NOW I SURRENDER, La Frontera's history told very differently...on the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

NOW I SURRENDER
ÁLVARO ENRIGUE (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
Riverhead Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A visionary novelist imagines the fiercely fought end of an epoch of almost unimaginable freedom and radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.”

In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel in service to the fledgling Republica, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, discovers he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction. Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to maneuver Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. In our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.

Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, their storylines playing out in multiple eras, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. Part epic, part alt-Western, it weaves past and present, myth and history, into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty—and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Yes, it felt to me like the narrator was a self-insert, was a bit showoffy in a story that honestly was not in need of ornamentation; just add footnotes and this is a non-fiction corrective to settler colonialism's lying mythmaking. Funny how when a rotten to the core politico needs a way to juice his polling before a rough election battle it's always at the cost of a darker skinned man being sold a bunch of bullshit about making peace and meaning murder (his, not the politico's) and it's frankly weird how often Florida is involved either directly like Alligator Alcatraz or indirectly like Geronimo learned. I'm stunned by how little imagination it takes to dupe people who don't learn even the lies and half-truths they're sold. Reuse threats even names and the audience is inclined to shrug at most, lap it up at least.

The violence of the events of how the West was "won" is breathtaking. Author Enrigue does not soft-pedal its stomach churning reality. It was the stuff of public record at the time, why lie about what "They" were clearly proud of? And speaking of "Them," it is one of Author Enrigue's narrative tactics to reduce characters to labels, the colonel or the warrior or suchlike in paragraphs lacking quotation marks or certain kinds of line breaks...heads up. I know many of y'all really hate when authors do that. It's in service of a teaching. It's not really important to have a family or personal name for a cog in the machine of treachery theft and genocide, and equally unhelpful to present a victim's personal data like that because it's not how their murderers victimizers abusers see them. They're not even important enough to the thieves to merit numbers tattooed on their arms.

When names are give it is to reinforce what is lost in their extermination. Otherwise it's cultural extirpation's great success to use labels. The terrible cost, the awful price, the nightmare of depersonalization and dehumanization...all, at every turn, reinforced and durable in its suffocating rage-baiting cruelty and pointless judgment.

The 2026 longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature is *stacked* with good reading. Start here.

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED, what a great title!

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED
EMILY ZINNIKAS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: TIME ONLY MAKES THE NIGHTMARE MORE REAL.

Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Willa's desire to bury her trauma, not make theater of it, is at the heart of this creepy, atmospheric story of dread. It's impossible to decouple one's existence as a survivor of an unsolved mass murder from the event but Willa's kept her profile as low as is possible.

The exigencies of storytelling make that impossible. Willa's goin' in. Not willingly, not graciously, but in she's going. Into the past, into reckoning with her...odd...beginnings, into what one hopes can be a laying-to-rest of the horrifying truths of childhood sexual assault.

It's the season for uneasy-making reads. Based on the synopsis I rather thought this story would be more about supernatural unease, dealing with hauntings and entities and so on. Instead it's about the awful reality that some kids are not safe even in their own beds. It's very uneasy-making but all too corporeal. I was surprised to feel so compelled to keep reading. It's not exciting writing on a sentence level but it kept my eyes engaged for an entire day, difficult to achieve at this late date in my reading career, as Willa's return to the site of her trauma brings her sporadically, almost haphazardly, into contact with her unresolved pain. Normally I would be complaining that was disorganized, or lacked narrative thrust. Instead of feeling that intellectual response I felt it was me being in Willa's fragmented, damaged emotions with her, processing with her as she had to do and I was along to witness so I could stand in fellowship with her in her hours of need.

It was not the experience I'd expected to have in the read. It was in most ways a better, more real, more involving one. It was dark, and dangerous, and deliberately frightening at times; it was always Othering, intensely alienating to be with Willa in the recovered moments. They were not numerous or extended in ways that felt prurient to me-the-reader.

Horror that gets dressed in supernatural drag doesn't often work that well for me. I usually dismiss the supernatural elements, where this time I had a context for them that made them make sense to me. I won't recommend the read to all readers...check the CWs...and I suspect the truest devotees to horror reading won't get as much out of the read as I, with my self-supplied remapping of the story, did.

It was a successful, pleasurable read for me. I hope y'all will consider giving it a shot at your time and treasure.

HALF LIGHT, subcontinental queerness interrogated pre-decriminalization

HALF LIGHT
MAHESH RAO
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An affair between two men in India changes the course of both their lives forever in this searing queer love story about shame, hope, and identity.

“Rao sheds light without judgement…Thoughtful, tender storytelling at its finest.” —Marie Claire

High up in the misty mountains of Darjeeling, a landslide cuts off a crumbling hillside hotel from the outside world. Trapped together with other guests and staff, two men begin to exchange lingering glances. For Neville, a charismatic student, such encounters are nothing new—urgent kisses in stairwells, fleeting encounters in parked cars. But for Pavan, a shy hotel employee accustomed to hiding in plain sight, their growing connection threatens to upend the careful life he has built in secrecy.

Years later, the men meet again by chance, this time surrounded by the towering skyscrapers and ghostly smog of Mumbai. Neville is now a restless graduate, trying to find his footing in the city. Pavan has long since fled the hills and begun a new life for himself working in a luxurious city hotel. As their renewed flirtation quickly turns fraught, long-buried secrets from their shared past threaten to tumble into the light.

Set on the cusp of India's landmark ruling to decriminalize homosexuality, Half Light is an atmospheric, elegantly wry story of outlawed desire and the fragile hope for a life beyond concealment. From literary powerhouse Mahesh Rao, this tender exploration of the struggle for acceptance and understanding will appeal to readers of Douglas Stuart and Tom Crewe.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: In this year of our lord twenty-twenty six, the World has decided to valorize the ineffable experience of Yearning. Longing purposefully for someone, usually in its most effective iterations someone forbidden to you. I liked Heated Rivalry the book; I adored Heated Rivalry the TV series, because it yearned more obviously for me to invest in, cry over, relate to than in the text version.

I think this story would be even better filmed, too. Its couple aren't as charismatic, or even as much of a couple, as Shane and Ilya; but they have similarly disparate beginnings. Pavan is lower in class, and from a national minority:

𝐏𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐲. 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞, 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐮𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐟𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. 𝐇𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐠𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐬𝐨 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫. 𝐀𝐭 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝-𝐦𝐞-𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐬 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐞, 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐰𝐥𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝. 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐦𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐥𝐞.

