YOUR NAME HERE, well...mine was, is yours?

YOUR NAME HERE
HELEN DeWITT & ILYA GRIDNEFF
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman‘s Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start.

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

My Review: A literary landscape infested with "pullulating DaVinci Codeed masses" decried, a celebration of Arabic language and literature "unthinkable fifty, even ten years ago", a six hundred-page high-concept literary jape that does gymnastics sophisticated enough to impress the literati and cow the middlebrow into quiescence...did I get it? does anyone get it?...this will gatekeep the hell out of Literature and that's a shame. It's fun. I know a lot of people will bounce off the idea of first, second (ugh) *and* third-person narratives in thirty pages, still less the nods and winks to multitudes of novels, writers, stories, movements, that form the matter behind this book. It's a lot. It's meant to be a lot. It's not making the read easy for you.

In 2026 you have immense resources, all free to use and instantly available 24/7/365. to follow rabbit holes to look stuff up. I love that fact, I enjoy that experience; that means I enjoy this read. (I'm not calling it a story, it's not one, it's either no story at all or skatey-eight skabillion of them.) If you're worried someone is Judging You for your uneducated, unsophisticated take on Your Name Here, you're right—they are doing that; turn it around. Judge them for being so snobbish. For making this complicated, convoluted read a critical darling...question their motives, impugn their legitimacy to judge what is or is not Literature. Challenge gatekeepers; good ones, who want to protect standards and increase others' knowledge bases, rise to the challenge to say *why*; snobs sneer and walk away.

Both responses are valid and supported...somewhere...in the text.

I'm not hopeful that masses of y'all will be rushing to get your ten-dollar ebooks of this title. I realize what I've said so far is going to break some brains, tire some eyes, and fail to ignite the fuel of fun that lies inside this chunky book. It's a commitment of time and energy. It's arch, the way Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman (two books I deeply enjoyed) were arch: playing very complex games with The Rules℠, like pretending Pynchon and Italo Calvino aren't difficult to read, will always put some readers...intelligent readers, people who love the act of reading as much as anyone can...right off a book.

I'm hopeful you'll give the book a try. Take it slowly, read it in chunks. Stop wherever it changes tense, for example, and come back later. Try, in other words, different ways to relate to reading a novel. This is a novel that can reward you making that effort if anything you read can.

I've been gate-kept out of offering my opinion on this read because so many have praised it immoderately, and so many have slagged it off so intently for the same reasons others have praised it. That makes writing about a book in any kind of helpful (or intended to be helpful) mode an invitation to those who do not agree with one's opinion to get mouthy. That's tiresome and tiring, and I really did not want to get into it.

I read the most fulsome and the most dismissive reviews I could find. It was amazing to me the precise same book I read, described in similar terms to each other, could lead to such very different personal conclusions. It made me feel the work was well worth calling still more attention to, because this dichotomy of opinion can't be solely about craft; it's about the point of the read.

I found it to be a worthwhile use of my shrinking supply of eyeblinks. I can't give it a perfect rating, I was never panting to get back to it or chewing over some insight until long into the night. It's snobby in the same way I am. It's beautiful in the way I resonate to but know others won't. It's too long.

And I would read it again.

HYPER: A Novel, the personal cost of being made stateless in a capitalist world

HYPER: A Novel
AGRI ISMAÏL
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A cutting, hypermodern saga of money, family, and survival for fans of Zadie Smith, Patricia Lockwood, and Mohsin Hamid.

When Rafiq Kermanj, founder of the Kurdish Communist Party, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his conservative wife Xezal and three children, they suffer the shame of penury and migration layered on Kurdish statelessness.

Agri Ismaïl's unforgettable debut novel follows the lives of Rafiq's children and their increasingly desperate relationship to money. Siver, the only daughter, escapes into an unhappy marriage in Baghdad before fleeing to raise her daughter as a single mother in Dubai. Mohammed, the eldest, stays in London to climb the unforgiving ladder of the financial sector. Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street.

