As any person keeping tabs on the publishing industry knows, there are so many high-profile books coming out this year that it’s difficult for some of the books that aren’t written by Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, and Nicholson Baker (as good as these authors are) to get the credit they deserve.
It has therefore become necessary to unleash yet another roundtable discussion for a particularly exciting title sometime during September. For those readers who have enjoyed our previous roundtable discussions of Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, Eric Kraft’s Flying, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap, and various other books, this September symposium will operate along similar lines.
I cannot reveal the book at this time. But I can tell you that the book is a highly ambitious novel. I can also tell you that there are eight vowels in the book’s title and three counts of one letter in the author’s name.
I should have more details about the book in question when we get closer to pub date. And we’ll reveal the book early enough so that those wishing to follow along can do so.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
We’re reading fucking Twilight, aren’t we?