...and Neville is far better educated and insulated from Pavan's existential risks in acting on his gayness, in pre-decriminalization times, by being richer. Not that much happens in the story but they do a lot of soul-searching in gorgeously evoked scenery. They are existing as gay in a country with even farther to go towards QUILTBAG equality than the US.

It makes their interest in each other more difficult, of course, and it sharpens their desire to be in relationship. It's very much a story that foregrounds their interiority, which makes me feel the Yearn all the more. It is not a romance, though, don't hear me tell you that! It's a story of two gay guys who notice each other and wonder, separately, if it's even okay to yearn for the lovingkindness they see and can imagine in each other. Neville is able to shut down the desire for more by seeking casual sex with nobody-bodies. Pavan is more constrained in his sexual expression without the money and class position; their ideas of each other are thus similar: I can't get what I want but I want what I thought I had with him.

It's powerful, the yearning, it's cruel in the extreme to criminalize a person's identity over something as trivial as sexuality, and Author Rao doesn't let us forget the men's struggles are not simple or internally resolvable. I'll be honest: I didn't like either man much. I was never rooting for them to get past their fears and be together. I was fully invested in their yearning, for a just and fair world, for a life they could feel validated them as men, for a way to seek someone who loves them for themselves and they might love in return. Their differing repressive forces are equally unfair. Their ultimate fates aren't vouchsafed to us, exactly, but decriminalization does push Pavan into making some steps into a future under his control. Neville is a rich boy from start to finish, not inclined to be otherwise, so his course is merely more openly itself.

I had to take a star off the beautifully evocative rale set in vividly realized places because the men were so constructed as to make their didactic positions as catalysts for Pavan's growth and Neville's stasis their only real relationship. It makes the experience of reading Neville's arc feel as though I was voyeurizing vapidity. On the whole, though, I found so much enjoyment in the settings and societal developments feeling so real to me that I hope you'll send a copy to your local filmmaker!

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, sobering and timely

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy
BRADLEY B. ONISHI
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling and urgently needed exposé on the forces pushing American politics and religion toward a post-constitutional autocracy

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural pulpits, from Catholic monasteries to Beltway think tanks and Project 2025, a convergence is underway. Reactionary Catholics dream of a new Christendom. Protestant pastors invoke divine right over democratic rule. Tech billionaires, led by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, argue that freedom and democracy are incompatible. Their solution? A singular ruler to bring “order” out of what they see as liberal chaos.

With a theologian’s sensibility, a journalist’s touch, and a historian’s eye for how movements evolve and adapt, Dr. Bradley B. Onishi traces the strange alliance between spiritual warfare and Silicon Valley libertarianism. At the center of it all is the desire for an unbound executive—one man, beyond checks, beyond balance, beyond democracy. This isn’t nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s an organized attempt to abandon the American experiment altogether. A former insider turned academic expert, Onishi brings unmatched depth to this investigation—tracing his own path from evangelical pastor to co-host of Straight White American Jesus, the nation’s leading religion and politics podcast.

As the 2024 election fades into history and a new political order takes shape, American Caesar is not just a warning. It’s a map of how we got here—and a call to act before the Republic as we know it becomes just another chapter in a forgotten history book.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm highly suspicious of the notion that "order" is a Good Thing because who decides this for other people is generally who wants to control those other people's lives in close detail. Those kinds of people are almost always puritans of one or another sort, who believe "They" should not be thinking those thoughts/doing those things (usually, though not always, sexual) because *eeewww*.

Author Onishi adds in the tech industry's "thinkers" to the usual suspects but stops short of using the slurs I myownself hurl at them. Author Onishi is tendentious as hell, shouting and waving his arms at the public, determinedly pointing the fingers of both hands at sometimes strained parallels with a past distant enough to make comparisons very very broad. Human nature does not change from what I can see; the same playbooks are still effective because our psychology is much the same.

"Much the same" does not mean we're always going to succumb to the same ruses. Look at the demonization of immigrants that's largely limited to haters and shouters, who are always in every era a minority; how many more people did what Minneapolis did and showed up to disrupt ICEstapo raids? California's honking warners of imminent danger are not getting hate outside the small bubble of the haters and screamers or there would be giant crowds of people helping ICE instead of huge shortages of recruits.

I'm not trying to put you off the read, it says what I think and explains what I fear; it brings the receipts for its bases of argument; it's going a bit further into the "it's inevitable, prepare to suffer" direction than I suspect is fully supported by developments. I think its tone is alarmist in a time when alarm is not only justified, but required; however presenting the grim facts ought to serve, not presenting deterministic conclusions. Those tend to dishearten the ordinary person, not rile them into the resistance and non-compliance we so urgently need to support and spread as a mindset.

Flawed by an overly emotional tone or not, this book can and should be part of your pre-election reading.

JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor, and thriver, and role model on top of all that

JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor
SARA McDOUGALL
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A spellbinding narrative history that defies modern assumptions about women’s lives in the Middle Ages and informs contemporary debates about sexual violence and the limits of justice

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival.

Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.

Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The idea that sexual assault is a death knell for a woman's reputation is *still* dying a slow, noisy death. It was my experience in my own lifetime that a woman pregnant and without some kind of man in her life to take the credit was a "slut" and never anything but; her reputation was set, her future decided, that was that. Many were the women who had abortions, fewer went away for "cures" and came back thinner; all were "fallen" ant thus tainted. This was the twentieth century pre-The Pill and well pre-Roe v Wade.

I thought that was just how it was, probably moreso in earlier times, but certainly not better.

Reading is very dangerous to one's ignorance.

A young woman arrived in Dijon, pregnant and alone, spouting some silly-sounding story about a husband visibly absent who...well, no one was buyin' it, but no one was really all that interested in it either because being pregnant was a very common and unavoidable hazard of being female in the world of men. Jehanne settled into a mundane life, making friends, doing work, being alive. All that came to a chaotic halt when mercenaries fighting some endless wars drifted through Dijon and...noticed...pretty, pregnant, manless Jehanne and bad things ensued.

