13 minute read
GODS OF WANT by KMing Chang
gods of want
GODS OF WANT
Chang, KMing One World/Random House (224 pp.) $27.00 | July 12, 2022 978-0-593-24158-5
Composed of 16 short stories that explore the immigrant experience, this book traces a line from old worlds to new worlds by means of the bloody umbilical cords that stretch between them.
Chang returns to the thematic territory of her debut novel, Bestiary (2020), in these stories that unthread the tangled relationships between mothers and daughter, aunts and cousins, siblings and lovers in the broadly defined Taiwanese immigrant community now living in California. The stories progress through their antic, sometimes manic, often bloody, muddy, orgasmic, or chewed-up and spit-out paces. In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” an endlessly proliferating infestation of dead cousins threatens to drive away the speaker’s new wife with their poltergeist mischief, including farting in the minister’s face at the wedding and replacing all of the wife’s teeth with the red-dyed shells of melon seeds in the night. In “Nüwa,” named for the mother goddess of Chinese mythology who is often depicted as having a long, serpentine body, the train that passes the narrator and her sister Meimei’s house at night may also be a snake who is responsible for devouring all the girls that have gone missing in their neighborhood. In “Resident Aliens,” the speaker, her mother, and her seven aunts “share two bedrooms and rent out the basement—what had once been a slaughterhouse, with hooks that snagged on our shadows and no windows but our mouths,” to a series of 26 widows, each upping the fairy-tale ante on the one who came before. Separated into three sections—“Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths”—the book signals its lingual play from the table of contents on. Indeed, the ease with which the various narrators shift into poetic transcendence in their workaday descriptions coupled with the linguistic flexibility of non-native idioms repurposed for a new English in a new world is as much a part of the storytelling as the stories themselves. All this together leaves the reader with a lingering sense that language, as well as life, is infinitely adaptable, no matter the ground on which it is given to grow.
Lurid, funny, strange, and deftly sorrowing—an important new voice.
Praise for Suburban Death Project … master of the uncanny … Harold Jaffe, Fulbright and NEA Fellow … just what brave new world of storytelling is this? Playful and effortlessly pleasurable … powerfully human. Curtis White, Essayist and experimental fiction writer … scrapes the nerve and pierces the heart. Parkison detonates and mesmerizes. Meg Tuite, Author of Meet My Haze … compelling and memorable fictions that will … reawaken you to the strangeness of the familiar world … George Looney, Author of The Worst May Be Over and Ode to the Earth in Translation … tales that echo like prophecy as they underline, again and again, the inescapably beautiful now. Sarah Blackman, Author of Mother Box and Hex 9 780991 378043
Aimee Parkison is widely published and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including: the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize; the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review; the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction; a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and a William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. She currently in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University. Photograph by Abelardo Reyes Gurrola $27.95 ISBN 978-0-9913780-4-3 5 2 7 9 5 > TM unboundedition.com
UPGRADE
Crouch, Blake Ballantine (352 pp.) $28.00 | July 12, 2022 978-0-593-15753-4
When a government agent is exposed to a virus that modifies his genetic code, he must consider whether to share these enhancements with the world or eradicate the virus. Logan Ramsay works for the Gene Protection Agency in a world where genetic modification has wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. His mother, a brilliant scientist, was responsible for the “Great Starvation” nearly two decades before, when she tried to improve the resistance of a rice plant to a particular virus and instead devastated the world’s rice supply. Two hundred million people died, and Logan went to prison for his role in the catastrophe; his mother took her own life. Now he investigates and takes down people
ORDER THROUGH Small Press Distribution OR Ingram
Aimee Parkison
Suburban Death Project
“… master of the uncanny … ”
Harold Jaffe “… tales that echo like prophecy … ”
Sarah Blackman
Suburban Death Project Aimee Parkison
Sometimes at night, I venture into the yard to stand beside the decaying pontoon
boat. That’s how I first saw the neighborhood ambassador owl and realized the
owl was calling to me, letting itself be known as owls rarely do. I wanted to explain
to the owl it was too late for me. I no longer went on trips to search for nests in
caves, tree hollows, bridges, and buildings. Gone were my childhood visits to caves
littered with droppings, pellets scattered amid golden-brown feathers.
