I WISHED by Dennis Cooper

they shouldn’t be. Chancy offers fleeting redemption for some characters, but she does not deal in false hopes. “We all look away unless it’s us, or someone we love, going up in flames,” one character muses. In this devastating work, Chancy refuses to let any of us look away.

A devastating, personal, and vital account.

KEEPING THE HOUSE

Cin, Tice And Other Stories (216 pp.) $17.95 paper | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-91350-508-0

Three generations of Turkish Cypriots navigate British culture while profiting off the London underworld.

This is nominally a story about crime and punishment among immigrants in London’s multicultural Tottenham neighborhood, but interdisciplinary artist Cin throws in everything but the kitchen sink in terms of language, story, and structure. At the book’s center is Damla, born in 1991; the narrative encompasses her adolescence and early adulthood, but it’s more a story about the sacrifices people make to protect their families and themselves. In addition to Damla and her siblings, ipek and Erhan, the book spends a lot of time flashing back to the origins of their mother, Ayla, and their grandmother Makbule as well as a host of friends, lovers, criminals, and partners in crime. There’s a plot in here somewhere, something to do with Ayla’s scheme to smuggle heroin into the country disguised in cabbages, of all things, but there’s no consistency to the story. There is, however, some remarkable writing as well as keen characterizations of Damla’s companions, none of whom are painted in black and white. The book’s greatest strength is its intense observational scrutiny, whether of the ubiquitous doldrums of work or the acute differences in the ways Damla and the people around her, notably her mother and grandmother, experience the world. The fragmented structure makes it read almost like a scrapbook; real deliberation is required in order to unearth the primary story and numerous subplots among scatterings of poetry and abrupt shifts in point of view. It’s clear there’s a method to the madness, though, as Cin writes, “Being the heroine of your own love story starts with a belief in magnetism, pulling the right corresponding elements towards you and somehow sifting out the debris.”

An anarchic, experimental debut a bit too novel for its own good.

★ “Once again, Brown shows his mastery of the graphic format for portraying humanity in the most trying of circumstances.” —Horn Book, starred review

“A succinct and impactful look at one of America’s worst tragedies, skillfully rendered by one of comics journalism’s best.”—School Library Journal

More from award-winning author Don Brown

I WISHED

Cooper, Dennis Soho (136 pp.) $25.00 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-1-641-29304-4

An elegy for a friend, lover, and muse that resists conventions of storytelling and expands the possibilities of the novel form with daring and vulnerability. With his five-part George Miles cycle—beginning with Closer (1989)— Cooper made his name as a Sadean enfant terrible, never shying away from depicting graphic scenes of sex and violence while capturing readers with hypnotic narrative authority. This group of novels, we learn in the opening pages of his latest, was not only an homage to his beloved friend—whose suicide at 30 the writer did not learn about until a decade later—but his only way of articulating a pain “that talking openly can’t handle.” Less narrative than prismatic, this book explores imagined landscapes, George’s childhood, and the depths of Cooper’s own psyche to ask: How does the artist alchemize his grief into a work that is legible and worthy of attention? In the first major section, a narrator explores George’s traumatic upbringing by a sexually abusive father and his mental health as he transitions into adulthood while living with untreated bipolar disorder. Here, Cooper refers to himself in the third person, too, as if to examine the

“A sad but sweet song about the uncertainty of middle age and how funny it is when time slips away.”

jacket weather

conditions for George’s suicide through an objective eye. Other sections examine George and the author’s relationship to him by way of wry humor and playful storytelling. In one section, a secular Santa Claus—described as “a kind of genius, [who] needs to love someone who’s very complicated”—chooses George as his favorite yet agonizes over what kind of gift to offer him. Another section bends and twists the fairy-tale form to depict a fictional encounter between George and artist James Turrell’s Roden Crater. Though the book’s emotional register can seem, at times, to be stuck in a rut of despair, its fragmentary structure allows for a range of emotional valences, ranging between grief and celebration, anger and love. Cooper’s urgency to relate his friend’s story is felt in every word, image, and narrative move; even the most oddball structural decisions possess tremendous power.

Spare but powerfully wrought, this is a book that pushes the novel’s capacity to capture grief, love, and truth.

JACKET WEATHER

DeCapite, Mike Soft Skull Press (272 pp.) $16.95 paper | Oct. 12, 2021 978-1-59376-693-1

What does love look like when you’re not cool anymore? A little older, a little wiser, and just as bewildering and overwhelming. This slice of contemporary life in New York City could have ended poorly, à la movies like (500) Days of Summer or Blue Valentine, but DeCapite clearly has the acumen to make this brittle, sweet fable both romantic and realistic at the same time. The narrator, Mike, is a bit of a nonentity beyond the way we experience the world through his eyes. The big earthquake that begins the book is his meeting with an old acquaintance named June, a survivor of the bygone punk years who still keeps a scrapbook with, for example, a cigarette she bummed from Iggy Pop. Mike becomes consumed by the soon-to-be-divorced June, still a bit gun-shy despite her adventurous nature. “I’ve always had a thing for you—twenty years ago I had a thing for you,” she tells him. “I was nervous to be around you because you’re a writer, I just thought you’re so smart, you were the coolest thing but you were married. Now I’m getting divorced, I need to be there for my divorce. I need to feel it and go through it, and I need to take my heart back and have my own life again.” Honest? Kind of. Heartbreaking? Absolutely. But DeCapite doesn’t dwell on the maudlin, instead constructing a narrative composed of equal parts Mike’s angst and self-doubt, June’s enigmatic behavior, and Mike’s exchanges with the old fellas at the 14th Street Y, who share stories of gangsters, God, and other memories. In the meantime, Mike and June hold on for dear life. “Step by step, you go from the inside to the outside,” he explains. “Life is a process of being gently shown the door.” It’s a completely confounding relationship, which makes it feel so very real.

A sad but sweet song about the uncertainty of middle age and how funny it is when time slips away.

KAYA DAYS

de Souza, Carl Trans. by Zuckerman, Jeffery Two Lines Press (178 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 14, 2021 978-1-949641-19-6

A much-anticipated novel in translation from a Mauritian maestro. In 1999, Kaya, a Mauritian musician and activist, performed at a public concert to advocate for the legalization of marijuana in the archipelago nation. Later arrested for smoking weed onstage, Kaya was found dead in his jail cell within a few days. This ignited widespread protests and violence across the ethnically diverse country, which had long simmered under poverty and inequality, especially among the islands’ Creole inhabitants. This highly charged backdrop serves as the point of departure for de Souza’s frenetic novel, which follows Santee as she searches for her brother, Ram, who goes missing in