So far it's a tale as old as time. But post-bad things, details not foregrounded (neither glossed over, just not dwelt on) in the text, Jehanne was not going to let herself be cowed into silence about the outrages she'd endured. One sees in this fact the root of her problem, and the reason she floated into Dijon instead of staying wherever she got pregnant in the first place. (Absent any details about this subject in the records, as Jehanne was not forthcoming, the author posits a possible reason for her landing in Dijon that I thought sounded very believable.) Seeking legal remedy for her violation was stunning in its effrontery, enduring the horrible humiliation of the trial, reliving the awful events, having deeply impertinent, invasive questions that can not be avoided asked, Jehanne showed amazing strength of character.

Her neighbors—including the very surprising man who conducted the investigation we still have documented—of fairly short duration, to my utter amazement, mostly had her back.

The records of the trial, the details of which are almost brain-meltingly boring...I deeply do not care about medieval tax-dodging schemes, but they were important to the witnesses' identities...made for what should have been a slog of an academic read. Author Sara, take your bow. Yes, I now know what people did for fun in 1470s Dijon, dreamt up ways to skive off paying taxes and damn do I wish I didn't, but this is leavened by Author Sara peppering the dough with interesting asides and details not strictly on topic. I will say that all those details added up to Jehanne's becoming a firmly embedded member of Dijon's community, a rough patch in the weave to be sure, but really part of a vibrant interesting bunch of folks.

It surprised me, it entertained me...yes, in spite of the stuff about who had what spurious tax exemption...and it gave me a ghost of gleeful recognition in getting to know Jehanne. She's someone I wish I'd known in the flesh.

Proof that academic, footnoted reads can be well worth reading for more than a degree.

WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO, debut art-critic novel

WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO
JED PERL
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A candid novel about the art, artists, and their tempestuous relationships in the countercultural movement of the 50’s and 60’s, by one of America's most celebrated art critics.

During intermission at a modern dance performance in San Francisco, esteemed and incorrigible cultural critic Marcia Lang collapses into a banquette and dies on the spot. Her lover, Burt, soon discovers that Marcia willed him her entire estate. His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco. As he processes Marcia’s death alongside their cadre of Berkeley bohemians, Burt begins to reconstruct Marcia’s work in progress as an elegiac collage for the friend he’s lost and the city that found her.

In his first novel, Jed Perl guides his reader down the back alleys of a mid-century San Francisco populated with painters, puppeteers, paperback revolutionaries, and the writers like Marcia who determined their positions in the cultural ecosystem. Through energetic and immersive prose, We Never Called It Frisco tests the structural limits of the novel as a site of reconstitution and remembrance.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The post-war history of US art, in novel form.

If nothing in you perked up at that précis, don't get this read onto your TBR because it's the sum total of the story. Marcia and Burt are names, not characters; their personalities aren't developed, though their...her...critical opinions about art are. Burt is quiet, he's more observant than Marcia's professional eye for art (and its movements) is.

The central tragedy, Marcia's early death, takes place before we-the-reader have the chance to invest in her whether positively or negatively. For that to work as a novelistic technique, the way we learn about her needs to be more personal, more through memories than through her writings. Burt's devastated, naturally; why would that not lead a storyteller into flashbacks, accompanied by her writings? Instead we listen to Marcia's judgmental pronunciamentos interspersed with Burt's sadness. It's not propulsive, nor was I expecting it to be; but it's also progressively less involving.

I liked the idea of this debut novel enough to finish it, and should Author Perl write more fiction, I will seek it out to read. It's not the best work he's done. But it's also not the best work he will do.

A MEDICINE GAME, men in friendship! rare find!

A MEDICINE GAME
JASON DONVILLE
North Vanguard Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Some games are played for victory. Others are played for healing.

When Moose and Jonathan, infantry officers in the Canadian Army and best friends since meeting at Royal Roads Military College, deploy to Sarajevo as peacekeepers, they are thrust into the inferno of a genocidal war. Tasked with reopening the city’s airport—a vital lifeline for humanitarian aid—they soon confront the brutal realities of human violence and the fragile boundaries of moral certainty. Snipers deliberately target civilians, often children, while the soldiers who witness these atrocities are ordered to remain neutral, powerless to intervene.

For Jonathan, a Mohawk soldier from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, healing has always meant something different. He carries with him something older than the uniform he wears: lacrosse—the Creator’s Game, known as the Medicine Game when played for healing.

Some wounds cannot be left on the battlefield. And the journey home demands a different kind of courage.

Spanning continents and generations, from Canada’s Pacific coast to the shattered streets of Sarajevo and the living traditions of Six Nations, A Medicine Game is a haunting and tender meditation on friendship, sacrifice, moral injury, and the long road home. Rooted in memory and illuminated by love, it speaks to an ancient truth: we are not healed before we learn to love. Rather, it is love itself that leads us—gently, and sometimes painfully—toward healing.

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My Review: I've been vaguely aware of the existence of a game called lacrosse since Calvin's nemesis Susie Derkins hit him with a snowball she'd chucked at him with one of the game's playing sticks. (Clearly I'm not interested enough to find out anything about it, but at least now I know it exists.) I was acutely aware of the Tutsi and Bosnian genocides that took place in the same decade as each other, and as Calvin and Hobbes introduced me to lacrosse. The idea that lacrosse could heal the PTSD of the soldiers who were forced by bizarre and humanity-denying rules simply to watch as murderers commit murder on an industrial scale, then, would never, not once, occur to me.

It still would not after reading this story where it does.

It was a painful story to read, that of the companions Jonathan and Moose as they navigate young manhood seeking their places in the military. I wanted to shout at them, to force them to utilize their evident and complementary skills in humane ways not in military endeavors. Instead they are front and center for the Bosnian religious genocide; it unsurprisingly leaves them floundering amid unresolved trauma once they're home in Canada.

I did enjoy the evocations of Canada as a locale and as a polity that's the antithesis of the wartime theater of operations. I'm not surprised the characters were always processing their grief and rage in their homeland; the contrast could not be more stark. It was worth noting that the men who became friends under hard training, then harsh service conditions, remained friends...too few stories feature men in friendship with each other, so it was very pleasant to see.

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, I'm picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe—Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival.

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler’s son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry—a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.

