This week in publishing we have new works from a number of seasoned veterans with a taste for big swings and clever premises.
Here you'll find that gothic horror, so often lurking in the dingy dark, can manifest also in the fluorescent world of the terminally online; that hell can be rather academic, really; and even that the rules of grammar, like a tight-fitting jacket, can be simply shrugged off by a talented writer when they no longer suit.
With Labor Day on the horizon, now is a good time to crack open a good book and get to work on a new understanding of what the world can contain.
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride
McBride shares a common lineage with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett — not only as Irish writers but also as unrepentant experimenters with no respect for the sanctity of traditional syntax. In her hands, language is not a tidy vessel for information so much as it is a malleable substance: the unkempt stuff of thought itself. In 2016's The Lesser Bohemians, those thoughts largely belonged to Eily, an Irish theater student whose turbulent romance with an older actor blooms into the complicated love that animates this sorta-sequel.
If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You by Leigh Stein
Stein knows more about the internet than I do. (Probably more than you too, dear reader, but I don't want to presume.) She's the kind of person legacy media organizations turn to when they need to explain a trend on TikTok, say, or any other frightening internet phenomena. Makes sense, then, that the versatile writer has found the gothic possibilities in a house full of social media influencers. The idea, at least as presented to protagonist Dayna, is to transform an aging mansion into a hub of influencer activity. But as you'd suspect, things get weird fast, as mystery and menace lurk behind the facades of the house, its mysterious owner and its always-online residents.
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
As a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, with degrees from Cambridge and Oxford already, Kuang has a soft spot for students, whose anxieties, vast workloads and uncertain prospects have informed some of her previous novels, including The Poppy War and Babel. In Katabasis, the novelist is inverting the ivory tower in a way, taking two graduate students to the depths of hell to retrieve their professor and, more importantly, rescue their career prospects. Kuang liberally seasons the proceedings with literary references, jabs at academia and enough mystery to keep this pair's deathly descent quite lively.
A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi
In a 2014 profile for NPR, Annalisa Quinn described Oyeyemi's style as a kind of "jolly gruesomeness": "It's a little wry, a little earnest, a little dangerous — weird and familiar at the same time." It's a brew reminiscent of the fairy tales that inspired many of the Prague-based Brit's previous novels — not the bowdlerized Disney versions, but the hardcore originals that can swerve from wonder to bloodshed with alarming agility. In her latest, a similarly magical conceit becomes a surreal, occasionally sanguinary romp as the dubious partnership of a woman's distinct identities (one for each day of the week) unravels in the shadow of conspiracy.
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews
Toews' latest book pivots on a question: "Why do you write?" The answer ought to be a layup for a writer on book tour, or at least rehearsed enough by now to sound like it. Of course, it's not that simple. The question and her digressive answers give this slim, eclectic memoir — Toews' first — its motor and shape, as she draws on episodes across her life. It's also the first book published by the Canadian Mennonite author since the 2022 film adaptation of her novel Women Talking earned a best picture nod at the Oscars.
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