author:
CORMAC MCCARTHY

Fiction
287 pages
Vintage Books

Sometime in 2009, the image of Cormac McCarthy’s protagonist in his post-apocalypse novel, The Road, will belong to a haggard, bearded Viggo Mortensen, just as Anton Chigurh is forever and ever a great-looking Spanish actor. Read the book before this happens.

Lately, Armageddon and its ensuing dystopia have, by way of global warming, escalating poverty, and collapsing economic ideologies, been pushed to the forefront of our consciousness. McCarthy’s jarring vision of it offers no relief.

In The Road, we follow a boy and his father on a journey south. There are few humans left, the surviving majority of which are marauding cannibals. Though religion has been wiped out, the boy has had a black-and-white moral code thrust upon him by his father, who, in some circumstances, is in need of its reminding. Killing people is bad. Eating them is worse. But the two live to “carry the fire.” The father and son are “the good guys.”

purchase via IndieBound

author:
LILLI CARRE

Graphic Novel
80 pages
Fantagraphics

Fans of Lilli Carre will not be disappointed with her first long-form graphic novel, The Lagoon. This is a dark and rhythmic read with imagery that makes the reader feel damp, cold, and in need of a warm cup of coffee and the embrace of a loved one.

Stylistically illustrated in simple black ink, the novel tells the story of a young girl whose own life (along with those of her loved ones) has been touched by a mysterious monster with a penchant for singing melodies so enchanting, that quite a few have met their demise while experiencing its bliss. The songs of this mysterious swamp dwelling creature serve as not only common conversation amongst the family, but also as the soundtrack to their lives.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
TONY O’NEILL

Fiction
258 pages
Harper Perennial

Perspective is a tricky thing. The angle from which a narrator relates events can make a tremendous difference in how those events come across: are they lost in the moment, immediate reactions clinging to their descriptions? Or are they more contemplative, looking back across a span of months or years, shaking their head, wondering how exactly they found themselves in that particular situation? The unnamed narrator of Tony O’Neill’s Down and Out on Murder Mile describes in vivid detail the story of his second marriage: birthed by heroin, inhabiting the worst parts of London and Los Angeles, and traumatic for everyone involved. It’s the vantage point O’Neill takes that gives the novel its particular feel: neither entirely confessional nor encompassed by what it recounts, it follows an uneasy and unsettling pattern in recounting a series of emotionally wrenching events.

Down and Out’s protagonist—an expatriate musician residing on the West Coast as the novel opens—meets his second wife as she overdoses at a party. Six months later they marry, a relationship that provides the novel with its structure. It makes for one of the most horrific descriptions of a relationship I’ve read in a long time, in which barely repressed hatred sidles up alongside addiction, paranoia, neglect, and occasional spurts of blood via a misplaced syringe. It’s not an easy read, in part because O’Neill conveys his narrator’s growing loathing for his wife with virtually no distancing. These scenes in particular are ugly to read—although that’s pretty clearly the point.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
WILLIE NELSON
w/ MIKE BLAKELY

Fiction
256 pages
Center Street

This is the first novel by music legend Willie Nelson, co-authored with Mike Blakely. Willie built the town of Luck, Texas, which inspired A Tale Out of Luck.

Captain Hank Tomlinson, a well-respected and retired Texas Ranger, and the owner of the Broken Arrow Ranch, is the main character. He is also known as a famous Indian-fighting lawman.

The epic tale opens with a mysterious drifter, Wes James, a horse rustler, being found dead, bludgeoned and scalped. Hank believes this murder resembles a strange string of murders from his past. He is concerned there will be Indian uprisings—who else scalps? He and his son Jay Blue, together with his adopted brother Skeeter, who has never known his parents, are enmeshed in many dangerous confrontations, too big for them to handle alone.

Hank’s prized Kentucky mare has gone missing and he suspects she jumped the corral fence following El Grullo, a.k.a “The Steel Dust Gray.” This stallion is believed to be a ghost and, wait for it, is feared by the Comanche. Trailing the missing horse develops heightened excitement in the desert and in the meantime he tracks James’ killer, only to find the Comanche are not involved leading the mystery in other directions

purchase via IndieBound

author:
JOHN HATCHER

Fiction
368 pages
De Capo Press

Modern perception of the Black Death is probably shaped more by Monty Python’s “Holy Grail” than any college classroom. The Black Death: A Personal History seeks to change this. Hatcher, the chairman of the history faculty at the University of Cambridge and a multi-published expert on the topic, approaches the era with an unusual tactic: taking the remarkably-intact manorial rolls from the English town of Walsham from 1348-1350, Hatcher produces a story that blends the nonfiction into a narrative, describing the terrifying rise and fall of the plague from a very local perspective.

This approach does indeed make the Black Death personal, and the author does a particularly fine job at describing the pre- and post-plague society. As the plague approached people were led by the church to believe that the plague was a punishment for their sins and that only religious activities could spare people from suffering, but at the same time many questioned and lost their faith. As the plague waned the countryside suddenly found itself in the beginning of a social upheaval with unoccupied plots of land and a lack of willing workers as the lower classes realized their work was intensely more valuable than it had been only two years previously. Although these are basic facts taught in every class that touches upon the subject, turning these facts into a story does emphasize their significance.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA
translated by:
CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS

Fiction
83 pages
Melville House

The first paragraph of Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai effectively spells out the plot of the story we’re about to read, decisively naming the two central characters—essentially creating them out of the air before us—and setting out where they’ll be at narrative’s end. The prose is exceedingly formal and exceedingly conscious of itself: “Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia,” one passage begins. And throughout the novella, this inherently literary style reoccurs: for one stretch, the protagonist finds himself in the archetypally metafictional situation of transcribing a novel that does not, in actuality, exist.

All of this might seem affected to a fault, or even overly precious. It isn’t. Zambra isn’t doing this to demonstrate his own mastery of the form, or to tip his hat at the number of narrative wrinkles he’s able to introduce into the story. At its heart, Bonsai’s subjects are love and regret: its primary characters, Julio and Emilia, have a brief relationship and grow apart. Years later, one has died and the other is adrift, and while their relationship doesn’t seem to have the force of a great literary love, its passing has nonetheless left both broken in some essential way.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
CHRISTINE WEISER

Fiction
230 pages
PS Books

Christine Weiser is a talented writer.

Her first novel, Broad Street, conjures the early nineties Philadelphia bar-band scene so well that you feel the need to wash the smell of stale beer and cigarettes out of your hair after reading. The protagonist and her mates in the girl band Broad Street (get it?), all in their early to mid-twenties, abuse themselves handily, and the scenery is strewn with broken guitar strings, empties, discarded condoms, a mushroom trip gone awry and many, many hangovers.

Those who troll the Philly music world will know that Weiser has nailed locations like the Khyber and the Trocadero. She does a great job of describing the progress of a show, the rivalry between bands, their pretensions and the happy fact that distorted amplification can hide a lot of sins. There is a very funny description of an ill-conceived double bill with a singer-songwriter who trills plaintively about his dog. Weiser drops band names here and there for an occasional guffaw. Favorites include: Smarmy and Ass Fault.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
NEIL GAIMAN

Fiction
320 pages
HarperCollins

If there’s one thing ‘common pleasure’ Neil Gaiman excels at, it’s pitching a book so that it’s suitable for children but also compelling for adults. The Graveyard Book does this beautifully, as an episodic adventure story telling the tale of a boy who survives the brutal murder of his family only to be brought up by the dead.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as ‘Bod,’ is a likeable everyman; he’s the perfect foil to characters that include ghouls, the ghost of a fractious young witch, a (dead) Romantic poet and the shadowy un-dead guardian of the graveyard, Silas. Silas is the real star of the piece, with Gaiman receiving marriage proposals for this—pardon the pun—deadly serious character. It’s an admirably clever touch embodying the moral core of the story in a character whose nature (hint: he doesn’t go out in the daylight) might be considered inherently evil. Gaiman spends much the book subverting stereotypes, which is always to be applauded in a book that children might read.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
MALLA NUNN

Fiction
388 pages
Atria Books

Never read book jackets. They set up ridiculous and impossible expectations that undermine the voice of the author they seek to elevate.

Take the jacket of A Beautiful Place to Die, the first novel by South African filmmaker Malla Nunn. Some marketing wizard decided to write that Nunn “reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene.” Bah! She does not. She reads like herself. And that’s not a bad thing.

Nunn does not approach the crystalline prose, the poetry, the psychological depths (and, perhaps thankfully, the Catholic sensibilities) of Greene. Chandler may be closer but the point is moot.

In A Beautiful Place to Die, Nunn begins what is to be a series of novels around Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. Cooper has been sent from Johannesburg to solve the murder of a white Boer police captain in a rural outpost near the border of Mozambique. Nunn does a good job of confounding expectations about whodunit and keeping the reader guessing. Her story is tightly plotted and its twists and turns are founded in the racial complexities and laws of this particular time and place (South Africa at the dawn of apartheid laws in 1952).

purchase via IndieBound

author:
ROBERTO BOLANO

Fiction
912 pages
FSG

Roberto Bolaño spent most of his life as a broke, nomadic poet wandering through South America, Mexico and Europe. A political exile from his home country Chile, he spearheaded the notorious infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico. He eventually left Latin America for Europe, where he lived the rest of his life. He was only 50 when he died of liver failure in 2003.

2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s last and most gut-wrenching novel, which he was still revising up to the last year of his life. The book is made up of 5 parts, and the separate narratives all weave around Santa Teresa, a city based on Ciudad Juarez in Northern Mexico where over four hundred murders of young women have taken place since 1993, and few have been solved.

It’s an absolutely singular work of fiction—not as haphazardly romantic or vibrantly poetic as Bolaño’s previous masterpiece The Savage Detectives—and yet 2666 is enigmatic, casually insightful, journalistically styled, and real, real, real. And it’s consumed with death—not surprising, seeing as how Bolaño knew he had little time left as he was struggling to complete the book.

purchase via IndieBound