With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus—dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world—involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

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My Review: The Swerve was a life-defining read for me in 2012. In it, Author Greenblatt took a horrendously complicated, unpleasantly difficult classical Latin poem about atomism and made it into a living document that gave form to a way of thinking that defines modernity in the 21st century.

If anyone can make a sea of "maybe"s and "perhaps"es into a life story, it is him. And he does.

Kit Marlowe is of enduring interest to many of us for lots of 21st-century reasons, including his apparent sexual interest in other men, his apparent involvement in anti-catholic espionage, and his very obvious murder in what we think was a tavern brawl before he turned thirty; but there's enough uncertainty about all of it that one can't pin him down. His plays survive him; Tamburlaine the Great and The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta and The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus shocked then, shock now four hundred years later, and likely delight in their transgressiveness to the same degree though for very different reasons in both ages. Marlowe knew how to use the prejudices of the world he wrote to entertain to deliver pointed messages well beyond the obvious scope of his story.

A provocateur's work is never done. He can still raise a rage-filled shout.

I think that would delight Kit Marlowe. I know he's not as revered as Shakespeare, his contemporary; but that's down to chance, the unpredictable lightning of luck (and probably Shakespeare's longer life thus larger surviving body of work). It could also be that Marlowe's authorship of The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer, making the homoerotic subtext of male loving friendship that was so celebrated in Elizabethan times into blaring text, had a little something to do with it. Homophobia is an evergreen form of hate, powerfully corrosive to even the most wonder-inspiring talents' gifts. If the ewww-ick response is your default response to gay sex, why are you thinking about it?

Imponderables like this float through my mind as I read this fantabulous work of stitchery that sews a bit here, a scrap there, none of them large, into a very interesting if unclear portrait of a man whose unapologetic purpose was to confront and discomfit the world he so obviously saw in perfect clarity, then whipped out his microscope to look more closely at its flaws.

Dark Renaissance is well titled...the renaissance of a dark figure, the Renaissance's dark side considered then and now, the renaissance of darkness in Marlowe's lifetime and his life and times...layers, layers like an onion, gleaming, and making one tear up as the essential oils of a man's very skin hit your eyes.

THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence, damning indictment using evidence seldom seen by the public

THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
TERENCE KEEL
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of His Name Is George Floyd and Under the Skin

A landmark investigation into forensic medicine that exposes the systematic concealment of state-sanctioned violence through death investigations

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they've sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd's and Sandra Bland's, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner's Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.

Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims' families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.

The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.

True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner's Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

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My Review: Starting with an acknowledgment of the demands we place on the police, "...we have asked police in America to maintain law and order in addition to managing the problems of poverty, the unhoused, the mentally unwell, and people suffering with substance abuse," Author Keel peels back the layers of denial, obfuscation, and lying that enshroud the deaths of people in law-enforcement custody. Coroners, tasked with the responsibility of reporting on the condition of the deceased's body after their death, often use terminology that clouds what would be interpreted as signs of violence lest police be accused of criminal conduct.

The obvious problem arises when there has been criminal police conduct. It is not always the case, nor is it unknown; the system is intended to hold bad actors accountable for their actions; so how are victims' families, members of the public, to feel confident when principal figures are left to perform their role largely under the radar and so in practical terms unaccountably?

Author Keel studied the problem, saw the tensions in the system up close, and presents us this honest report with all its uneasy conclusions. I'm particularly taken with the concept of "second death," the erasure of the deceased's violent death at the hands of public safety professionals; men and women who collude to prevent the truth of the deceased's time in custody leading to their death is enacting a different sort of violence on them and their survivors, whether family or society at large, by shielding violent offenders from responsibility because they are the police.

It should surprise no one that racialized and marginalized victims disproportionately suffer fatal consequences on entering police custody. It is almost impossible for members of those groups to receive posthumous justice due to the bureaucratic sleight-of-hand defeating open and transparent accountability for deaths in custody. Medical jargon, grammatical skulduggery...much can be hidden by using bureaucracy's beloved passive voice, and ameliorative jargon eg, "shots were fired" by anyone in particular, or just impelled by hard breezes?, or "an officer-involved conflict" of what sort? initiated by whom?, etc etc.

Narratives constructed in this pettifogging fashion are not rigorous, and should be challenged at every turn. That they are not indicates the true purpose of coroners' reports by whatever name: exculpation by obfuscation.

It is infuriating that this is widespread, nay ubiquitous, and goes largely unchallenged. In bringing the abuse of public trust this behavior represents, Author Keel does his best to prevent as many "second death"s as he possibly can. I pray for his ongoing success and for this cultural poltroonery to be held up for public ridicule.

A TIME TO BE BORN, Author DAWN POWELL's scathing social commentary is evergreen

A TIME TO BE BORN
DAWN POWELL
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous new paperback of Dawn Powell’s razor-sharp comedy of manners, following a glittering tale of ambition and betrayal in prewar New York City.

“Few books have so bitingly and energetically captured the hunger for status and success that animate the city and enrage so many.” — The New York Times

Deemed “wittier than Dorothy Parker, [and able to] dissect the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald” (The New York Times Book Review), Dawn Powell earns her place as one of America’s great novelists with this biting satire of a wealthy, self-involved publisher and his scheming novelist wife.

Amanda Keeler has clawed her way out of the backwaters of Ohio and into the affections of Julien Evans, New York’s most powerful newspaper tycoon. With his ex-wife vanquished, Amanda reigns over their Fifth Avenue mansion, publishing wildly successful (ghostwritten) novels, charming guests at martini-soaked parties and furiously fending off Julien’s pesky advances.

That’s until the past comes knocking in the form of Vicky Haven, a timid school friend desperate for reinvention. Ever the strategist, Amanda lands Vicky a job in listings and a studio apartment—perfect for Amanda’s daytime trysts with old flame, Ken Saunders. But matters of the heart rarely follow orders. When Vicky begins to wise up to her scheme, and sets her own sights on Ken, she ignites a love triangle that threatens to topple Amanda’s carefully constructed empire.

