Lydia Davis, Essays
Davis, an innovative fiction writer, is also an erudite essayist, critic and translator, with an ever-questing mind evident in these 33 essays, commentaries, reviews, prefaces, observations, analyses and talks, spanning the past 50 years. In the first of five masterclasses on writing styles and influences, she describes how she followed her parents’ lead (both had short stories published in The New Yorker), and then developed her distinctive, condensed style through reading Franz Kafka, Grace Paley and Samuel Beckett. Here are essays on Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes and Lucia Berlin, and visual artists Joan Mitchell and Joseph Cornell. Her concluding essay questions the “art of remembering in an age of forgetting”, and explores “the mind’s inevitable habit of making metaphors”. An essential literary companion. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Thomas Travisano, Love Unknown
For his insightful biography, Travisano draws upon US poet and short-story writer Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, notebooks, interviews and archives. He also visits the places where Bishop spent time, from her birthplace (Worcester, Massachusetts) and Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she spent her girlhood, to Greenwich Village, Paris, Key West, Rio de Janeiro and Cambridge, where she circulated among interlocking groups of artists and intellectuals. His close reading of her poems ties them to early traumas (her father died when she was a baby; when Bishop was five her mother, who suffered from serious mental illness, was institutionalised; and the uncle who was her guardian abused her) and the people and places who shaped her life. Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Frank Bidart and her publishers all play a role; but most powerful are the women who shared her life. (Credit: Viking)
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, The Revisioners
With extraordinary artistry, empathy and hope, Sexton invokes the voices of three generations of women linked by family, experiencing slavery in 1855; the Jim Crow South in 1924; and newly gentrifying post-Katrina New Orleans in 2017. Josephine notices the new slave, Jupiter, the moment he shows up at the Wildwood plantation, and stays connected to him thereafter. The woman of the next generation, also called Josephine, begins married life with her husband Jericho as a sharecropper, and as they thrive, shifts to a neighbourhood where a white couple move in nearby. Her budding friendship with the wife is blighted by her involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. Ava, in the modern day, benefits from all their wisdom, and her mother’s and grandmother’s before her. (Credit: Counterpoint)
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
Award-winning short-story writer Machado offers a raw, innovative memoir about the dynamics of psychological abuse. She calls her first girlfriend “the woman in the Dream House”, after the house they share in Iowa City. Early on, the relationship is lusty, and the two take road trips for fun. Then the woman becomes possessive and shaming, and moves 408 miles away to Bloomington, Indiana with another girlfriend. Machado tempers the visceral impact of her memories with intriguing chapter headings: ‘Dream House as Inventory: She makes you tell her what is wrong with you’and ‘Dream House as Demonic Possession’. She explores comparisons to fairy tales, Star Trek and the film Gaslight. “Women could abuse other women,” she writes. Her gruelling experience is proof. (Credit: Graywolf Press)
Philippe Lançon, Disturbance
Lançon’s searing memoir of the attack on the satirical weekly publication Charlie Hebdo by two terrorists in Paris on 7 January, 2015, details how it cleaved his life in two. He shares his shocked vision of his dead journalistic colleagues and of his own injuries on the day of the attacks. Within weeks, Charlie’s rebuilt staff publishes a ‘resurrection’ issue, including Lançon’s account, but he is still experiencing shock and unreality, the prelude to years of recovery. Rebuilding his shattered lower face involves months in hospitals under armed guard, multiple surgeries, excruciating physical therapy and treatment for PTSD. His comforts as he adjusts to a new reality are family, close friends, literature, art and music. Lançon won the Prix Femina for this eloquent book of witness and recovery. It is translated from the French by Steven Rendall. (Credit: Europa Editions)
Joseph Kanon, The Accomplice
Nazi hunters seeking justice after the Holocaust gained new traction after the 1960 capture – and subsequent trial – of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Kanon’s new spy novel follows Aaron, an American CIA analyst, who travels to Buenos Aires in 1962 on behalf of his uncle Max, an Auschwitz survivor. Max is haunted by his wartime memories, and the atrocities carried out by Dr Otto Schramm, a Nazi doctor who conducted medical experiments on children. Schramm has been reported dead, but Max spotted him in Hamburg, and the hunt is on. In Argentina, Aaron tracks Schramm’s whereabouts through Nazis in exile, Peronistas, Mossad and CIA operatives and diplomats from Brazil, where Schramm hopes to relocate. Filled with switchbacks and turnarounds, The Accomplice is complex and satisfying. (Credit: Atria)
Nona Fernández, Space Invaders
Estrella González Jepsen haunts the dreams of her classmates. In a prismatic chorus, they share the fragments that make up their recollections from a troubled period in Chile’s history. One recalls her long dark hair in braids, others remember it flowing loose, while another only remembers her voice. Maldonado dreams of the letters they wrote, in a correspondence that continued after they finished school. Riquelme dreams of a visit to her house, where they played Space Aliens, and where he saw her father, a high-ranking military officer in the brutal Pinochet regime, remove his left hand. Taut and evocative, award-winning Chilean author Fernández’s seventh novel shows how a dictatorship works from within to shape lives, and is translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. (Credit: Graywolf Press)
Shannon Pufahl, On Swift Horses
This remarkable first novel is set in the mid-1950s, when gay women and men were marginalised and persecuted. Muriel migrates from rural Kansas to San Diego with her husband Lee, whose brother Julius is expected to join them. But Julius drifts from one card game to another, just ahead of the men he cheats, from Las Vegas – where he finds a casino job and a steady boyfriend – to Tijuana. Muriel’s growing independence from her husband is measured in secret betting trips to the Del Mar racetrack, where the horses are “tall and obdurate and lightly controlled”. She amasses enough cash to buy Lee’s dream property, and there she meets the woman neighbour who will change her life. With gorgeous language, Pufahl pulls us into a close-knit, sometimes dangerous world. (Credit: Riverhead)
Temple Drake, NVK
Drake sets up her supercharged, genre-mixing first novel in the prologue. Naemi Vieno Kuusela survives a massacre of her family in North Karelia in eastern Finland circa 1579. Becoming immortal through a blood ritual, she surfaces time and again, as a childless Finnish fisherman’s wife and a student in 1974 London, keeping the initials NVK. In Shanghai in 2012, she attracts a businessman entertaining clients in a glamorous private club. Unimpressed by Zhang’s chauffeured Jaguar and his Prada suits, she likes the fact he must go on “chance and intuition”. During their affair, Zhang begins to investigate her identity. Then Mad Dog, an older friend, is murdered, and Zhang’s days take the shape of a thriller. The gritty, noir-ish scenes of supernatural Shanghai equal any of NVK’s past lives. (Credit: Other Press)
Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
Zachary Ezra Rawlins, the son of a fortune teller, finds an uncatalogued book in his college library in Vermont. He reads about a pirate, a ceremony with an acolyte in a strange underground library and, to his shock, an incident in his own boyhood when he found a painted doorway in an alley and didn’t open it. This discovery launches a quest that involves fate and love, the Moon, an owl king, bees, keys, swords, cats, crypts and a risky journey into a secret otherworldly place, a “book-centric fantasia” along the Starless Sea. Morgenstern’s story dazzles with special effects – metanarratives, intellectual quips, literary clues and references (the Algonquin, the Strand, Borges: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”) A book-lover’s dream. (Credit: Doubleday)