Happy spring, everyone! This month, I’m excited to share with you two brand-new novels, an astoundingly good story collection, and possibly THE haunted house classic (which many of you have probably already read, but if you haven’t, you’ll now want to). As always, I hope you’ll find at least one or two to your taste and discover a book you might not have otherwise encountered.
Here goes:
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
If the playful, bright yellow cover of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! has not yet caught your eye in the new books rack of your local library or bookstore, I encourage you to look out for it. Considering that Akbar is best known for his poetry, it’s not a surprise that the language is strong (the book even incorporates some poems), but the novel’s pleasures also encompass a deft handling of multiple points of view en route to a very satisfying plot twist. It’s also a delightfully meta book, in a similar spirit to Justin Torres’s Blackouts, but with a more straightforward, less puzzle-like structure. In short, it’s a novel about an Iranian-American poet in recovery from alcoholism who is trying to write a book about martyrs; as such, it includes both the aforementioned poems and excerpts from a Word doc in progress, ostensibly written by the book’s protagonist, Cyrus. It’s also very much a quest to understand what makes life worth living, and how art may or may not bring meaning to deaths that might otherwise feel meaningless. That said, the exclamation point at the end of the title cues the book’s fundamentally exuberant spirit. My favorite of 2024 so far!
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
Shelved under science fiction in my local library, this recently released second novel by Marie-Helene Bertino would probably be better grouped with contemporary literary fabulists like Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, who are known for combining sharp prose with speculative elements. The book is a coming-of-age novel about a Gen X girl named Adina growing up in Philadelphia who happens to be an alien sent from a distant planet to observe human behavior. The writing is strong and often threaded with wry humor. While the alien premise seemed a bit superficial, more of a convenient explanation for Adina’s somewhat detached, observational character (who eventually becomes a writer, ahem) rather than a primary engine for the plot, the book steadily won me over. Like Martyr!, Beautyland interrogates the value of writing in the face of a world characterized by profound grief and loss (content warning: cancer). If you enjoyed Bertino’s 2020 novel Parakeet, you’ll likely find this one worth picking up as well.
Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones’s 1992 debut collection is one of the strongest story collections I’ve ever read and is well-worth hunting down, especially if you are a short story writer and/or enjoy realist stories that feel like tiny novels unto themselves. If my recommendation isn’t enough, it also won the PEN/Hemingway award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. I picked it up after taking an online craft intensive with the writer Jamel Brinkley through Tin House last December that included a story from Jones’s second collection, Aunt Hagar’s Children, as an exemplar of omniscient point of view. A virtuosic use of point of view is characteristic of Lost in the City as well; several stories shift in their attachment from one third person perspective to another—a father to a daughter, an aunt to a niece—to great effect.
As I mentioned in last month’s recommendation of Lot, these stories are linked by their setting in Washington, D.C., primarily in predominantly Black neighborhoods undergoing gentrification in the mid- to late twentieth century. As specific as many of these stories are to this near-historical context, they have the timeless quality of great literature, whose ultimate subject is the human heart. If you enjoy well-paced character studies imbued with emotional depth and tension and writing that is so good you hardly notice it because it pulls you along through the story with what appears to be effortless grace, this book is for you.
My favorites included: “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” “The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed,” “The Store,” “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day,” “His Mother’s House,” and “A Dark Night.”
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
This month, Shirley Jackson’s horror classic, The Haunting of Hill House, continues my streak of including one book by a no-longer-living author. I had only read Jackson’s oft-anthologized short story “The Lottery” in the context of English class and was pleasantly surprised by how different this story is in style. While the book is often seen as setting the standard of the haunted house genre, Jackson is very much aware of the tropes of 19th century haunted-house hunters and often consciously acknowledges and plays with these tropes in some interesting ways. The book is beautifully paced and tightly structured, the characters richly developed, and the prose elegant. You might, like me, have encountered its famous first sentence before for that reason: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” Even if you are not a fan of the horror genre, you might want to check this one out for its craft and psychological depth (and it’s not particularly gory).
Happy reading!
These sound delicious; thanks for the fresh reviews!