Jennifer Egan – Manhattan Beach

Corsair / Scribner

“Beneath the exciting plot and readable prose, Egan is still examining the modes and consequences of power in the United States. As such, Manhattan Beach is the introduction to the Look At Me‘s conclusion, the two texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.”

REVIEW

Steve Erickson – Shadowbahn

Blue Rider Press

“In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers return, fully formed, in the middle of the Dakota Badlands. Thousands are drawn to this “American Stonehenge,” and rumours start of a figure on the upper floors. This person, we find out, is Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of Elvis—a man with no singing voice haunted by the spectre of his brother, and the memory of a parallel America where Elvis was never born. Growing increasingly strange, the dream-like novel charts the movement of several characters through this world, where a second reality impinges on our own, as though the line between two dimensions has grown porous, slowly melding into one.” (Taken from our review of Protomartyr’s Relatives In Descent).

Ottessa Moshfegh – Homesick for Another World

Jonathan Cape

“I don’t know what they teach you in Utah,” warns an elderly gossip column writer in one of the stories from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, “but even Jesus would get greedy here.” Similarly black and bleak, the entire collection is built on characters who, in one way or another, are reaching a point of unbearable tension within their current state. From the alcoholic, grade-fudging teacher of opener ‘Bettering Myself’ to the wannabee actor and  of ‘The Weirdos’, the people here are somehow jarred slightly out of reality, lost within the only world they know, or reaching a fatal point of self-destruction—exploding in some great flash of light or disintegrating into dust and shifted high on the wind. Consistently funny and sad and interesting, Homesick cements Moshfegh’s position as one of the best writers plying their trade right now.

Gabe Habash – Stephen Florida

Coffee House Press

Stephen Florida follows the final year of a lonely young wrestler in a North Dakota college, the last chance to achieve his dream of winning the Division IV NCAA Championship. Evoking the likes of DeLillo‘s Logos College and Wallace’s Enfield Tennis Academy, the college is a paradoxical blend of logic and madness, the ascetic athletic routine straining around the neurotic inner lives of the athletes, the competition between the boys blossoming into obsession and violence. Florida himself is either the ultimate unreliable narrator, or the most reliable narrator literature has ever seen, sucking us into his strange life and having us root for him, no matter how futile we both realise the quest to be.

Chavisa Woods – Things To Do When You’re a Goth in the Country

Seven Stories Press

“The stories are a reminder that despite much of the bluster and bravado it presents internationally, America is a dense mosaic of misfits, many of whom are trapped in damaging cycles by powers beyond their control. Whether dealing with war, drugs, queer relationships or, well… being a goth in the country, Chavisa Woods achieves a tone that’s simultaneously streetwise and sympathetic, and is exactly the kind of fiction we’re going to need to get us through currents times.”

REVIEW

Daniel Magariel – One of the Boys

Granta

Short, sharp and striking, Magariel’s debut One of the Boys blends sensitivity and ferocity to explore the relationship between two young boys and their abusive father. Fleeing their mother (inventing stories of maltreatment to gain custody), the volatile dad drives his sons to Albuquerque, promising a tight-knit relationship and a better life. But instead he slowly descends into the nadir of addiction, leaving the brothers to navigate the complexities of adult life alone, learning the importance of the unsaid, the truth behind closed doors.

Joseph Scapellato – Big Lonesome

Mariner Books

“Here, times gone are both something to escape and retreat into, to remember and forget, questions and answers and warnings all rolled into one. They come with lessons we’d do well to learn, expectations we’d do well to ignore. Ultimately, Big Lonesome paints the past as something that can destroy us, and as something that could save our souls.”

REVIEW

Omar El Akkad – American War

Picador / Knopf

“For all of its futuristic flourishes, this war could be any number of places from the past fifty years. The refugee camps, the suicide bombers, the baseless incarceration and torture. The distant foreign concern, the malicious intervention. The self-perpetuating violence. Angry young people killing angry young people, creating more angry young people. So, beneath the YA-style coming-of-age plot and sci-fi dressing, the novel is a study of radicalisation, of finding identity and purpose within chaos through unflinching world views and gestures of loyalty.”

REVIEW

George Saunders – Lincoln in the Bardo

Bloomsbury

“The majority of the action takes place in a state of existence between life and whatever comes next. The space is laid over our own, the spirits that inhabit it able to see the real world and pass across it, but unable to successfully interact with anything tangible, or communicate with anyone living. The result is a frustrating and confusing isolation, where words can be voiced but not heard, gestured made but never quite received. They are, therefore, left as bewildered viewers of the living, incapable of altering their paths and decisions, and wondering when, if ever, something might change.” (Taken from our review of Friendship’s Shock out of Season).

