#Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize

[jamesmurualiterary]

Noor Naga, Wole Soyinka honoured at Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize 2022

Noor Naga, Wole Soyinka honoured at Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize 2022

Noor Naga and Wole Soyinka were honoured at the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize 2022 awards on December 6, 2022. The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize is an annual award presented by The Center for Fiction, a non-profit organization in New York, USA since 2006. It recognizes the year’s best debut novel as selected by a panel of distinguished American writers and carries with it an…

[macrolit]

NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

[electronickingdomfox]

"Memory Prime" review

Novel from 1988, by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens. It's strange that the title says "the new novel by...", since as far as I know, this was the first Star Trek book of these authors. Chaotic, crazy, convoluted, at times campy and hard to follow, it's also a lot of fun. Even the cover is a "what-the-fuck" moment, with that Spock looking tiredly at the viewer, wearing the trademark Kirk-ripped-shirt.

The story mixes several TOS elements: a conspiracy to kill someone aboard the Enterprise; a mission to rescue Spock that puts everyone's careers in danger; and an obnoxious Commodore that hinders the heroes' efforts. All mixed and enhanced to cinematic level. Apart from all that, the novel expands on the story from "The Lights of Zetar", showing the aftermath of Memory Alpha's destruction. And has Mira Romaine (the guest from that episode) as one of the main characters.

The titular Memory Prime is the new center of knowledge and research for the Federation, and the main node in a network of similar centers, each in a different asteroid. Selected as the place to hold the Nobel prizes, the Enterprise is tasked with bringing scientists from all over the Federation to the ceremony. But things get awry when Starfleet intelligence discovers that one or more of the scientists are targeted for assassination. And to everybody's surprise, the main suspect is... Spock!! On top of that, Starfleet has lost confidence in Kirk, and orders a Commodore to take over the Enterprise during the emergency. So Kirk now has to recover both his First Officer and his ship, while confronted with a thickening web of conspiracy. There's something of pulp fiction about the cackling villains, killer robots, and constant plot twists and cliffhangers. But surprisingly, there's also an element of more serious science fiction, with the introduction of the Pathfinders (artificial intelligences that have developed their own worldview), and the discussions about computer science. The chapters dealing with the Pathfinders show a fascinating and alien perspective, that may very well be classified as "cyberpunk". It's possible that something of this owes more to TNG than TOS. The final reveal about who was behind the assassination, the real target of it, and the motives, were actually unexpected.

As for the characters, Kirk gets the spotlight and most heroic deeds (so it's no wonder that these same authors got to co-write the Shatnerverse novels later). And of course Spock is central to the plot, though absent during a good chunk of the story. But Scotty also gets a larger-than-usual role, and picks up his romance with Romaine. While Uhura has one of her most badass moments when confronting the Commodore. Also, everyone has crazy, crazy fight scenes: from Kirk defeating a robot with bullfighter techniques (and utterly annihilating his shirt in the process), to Spock locking in a mind-meld combat, or McCoy... attacking with hypos.

In summary, a pretty exciting action adventure, with humorous scenes that are actually funny, and some food-for-thought concerning AI and the fainting distinction between human and machine. Even if the plot can get messy and even ridiculous at times.

Spirk Meter: 9/10*. Kirk is really distressed by Spock's framing and incarceration, and spends most of the novel focused on rescuing him no matter what. Even if this means the end of his career and losing the Enterprise; Spock comes as his first priority. He doesn't doubt his innocence for a moment, either, while others in the crew have some reservations. And whenever Spock's in physical danger, Kirk is the first to jump to protect him (even if he himself is a wreck). Kirk is also the only one who truly seems to understand Spock, he can anticipate his thoughts and see his logic, where others only see crazyness. Besides, there's a scene where Kirk faints, and the first thing he says upon waking up is "Spock, Spock...?". And yeah, Spock is there, hovering over him and pushing him gently to lie back in bed.

Though this is clearly a spirky novel and McCoy has a lesser role, there are a few moments with him too. At the beginning, both he and Kirk devise a convoluted plan to keep Spock in the dark about the Nobel ceremony, in the hopes of seeing him smile or at least react when the surprise is revealed. While at the end, McCoy wants to know EVERYTHING about Spock's years in the Academy, once he learns from one of his teachers that he was a bit of a "class clown" back then (for Vulcan standards). And despite Spock's apparent annoyance, Kirk notices a warm expression on him, because of the doctor's antics. Kirk also jumps in front of McCoy and Spock to take a lethal phaser shot instead of them. With the hilarious result that the shot wasn't neither that lethal, nor he took it all that well, considering both Spock and McCoy also end up groaning in bed after a stun.