Scathingly funny and irresistibly glamorous, A Time to be Born is a timeless portrait of social climbing, set in a 1940s Manhattan rife with backstabbing charm, brittle friendships and women who always land on their feet–heels first. Reissued in a stunning new package, it is the perfect introduction to Dawn Powell’s wicked wit and unsparing eye, guaranteed to delight both established fans and new readers alike.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My mother loved The Locusts Have No King and Angels on Toast. She always said it was unkind of Dawn Powell to make her bitches so funny, because in the end it was bitchiness or bust in these women's lives. I've read Edmund Wilson's famous (I think dismissive) "praise" for her writing that her audience...women...never cottoned on to her writing in droves because there was no one to relate to.

That did not age well, Mr. Wilson. It's misogynistic even for a very openly misogynistic age. My own read of the literary marketplace's lukewarm reception of Powell has more to do with my mother's observation that the women were bitches first and foremost: made up of 90% bitchiness, 8% ambition, and 2% fashion. It gets wearing when the glossy surfaces deliver gloss gloss and more shiny gloss. This takedown of Clare Boothe Luce is honest, unsparing, based in the author's cold phony-flensing eye's most well-illuminated view of a woman whose substance could never fill out the image she projected. It was one of Powell's few hot-selling titles on that basis.

But in 2026, most all y'all need to use Wikipedia to know who she is. This vitiates the power of a takedown, a roman à clef of bitter and contemptuous thoroughness, a book-length Vanity Fair hit piece. I think it's delicious. I think most people will read the sentences and enjoy the bitchery, the evocation of a vanished world of unquestionable elite power, no backfooting in this story until we get into the bedroom...it's wonderful at pitting women against each other over a man neither should even notice still less grace with their desires but he was A Man in a time that was enough.

I don't see that catching fire in today's social climate. It's out of step in 2026. It was cold, unfeeling, in 1942; and now it's a relic of a time so distant as to be semi-mythical. Because it is an evocation of coldness, fame, and the callous using of people, it really should work as a reminder that the same kind of people doing the same kind of social climbing are hollow images who stand bestride our world like they did Powell's, and are now forgotten...well, it ought to inspire us to see through them, to see the vapors they conjure for what they are.

It has the uphill battle of ongoing misogyny. It's still true that piercing social commentary is taken more seriously when it treats men as central to the story. Look how much ink is spilled about that traitorous fuck Zuck as opposed to Carly Fiorina, another evil person seen from a labor perspective. It's also the book's enemy, time (ironically enough) that's proving sic transit gloria mundi for the models its characters are based on.

I'm hoping more of y'all will pick up on the story's commentary on fame and see how deeply relevant Powell's observations are for our own time.

THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL, first in a well-made paranormal series

THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL
VIKKI VanSICKLE
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Reluctant psychic Drew Benson can read tarot cards and get impressions from objects—she just never expected to use her gifts to investigate an infamous cold case.

Drew Benson has a secret. She gets visions, something she hasn’t tapped into since she was a teenager, when her late aunt, a TV psychic known as Hannah Mystic, became the scapegoat in the unsolved disappearance of a local teenager. Twenty years later, Drew is happy to ignore her gift, focusing instead on keeping the metaphysical shop she inherited from Hannah afloat, wrangling her sole, astrology-obsessed employee, and dodging local rake Foster Banks in her picturesque lakeside hometown.

But when Drew's arch-nemesis from high school, now a big city reporter, decides to investigate the cold case from all those years ago, it’s Drew’s ability that could finally make a break in the decades old mystery. With bills piling up, a disapproving mother laying on the guilt, and a local vandal who wants Drew and her witchy store gone, Drew has a lot to lose. But what she stands to gain—finding out what happened to the missing teen, clearing her aunt’s name, and a second chance at belonging—could change everything.

In The Mystic and the Missing Girl, Vikki VanSickle seamlessly draws readers into an utterly charming world in this unputdownable, small town mystery.

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My Review: Drew's a woman who just will not let unfairness or inequitable bullshit rampant in our world go unchallenged. Her "...but that's not right" meter's calibrated very finely indeed, which is probably why those who've gone before in dishonest or unkindly meant ways trust her to bring fairness and closure to their stolen lives.

What makes all that work on a story level is that Drew doesn't have evidence until she, and a very unusual partner in Nick, do the investigation to actually solve the crime. That was very satisfying to me, as was the fact that Drew had to overcome significant internal hurdles to accept and trust her psychometry practice was giving her accurate information to aim the shoe-leather-wearing investigation parts.

Nick being a normal adult and a reasonable guy who learns the right lesson...Drew can be trusted, the leads she turns up in this weird way all pan out or lead to the right data...is a relief. No disbelief carried beyond the point of learning Drew's correct, no rufftuff manly-man nonsense.

The small-town weirdness is played for laffs but that's how it goes in mysteries of a cozy bent. I didn't think any of them were incredible. Unlikely, but that's bog-standard nowadays; rolling with it was fine, especially as they were all adding their bits to the shoe-leather-wearing investigation part as well as fleshing out the history of Drew's late auntie Hannah, their former neighbor who also had paranormal abilities that quite famously failed her once...and that was all the town needed.

Drew needs to redeem her aunt's memory. Nick needs a resolved cold case. Their work styles mesh better than is the norm in cozy mysteries. It's clear we're going to get a series, sooner rather than later please, because the paranormal edge is neither overemphasized nor played for humor...that's all in the town's responses to it.

Drew's shop having a pweshus cutesypooh c-a-t was the loss of the fifth star.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES, even Kirkus likes it!

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES
WARREN READ
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption.

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

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My Review: A grandparent who goes into battle for a dead child's child is a story that resonates with old-man me. By far my favorite iteration of it is Let Him Go by Larry Watson. This one's a close second.

Red Miller has the relatively common parenting experience of looking at a child's mate choice and thinking, "did I do *that* crappy a job?" Another not-uncommon event is the child whose own child is hidden from the parent for complicated emotional reasons, or uncomplicated practical ones; there are a million ways a family can fall apart, and Red's living through one or two...if the Idaho deputy on the other end of the phone telling him about his daughter's involvement in a fatal accident and subsequent disappearance, he's feeling like there's a few of her steps down the road of irresponsibility that he is due to catch up on.

Seeing everything unravel is likely a very common experience among the older people, no matter how hard one works there's often enough something that comes along to muck it all up. His wife's early death, his subsequent descent into private grief, his daughter's youthful rebellion, all leading to this moment...well, the details are likely different but you probably know these emotional blows from having endured them.