Siver's world is presented in sparse fragments of contemporary auto-fiction, freely jumping from past to present; Mohammed's in a hysterical realism reflecting London after the stock market crash; and Laika's in a kinetic prose that emulates the speed and rhythms of the internet, a new topic always a click away.At once a love letter to the systems novel and a subversion of the family saga, Hyper uses the unsettled nature of the Kurdish diaspora to capture the dislocations of life under capitalism. Equal parts heartfelt family story and razor-sharp satire, Hyper is an ambitious, thrilling articulation of life in the twenty-first century, marking debut author Agri Ismaïl as one of the most perceptive and exciting new voices in contemporary literature.

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

My Review: An intense read, one that demands you consider the setting, the actors, and the milieu of each section before the read can fully settle in; the rhythm is there but you'll stumble a bit until you find it. It's surreal, it's non-linear, it's got the modernist quality of meeting its characters in their own emotional reality. It asks a lot of the reader in its three hundred fifty-ish pages.

The aftermath of the 2008 crisis was brutal. The richest got hugely richer. It's clear to the reader that the eldest Hardi son, Mohammed, is fully on board with this. He's in a trading firm that makes (until now) the richest richer. His PoV is a funny parodic echo of how those rich Brits speak; you know they would look down on him for his antecedents (an impoverished former Communist Party founder father? my dear...), for his non-U vocabulary and choices of subject. It's fitting that we meet him in David-Lodge-ian prose.

Sive, the only Hardi daughter, isn't thriving. Her convenient marriage to a wealthy Iraqi man collapsed when he decided to take a second wife. She left, she took her child and went to Dubai where she's resentfully eking out a living selling luxury goods to the massive winners of the 2008 collapse. She never really reflects on how her upbringing as the stateless child of social-change losers is being repeated in her own life. Siver reflects, in very spare almost elegiac prose on how women do not control their fates, how men are selfish, hoe children need need need but offer little, and so on and so forth. "You didn't love the man you left so where's the problem?" is my question for her. Not addressed, not in her awareness, only the sense (inherited from her genuinely aggrieved mother) that living her life cut into bits that suit a man not herself is unfair. It certainly is, Siver, and worth fighting not running from into a grey, cold fog of victimhood.

Laika, named for Laika, is probably closest to his bitter, defeated father in outlook. His world is as close to completely contactless as he can make it, like his economically and spiritually impoverished father who barely scrapes by as another stateless immigrant to the land whose brutal, ugly imperialism sowed the seeds of his bitter harvest. It's a tiny, tightly bounded world he's set up in New York City, only opening into the whole of the internet when he's online living a life that suits him. It's all funded by, well, hacking; using the system that's held so many in thrall, under misused power, for generations: he's used a shadow algorithm to trade in tandem with Goldman Sachs. Don't laugh...it's a personal debacle of biblical proportions. It's all told in the most difficult-to-read (for me anyway) prose that tightly focuses on Laika's narrowness and stuckness.

A Communist-Party founding dad with a religious wife produced these hypercapitalist, money-obsessed children. While we spend little time with Rafiq, we see in his fractured family the echoes of bombs exploded before he, let alone they, were born. The cruel and callous world of Empire (anyone's) broke these humans' spirits each in a different way. The hammer blows of being denied your identity as a group, a member of a group, or a person with agency to determine your own course all play out in Rafiq and his family. It does not end happily for them.

Author Ismaïl is a lawyer by training, those people whose profession is predicated on the ability to craft facts into a narrative that persuades others to buy into it. This is a very lawyerly novel, in the best way. It takes information (can't call them facts, exactly, when they're about fictional characters) that can be seen multiple ways...Siver's a gold-digger, Mohammed's a pathetic wannabe, Laika's a solipsistic nihilist...and gives them dimensionality, affords them nuance, build their bases out to admit of different analyses and impressions. Rafiq and Xezal never had a connection worth the name, now he's a downtrodden prole without resources...like the ones he wanted to save...she heads back to her home without him because she can. Come to find out she's not going home. It isn't home, the place; it's home, the state of being, that Xezal and Rafiq never had, never made. It's no surprise their Western-raised kids looked outside themselves to find a core strong enough to build on. And no surprise the entire edifice of family, built on slender reeds and sand, collapsed so spectacularly.