*A 10 in this scale is the most obvious spirk moments in TOS. Think of the back massage, "You make me believe in miracles", or "Amok Time" for example.

[victusinveritas]

Happy 84th birthday to esteemed Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood! She is pictured here attempting to burn an 'unburnable' copy of her novel "The Handmaid's Tale" with a flamethrower. A single unburnable copy was created last year to raise awareness about increasing censorship; her dystopian science fiction novel, which centers around one woman's quest for freedom in a totalitarian theocracy where women's rights are completely suppressed, has been the subject of numerous censorship challenges since its publication in 1985. The unburnable copy was auctioned off after Atwood's flamethrowing attempt, raising $130,00 for PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization. As Atwood famously asserted in her poem "Spelling": "A word after a word after a word is power."

Born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1939, Atwood is the author of 15 books of poetry and numerous novels, including Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, The Edible Woman, and Oryx and Crake. She won the Booker Prize -- which honors the best original novel published that year -- for "The Blind Assassin" in 2000 and has been shortlisted several additional times. She has also won two Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor. This year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected Atwood as a Foreign Honorary Member of the Academy.

Atwood’s classic dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale” is available at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-handmaid-s-tale

There is also a t-shirt featuring the iconic artwork from the novel’s first edition for teens and adults at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-handmaid-s-tale-t-shirt

To introduce kids to the power of their own words, we recommend the 'IlluStory Create Your Own Book Kit' for ages 5 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/make-your-own-book-kit) and the creative writing guides "Writing Magic: Creating Stories That Fly" for ages 8 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/writing-magic) and "Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book?" for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/dear-ally)

And for books for tweens and teens about girls living in real-life oppressive societies with little respect for freedom of expression, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426

[national-hockey-gay]

do you have any poetry collection recommendations/poet recommendations in general just to like Read?

boy do i ever!!!

okay i have two all time top favorite poets (not ranked in a particular order):

1. Louise Glück: There was actually an anthology published of all the books so published from the start of her career to 2012.

(Poems 1962-2012 is 600+ pages of incredible poetry and relatively cheap, especially for its size and considering poetry tends to cost more than fiction books)

Glück’s poetry is actually the reason I started reading more poetry in the first place. She writes both long form and short form poetry (with her more recent working being longer than a lot of her previous poems), and her language level tends to be pretty accessible.

She writes about hundreds of different topics, but reading from the anthology you get a large mix of themes about motherhood, love, and nature and she also has collections that focus on greek mythology as well as jewish religion.

She has won a Nobel Prize for her poetry, which I consider to be a pretty good way to gauge the caliber of her work!

Highly, highly recommend her work!!

2. Ocean Vuong.

I’ve read his three most recent works: Night Sky With Exit Wounds, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Time is a Mother.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is actually a novel rather than a poetry collection but it reads a lot like poetry and I consider it to be an must-read.

A lot of his works center around his his experience as a queer, Vietnamese American and his relationship with his own intrapersonal identity as well as with his mother. I cant think of a single poem of his that isn’t absolutely incredible, and I think if you’re going to talk about the best poets of our age he’s a crucial mention.

I highly recommend reading his works in publishing order (which is the way I listed them above). His poetry is genuinely life-changing and I cannot stress how much I recommend his writing.

Outside of my two favorite authors I also recommend:

–Amanda Gorman, who is the youngest inaugural poet in U. S. history and is shaping the voice of modern poetry.

You can watch her recite her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb” here!

She also has published a collection of her poetry, Call Us What We Carry, which I read all in the same day I bought it because it’s brilliant and captivating.

—The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, which is a fiction novel but the main character narrates the story through her own poetry, making it a poetry collection and a novel all in one. I read this for the first time when I was 13 and I pick it up again every single year.

(I do also highly recommend looking up trigger warnings for this book before you read it, because there are a couple scenes that can be intense!)

—The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi. It’s likely you’re familiar with this quote from it (which i see circulating tumblr and pinterest all the time):

“Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.

I want an excuse to change my life.”

And I can guarantee the rest of this poetry collection is just as poignant and beautiful! Highly recommend, 10/10 stars always.

—Pablo Neruda is also one of my favorite poets! I own a large collection of his poetry, The Poems of Pablo Neruda, which places the original poem, written in Spanish, next to the English translation, which I enjoy a lot. He also has a lot of well-known quotes that float around tumblr a lot, so that sense of familiarity can be fun, especially when you’re not expecting it!

Hope you enjoy these recommendations!