Now, of course, he has to head east into territory he doesn't know, isn't excited to get to know, and meet people he could do without ever having known existed to see what the hell he has to do to get this mess cleaned up, see if he can actually find a future with his family after losing the heart of it, losing his heart, and making every last mistake he could for the past five years right again.

The quiet, compact...just over 250pp...story is never mired down in the gloopy goofy introspection that can get so tiring when what you want to read is a story not a mea-maxima-culpa. Instead we see the life that Red Miller wants is not the one he has because he's doing a lot of work in the present to create a different one. It's so refreshing; it shows Author Read really took on board the lessons of writing his first book, The Lyncher in Me, about his appalling family secret. It's best to set the scene, say the least possible number of words, and let we-the-reader think it over and decide what we're going to do with it all.

Well applied, that lesson; it's made a terrific story into a pleasure to read.

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, truth told, action called for

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides
SAUL WILLIAMS
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, avaiable now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams explores how artists today must respond to systemic violence and injustice—in the words of Paul Robeson, by choosing sides.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is Williams’ clear-eyed exploration of the role of the artist in these times by answering the question: what radicalized you? He answers by examining how his role models—writers and artists, from Amiri Baraka to local musicians in Brazilian bars to Palestinian hip-hop heads—have responded to imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. Riffing on Paul Robeson’s famous declaration, Williams builds a provocative case for why today’s artists cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice. “We need songs that crumble empires,” he writes, “films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship.”

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question, What does poetry have to do with politics?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What does poetry have to do with anything, demands my inner poetry-averse Philistine. What all art has to do with politics, answers reasonable me.

Everything. Just as Reverend Jedidiah, here, says it does.

I was inclined to listen to the words of the Reverend from Sinners because everything he's saying in these barely-200 pages is so exactly what I'd like you to hear...art matters or "They" would not try to censor it, take it away from you, hide it if "They" don't approve of it...search engine enshittification is more complicated than a ban, but also flies under your radar and has built-in plausible deniability.

You are what you consume. Go light on the empty, sweet-tasting, pretty but pointless stuff for a healthy mind/body/spirit (health is the enemy of bullshit on every measurable axis). Reverend Jedidiah says so too, out of his complicated mind and mouth. I'm very impressed by Author Saul's meditations on the promises and beauties in spirituality being bait (my word) for the hook of obedience and deference to authority. It's deeply saddening, but true as even a brief glance at the world shows you. Taking sides in the culture wars is often hardest for people who see the misuse of their source of joy and consolaion in the world. So much of the noise in the world is, and always has been, intended to make it hard for you to focus for very long. Breaking through the noise is best done by listening to it, looking for what it's pushing you to accept. Advertising, for example, is pushing you to accept the "blessing" of capitalism...look at this maginificent abundance of stuff! see what an amazing life you can have!...without looking at the wages no one can live on, the cost of the plastic it's wrapped in, the fact that it's flimsy and will break. Begin your journey at church...why would Jesus say it's fine to rip kids away from parents, to take fathers from their families to be shipped away not even where they came from and might have needed to escape, when a huge part of the christian message is "love thy neighbor?" All very obvious. But the noise, the shouting, the struggle to afford all the brummagem gauds makes the obvious recede into shadows so it won't bother you with its obviousness.

"They" don't need to lie to you if "They" can distract you from the stone-cold obvious truth.

Author Saul follows in the footsteps of truly great souls, from Paul Robeson to his mother. He distills into readable, relatable prose the truths that can feel threatening to acknowledge, accept, and act on: You, no matter how "small" or "insignificant" you think you are, must take sides. You can't afford not to. There is too much at stake, too much happening that we can not let go on as it is.

Take comfort in reading Author Saul's wisdom. No, it's not easy. It never is.

It's necessary instead.

SWITZY, Emma Cline's latest and a Booker-longlisted smack in the face

SWITZY
EMMA CLINE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlist will be announced on September 22.

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man’s last pilgrimage, from the New York Times best selling author of The Girls and The Guest.

A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.

A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.

This is what David Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.

His final destination is Zurich.

David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.

As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

And maybe it made sense that this task proved so difficult, that the attempt to write the letter only underscored the necessity of the letter: things really had become unmanage-able. Other words for it: unbearable; meaning-less.

Disconcerting, this mental ice floe, populated only by David, floating off into the polar darkness. He was some-times a figure standing on the shore, watching himself float away, and sometimes he was on the ice floe, losing sight of land.

The ice floe-he had tried to write about that. In the letter.

In his strange new child's handwriting, these fat, scratched-out blocks.

The ice floe. The white room in the brain. How he knew when he was smiling and it was an error.

This dark hour, this loneliness.

Fear which lacked a shape. A dark, crumpled coat thrown carelessly into the corner of an unfamiliar room.

It's not the creeping horror of the smartphone-reading generation's inability to see the meaning-carrying blocks of text I still call paragraphs this time, it's the unmooring, the complexification of a dementia-raddled mind that has these single-line statements progressing down the page exactly as David's mind progresses down the legibility scale. He can parse less and less information, understand fewer and fewer ideas and concepts as his mind decouples meaning and experience.

A life lived amid the intense and complicated whirl of global finance. A life lived without awareness of what he was undervaluing, like most of us lead. A life that, now that he's losing his Self to the unraveling of dementia, he's decided to end...seemingly without reference to anyone else, a final act of solipsistic capitalism as there are no other stakeholders left in his world.

An uncomfortable indictment of the entirety of the life he's choosing to end.

It's a story I read in fits and starts because I kept feeling the need to step away from David so I could (re)gain perspective on him; is he, was he, only ever a monster or has he lost the parts of his self-constructed identity that were warm and inviting and needing and needed to the ravages now making him feel the need to leave his world?

I never found an answer. I wonder if he did, and so disliked what he found that assisted dying sounded like a way out of the emotional reckoning that is the end of life.

It felt to me that it would be well within his character to choose that last for those selfish reasons. I support his decision, no matter how he arrived at it, because he like all of us deserves to choose what kind of ending he gets. But wow...to leave it until you've decided you're going to die to make the amends you should have made long ago?

So very solipsistic, fearful, cowardly, and typical.

A fascinating story richly deserving a place in the Booker Prize conversation for this year. Also deserving of praise for contributing to multiple societal conversations we very, very badly need to have.

