coming-of-age novels set on the cusp of war in 1939: The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle and Martha Quest by Doris Lessing.

A scene of looking at peculiar human behaviour and imagining how David Attenborough would narrate it in a documentary in Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson and I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai.

The painter Caravaggio is mentioned in a novel (The Things We Do to Our Friends by Heather Darwent) plus two poetry books (The Fourth Sister by Laura Scott and Manorism by Yomi Sode) I was reading at the same time.

Characters are plagued by mosquitoes in The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel and Through the Groves by Anne Hull.

Edinburgh’s history of grave robbing is mentioned in The Things We Do to Our Friends by Heather Darwent and Womb by Leah Hazard.

I read a chapter about mayflies in Lev Parikian’s book Taking Flight and then a poem about mayflies later the same day in Ephemeron by Fiona Benson.

Childhood reminiscences about playing the board game Operation and wetting the bed appear in Homesick by Jennifer Croft and Through the Groves by Anne Hull.

Fiddler on the Roof songs are mentioned in Through the Groves by Anne Hull and We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman.

There’s a minor character named Frith in Shadow Girls by Carol Birch and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

Scenes of a female couple snogging in a bar bathroom in Through the Groves by Anne Hull and The Garnett Girls by Georgina Moore.

The main character regrets not spending more time with her father before his sudden death in Maame by Jessica George and Pure Colour by Sheila Heti.

The main character is called Mira in Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton and Pure Colour by Sheila Heti, and a Mira is briefly mentioned in one of the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans.

Macbeth references in Shadow Girls by Carol Birch and Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton – my second Macbeth-sourced title in recent times, after Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin last year.

A ‘Goldilocks scenario’ is referred to in Womb by Leah Hazard (the ideal contraction strength) and Taking Flight by Lev Parikian (the ideal body weight for a bird).

Caribbean patois and mention of an ackee tree in the short story collection If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery and the poetry collection Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa.

The Japanese folktale “The Boy Who Drew Cats” appeared in Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, which I read last year, and then also in Enchantment by Katherine May.

Chinese characters are mentioned to have taken part in the Tiananmen Square massacre/June 4th incident in Dear Chrysanthemums by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Oh My Mother! by Connie Wang.

Endometriosis comes up in What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo and Womb by Leah Hazard.

What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?

Posted in: book serendipity | Tagged: Amy Bloom, Anne Hull, Bill Bryson, book serendipity, Caravaggio, Carol Birch, Catherine Newman, Celeste Ng, China, Connie Wang, Danielle Evans, Daphne du Maurier, David Attenborough, Doris Lessing, Edinburgh, Eleanor Catton, endometriosis, Fiona Benson, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, folk tales, Gabrielle Zevin, Georgina Moore, Ghana, gout, Guadalupe Nettel, Hannah Bourne-Taylor, Heather Darwent, insects, Isabel Zapata, Japanese literature, Jennifer Croft, Jessica George, Jonathan Escoffery, Katherine May, Laura Scott, Leah Hazard, Lev Parikian, Lorrie Moore, Macbeth, Mexico, Michelle Zauner, motherhood, patois, Peace Adzo Medie, Peggy O’Donnell Heffington, Ramona Ausubel, Rebecca Makkai, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Shane McCrae, Sheila Heti, Stephanie Foo, T.C. Boyle, Tiananmen Square, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, William Shakespeare, Yomi Sode

Three on a Theme for Valentine’s Day: “Love” Short Story Collections

By Rebecca Foster on February 14, 2023 | 31 Comments

Even though I’m really not a Valentine’s Day sort of person*, this is the seventh year in a row that I’ve put together a themed post featuring books that have “Love” or a similar word in the title in the run-up to mid-February (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022).

I also don’t generally read short story collections if it’s not September – I seem to need that alliterative crutch to get to a dozen or so of them – but my “Birds” trio and these three were so great that I had to wonder why I don’t read them all year round.

