In the muted second volume in a projected pentalogy (following Aubrey McKee), Pugsley depicts his 20-something protagonist’s new life in Toronto, where he’s moved from his native Halifax to begin graduate work in inorganic chemistry. Drama ensues when Gudrun Peel, a vivacious poet Aubrey met at a book party, shows up drunk at his apartment, slumps onto his couch, and unloads her fear that if she lands the book publicist job she’s just interviewed for, she’ll turn into a corporate drone. She accepts the job offer despite her reservations, and the two begin dating. As Aubrey tags along with Gudrun to book launches, he considers a literary life of his own and starts writing plays. The novel has an inventive structure, beginning with a short story set sometime in the future about Aubrey working as a writer on a sketch-comedy show and ending with a play by Aubrey about his wealthy friend Quincy, who’s described as the “hero in this period of my education” but is only briefly mentioned earlier in the narrative. Unfortunately, the substance of Aubrey’s education never quite materializes amid all the formal pyrotechnics. It’s Knausgård lite. Agent: Jennifer Hollyer, Jennifer Hollyer Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

A grieving 20-something woman struggles to work her way up the ranks of a late-night comedy show at the height of the #MeToo movement in Shook’s endearing sophomore effort (after If We’re Being Honest). Presley Fry, an assistant talent booker, enjoys chatting with her work crush Adam about romantic comedy tropes and the city’s stand-up scene, even though he often talks about other women. Though Presley has a toehold in her dream career, she makes minimum wage and has little prospect of a promotion or raise. She got the job through her late mother’s friend Susan Clark, whose husband, Tom, is an executive at the network. After Susan’s life is upended by allegations that Tom sexually harassed his colleagues, she reaches out to Presley with an invitation to dinner, and the two women begin an unlikely friendship. Some of the plot turns are predictable, but readers will find it easy to root for Presley as she tires of being in the friend zone with Adam and pounds the pavement in search of a comedian whose rising star she might hitch her wagon to. This charms. Agent: Andrianna deLone, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

This vibrant collection of new and selected works from Watson, who died in 2020, showcases the author’s wry humor and taste for the bizarre. “Dying for Dolly” follows an ex-con who releases a novelty song about Dolly Parton and scores a spot opening for the singer. “The Zookeeper and the Leopard” concerns a zoo manager who sets a leopard free to antagonize the town’s chief animal control officer, whom he suspects of sleeping with his wife. Both stories draw sharp portraits of men in over their heads, while “Eykelboom,” written in third-person plural from the perspective of a close-knit Southern town, depicts the travails of a boy who moves there from “some crude and faceless Yankee state” and struggles to fit in. The title story begins in the register of a clinical report on a family’s car accident, which killed the father and maimed the teenage daughter, before swerving into an intriguing stew of gossip and speculation about the fate of the mother, who disappeared from the scene of the crash and may have been driving. In “Terrible Argument,” previously collected in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, a couple’s pet dog observes their incessant bickering. This accomplished volume puts Watson’s impressive tonal and stylistic range on full display. It’s sure to satisfy fans and newcomers alike. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

BBC radio broadcaster Elms (The Way We Wore) delivers an effusive if haphazard ode to concerts and other live musical performances. Casting a wide net, he rhapsodizes over the pleasures of clubbing as a teenager (“You watch each other rather than a band... the music is the soundtrack to your story”); bemoans a disappointing show during which Al Green spent most of his time “handing out roses ‘to the laydees’ and praising the Lord”; and reflects on a more recent Paul Weller concert that fostered “a tangible feeling of unity, which gets so much rarer as we get older, more distanced, more alone.” Such moments vividly capture the appeal of live music, though they’re hampered by the author’s tendency to name-drop (Amy Winehouse sent him a platinum copy of Back in Black as thanks for having her on his radio show) and veer into tangents, including a series of strained comparisons between music and soccer. The result is more a hodgepodge of anecdotes than the focused study the title suggests. Readers will need patience to separate the wheat from the chaff. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