CHOSEN FAMILY: A Novel, Aussie lesbian-led found-family with all its loving flaws

CHOSEN FAMILY: A Novel
MADELEINE GRAY
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant and irreverently funny novel about one gorgeously messy friendship-feud-unrequited-love-affair set in Sydney across eighteen years.

Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd, and friendless. When they meet on the brutal battlefield that is their posh all girls’ high school during their first year there, both their lives are changed forever. From school, to university, to careers, Nell and Eve’s relationship is a life raft that is also a poison apple that is also a Medusan stare, frozen in time.

When the passion, guilt, shame, and joy that perpetually twists and turns between them finally implodes, Nell abruptly walks away, leaving Eve alone at the helm of the gloriously unorthodox family they’ve built with their seven-year-old daughter, Lake. Eve finds herself left wondering: Can the wounds of adolescent betrayal ever really heal? Can we ever really understand what’s going on in someone else’s head? And what’s love got to do, got to do with it?

Written with Gray’s characteristic big-heartedness and dark wit, Chosen Family is a queer modern classic that reminds us again and again that sometimes the most fulfilling and life-saving relationships are the ones that are the hardest to define.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Who among us did not think "I'll do it right" when imagining parenthood?

No one does it right.

Kids hate their parents because they lack the perspective to understand what comes with the job of parenting, partnering, sustaining all of this all the time under all conditions in all moods with no meaningful support. This is true of all classes—genders—wealth levels.

You as a parent have one thing under your control: What your kids hate you for. Choose wisely.

Sound impossible? Of course it does, because it is, always was, and insofar as I know anything about humanity, always will be. So we read about how badly others fuck it up, or about how they say they didn't. It's all about getting a hit of fellow feeling that SOMEone is getting wronger than you. A book like this one is an excellent source of that schadenfreude. I might be screwing my kids up but it's got to be better than raising a kid with someone you're in love with but can't tell her or make a move on her to show your love's more than of the mind but only if she's willing but she can't do that so neither can you.

Talk about modeling dysfunction!

It's a story that's very much rooted in urban life, no one in small-town Anglophonia is going to do this; it's a very Australian story because the cultural references root it there...which facet of the story I quite enjoyed, though I'll bet Aussies reading it are wondering how dated/anachronistic (set fifteen or so years ago from when it was published and when I'm reading it) references made into the book. It's thus an advantage to read it in the US, a bit like reading Zazie dans le métro in English is appreciating a classic and in French is "they thought this was funny in 1959?"

Eve, one of our PoV moms, is a student making a good go of intellectualizing the queer experience in endless study and reading. "Look over there!" I kept wanting to shout, pointing at Nell. "A queer person to experimentally test your theories on who's DYING for a chance!!" But the thing about theorizing is that it keeps the messy, smelly reality of bodies at bay. The incredibly messy emotional realities of being human aren't susceptible to the keeping-at-bay delusion for long. Our framing device is Eve writing to Nell after a long estrangement, a letter unsent, atonement unsought; Eve's not a great one for introspection so her missed opportunities are legion whether past or present. Moving among the times of the family's life works well enough as a means of getting us to the story's heart; it's not a technique I love for itself, but Author Gray has the skill to use it well enough that I didn't make scoffing noises and slam the Kindle shut.

If you like Sally Rooney's messy stories about messy people whose love problems are lack of honesty with their communication and a *serious* need to see a therapist, only want it queer and Australian, your story awaits. I think most readers of "contemporary/women's fiction" in the Industry's reductive and condescending marketing terminology will enjoy the experience enough to make it worth their time and treasure. I was glad to see the back of Eve, and that seemed to me to be both the problem with and the explanation of my compulsion to finish the story.

People who are hard to love are no less..possibly more...interesting because of it; but interacting with them IRL is more exhausting than reading about them in doses we-the-reader get to set. Let Author Gray do the heavy lifting of living with the family, and enjoy the way it feels to leave without hurt feelings.

CONFLUENCE, our queer elders show us how they did it in times more dangerous than today

CONFLUENCE
ALEX TURNER with Lucian Childs
Arsenal Pulp Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate, deeply moving queer coming-of-age novel that evokes '50s small-town life and the surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall '60s

In 1956, lonely teenager Teddy is drawn to the water and woods surrounding his small town, where he meets bad boy Wade and becomes overwhelmed by his attraction to him. During the rapturous early period of their friendship, the two range over the area’s mountains and waterways before falling out after high school over Teddy’s sexuality. In the years following their separation, Teddy—now going by Ted—struggles to live openly as a gay man, finding and losing lovers at parties, dance clubs, and cruising spots in a surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall gay Vancouver. He is befriended by a lively crew of eccentrics—a new chosen family—who aid him in finding fulfillment both as a gay man and as an artist. Returning to his hometown nearly a decade later, Ted must decide whether or not to reunite with the one who once meant so much to him: the sexy and mercurial Wade.

Confluence is a collaboration between late author Alex Turner and his husband, Lucian Childs. Drawing on his sixty-year history with his beloved West Coast home, Turner wrote much of this beautifully rendered novel before he passed away in 2019. Childs, an award-winning author himself, completed the work, a novel that is simultaneously poetic, humorous, and exuberantly down to earth.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Exuberant" is a very good word to use with this novel's affect in mind. It's inherent, in a funny way, in the idea of coming of age; it feels a lot harder and more like a chore as you're doing it than the reality from the outside, and later the memory of it, report.

Teddy and Wade, misfits in their small town of origin, do what misfits most often do. They find common cause, they make a mutual defense pact against the world...in this case more like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact than the Kellogg–Briand Pact, one ending when they began a war and the other still in force. Teddy's attraction to Wade is different than the usual alliance of convenience only neither knows it until it's been the glue between them for quite a while.

It's quite a common experience, the different relationships/same people one. As always there's an event that brings out the need to discuss what each feels as adolescence presses its hormonal buttons. Wade, being straight and it being 1956, doesn't respond very kindly or acceptingly towards Teddy, hastening his departure for the big city of Vancouver.