Are these love stories? Some, to an extent. But also loss stories. Loneliness stories. Hatred stories. Abandonment stories. A few even verge on horror. In other words, realistic slivers of life. And as different as Carver’s lean, masculine tales of addiction and failure might seem from Bloom’s wry scenes of family life and Dunmore’s intimate pictures of isolation and mental illness, I found that all three resonated with each other. As for character detail, Dunmore’s “fat men” echo the overweight male protagonist in Bloom’s first story cycle.

Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom (2010)

One of these stories, “Sleepwalking,” was familiar to me because it is reprinted from her 1993 collection, Come to Me, and another two were originally published in 2000’s A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You – isn’t she great at titles?! She excels at first lines, too: some from this volume are “At two o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame,” “William has gout,” “Clare can’t walk,” “No power” and “I had always planned to kill my father.”

The book contains two quartets of linked stories and four stand-alone stories. The first set is about Clare and William, whose dynamic shifts from acquaintances to couple-friends to lovers to spouses. Bloom, a former psychotherapist, is interested in tracking how they navigate these changes over the years, and does so by switching between first- and third-person narration and adopting a different perspective for each story. She does the same with the four stories about Lionel and Julia, a Black man and his white stepmother. Over the course of maybe three decades, we see the constellations of relationships each one forms, while the family core remains. She also includes sexual encounters between characters who are middle-aged and older – when, according to stereotypes, lust should have been snuffed out.

Of the unlinked stories, the most memorable was “By-and-By,” a distressingly unemotional account of the ripple effects of a serial killer’s actions as seen by a victim’s roommate. I also loved the title story, which appears last. An older man and his daughter-in-law meet twice, by accident, in small-town eateries, the one wanting to come clean about a troubled past and the other wanting to embark on a new and surprising romance. This one reminded me of Richard Russo and early John Irving, while the collection as a whole would suit fans of Julia Glass, Tessa Hadley, Sue Miller, Lorrie Moore and Elizabeth Strout. (Secondhand – Bookbarn International)

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by Raymond Carver (1981)

Such a famous title that it has spawned countless imitators, two of which I’ve even read (What We Talk about When We Talk about God by Rob Bell and What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank by Nathan Englander). It turns out I had Carver confused with John Cheever, so I was expecting gritty stories of alcoholism in the 1950s Midwest. Yes to the alcohol abuse, but Carver was from the Pacific Northwest and was writing in the 1980s. A number of his protagonists are drunk, deadbeat dads who have been kicked out and make a scene to get back at their wives. Others are more passive, stuck in suburban ennui. Grown men fear turning into their fathers (“Sacks”). Ultimatums are defused (“Everything Stuck to Him”) and custody arrangements fought over (the Solomonic fable “Popular Mechanics”).

The declarative simplicity of the prose, and the interest in male activities like gambling, hunting and fishing, can’t fail to recall Ernest Hemingway, yet I warmed to Carver much more than Hem. Two of these stories struck me as feminist for how they expose nonchalant male violence towards women; elsewhere I spotted tiny gender-transgressing details (a man who knits, for instance). In “Tell the Women We’re Going,” two men escape their families to play pool and drink, then make a fateful decision on the way home. I don’t think I’ve been as shocked by the matter-of-fact brutality of a short story since “The Lottery.” My favourite was also chilling, “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Both reveal how homosocial peer pressure leads to bad behaviour; this was toxic masculinity before we had that term.