12 STORIES OF DISTURBING BRILLIANCE
Harold Jaffe
Fulbright and NEA Fellow, Author of 28 books
TM
Contact the publisher regarding rights through unboundedition.com.
who are running “dark gene lab[s]” and otherwise seeking to change the human genome. During a raid, Logan is exposed to a virus, and while the initial side effects seem to ease after a few days, he soon begins to notice unusual things: the fact that he can read incredibly complex books in just a few hours and retain all of the information; the fact that he can beat his daughter in chess, which hasn’t happened for years; the way he can remember every moment of his life in perfect detail. Government agents lock him up and run test after test as Logan becomes stronger and more intelligent by the day. It is revealed that, before her death, Logan’s mother promised to release “a viral gene drive” that would offer a “significant upgrade” to the human species. When someone arrives to break him out of the containment facility, Logan will be forced to make a decision: allow the genetic upgrade to spread through the human species, even though a certain percentage of the population will die horrible deaths, or destroy the virus. High-octane action, some moral complexity, and a surprisingly emotional ending elevate this novel.
Recommended—even for reluctant science fiction readers.
THE LAST HOURS IN PARIS
Druart, Ruth Grand Central Publishing (448 pp.) $28.00 | July 19, 2022 978-1-5387-3521-3
This World War II saga explores issues of parenthood, justice, and retribution. Druart’s second novel unfolds in two timelines, taking place in the 1940s and 1960s. At the book’s outset, in 1963, Élise has been living in apparent exile from her Paris roots, in a remote Breton village with a mysterious old woman named Soizic. Joséphine, Élise’s 18-year-old daughter, unearths her birth certificate and learns what her mother had postponed telling her: A man with a German surname is her father, not, as she had been told, her mother’s fiance who died fighting for France. Not understanding that her parentage was not only a source of disgrace, but of danger, Joséphine is angered by the deception and vows to track down her father. By 1944, Élise, her mother, and sister have endured four years of Nazi occupation. The way in which Paris has been devastated on so many fronts is viscerally evoked. Élise is part of a clandestine operation that arranges passage to Switzerland for Jewish children. At a bookshop, Élise meets Sébastian, a bilingual German soldier whose mother was French and who, with the glaring exception of his uniform, can pass as French. Sébastian finds the duties of his posting repugnant—acting as interpreter during Gestapo interrogation sessions and translating denunciation letters in which Parisians turn in their Jewish neighbors. Sébastian interferes when French police harass Élise in the bookshop, where he is an unwelcome customer. He takes escalating risks to win Élise’s trust and, ultimately, her love—rescuing her from the Gestapo and helping to save several children from deportation. Joséphine’s journey of discovery uncovers a tragedy of errors. Sébastian and Élise seem too innocent—unconvincingly so—to realize the depths of depravity into which both occupiers and occupied can sink. Their misplaced optimism will have disastrous consequences for each. But although Sébastian’s complexity will emerge only later, these characters command sympathy, to the point that readers will be exasperated by their missteps.
A vivid exposé of war and its dislocations.
A CATALOG OF SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON
Dung Kaicheung Trans. by Bonnie S. McDougall & Anders Hansson Columbia Univ. (344 pp.) $28.00 paper | June 21, 2022 978-0-231-20543-6
Tales from Hong Kong at the end of the 20th century, superficially about pop culture and fads, are as relevant today as they were when they were first published in 1999.
ON THE COVER Hernan Diaz
In his new novel, Trust, the author seeks to explore the machinery of capitalism and the nature of its fictions
BY TOM BEER
Pascal Perich
When Hernan Diaz meets with me over Zoom in mid-April, he is camped in a friend’s London flat, having tested positive for Covid after arriving in the U.K. for the London Book Fair. “I had all these things lined up for Trust,” says the Brooklyn-based author, referring to his second novel, out May 3 from Riverhead in the U.S. “I was going to meet booksellers and press. Instead I’ve just been sequestered, first in a hotel room, and then at a good friend’s vacant apartment.”