Nathan Hill – The Nix

Picador

“Hill is dedicated to the Wallacean endeavor of sincerity while simultaneously warning of the dangers that arise from a complete suspension of skepticism and irony. The Nix enacts a constantly revolving committal to criticism and skepticism coupled with attempts at understanding and empathy, a perpetual readjustment of the scales so that neither irony nor sincerity can gain detrimental prevalence.” (From a piece for Critique).

 Chanelle Benz – The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

Ecco

The debut collection of stories by Chanelle Benz, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead stretches across eras, places and styles to become one of the most diverse and wide-ranging books of the year. From Western bank hold-ups and contemporary wanderers to Middle Eastern subterfuge and a metafictional pastiche/parody of Gothic romance classics, the structure, tone and content veers from piece to piece, leaving it unclear quite where Benz’s true voice will settle, but offering a handful of viable avenues for the future.

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— Joseph Scapellato, ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Lovers’

Through a careful give and take between familiar imagery and surrealist flourishes, Joseph Scapellato’s debut collection Big Lonesome is a subversive love letter to The Wild West, skewing archetypes just enough to subvert the myths and tropes of the genre. Split into three sections– ‘Old West’, ‘New West’ and ‘Post-West’– the book stretches the notion of The West into the present and beyond, resulting in twenty-five stories of considerable variation that nonetheless hang upon the All-American themes of individualism, identity and history.

Unsurprisingly, ‘Old West’ is the most traditional of the segments, though this is not to say Scapellato plays it straight. ‘Big Lonesome Beginnings’ sets the tone, a story centred on a saunter of cowboys, one armed with a guitar in place of an absent Her, the others forcing themselves to stay awake so as not to miss what the music has them feeling. “He knew his music would never be a body,” Scapellato writes, “but he played it nonetheless.” From here we are introduced to cowboys of all shapes and sizes, from the eponymous centaurian hero of ‘Horseman Cowboy’ to the puny cowboy of ‘Mutt-Face’ who attempts (unsuccessfully) to drink himself big, each character representing some spin on the masculine mystique of Western mythology. One standout is ‘Thataway’, where a hard-luck cowboy lives in fear of a ‘rile’ which rises within him and (worse) the ‘weepies’ which sometimes follow. Sitting in a laundromat, he meets an odd old man who speaks of the ‘brown boy’ who climbs down throats and hugs hearts but ultimately abandons you. The story grows increasingly hallucinatory, the old man growing more strange and the brown boy manifesting physically. The cowboy comes to learn that beneath his fear of his emotions lies a deeper dread, a dark dead absence that grins behind the early promise of narcotic relief.

“Most nothings showed up where a something used to be, and the gone something was what you used to measure the nothing. This nothing had come from where there had never been anything. There was no telling how much of him it would require, and for how long, and to what end. It was much worse than the weepies” (23).

The jewel at the centre of ‘Old West’ is ‘Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Loves’, a piece split into subheadings detailing either a true love (“His First”, “His Second”, etc.) or other notable and metaphorically-ripe events from the cowboy’s life. His first three loves are women—a singing whore, a blushing teacher, a star-crossed senorita—but the fourth is a radio. Finding the cowboy in his old age and sharing wistful wisdom with a local kid (“Music don’t make the world smaller. Just makes you bigger.”), this final section paints loneliness in its true light, comprehensive and all-consuming yet also surprisingly feeble, a force that feels like the default state right up until it is no longer. The result is a Saunders-like sense of compassion and empathy, love appearing at irregular intervals to slap Good Stuff in the face and help him see clearly for however long it lasts.

“The way he saw it, love had always come to him like a thing remembered. Known and new. And now the radio! It received what it was given, and what it received it gave. It gave to those who gathered round. What was far was now” (36).

‘New West’ drags us forward into something like the present day, where the cowboys are still cowboys, yet ones reared on the Western myth. As such, it’s impossible to tell whether this West is one big performance or something intrinsic in the American spirit, loneliness and self-destruction made halfway gratifying by the knowledge of those already lost to the curse, by a nostalgia for something that was never quite yours. Again, the stories range from the mundane to the fantastic, the latter typified by ‘Cowgirl’, where a human female born of a cow traverses life in strange detachment, thoughts and feelings arriving and dissipating without warning, her mind clouded (or not) by a bovine thoughtlessness. ‘A Mother Buries a Gun in the Desert Again’ is a pretty literal expansion of the title, charting the slow sadness of ageing and steady surrender to liquid distractions, while ‘Small Boy’ serves as a direct challenge of the whole Heroic Western trope, asking a variety of people a simple question with the forthright innocence only found in young children. “Why did we kill all the Indians?”