Many of the stories are only 3–8 pages long, such that 17 fit into a slender volume. They’re about half and half first- and third-person, sometimes with speech marks and sometimes not. At 15 pages, the title story is the longest and a great one. Two couples are having pre-dinner drinks and discussing types of love – physical, spiritual and so on. The POV character mostly conveys monologues by his friend Mel, a cardiologist (of course he would be a heart doctor!), comparing the obsessive love of his first wife’s ex, who turned out to be a stalker, and the mature devotion he saw in an elderly couple at his hospital after a horrific car accident. There were a few flippant or less memorable stories in here, but I’m impressed enough to seek out more of Carver’s work, poetry or prose. (Secondhand – Books for Amnesty, York)

Love of Fat Men by Helen Dunmore (1997)

This was an early work by Dunmore, who was so prolific in her two-decade career that I still come across titles of hers that I’ve never heard of before. I don’t think a book by this title would get published nowadays, but I won’t hold it against her. It is literal in that Ulli, a recurring character in 10 of these 19 stories, finds comfort in sleeping with larger men. I wondered what so captured Dunmore’s imagination about Scandinavia: you can work out that Ulli is from Finland and most of the stories are set there or in nearby countries.

Every other story returns to Ulli, but the fragments of her life miss out the connective tissue: we suspect she’s pregnant as a teen, but don’t learn what she chose to do about it; we witness some dysfunctional scenes and realize she’s estranged from her family later on, but don’t find out if there was some big bust-up that prompted it. She comes across as a loner and a nomad, apt to be effaced by stronger personalities. In “The Ice Bear,” she’s on a ferry from Sweden back to Finland and can’t escape the prattle of a male missionary. In “A Question of Latitude” she’s out for a restaurant meal with friends, one of whom diagnoses her thus: “Nothing really affects you, does it? You just smile and put it out of your mind. And you cut people out of your life the same way, when you’ve finished with them.”

Whereas in the Bloom the interconnected stories are the strongest, here my preference was for the others. “The Bridge Painter” is about a man who leaves a peculiar calling card at each bridge he visits. “Annina” paints a woman with a questionable grasp on reality after the loss of a child. Best of all is probably “North Sea Crossing,” which contrasts two father-and-son pairs. If you only know Dunmore from novels, I can recommend her poetry and short stories, too. (Secondhand – Bas Books, Newbury)

All three:

Try all of these authors right away if you haven’t already!

*A daytrip into London on Thursday was our Valentine’s gift to selves. We toured the Tower of London and the Science Museum (the Wellcome medical collections for me) and had an exceptional late lunch at Dishoom (starters and drinks pictured below). Tonight we’ll be having chocolate prune pots in front of The Bookshop Band’s love-themed livestream concert.

Posted in: Fiction Reviews | Tagged: alcoholism, Amy Bloom, Elizabeth Strout, Ernest Hemingway, Finland, Helen Dunmore, John Cheever, John Irving, Julia Glass, linked short stories, Lorrie Moore, love, middle age, Nathan Englander, Raymond Carver, Richard Russo, Rob Bell, Scandinavia, secondhand books, short stories, Sue Miller, Tessa Hadley, The Bookshop Band, Three on a Theme, Valentine's Day, Wellcome Collection

Book Serendipity, Mid-December 2022 to Mid-February 2023

By Rebecca Foster on February 10, 2023 | 19 Comments

I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every few months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. The following are in roughly chronological order.

My biggest overall coincidence set this time was around Korean culture, especially food:

A demanding Korean/American mother (“Umma”) in Sea Change by Gina Chung, Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling, and Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
In the Chung and Zauner, she has eyebrows tattooed on.
In the Chung and Sterling, there’s also a mall setting.
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin was set in South Korea and mentioned a lot of the same cultural factors and foods. KIMCHI (which I’ve never had) was inescapable in these four books.

And the rest…

The concept of Satan as “the enemy” in God’s Ex-Girlfriend by Gloria Beth Amodeo and All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer, two 2023 memoirs I reviewed for Foreword Reviews.

A mention of the Newsboys (my favourite Christian rock band when I was a teenager) in God’s Ex-Girlfriend by Gloria Beth Amodeo and, of all places, Animal Life by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (the context: a list of songs with “Born” in the title; theirs is called – you guessed it! – “Born Again”).

Two Moores in my stack at once: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore and The Distance from Slaughter County by Steven Moore.