[devoutjunk]

Novel Syllabus 2024

This coming year I think I'm going to be on here more often than I am on twitter or elsewhere, and as part of that, I'm going to start documenting the process of writing my novel more actively. I want to return to/resurrect the momentum and energy I had while writing the first draft and be more intentional about setting aside time to work, even when it's difficult. Below are my writing goals for the coming year as well as my reading list of texts for inspiration, genre/background research, comps, etc. Would welcome any suggestions of texts (any genre/discipline) pertaining to Antigone, death & resurrection, Welsh and Cornish myth and folklore, ecology & environmental crisis, and the Gothic.

Writing Goals

Reach 50k words in draft 2 overall

Finish a draft of Anna's timeline

Finish a draft of Jo's timeline

Polish & submit an excerpt for the Center for Fiction Prize

Reading

* = reread

Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & The Apocalyptic

The Memory Theater (Karin Tidbeck)

Who Fears Death (Nnedi Okorafor)

Urth of The New Sun (Gene Wolfe)

Slow River (Nicola Griffith)

Dream Snake (Vonda McIntyre)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Marlon James)

Notes from the Burning Age (Claire North)

Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)*

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)*

The Last Man (Mary Shelley)

The Drowned World (J.G. Ballard)

Strange Beasts of China (Yan Ge, trans. by Jeremy Tiang)

City of Saints and Madmen (Jeff VanderMeer)

Freshwater (Akweke Emezi)

The Glass Hotel (Emily St. John Mandel)

Pattern Master (Octavia Butler)

Sleep Donation (Karen Russell)

How High We Go in the Dark (Sequoia Nagamatsu)

The Magician's Nephew (C.S. Lewis)*

The Golden Compass (Phillip Pullman)*

The Green Witch (Susan Cooper)

The Tombs of Atuan (Ursula K. Le Guin)

Black Sun (Rebecca Roanhorse)

Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)

Lives of the Monster Dogs (Kirsten Bakis)

Brian Evenson

Sofia Samatar

Connie Willis

Samuel Delaney

Jo Walton

Tanith Lee

Retellings

A Wild Swan (Michael Cunningham)

Til We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis)

Gingerbread (Helen Oyeyemi)

Circe (Madeline Miller)

The Owl Service (Alan Garner)

Literary Myth-Making, Mystery, and the Gothic

Nights at the Circus (Angela Carter)

Frenchman's Creek (Daphne Du Maurier)

Possession (A.S. Byatt)*

The Game (A.S. Byatt)*

The Essex Serpent (Sarah Perry)

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

The Secret History (Donna Tartt)*

The Wild Hunt (Emma Seckel)

King Nyx (Kirsten Bakis)

The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

The Lottery and Other Stories (Shirley Jackson)

Beloved (Toni Morrison)

The Night Land (William Hope Hodgson)

Interview with a Vampire (Anne Rice)*

Sexing the Cherry (Jeanette Winterson)*

Night Side of the River (Jeanette Winterson)

Bad Heroines (Emily Danforth)

All the Murmuring Bones (A.G. Slatter)

The Path of Thorns (A.G. Slatter)

Gormenghast (Mervyn Peake)

Prose Work, Perspective, and Stream of Consciousness

The Chandelier (Clarice Lispector)

The Waves (Virginia Woolf)*

The Years (Virginia Woolf)

The Intimate Historical Epic / Court Intrigues

Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)*

Menewood (Nicola Griffith)

Dark Earth (Rebecca Stott)

A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)

Research

The Mabinogion (trans. Sioned Davies)

Le Morte D'Arthur (Thomas Malory)

The Collected Brothers Grimm (Phillip Pullman)

Angela Carter's Collected Fairytales

Mythology (Edith Hamilton)

Underland (Robert Macfarlane)

The Wild Places (Robert Macfarlane)

Wildwood (Roger Deakin)

Vanishing Cornwall (Daphne Du Maurier)

Lonely Planet: Guide to Devon & Cornwall

A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World (David Gessner)

The Lost Boys of Montauk (Amanda M. Fairbanks)

A Cyborg Manifesto (Donna J. Harraway)

A Treasury of British Folklore (Dee Dee Chainey)*

The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (Eileen M. Hunt)

Antigone's Claim (Judith Butler)

Theories of Desire: Antigone Again (Judith Butler)

Ecology of Fear (Mike Davis)

[theoxfordamerican]

Donna Tartt: An OA Retrospective

Oxford American has been a window to the American South for over a quarter-century and has racked up quite a roster of contributing authors and artists. So, why not feature some of our past and present OA contributors whose work has proved foundational to the story of our magazine? First up, Donna Tartt, an audacious literary figure who has found a new generation of ardent readers with the surge of “dark academia” aesthetics on the internet. 

Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, Tartt has always connected intimately to the South. She is perhaps best known for her debut novel, 1992’s The Secret History. Her sophomore effort, The Little Friend (2002), took readers on a journey into the heart of a Southern family grappling with an unsolved murder. Over a decade later, she returned with The Goldfinch (2013), which earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Tartt first attended Ole Miss, where her talent caught the eye of Willie Morris, another OA contributor and venerable Southern literary figure. Morris would serve as a friend and mentor for years to come.

Now, you may be asking yourself, what exactly is dark academia? In a 2023 article for English Studies, Prof. Simone Murray concisely defined it as a “vibrant online subculture centered upon readers’ performances of bookishness.” Think leather-bound books, neogothic architecture, and tweed jackets. Tartt’s The Secret History could be considered a sacred text. Although Tartt attended Ole Miss and Bennington College in the 1980s (and writes of that era), the narrative has struck a chord with younger generations over thirty years later. Case in point: #DarkAcademia has over 2.3 million posts on Instagram and over 5.2 billion views on TikTok. 

And yet, some of Tartt’s contemporary fans probably have no idea of the treasure trove that is the OA archives! Here is a list of the various Tartt contributions featured in our issues. Do you have these on your shelf? 

Issue 2: Basketball Season: Requiem of a Mississippi Cheerleader Issue 4: “True Crime” (poem)  Issue 6: In Melbourne Issue 11: Murder & Imagination Issue 26: The Belle and the Lady Issue 29: Tribute: Willie Morris Issue 30: Spirituality in the Modern Novel Issue 41: Spanish Grandeur in Mississippi Issue 72: Tribute: Barry Hannah

[gealach-in-a-misty-world]

Sancia, Clef, and Berenice have gone up against plenty of long odds in the past. But the war they’re fighting now is one even they can’t win. This time, they’re not facing robber-baron elites, or even an immortal hierophant, but an entity whose intelligence is spread over half the globe—a ghost in the machine that uses the magic of scriving to possess and control not just objects, but human minds. To fight it, they’ve used scriving technology to transform themselves and their allies into an army—a society—that’s like nothing humanity has seen before. With its strength at their backs, they’ve freed a handful of their enemy’s hosts from servitude, even brought down some of its fearsome, reality-altering dreadnaughts. Yet despite their efforts, their enemy marches on—implacable. Unstoppable. Now, as their opponent closes in on its true prize—an ancient doorway, long buried, that leads to the chambers at the center of creation itself—Sancia and her friends glimpse a chance at reaching it first, and with it, a last desperate opportunity to stop this unbeatable foe. But to do so, they’ll have to unlock the centuries-old mystery of scriving’s origins, embark on a desperate mission into the heart of their enemy’s power, and pull off the most daring heist they’ve ever attempted.

"There is no dancing through a monsoon". Robert Jackson Bennett's Locklands aims higher than ever and crafts a tale of gigantic scope, a novel about transhumanism, choices, and sacrifices. Set eight years after Shorefall's devastating conclusion, it follows the original cast as they make a new society, something so vastly different from everything that came before, a new way of being. They fight for a chance to survive, battling against the ancient being that they awakened in the past, and finding unexpected allies. It's all-out war, vast and desperate, the very surface of the earth altered.

And yet at its heart, it's also a quiet story of loss and despair, about what a single man can accomplish in the face of a personal tragedy. It's terrible to imagine that much of the pain and catastrophies suffered by humanity were done in the course of attempting to right a wrong. Against the backdrop of the war mysteries are revealed, and the tragedy at the center of it all pulls at heartstrings in its simplicity.

Sancia and Berenice suffer through a trial of their own, as they're forced to face the consequences of what happened in the first book. They're an older couple now, they've been together for years, and they're comfortable in their skin and their love and in the ties that bind them; they know each other, inside and out, but darkness looms ahead, and choices that must be made.

The epilogue is masterful, tying all the final threads together to form a heartbreaking conclusion that nonetheless is filled with hope.

Locklands is the perfect finale to an imaginative trilogy.

✨ 5 stars

[You can find more of my reviews about queer speculative fiction on my blog MISTY WORLD]

[wowbright]

I know a lot of you love Less by Andrew Sean greer, I'm not here to piss on your parade, but if anybody wants to hear an opposing view, here's why I'm angry that I spent my weekend sewing project listening to this bullshit:

it doesn't appear that Arthur Less has ever had a job ever? Apparently he's just living off the largess of his first boyfriend, a poet who somehow became financially well off?

yes, I know that writing can be a job, but he's only published two novels and neither were that well received, and he's 50 years old. What has he been doing for the last 30 years?

all this is to say that like zora, I have no interest in reading a book about the sorrows of a San Francisco white guy who has lived in privilege and with a huge amount of good luck all his life, even if he is gay.