Closing story ‘Snake Canyon’ has a Jon Raymond/Kelly Reinhardt vibe, finding two friends retreating to the wilderness as a salve against day-to-day life. “The air was clean and dry, but flush with the feeling they’d come for,” Scapellato writes. “An emptying out: an emptying in. A reminder that they were made out of their bodies” (95). Disaster strikes, as one of the men gets so badly injured the other must to carry him down the mountain, and the heart of the New West experience is revealed. Having a weird out-of-body experience, the man sees himself saving his friend’s life. At first, he is filled with pride at the vision, though doubts soon creep in as he wishes he was stronger and more confident in his life-saving ability. Finally, he turns to anger, furious at an imagined audience judging his every action, seeing his act of heroism in its less-than-glorious detail, recognising him not as a Western hero but a fallible human. The idea that the truth of the Old West was equally human/cowardly lurks at the back of the story, a vague awareness of some self-imposed amnesia, a blurring of the truth.

“By intentionally or unintentionally overlooking history, American communities could choose to shape and be shaped by imagined futures that, at least initially, appeared untouched by American mistakes, by American embarrassments. Freedom in forgetting” (96-7)

If ‘New West’ is a contemporary West, then ‘Post-West’ is a contemporary Midwest, representing another step away from American history toward the imagined futures referenced above. Still, the characters here seem just as lost, either dizzied by their new-found freedom or else confused by some looming strangeness, as though history lurks just out of view, a gigantic body disrupting the normal forces of life. ‘It Meant There Would Be More’ is one such example, a story examining a couple and their life within an apartment complex where communication feels subtly impossible, every interaction a thin skin atop of a deep recess of fear and feeling.

I took her hand, the one with the keys. I talked about what we were and what we could be.
She took back her hand. “When you talk about us you don’t mean what you say.
“I mean it now.”
“Exactly. That’s it, that’s all” (122).

Focusing on a man who takes his fiance’s dog to a bar, ‘Dead Dogs’ follows a similar vein, the canine triggering a series of patrons to approach with tales of the own, long deceased pets. One-sided and almost entirely for their own benefit, their stories are more like soliloquies, Evan Dara-like monologues whose natural cadences mask a broader sadness. Again the sense is one of stilted communication, people with this urgent need to share what’s inside their heads yet either too embarrassed to do so or else finding words and phrases insufficient, the message degraded upon contact with air. ‘Company’ confronts this head on, with a person trying to get another to talk, or at least know they can should they feel so inclined. The story progresses to a suicide attempt, the sense of danger sharpening the narrator’s plea:

“You’re no addict brother, you’re not insane, you haven’t been beaten or abused or abandoned. You’re okay! You’re okay, so what is it, what is it always, and why have we only ever talked around it?” (174)

What’s striking about ‘Company’, and indeed the majority of the collection, is the push and pull of the past. “I can’t stop plunging my head into the past,” the narrator says, “even though it’s hard to breathe in” (170). Here, times gone are both something to escape and retreat into, to remember and forget, questions and answers and warnings all rolled into one. They come with lessons we’d do well to learn, expectations we’d do well to ignore. Ultimately, Big Lonesome paints the past as something that can destroy us, and as something that could save our souls.

Big Lonesome is out now via Mariner Books, and you can head to the Joseph Scapellato website for more info on the author.

The lure of making a companion mixtape for this one proved just too much. Just like the collection, we’ve broken the playlist into three distinct sections.

Tracklisting:

“Old West”

1) The Rev. J.M. Gates – Death’s Black Train is Coming
2) Ken Maynard – The Lone Star Trail
3) Bascom Lamar Lunsford – Dry Bones
4) Uncle Dave Macon – Walking in the Sunlight
5) Blind Lemon Jefferson – See That My Grave is Kept Clean
6) Harry Jackson – Some Cowboy Brag Talk

“New West”

7) Andrew Weathers Ensemble – You Are Powerful We Are Taking Over
8) Fog Lake – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
9) Sawtooth – Dead Dog Eyes
10) Jordan O’Jordan – A Lonely Road
11) The Dead Tongues – Stained Glass Eyes
12) Ben Seretan – Cottonwood Tree

“Post West”

13) Frederick Squire – Old Times Past New Times
14) Dear Nora – The Lonesome Border, Pt. 1
15) Phosphorescent – A New Anhedonia (Live On KEXP)
16) YOWL – Saturday Drag
17) Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild
18) Talons’ – Change

Photo From the Joseph Scapelatto Website / Cover (re)design by Liam Doyle

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