A chapter in The Distance from Slaughter County by Steven Moore is called “Fight Night” and I was reading the early pages of Fight Night by Miriam Toews at the same time.

A story in Birds of America by Lorrie Moore is called “Real Estate” and I was reading Real Estate by Deborah Levy at the same time.

The Virgil quote “there are tears at the heart of things” and the theme of melancholy link Bittersweet by Susan Cain and The Heart of Things by Richard Holloway.

A character who stutters in Bournville by Jonathan Coe and A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale.

(Werther’s) butterscotch candies are mentioned in Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, What Napoleon Could Not Do by DK Nnuro, and How to Be Sad by Helen Russell.

A mother who loves going to church in Bournville by Jonathan Coe and Born a Crime by Trevor Noah.

The metaphor of a girl trapped in a block of marble ready to have her identity carved out in Sea Change by Gina Chung and Everything’s Changing by Chelsea Stickle.

When I read a short story about a landmine-detecting rat in Everything’s Changing by Chelsea Stickle, I knew it wasn’t the first time I’d encountered that very specific setup. It took some digging, but I found out the other was in Attrib. by Eley Williams.

Shane McCrae, whose forthcoming memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun I was also reading, is a named poetic influence/source in More Sky by Joe Varrick-Carty.

I’m sure that after the one in Margaret Atwood’s The Door I encountered another poem about a frozen cat … but can’t now find it for the life of me.

A character named Marnie in Martha Quest by Doris Lessing and City of Friends by Joanna Trollope.

Cape Verdean immigrants in the Boston area, then and now, in Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt and The War for Gloria by Atticus Lish.

Someone swaps green tea for coffee in Bittersweet by Susan Cain and City of Friends by Joanna Trollope.

A half-French, half-Asian protagonist in a novella translated from the French: A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery and Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin.

A (semi-)historical lesbian couple as a subject of historical fiction in Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt and Chase of the Wild Goose by Mary Gordon.

A lesbian couple with a ten-year age gap breaks up because the one partner wants a baby and the other does not in My Mother Says by Stine Pilgaard and City of Friends by Joanna Trollope.

After I specifically read three Frost Fairs books … 18th-century frolics on the frozen Thames were mentioned in The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph.

As I was reading The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph, I saw him briefly mentioned in How to Be Sad by Helen Russell.

From one 139-page book about a foreigner’s wanderings in Kyoto (often taking in temples) to another: I followed up A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery with How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow.

Persimmon jam is mentioned in Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin and How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow.

A brave post-tragedy trip to a mothers and babies group ends abruptly when people are awkward or rude in All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett and How to Be Sad by Helen Russell.

As I was reading What We Talk about when We Talk about Love by Raymond Carver, I encountered a snippet from his poetry as a chapter epigraph in Bittersweet by Susan Cain.

Sexologist Havelock Ellis inspired one of the main characters in The New Life by Tom Crewe and is mentioned in passing in Martha Quest by Doris Lessing.

What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?

Posted in: book serendipity | Tagged: Atticus Lish, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Celeste Ng, Chelsea Stickle, Deborah Levy, Doris Lessing, Eley Williams, Elisa Shua Dusapin, Florentyna Leow, Gina Chung, Gloria Beth Amodeo, Havelock Ellis, Helen Russell, Joanna Trollope, Joe Varrick-Carty, Jonathan Coe, Julie Gerstenblatt, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Korean, Kyoto, Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Mary Louisa Gordon, Matthew Vollmer, Michelle Min Sterling, Michelle Zauner, Miriam Toews, Muriel Barbery, Patrick Gale, Raymond Carver, Richard Holloway, Shane McCrae, South Korea, Steven Moore, Stine Pilgaard, Susan Cain, Tom Crewe, Trevor Noah, Victoria Bennett

Three on a Theme: “Birds” Short Story Collections

By Rebecca Foster on January 9, 2023 | 21 Comments

I read these three collections one at a time over three and a half months of last year, initially intending to write them up as part of my short story focus in September but ultimately deciding to spend more time with the latter two (and then falling ill with Covid before I could write them all up in 2022). They topped my Best Backlist Reads.

