The title of Guillermo Stitch’s last novel was Lake of Urine. His latest is The Coast of Everything. Clearly the man is a fan of geography. But, then, as a novelist why shouldn’t he be? Bodies of water persist as some of our richest, most versatile metaphors, and if memorable, imaginative storytelling banks on any one device, it’s metaphor.
The difficulty with writing a book as beloved as Pachinko is that following it is almost impossible. With her new novel, American Hagwon (2026), Min Jin Lee has done her best. The underlying strength of this third installment in a planned quartet about the Korean diaspora is Lee’s ambition. While the novel’s core theme is the obsession with education in Korean culture, it is also, in many ways, an immigration novel.
In the early 1980s, an adolescent Eduardo Halfon, then living in Florida with his parents after fleeing the violence of the Guatemalan Civil War, returned to his home country to attend a camp for Jewish children. For the first few days, the experience was typical enough — expeditions into the forest, lessons in survival techniques, nights fitfully sleeping on a cot. Then, early one morning, Halfon and his companions were awoken by uniformed camp counselors with swastikas affixed to their arms.
Something awful happens when you start to achieve a degree of success as a writer. All of a sudden, people sidle up to you at parties, stick up their hands at your readings, and ask questions about things other than your book. At first, all they really want to know about is your “writing process”: What kind of chair do you sit in? Do you have a favorite font? Do you line up your highlighter pens in a little rainbow every morning before you start?
In the first 10 pages of Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, Night Night Fawn, the walls are already closing in on the novel’s narrator, Barbara Rosenberg. She is trapped in her cramped 14th-floor apartment on East 69th Street and Second Avenue — “an address in which, as everybody knows, there is no honor” — the same “shrunken little apartment every Striver-Jew . . . moved to by the 1960s,” where she has lived her entire adult life. She is dying of cancer, addicted to opiates, and her mensch husband, Stephen, is dead.
Ironically, the Greeks and Romans were pretty goth. As a Roman tombstone tells us, “We are, and we were, nothing. See, reader, how quickly us mortals come from nothing and return to nothing.” Okay, maybe that’s a little long for a Hot Topic t-shirt, but how about this one? Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — “I was not, then I was, now I’m not, I don’t care.”
Cards on the table: there is no God, and Christian rock cannot achieve greatness. Chances are you agree with the latter; to each their own with the former. John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his GQ classic “Upon This Rock” of 2004, claimed the genre had “excellence-proofed itself”: It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach people.”
Richard Russo fans will recognize some familiar markers of his fiction in his latest novel, Under the Falls. The setting is a landscape of physical, economic, and emotional desolation — Stone Mountain, a hardscrabble, down-on-its-luck upstate New York town where the old lakeside amusement park rides are dismantled and rusting. This is “a place that doesn’t yield many good outcomes,” where Russo’s characters are merely scrambling to survive. Unhappy as they are, they are mostly unwilling or unable to leave.
What is the state of American literature today? This loaded question never has an easy answer, and invariably the debate grows tedious, ideological and sociological combatants racing to their predictable corners, fists wearily raised. In my years as a novelist and columnist and now editor-in-chief of this publication, I’ve come to believe that large, conglomerate publishers care less about disgorging excellent literature than they once did — that this pursuit, for a variety of reasons, is less interesting to them.
A series of minor events — a dinner party, a holiday in La Spezia, a poorly attended funeral — make up two years in the middling lives of a middle-aged, middle-class set of London friends, retold through different perspectives over the six chapters of Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Morality.
The short story collection is a difficult and awkward form. It lacks the unity of the novel, and unlike a narrative that stands alone in a literary or cultural magazine, each story seems as if it should somehow be connected to the other stories around it. This, of course, is despite the fact that many of the stories in the collection will have already been published separately in the aforementioned magazines and journals.
There exists such a thing as a “poet’s novel” — that is, a novel written by a writer who is primarily a poet. Notable examples include The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell, and The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz. These aren’t just novels that happen to have been written by poets. They are novels that express a certain poetic sensibility. They dwell lovingly on description, whether of landscapes or clothing or furniture.
“Works of art are of an infinite solitude,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, “and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”Child of Light, a novel written by the artist, poet, and playwright Jesi Bender, has certainly received its fair share of love. One reviewer likens the prose to Nabokov’s and calls one passage in particular as “concise and devastating an illustration of inherited trauma as you’re ever likely to see in print.”
Solvej Balle’s book series On the Calculation of Volume is all about waiting. This waiting extends to its readership. Though it’s cast as a septology, only six of the books are published, and of those, only four have been translated into English. Book V is scheduled to be released in English in November. Book seven does not have a release date, not even in its original language.
Military life has long served as reliable fodder for American literature, which should come as no surprise: something about stories of men from all corners of the country facing danger as a team is inherently dramatic. From Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, authors have mined the ups and downs of military life not just to shine a light on what makes those institutions — and the people who work them — tick, but also the American experience as a whole.