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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—Chavisa Woods, ‘A Little Aside’

Things To Do When You’re a Goth in the Country, the latest short story collection by Brooklyn-based writer Chavisa Woods, focuses on those who feel separate from society. Whether they be queer artists or trailer park residents, these are paranoid, poverty-stricken people preoccupied with the myths and mistruths that have filled the vacuum left by an absent government which promised to protect them. Woods’ stories exist beneath the suffocating grasp of convention, detailing the mental gymnastics required to support supposedly moral institutions built on bigotry and hate, in places where residents proudly wave a flag even as the neighbourhood kids are blown up by IEDs in a desert 7,000 miles away.

Opener ‘How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama’ tells the story of an artist returning to their hometown to visit their two brothers. It begins as a classic small-town-outsider-turned-cool-NYC-artist-returns-to-depressing-backwater, with the appearance of an edgy half cousin on the run from a manslaughter charge acting as the desperate illustration of why the artist left town in the first place.

But Woods isn’t satisfied with such black and white distinctions, and paints everyone, even the “bad” characters, in a pretty sympathetic light. There are reasons why people live the way they do, whether that’s rejecting the conservative values of their hometown and moving to the city to make art, rejecting mainstream morals and turning to crime, or adopting a worldview full of intolerance and mistrust. It’s a story that works particularly well in light of Trump’s America, the characters struggling and lost, turning to myth and conspiracy to foster some semblance of excitement or meaning in their lives.

“For months my brothers had been telling me about these green floating gaseous orbs they are coming out of the woods that they think are coming from UFOs out there. But I think it’s more a combination of mold, the meth kid cooking out in the field, and also, last year the EPA cleaned off about fifteen miles’ worth of toxic topsoil from this area…Oh well. Green, glowing orbs are a lot more fun to think about of as alien life-threatening than all that other crap, especially if you’re living with them. Especially if there’s nothing you can do about them.”

There are several stories which take a big step into the weird—be it because the main characters drop acid (‘Take the Way…’) or get steered towards magical realist allegory (‘A New Mohawk’)—but these too are rooted in a malaise that’s very much real. Even the short and furious rant ‘A Little Aside’ feels distinctly of the here and now, taking the narratives spun by Alex Jones and David Icke and countless Youtube channels and presenting them from a raving first person perspective (“I know when it’s coming. I know when it’s gonna happen: 12/21/2121. We don’t got much time left”).

Also told in first person, the title story is one of teenage rebellion, of trying to carve out a niche for yourself in a world that isn’t interested. Narrated by a sixteen year old girl, it tells of huffing whipped cream fumes on a merry go round, urban myths and haunted bridges, smoking beneath the bell tower because there’s nothing else to do. She has plenty advice for any budding rural goths, from harassing army recruiters in the high school canteen to etching pentacles into your forehead with a razor blade (pentacles preferred to pentagrams as she finds pentagrams “a bit of an overkill, and rather silly as satanism is so blasé and reactionary an endeavour”). But perhaps the most striking scene is made when she reads a passage from Ezekiel to the local congregation as part of enforced Bible study:

“I approached the pulpit with my big red bible…chains rattling from my hips,and fucked-up Barbie doll necklaces hanging around my neck; Vietnam ear tokens honouring the violence of girlishness. There I stood before the congregation in the small steepled white church, under the empty cross, exposed rafters echoing barnyards, my eyes painted thick with black curlicues swirling up from my lids to around my temples, and upside-down crosses resting like tears on my cheeks…And I read them their Bible. I read the congregation their sacred text, dressed that way on their pulpit. I spoke in a booming deep-throated voice that, at moments, devolved into a growl, echoing through their sanctuary like it was a black magic road show we were doing […] I read their sacred book and I made it mine.”

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.

Things to Do When You’re a Goth in the Country is out now on Seven Stories Press.

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