The word from the title is incidental, really; the books do have a lot in common in terms of theme and tone, though. The environment, fidelity and motherhood are recurring elements. The warmth and psychological depth are palpable. Each story feels fleshed out enough that I could happily read an entire novel set in its realm, but also complete unto itself.

Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman (2012)

I knew Bergman from her second of three collections, Almost Famous Women; this was her debut. As is common for a first book, it incorporates autobiographical characteristics: North Carolina settings, a preponderance of animals (her husband is a vet), and pregnancy and early motherhood. Eleven of the 12 stories are in the first person, there are no speech marks, and the protagonists are generally women in their twenties or thirties coping with young children, crumbling households, ageing parents, and ethical dilemmas at work.

Creatures are companions or catalysts here. In “Housewifely Arts,” a single mother and her son embark on a road trip to rescue her late mother’s African gray parrot. In the title story, Mae accompanies her father and her new beau on a search for the ivory-billed woodpecker. Fear grapples with openness to change for many of these characters, as expressed in the final lines: “I wished for things to stay the same. I wished for stillness everywhere, but I opened up the rest of the bedroom windows and let the world in.”

Environmental threat blares in the background, but usually fades in comparison to everyday concerns; the 2050-set “The Artificial Heart” is more alarmed about her aged father’s bionic existence than about a dying planet. In “Yesterday’s Whales,” the overall standout for me, ambivalence about motherhood meets climate catastrophism. The narrator’s boyfriend, Malachi, founded a nonprofit called Enough with Us, which asks members to vow not to reproduce so the human race can die out and nature can take over. Embarrassing, then, that she finds herself pregnant and unwilling to tread the hard line he’s drawn. This one is funny and poignant, capturing so many of my own feelings, and seems 10 years ahead of its time.

When someone’s ideal is the absence of all human life, romance is kind of a joke.

I wanted, then, to become what I most admired, what now seemed most real to me. I wanted to be that exalted, complicated presence in someone’s life, the familiar body, the source of another’s existence. But I knew what I wanted was not always what I needed.

I envied my mother’s childhood, the awe with which she’d turned to her country and the world, the confidence she’d had in her right to exist and bear children. The world and mothers alike, I knew, had lost a little freshness.

(Secondhand, a gift from my wish list a couple of years ago)

Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff (2009)

What a clever decision to open with “Lucky Chow Fun,” a story set in Templeton, the location of Groff’s debut novel – it forms a thread of continuity between her first book and her second. Elizabeth, the only girl on the varsity swim team, comes to a number of realizations about her family and her community, including that the title Chinese restaurant is a front for a brothel that exploits trafficked women. The story becomes a wider parable about appearances and suspicion. “In these dark days, there is so much distrust in this town. … You never know quite what to think about people”. And what a brilliant last line: “I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.”

“L. DeBard and Aliette” recasts in the notorious Héloïse and Abelard romance an Olympic swimmer and a schoolgirl in Spanish flu-plagued New York City. The other seven stories alternate between historical fiction and contemporary, the USA and abroad, first person and third person, speech marks or none. Desire and boundaries, accomplishment and escape, fear and risk are contradictory pulls. While the details have faded for me, I remember that, while I was reading them, each of these stories enveloped me in a particular world – 30 pages seems like the ideal length here to fully explore a set of characters and a situation. If I had to choose a favourite, it would be “Blythe,” about a woman who feels responsible for her alcoholic best friend. (From my birthday book haul last year)

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (1998)

Life: what an absurd little story it always made.