This sharp-witted collection from Sarris (How a Mountain Was Made) comprises stories told by “crow sisters” about the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok homelands of northern California. Question Woman and Answer Woman, the twin granddaughters of trickster Coyote, live as crows. Their stories, loosely anchored in creation myths but also firmly grounded in place and time, are enigmatic and open-ended, and nearly always center people who have learned, to their peril, to ignore their connections to the land and each other. In the evocative “A Man Follows an Osprey,” a troubled man hopes an osprey will lead him to a legendary box of gold. The field worker heroine of the mysterious “A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake, and a Hummingbird in Santa Rosa” finds her life forever changed when she’s drawn night after night to a camp where three shape-shifters tell stories by the light of the moon. In the poignant “A Woman Invents a Lover,” a gaggle of gossips watch as good-hearted Marlene falls in love, is abandoned, and must perform a series of fairy tale–like tasks to reconnect with her family and her past. These incandescent stories will linger in the reader’s imagination. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mexican writer Tarazona’s inventive English-language debut follows an author whose consciousness splits into two separate realities. The break takes place after the unnamed protagonist, who is grieving her mother’s recent death and whose brain feels as if it’s full of stalactites, is found to have abnormal brain rhythms. One version of the woman returns to her daily routine in Mexico City, while the other runs away to a remote island, where she plans to end her life (“It doesn’t matter that you each inhabit a different body,” Tarazona writes. “Conjugations are irrelevant”). Interspersed throughout both narrative strands are dreamlike and at times apocryphal stories about the woman’s mother and grandmother, who practiced yoga together for decades with a powerful swami who might have been a “con man.” While readers may feel disoriented at the outset, the free-flowing, philosophical narrative, expertly translated by Davis and Dunn, builds to a masterful and deeply meaningful conclusion about the woman’s two selves. It’s a triumph of experimentation. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble) easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. In 1980, wealthy polystyrene manufacturer Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his Long Island home and held for a week until his wife, Ruth, paid the $250,000 ransom. Now, 40 years later, he’s still traumatized, and is dutifully tended to by the controlling but loyal Ruth. Their three children also continue to live under the shadow of the kidnapping. There’s Beamer, a moderately successful screenwriter with a secret drug and BDSM addiction; Nathan, a lawyer who’s too timid for the partner track at his firm; and Jenny, a union organizer whose chief pleasure in life is pissing off her mother. Beamer is excited about an idea for a new project starring Mandy Patinkin when Jenny texts with troubling news: due to a series of financial reversals, the family fortune they’ve all depended on is gone. How the Fletchers respond to the crisis and finally put their shared past to rest forms the core of this entertaining saga. Brodesser-Akner’s latest combines the smarts of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up, the polymath verisimilitude of Tom Wolfe’s novels, and the Jewish soul of Sholem Aleichem’s stories. This is a comedic feast. Agent: Sloan Harris, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Alering mixes mountain magic and teenage angst in her potent if murky debut set in 1980s Appalachia. Sisters Sheila, 17, and Angie, 12, live on a mountain with their mother and their great-aunt Thena, who took the family in after a hazily described traumatic event involving their father. Sheila, who has a rope tied around her neck that only she can see, works as a dishwasher at a state asylum for the criminally insane when she is not at school, while Angie spends her free time drawing tarot-like cards whose characters talk to her, including one she names the Worm King. After two women are found bludgeoned to death on a hiking trail near Thena’s house, the girls put their minds and their magic toward finding the killer. Many strange things happen—a boy who inexplicably lives at the asylum tells Sheila he can see her rope, drawings of Angie’s characters appear in a patient’s cell, and the sisters eventually turn up useful clues thanks to input from the Worm King. Some readers will be left scratching their heads, but Alering pulls off an evocative portrait of the creepy rural setting. It’s a passable Appalachian gothic. Agents: Martha Perotto-Wills and James Mustelier, Bent Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Shepherd’s imaginative latest (after The Cartographers), a middle-aged woman wins the chance to star in a mind-bending reality TV show built around a new technology called The Bubble, which allows contestants to choose different lives for themselves and adjusts their memories to match. Marsh, a recently divorced paralegal, begins her tenure on the show by repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempting to rekindle her marriage. Eventually, she constructs new lives as a high-powered lawyer in Hong Kong, a wildlife photographer in Iceland, and more. She also pursues a romance with her high school boyfriend and improves her relationship with her teenage daughter. Each life feels like an improvement on her real one, but when glitches appear in The Bubble, Marsh worries her chance at a perfect life will slip through her fingers. In the chapter endings, Shepherd playfully mines nostalgia for Choose Your Own Adventure series (“If Ren didn’t break up with Marsh last night: Turn the page”). Whichever path readers take, they’ll find a tantalizing and well-knit story. Reality TV fans especially ought to take note. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink

A London heat wave and a whale stuck in the Thames form the backdrop of McKenna’s stimulating first novel. The narrative unfolds over a pivotal weekend in the lives of a group of friends, as the oppressive weather and crowds of tourists exacerbate their stress over their uncertain futures. Maggie, 30, worries her pregnancy will put a strain on her relationship with Ed and complicate their planned return to their Essex hometown. Ed, in turn, is excited to get away from his dead-end courier job and start a family with Maggie, though he’s also secretly having anonymous sex with men. Ed once carried on a relationship with Maggie’s friend, Phil, who’s falling in love with Keith, one of his roommates in an illegal warehouse loft. The characters’ precariousness is frequently and cleverly laid bare through the presence of the whale, whose ordeal is tied by many to climate change, and the narrative boldly explores themes of sexuality, shame, and miscommunication. McKenna’s ornate tapestry is one to savor. Agent: Liv Maidment, Madeleine Milburn Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink