We think it’s a fair bet that, as readers of The Offing, you’re not looking for beach reads. Whether this summer finds you on the fire escape or the front porch, the subway or the shore, you’re likely on the look-out — like us — for deep reading.
So we’ve pulled together this month’s most compelling new fiction (and a few ICYMI titles from this spring). Some harrowing, others comical, many fabulist, these works delve into questions of family, memory, identity, and the art of literature itself.
Now that’s our idea of of summer reading.
July Releases
Oreo by Fran Ross (New Directions)
“A pioneering, dazzling satire . . .Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.”
Fran Ross (1935-1985) grew up in Philadelphia. She wrote Oreo while working as a proofreader and journalist, and then moved to Los Angeles to write for Richard Pryor. Read The Offing’s excerpt of Oreo, and the introduction to the newly released edition by Danzy Senna, which appeared in The New Yorker in May.
Confession of the Lioness by Mia Couto (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
“A dark, poetic mystery about the women of the remote village of Kulumani and the lionesses that hunt them. Told through two haunting, interwoven diaries, [the novel] reveals the mysterious world of Kulumani, an isolated village in Mozambique whose traditions and beliefs are threatened when ghostlike lionesses begin hunting the women who live there.”
Mia Couto, born in Beira, Mozambique, is one of the most prominent writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa. He was awarded the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and short-listed for the Man Booker International prize in 2015.
Speak by Louisa Hall (Ecco Press)
“A thoughtful, poignant novel that explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence — illuminating the very human need for communication, connection, and understanding. In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive.”
Louisa Hall is a poet, novelist, and writing teacher. She holds a PhD in literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Listen to an NPR interview with Hall about her new novel.
Olivay by Deborah Reed (Lake Union Publishing)
“Olivay, widowed for a year and sleepwalking through life, meets Henry by chance. She takes him to her Los Angeles loft, thinking it will just be for the night. But the following morning, bombs detonate across the city; mayhem and carnage fill the streets; and her loft is covered in broken glass and her own blood…Olivay explores the wreckage of loss and the collision of grief, desire, and terror in its aftermath.”
Deborah Reed is the author of Things We Set on Fire and Carry Yourself Back to Me. She also writes under the pen name Audrey Braun.
A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions)
“An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short ‘history’ of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of ‘portable literature.’ The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico García Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O’Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious.”
The Paris Review says of Spanish-born Vila-Matas that “he pioneered one of contemporary literature’s most interesting responses to the great Modernist writers.” Read a consideration of his work, along with other surrealist fiction writers, at The New Republic.
Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi (New Directions)
“Basharat and his family are Indian Muslims who have relocated to Pakistan, but who remain deeply steeped in the nostalgia of pre-Partition life in India. Through Mirages of the Mind’s absurd anecdotes and unforgettable biographical sketches — which hide the deeper unease and sorrow of the family’s journey from Kanpur to Karachi — Basharat emerges as a wise fool, and the host of this unique sketch comedy. From humorous scenes in colonial north India, to the heartbreak and homesickness of post-colonial life in Pakistan, Mirages of the Mind forms an authentic portrait of life among South Asia’s Urdu speakers, rendered beautifully into English by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad.”
Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi is the author of four books, and has received the Hilal-i-Imtiaz and the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, two of the most coveted arts awards in Pakistan. Read a review of the novel in The Express Tribune, which calls the author “one of Pakistan’s greatest living writers.”
The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch (Harper)
“A masterful literary talent explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art. In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions—and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own. As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends […] to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question.”
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the memoir The Chronology of Water and the novel Dora: A Headcase. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Iowa Review, Mother Jones, Ms., the Sun, the Rumpus, PANK, Zyzzyva, Fiction International, and other publications. She teaches writing and literature in Portland, Oregon. Read a review of the novel in the Boston Globe, which calls it “an intensely corporal, potently feminist, tenaciously written work as alert to animal resilience as to the capacity for bruised and battered suffering, for desire, for ecstasy.”
ICYMI June Releases
Moods by Yoel Hoffman (New Directions)
“Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods is flooded with feelings about his family, losses, loves, the soul’s hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee, with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor.”
Yoel Hoffmann, born in Brasow, Romania in 1937, is a citizen of Israel, and is Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the U. of Haifa. Critic David Ulin described him as “not just a good writer but a great one, with the ability to find, in the moment-to-moment dislocation of daily existence, epiphanies of revelatory force. What Hoffmann has achieved is a kind of magic.” Read more about Hoffman’s life and work here.
The Loved Ones by Mary-Beth Hughes (Atlantic Monthly Press)
“In The Loved Ones, Hughes takes her gimlet eye deep into the secret places between men and women to give an incisive portrayal of one family’s struggle to stay together against stacked odds of deception, adultery, and loss. Years in the making, this is Hughes’ astonishing and compulsively readable break out, a sweepingly cinematic novel of relationships defined by an era of glamour and decadence.”
Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wavemaker II and Double Happiness. Read a review of The Loved Ones in Bookforum, which calls it “emotionally raw but ultimately elegant…a cold weapon of a book.”
Beautiful Mutants & Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury)
“Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy’s surreal first novel, introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of grotesques-among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s. In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective.”
Deborah Levy is the author Swimming Home (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl, the story collection Black Vodka, and the essay Things I Don’t Want to Know. Born in South Africa, she lives in London, England. Read a review of her work, and an interview in which she reflects back on her career and the importance of literature by women, both in The Guardian.
ICYMI May Releases
In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar (Knopf)
“These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere — and, sometimes, turning back again.”
Born in the Philippines and raised in Bahrain and the United States, Mia Alvar graduated from Harvard College and the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Listen to an NPR interview with Alvar, and read the rave review in the New York Times, which declares the collection full of “finely wrought shocks, delivered in exacting prose, reverberate without easy resolution.”
Lifted by the Great Nothing by Karim Dimechkie (Bloomsbury)
“A startlingly graceful, and often hilarious, coming-of-age story about the lengths we go to preserve the untruths we live by. With its poignant relationships, unsettling misadventures, and surprising love stories, it is a touching and devastating portrait of a young man coming to terms with his country’s — and his own — violent past.”
Karim Dimechkie was a Michener Fellow. Listen to an NPR review of his debut novel. Read a lovely piece he wrote about his pitbull and his manic-depression for the New York Times.
Mislaid by Nell Zink (Ecco Press)
“A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice — the author of the acclaimed The Wallcreeper — about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.”
Nell Zink is the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Wallcreeper. Read a review of her work in The Independent, which calls her “ a writer of astonishing verve and aptitude.”