I’d read a few of Moore’s works before (A Gate at the Stairs, Bark, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?) and not grasped what the fuss is about; turns out I’d just chosen the wrong ones to read. This collection is every bit as good as everyone has been saying for the last 25 years. Amy Bloom, Carol Shields and Helen Simpson are a few other authors who struck me as having a similar tone and themes. Rich with psychological understanding of her characters – many of them women passing from youth to midlife, contemplating or being affected by adultery – and their relationships, the stories are sometimes wry and sometimes wrenching (that setup to “Terrific Mother”!). There were even two dysfunctional-family-at-the-holidays ones (“Charades” and “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens”) for me to read in December.

I’ll single out four of the 12 as favourites, though, really, any or all would be worthy of anthologizing in a volume epitomizing the art of the short story. “Which Is More than I Can Say about Some People” has a mother and daughter learning new things about each other on a vacation to Ireland. “What You Want to Do Fine,” another road trip narrative, stars an unlikely gay couple, one half of which is the flamboyant (and blind) Quilty. “People Like That Are the Only People Here” is so vivid on the plight of parents with a child in the paediatric oncology ward that I feel I should check whether Moore lived through that too. And the best of the best: “Real Estate” (not least because she dared to print two full pages of laughter: “Ha!”), which turns gently surreal as Ruth and her philandering husband move into a house that turns out to be a wreck, infested by both animal and human pests.

Moore is as great at the sentence level as she is at overarching plots. Here are a few out-of-context lines I saved to go back to:

She was starting to have two speeds: Coma and Hysteria.

In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath.

Never a temple, her body had gone from being a home, to being a house, to being a phone booth, to being a kite. Nothing about it gave her proper shelter.

(From Oxfam Books, Hexham – a stop on our Northumberland trip last year)

Two of these writers are best known for their short stories; the third (Groff), to my mind, should be. Unusual for me to fall so wholeheartedly for short stories – these all earned my rarest rating:

Posted in: Fiction Reviews | Tagged: Amy Bloom, birds, Carol Shields, Christmas, environmental crisis, environmentalism, Helen Simpson, historical fiction, Ireland, Lauren Groff, Lorrie Moore, Megan Mayhew Bergman, motherhood, pregnancy, road trips, short stories

Most Anticipated Releases of 2023

By Rebecca Foster on January 4, 2023 | 38 Comments

In real life, it can feel like I have little to look forward to. A catch-up holiday gathering and a shortened visit from my sister were over all too soon, and we have yet to book any trips for the summer months. Thankfully, there are always pre-release books to get excited about.

Sisters at the south coast

This list of my 20 most anticipated titles covers a bit more than the first half of the year, with the latest publication dates falling in August. I’ve already read 14 releases from 2023 (written up here), and I’m also looking forward to new work from Margaret Atwood, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Angie Cruz, Patrick deWitt, Naoise Dolan, Tessa Hadley, Louisa Hall, Leah Hazard, Christian Kiefer, Max Porter, Tom Rachman, Gretchen Rubin, Will Schwalbe, Jenn Shapland, Abraham Verghese, Bryan Washington, Anne Youngson and more, as well as to trying out various debut authors.

The following are in (UK) release date order, within sections by genre. U.S. details given too/instead if USA-only. Quotes are excerpts from the publisher blurbs, e.g., from Goodreads.

Fiction

The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen [Jan. 24, Henry Holt and Co.] I loved Pylväinen’s 2012 debut, We Sinners. This sounds like a winning combination of The Bell in the Lake and The Mercies. “A richly atmospheric saga that charts the repercussions of a scandalous nineteenth century love affair between a young Sámi reindeer herder in the Arctic Circle and the daughter of the renegade Lutheran minister whose teachings are upending the Sámi way of life.” (Edelweiss download)

Heartstopper, Volume 5 by Alice Oseman [Feb. 2, Hodder Children’s] A repeat from my 2022 Most Anticipated post. Will this finally be the year?? I devoured the first four volumes of this teen comic in 2021. Nick will be getting ready to go off to university, so I guess we’ll see how he leaves things with Charlie and whether their relationship will survive a separation. (No cover art yet.)