Life, as is its wont, happens; Teddy becomes Ted, a good-looking young queer-about-town exuberantly exploring the joys of sex and the consolations of friendship. It's a story I've read oh so many times, set in a place I've never been but recognize as a cognate with my natal place San Francisco, my coming-of-age place Austin, and my home Manhattan. It's the island of safety in an unsafe world.

That safety, the sense of it being okay to be yourself, is what makes this such a magical read. Its hormonal passages aren't lacking in number or excitement. Its more important idea, though, is the safety to explore the hormonal drives because there's a safe place to do it, albeit still without any legal protection; but a loving group of likeminded people to cushion the fall from the heights of Love and the pangs of loneliness that follow the ends of things. That's honestly more important in the long run.

Of course a novel will always need resolutions to big unresolved threads in a life. Reality doesn't impose such conditions on us. We-the-reader need to know, though, what happened to Wade who stayed behind.

We find out.

It was a pleasure to be with these young gay men in their youth, distant by decades from my own youth and most of a century removed from the present. It is vital to have these words of witness from someone who was there to understand it from the inside, who lived its reality and thought it good to bring those moments to life for us who followed in time. I hope those younger than I am will find those words, realize how similar humans are to each other, how much different their own time is from the story's time and hopefully to find those differences contain mostly improvements.

We live in a time of miracles being commonplace. Appreciating that is a great way to honor those who worked for a world better than their own to come into being.

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC, two halves make a funny-shaped whole

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC
ARUNI KASHYAP
HarperVia (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: India's right-wing horrible human beings are enough like our US versions that I was stressed for Rohit from the get-go; I was also reminded that au fond, humans are not different anywhere on this globe. The same insatiable desire to control others in every way, the same pressure to conform or else, the same kinds of violent resistance and repression, for reasons only cosmetically different.

The reason I'm not offering perfect ratings and warbles of delight for this clear-sighted takedown of the repression and conformity machine is simple: Dhruv's a bastard. Rohit needs to get over his addiction to an emotionally unavailable man, and that story is *uncomfortably* close to home. It's all on Rohit, of course, Dhruv's uninterest could've been more kindly expressed but that is not incumbent on any of us to come up with in the moment. Rohit losing himself in the pursuit of distraction is deeply relatable. His choices are very interesting to me because they're further evidence of human nature being consistent across cultures.

Where the mess that is the authoritarian horror India lives under (and the US seems to be rushing to emulate) takes hold of the narrative, the second half becomes more a political argument against authoritarianism while backgrounding Rohit's emotional life. The shift in tome is always going to be tricky to navigate; I didn't feel it was all that well handled. I was taken from one focus, on the intimate life and choices of Rohit, into another, the violent and vicious reactionary response of a right-wing regime to gay men.

Both were very involving, though a reader looking for more of the first story might not like being catapulted into the second much. Readers interested in the second stiry might have preferred it to be more than just lightly foreshadowed from the beginning. It's this dichotomy between the (roughly) halves that stalled me out at four stars. There are that many because I really liked and invested in Rohit and his happiness. Sure, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and demand he get on with finding someone who deserves his love. But he really deserves that kind of happy ending. (Other kinds too but permaybehaps on the page in my imagined other story...not this unsteamy one.)

A successful read for all my quibbly niggles, a story I'd enjoy seeing more of, should a follow-on tale eventuate. That ain't the most common end to a review I write about a book that frustrated me!

THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes, fun and relevant and undemanding

THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes
XABI MOLIA (tr. Alexander Hertich)
Dalkey Archive (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The ugly side of superheroes

What if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?

The superheroes’ first missions—combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims—are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair with another’s wife. Another questions following the government’s imperialist agenda. Meanwhile the public carps on social media.

Molia takes our fascination with superheroes and adds a cutting portrayal of contemporary social mores to create an entertaining and disturbing work with deep dystopian underpinnings.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember the 1995 one-hit wonder "(What If God Was) One of Us?" It was a monster hit around the world. Its central question was one I think troubles people; it makes us all wonder why her and not me, why is there such an unfair randomness to divinity, what Greeks explained as someone being a demigod like Achilles or Herakles.

What we now call "superheroes."

In the labyrinth of the human soul, the superhero is tucked into a corner along the same stretch of hallway as the demigod. It's about wanting the anthropomorphic Divine to share more substance with us, not seeing the genuinely miraculous, divine acts of creation we interact with daily: my meds, the ones that keep my blood free of oversupplies of uric acid, the ones that keep mmy heart beating in normal rhythm, the computer I'm typing on, the phone you're reading this on, the software, the microchips...all designed by a human, all manufactured by human-designed machines...miracles surround us, the divine in us engendered them. But we use our miracles profligately. The computer and internet that give us access to the immense body of knowledge that's enabled wonders also gave us social media and streaming news.

I think of the first examples as Divine, the last as what we humans do when our reach exceeds our grasp...or demigods those superheroes come to life. Philosophical 3am maunderings aside, the novel The Firsts uses our overreach to explain our grasp to us. The ordinary people with superpowers are observed, as we all are, and reported on, scrutinized as celebrities are as part of their bargain for our attention. It's not the newest wrinkle in the communal brain, the soap operas that are comic books have pulled this idea out every so often. I'm not blaming or running down the book or its author, no idea is totally new or it would be ignored or rejected. Delivering dystopian stories can't really add a burden of novelty onto the already painful message of self-examination's fruits.

Science fiction's used the media-snippets (notably, prize-baitingly The Sheep Look Up, about fifty-five years old) and for centuries before that epistolary novels (Dracula for one) fake that same sense of immediacy and intimacy of perception, for generations. updating it for newly available tech underlines the basic reality of the human desire to share...willingly or not...our fellows' and our betters' deepest depths. As long as they're glowed up, glossy, and either unthreatening or in some way humiliating to them but never to us.

It's not fresh, then, the format of this story's delivery, and it obeys all these rules. It's French so its reactions to two superheroes' scandalous infidelity is more gleeful in tone than the US puritanical moralizing judgment, but really what we have here is not groundbreaking fiction or social observation or advancement in techniques of writing.

But it's a damn fun day or reading as people, ordinary people, grapple with the tweaked superpowers we all factually possess (you read that list-paragraph above, right?); if you go into this read expecting a good time that's not as demanding of your concentration and thinking as most stories from this publisher are, you can enjoy a well-told tale in a format not new or fresh but well-used in the story's service.