A powerfully affecting examination of the generational consequences stemming from capitalist, imperialist destruction, erroneously called "progress" and "stat-building" to distract from its cruelty and exclusion. I wished I'd had easier transitions between styles of storytelling used in recounting the siblings' life histories; it's a quibble, but it's the reason I can't finish out that fifth star. Just too big a ka-THUNK as I crossed each border.

PATCHWORK, excellent title for what I hope you'll see with refreshed and restored pleasure in Literature

PATCHWORK
TOM COMITTA
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tom Comitta returns with a novella that is at once a picaresque quest for a stolen snuffbox and a marvel of literary découpage, equal parts love story, old-fashioned thriller, and absurdist romp.

To whom does a story belong? Who is its author? What is an author? Does it matter? These questions and more populate the subversive and audacious Patchwork, a comical tragedy that highlights the connective tissue that joins stories to themselves as well as to the grand history of storytelling itself. Celebrating the tropes and clichés of classical novels while simultaneously forging them into an original narrative, Patchwork ultimately shows us that the stories produced by hundreds of writers past—celebrated or obscure, reverent or hilarious, factual or fantastical—may, in the hands of a master, become a single, seamless whole.

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

My Review: Every so often it's very helpful to one's mood to see Literature cavorting naked, ignoring your shocked gaze. It's a little like finding those nudes of your grandfather, young and virile, displaying for whoever it was that took them. (DON'T ASK.)

Tom Comitta's displaying Literature's bare backside as he remixes bits and pieces of what others wrote to serve new meanings and explore ideas of authorship, of Authority, by...ignoring it. Samuel Beckett made similar experiments sixty years ago. It's refreshing, to say the least, when someone looks afresh at shibboleths like Literature and sees what's under its underpants instead of reverently praising its court dresses.

The means by which he accomplishes this is to set Literature off on a snipe hunt for a snuff box. Ostensibly. Sorta-kinda, anyway, but we ain't goin' in a line, let alone a straight one, anywhere. There are lots and lots of side quests, points where you put your readerly trust in Author Comitta because if there's a path ahead you sure can't see it, and then lo! Behold the comic-strip of a walk home, made up entirely of Victorian artwork that decorated Dickens novels.

Does it make sense? Yes, but in a curious way, no. It's consistent with hunting, with being in motion; it's a metacommentary on research and its pleasures; it's not the only time we are required to double-clutch the non-synchromesh transmission of this assembled car of many manufacturer's bits to see if we're going to make it up the hill of narrative logic.

Don't count on it.

We're then thrust into an olfactory assessment of the walk that runs through Richard Price's evocative prose pertaining to a mall food court's assault on one's nose. That's really another sly rib-poke. A huge assortment of things made into one thing in our readerly framework just by the accident of proximity...like reading the thesaurus as a story, like using all the words you find there in chains of meaning.

It's short, barely two hundred pages. It's pungent and oddly elegant, see above. It's unusual, it's not country you necessarily have a map for at hand (unless you own a copy of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, that is). Patchwork is a perfect title for this patched-up piecework example of how to quilt, tat, and knit a whole thing, to sew bits into a refined Frankensteinian monster, that becomes a whole and separate artwork. It's a read that is animated in its parts by many heads and hands long-dead mostly forgotten and revived, reanimated, restored and repurposed by Tom Comitta.

He's done this before, The Nature Book came out from Coffee House Press in 2023 when his subject was the deathly serious issue of climate change; I didn't read it because, well, grim much? I'll go back and pick it up. The world needs fresh ways of thinking about things we already (think we) know. Perspectives like Comitta's are forceful reminders that knowledge, that what already exists in our heads, is not static, not fixed in one pattern, unless we force, allow, ignore it to be. I can't offer a perfect five because, in order to ask people for money, the publisher needs to tell them it's *about* something so a plot of sorts is crafted...I'd say grafted, in the sense skin is over a wound...and it really doesn't add a whole lot to the exercise.

Freshen up your readerly search engine by querying it in unusual ways. You're rewarded by surprises and pleasures not easy to find.