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai [Feb. 21, Viking / Feb. 23, Fleet] Makkai has written a couple of stellar novels; this sounds quite different from her usual lit fic but promises Secret History vibes. “A fortysomething podcaster and mother of two, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past [, including] the murder of one of her high school classmates, Thalia Keith. … [But] when she’s invited back to Granby, the elite New England boarding school where she spent four largely miserable years, to teach a course, Bodie finds herself inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws.” (Proof copy)

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton [March 7, Granta / Farrar, Straus and Giroux] I was lukewarm on The Luminaries (my most popular Goodreads review ever) but fancy trying Catton again – though this sounds like Atwood’s Year of the Flood, redux. “Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group … Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. … Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker. … A gripping psychological thriller … Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character.” (NetGalley download)

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld [April 4, Random House / April 6, Doubleday] Sittenfeld is one of my favourite contemporary novelists. “Sally Milz is a sketch writer for The Night Owls, the late-night live comedy show that airs each Saturday. … Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. … Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.”

The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel [April 18, Riverhead] “Jane is … on the cutting-edge team of a bold project looking to ‘de-extinct’ the woolly mammoth. … As Jane and her daughters ping-pong from the slopes of Siberia to a university in California, from the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, The Last Animal takes readers on an expansive, bighearted journey that explores the possibility and peril of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it’s like to be a woman and a mother in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.”

Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal [April 18, Pamela Dorman Books] Kitchens of the Great Midwest is one of my all-time favourite debuts. A repeat from my 2021 Most Anticipated post, hopefully here at last! “A story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them … full of his signature honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters as they grapple with love, loss, and marriage.” (Edelweiss download)

The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller [April 20, Fig Tree (Penguin) / June 6, Tin House] Fuller is another of my favourite contemporary novelists and never disappoints. “Neffy is a young woman running away from grief and guilt … When she answers the call to volunteer in a controlled vaccine trial, it offers her a way to pay off her many debts … [and] she is introduced to a pioneering and controversial technology which allows her to revisit memories from her life before.” And apparently there’s also an octopus? (NetGalley download)

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor [May 23, Riverhead / June 22, Jonathan Cape (Penguin)] “In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. … These three [main characters] are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens … [T]he group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.” (Proof copy)

Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza [June 8, Tinder Press] I loved her debut novel, How to Be Human, and this sounds timely. (I have never owned a smartphone.) “When Kurt’s phone rings during sex—and he reaches to pick it up—Susan knows that their marriage has passed the point of no return. … This sense of loss becomes increasingly focused on a cache of handwritten letters, from her first love, Antony, mementoes of a time when devotion seemed to spill out easily onto paper. Increasingly desperate and out of synch with the contemporary world, Susan embarks on a journey of discovery that will reconnect her to her younger self, while simultaneously revealing her future.” (No cover art yet.)

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore [June 20, Faber / Knopf] What a title! I’m keen to read more from Moore after her Birds of America got a 5-star rating from me late last year. “Finn is in the grip of middle-age and on an enforced break from work: it might be that he’s too emotional to teach history now. He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all. High up in a New York City hospice, he sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next. But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality.”

A Manual for How to Love Us by Erin Slaughter [July 5, Harper Collins] “A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women’s grief. … Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us. … Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real. … Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South.” Linked short stories are irresistible for me, and I like the idea of a focus on grief.

Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue [Aug. 24, Pan Macmillan / Aug. 29, Little, Brown] Donoghue’s contemporary settings have been a little more successful for me, but she’s still a reliable author whose career I am happy to follow. “Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, … the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 … Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling, and deeply researched”.