Unlike the Pulitzer prize committee, I'm not convinced the fact that she says that in the middle of a boring book about a self-absorbed San Francisco white guy--these little bits of meta commentary about the book's problems--the meta commentary does not make the book better. It makes it worse. The author is aware that the protagonist is a fucking pain in the ass, and yet subjects us to this story anyway.

I mean, I guess it's great that someone loves him. I don't know why, but love does that. I am probably in love with a mediocre person too, and the person who is in love with me vice versa etc etc. That doesn't mean I'm going to write a damn book about it, at least not when it's super fucking naval gazing and pitiable like this.

I don't understand why Freddy thinks that Arthur is the bravest person he knows. Arthur is so scared of love he can't recognize it when it's biting him in the ass, and then when he does recognize it, he's too much of a wimp to say that he feels it and what he wants out of it. Does this mean that no one should love Arthur? No. Does it make him brave? No. But I guess Freddy's maybe sort of similar so he wouldn't hold lack of bravery in the love department against Arthur. I just don't see any proof of Arthur being brave anywhere else in his life, so I'm confused.

The thing that makes me most angry about this book: it reminded me why I rarely read mainstream contemporary fiction anymore. I mean, I pretty much swore it off a few years after college, except for when I was assigned an occasional book review. It's just, the stuff that gets all the praise and glory seems to be about these self-centered, myopic, emotionally out of touch characters. Are we all sometimes self-centered, myopic, and emotionally out of touch? Yes. But is a person who is all those three things, constantly, interesting? Is it interesting to make these character flaws so permanent that they provide all the conflict in the book? No. Who are these losers? Could they have real problems? Like actual difficulty paying the electric bill, or a disability, or an actual mental illness that keeps them from feeling things instead of making it into a stubborn character flaw that somehow makes the book seem deep or whatever?

In the words of @badmotherflanner, who does not endorse this book review

Fuck the Academy

[musingsofmonica]

The Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize Longlist

We are proud to share these extraordinary books with you. Please join us in congratulating The Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize Longlisted authors.

[johnrgordon]

LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE

FROM THE WINNER OF THE FERRO-GRUMLEY FICTION AWARD

A BOOK FOR KEEPS - Book of the Year 2020

The night the statue of a Confederate colonel is torn down in the center of a dying, opioid-scarred and racially divided Southern town is the night two wild teenagers meet and start to fall in love. White working class Cleve is broke and drifting into criminality; black, bourgeois Roe is alienated and rebellious. They say opposites attract, and who could be more opposite than Cleve and Roe?

When Cleve finds himself, at age 17, home alone for the first time in his life, he summons the courage to invite Roe to stay over. The young men’s relationship looks set to move to another level when they are interrupted by Hark, a mysterious black vagrant who seems to possess supernatural powers, and takes them on a strange and troubling journey into the past.

Hark is a touching, vividly contemporary coming of age story; a compelling, fast-paced and ultimately hopeful tale of gay interracial love; and shows us how necessary it is to confront the evils of our shared history, however painful it may be to do so.

JOHN R GORDON is the author of eight novels, including the black gay antebellum epic Drapetomania. Hailed as “an all-out masterpiece” by PATRIK IAN-POLK (Noah’s Arc, Blackbird, The Skinny) and “a dazzling work of imagination” by MICHAEL ERIC DYSON (Tears We Cannot Stop: Sermon to White America) it won the prestigious 2019 Ferro-Grumley Award for best LGBTQ fiction.

Read a moving review by, and fascinating interview with, author and critic Rue Sparks.

'A master novelist' - Huffington Post

'A novelist at the height of his powers' - DIRIYE OSMAN, The Financial Times

'Audaciously provocative, sexy and spooky all at once. And very much of the zeitgeist!' - CRAIG LAURANCE GIDNEY, A Spectral Hue

'It shouldn't work but it does... A welcome addition to the tradition.' - LARRY DUPLECHAN, Blackbird

'Profound and vibrant... one of the most profound endings of any book I have read. Not just this year—ever. I am still reeling over how perfect and deeply important the events are, and how much they mean regarding our shared histories... a book that unilaterally needs to be read. Not only do I think most of us should read this, I think a lot of us need to read this book.' - RUE SPARKS

You can buy this text via the following outlets:

UK: Waterstones / Amazon

US: Barnes & Noble / Amazon