BEACON PRESS, OCTOBER 2022, 344 PP. In the second year of my fiction MFA, just after quarantine lifted, I was sitting in the park with a few of my classmates. We were reacclimating to each other, and all the conversation felt like it was on stilts, ready to tip over into topics we might have avoided in mixed company a year ago: death, race. A classmate (white, male) squinted into the sun and complained
Harper, November 2022, 224 pp. We All Want Impossible Things, the first novel for adults by Catherine Newman, traces two best friends—Ash and Edi—in their last few weeks together as Edi dies of ovarian cancer. We open on Edi, Ash, and Edi’s husband learning that there is nothing more the doctors can do and that there are no beds available in inpatient hospice. Home care is out of the question; Edi’s young child has been
BLOOMSBURY, DECEMBER 2022, 419 pp. I’ve always found the question of what it is that a character wants very boring and annoying. I’ve heard it asked many times in creative writing workshops when someone, usually a woman (and sometimes that woman is me), has handed in a story where there are lots of pretty sentences that convey a deep emotionality but where nothing in particular happens. The general consensus is that that’s not enough
Louise Bourgeois, Fallen Woman (Femme Maison), 1946-47. Private collection, New York. Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Maison, 1946-47. Private collection, New York. I DIDN’T KNOW a painting could make me feel as if I were falling. It happened for the first time when I saw an untitled 1948 painting by Louise Bourgeois in the current exhibit of her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A vivisection of a seven-story apartment building, it suggests both an internal
Bloomsbury Publishing, 128 pp Oakland-based artist Wendy MacNaughton spent 2017 at the Zen Project Hospice in San Francisco, sitting with residents, listening to them reflect on death. She wrote down what she heard and drew what she saw. “Drawing is a way we can look closely at something we might otherwise be afraid to look at,” is one lesson in How to Say Goodbye. MacNaughton gave away the first edition of two hundred books, asking
PENGUIN, OCTOBER 2022, 352 PP. A DYSTOPIA IS an imaginary place where neither you nor I would want to dwell, for it dramatically extends the most painful and dangerous features of the present moment. As such, a dystopia warns us to change the present while we can. The imagined United States of Celeste Ng’s new novel, Our Missing Hearts, has gone through “The Crisis,” a long economic depression that spawned social disruption and crime.
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, JANUARY 2023, 176 PP. NO ONE KNOWS why they remember anything. Even the details of a disaster, like your time as a hostage, or the hurricane that swept away your house, may be shrouded in protective amnesia, while you can precisely describe the insignia on a set of buttons you saw when you were four. As Janet Malcolm puts it in her posthumous memoir, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory,