Nonfiction

The Year of the Cat: A Love Story by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett [Jan. 19, Tinder Press] “When Rhiannon fell in love with, and eventually married her flatmate, she imagined they might one day move on. … The desire for a baby is never far from the surface, but … after a childhood spent caring for her autistic brother, does she really want to devote herself to motherhood? Moving through the seasons over the course of lockdown, [this] nimbly charts the way a kitten called Mackerel walked into Rhiannon’s home and heart, and taught her to face down her fears and appreciate quite how much love she had to offer.”

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir by Iliana Regan [Jan. 24, Blackstone] “As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan’s boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna’s efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that’s suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. … Along the way she struggles … with her personal and familial legacies of addiction, violence, fear, and obsession—all while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.” (Edelweiss download)

Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age by Katherine May [Feb. 28, Riverhead / March 9, Faber] I was a fan of her previous book, Wintering. “After years of pandemic life—parenting while working, battling anxiety about things beyond her control, feeling overwhelmed by the news-cycle and increasingly isolated—Katherine May feels bone-tired, on edge and depleted. Could there be another way to live? One that would allow her to feel less fraught and more connected, more rested and at ease, even as seismic changes unfold on the planet? Craving a different path, May begins to explore the restorative properties of the natural world”. (Proof copy)

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer [April 25, Knopf / May 25, Sceptre] “What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Can we love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is history an excuse? What makes women artists monstrous? And what should we do with beauty, and with our unruly feelings about it? Dederer explores these questions and our relationships with the artists whose behaviour disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms. She interrogates her own responses and her own behaviour, and she pushes the fan, and the reader, to do the same.”

Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience by Natasha Carthew [May 25, Hodder Studio] Carthew hangs around the fringes of UK nature writing, mostly considering the plight of the working class. “Carthew grew up in rural poverty in Cornwall, battling limited opportunities, precarious resources, escalating property prices, isolation and a community marked by the ravages of inequality. Her world existed alongside the postcard picture Cornwall … part-memoir, part-investigation, part love-letter to Cornwall. … This is a journey through place, and a story of hope, beauty, and fierce resilience.”

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley [June 25, MCD Books] According to Crosley, this is “a five-part book about many kinds of loss.” The press release adds to that: “Telling the interwoven story of a burglary, the suicide of Crosley’s closest friend, and the onset of Covid in New York City, [this] is the first full-length work of nonfiction by a writer best known for her acclaimed, bestselling books of essays.” (No cover art yet.)

Poetry

Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan [Aug. 23, Faber] Their debut collection, Flèche, was my top poetry release in 2019. “These piercing poems fearlessly explore intertwined themes of queer identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy: interrogating acts of Covid racism, instances of queerphobia and the hegemony of the English language. Questions of acceptance and assimilation are further explored through a family’s evolving dynamics over time, or through the specious jargon of ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’.” (No cover art yet.)

Other lists for more ideas:

What catches your eye here? What other 2023 titles do I need to know about?

Posted in: Book lists | Tagged: 2023 releases, Abraham Verghese, Alice Oseman, Anne Youngson, Brandon Taylor, Claire Dederer, Claire Fuller, Curtis Sittenfeld, Eleanor Catton, Emma Donoghue, Erin Slaughter, Hanna Pylväinen, historical fiction, Iliana Regan, J. Ryan Stradal, Jenn Shapland, Katherine May, Leah Hazard, linked short stories, Lorrie Moore, Louisa Hall, Margaret Atwood, Mary Jean Chan, Max Porter, Naoise Dolan, Natasha Carthew, Paula Cocozza, Ramona Ausubel, Rebecca Makkai, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Sloane Crosley, Tessa Hadley, Will Schwalbe

Best Backlist Reads of the Year

By Rebecca Foster on December 29, 2022 | 22 Comments

Like many bloggers, I’m irresistibly drawn to the new books released each year. However, I consistently find that many of my most memorable reads were published years or even decades ago. These 16 selections, in alphabetical order within genre, together with my Best of 2022 post (coming up tomorrow), make up the top 9.5% or so of my reading for the year. Three of the below were rereads.