The good news is that Diaz has just tested negative and will fly back to the States in time for a 11-city tour with a series of live events as well as an online talk with Roxane Gay for her book club on June 23. It’s a big drumroll of publicity for the novelist, whose first book, In the Distance, was published in 2017 by indie Graywolf Press and went on to become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Trust is a fascinating puzzle box, composed of four separate sections that all circle around mysterious fictional New York financier Andrew Bevel, whose dealings may have played a significant role in the stock market crash of 1929. To make things even more meta, the book opens with a novella, Bonds, in which fictional writer Harold Vanner fictionalizes Bevel’s story in an Edith Wharton–like tale. Other sections of the book complicate the very public narrative of Bonds. In its starred review, Kirkus calls the book “a clever and affecting highconcept novel of high finance.”
I spoke with Diaz—who was born in Buenos Aires, grew up partly in Sweden, and moved to New York to attend New York University—about the inspirations and ideas behind this heady novel. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I seem compelled to open every interview nowadays with this question, so forgive me: Was this a pandemic novel? That’s a legitimate question. As you can imagine, this was a much longer project than the last couple of years; I would say a third of it was a Covid novel. I live in a small Brooklyn apartment, so [Covid] really affected my way of working. I started getting up at 4 a.m. to get the quiet hours. I found solace in the writing of the book, just shutting out reality. And then I was lucky enough to get a Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library at the peak of Covid. I went there, walking from Brooklyn to the library [in midtown Manhattan], every day. Some days I was [at the center] all on my own, which was also a magical, weird, apocalyptic experience that made its way onto the pages.
And you were in that grand beaux-arts library building on Fifth Avenue that so perfectly evokes the period you’re writing about.
It’s a monument to capital, with all the philanthropists who funded the building and the private collections that were donated. The history of capital and how it has inscribed itself on the public body of the city of New York were very present to me during the writing of the book.
The structure of the novel is quite original. The first section is a novel that feels as if it could have been written by Wharton. I have a very intense relationship with Henry James and Edith Wharton; it’s literature that speaks to me in a very intense way and has determined me as a reader and as a writer. So it was joyful to be able to inhabit that voice a little bit for a while, because it’s something that is actually impossible to do. It’s like being a musician and writing, like…Brahms. It just can’t be done. But here was a good excuse to allow myself to try this. That novel within the novel contains the whole book, although in a disfigured, distorted, warped way. To write that novel first was a good way to learn what the book was about.
And then come these other related but free-standing sections: The tycoon’s own memoir, an account by his ghostwriter, and the diary of his wife. How did you settle on this approach? I knew very early on that I wanted to write about wealth. Not just class—which American literature has done very well—but the labyrinth of capital and how it works. I was interested in how extreme wealth distorts the reality around itself, which is something we were seeing very much during the Trump years.
The structure felt necessary for two reasons. No. 1, the nature of wealth is being highly mediated, because the labor of multitudes goes into it. I didn’t want the book to be narrated from one single perspective. The second reason is that reality itself had been commodified during those years, and that was something that I found frightening and fascinating in equal measure. So the book is to a large extent about that distinction between fact and fiction, between historical record and fabrication and the line that separates these realms.
You mention James and Wharton. Were there other books or authors who influenced the writing of Trust? Upton Sinclair’s The Moneychangers, which is a book from 1909 that is totally out of print. I bought, for $4.50, a first edition on ABE books, because nobody cares. And the other is the Trilogy of Desire by Theodore Dreiser, of which only the first volume, The Financier, is in print with Penguin Classics. They are the only books, to my mind, that were focused on the machine of capital in a way that is otherwise lacking in the American canon. I can’t say that I liked them as literature, but I learned from them. And then I read the autobiographies of “great men” from the time—Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford.
Aside from the inner workings of the financial world, what did you learn from this reading? If you read these narratives of accumulation and these epics of capital, there simply are no women in them in any regard—not in the fiction and certainly not in the historical documents. It’s a womanless world, and that is one of the conventions, one of the assumptions that I wanted to subvert. And one of the erasures that I wanted to rectify, because it’s a highly ideological erasure. It’s not an innocent omission.
The book ends with the secret diary of Mildred Bevel, the financier’s wife, which rather thrillingly illuminates what has come before. Was that section enjoyable to write? I feel very exposed in that section of the book; I have a hard time revisiting it, just for reasons of my own. I feel that Mildred and I share a lot of interests in terms of literature and philosophy and music. It was very important to me not to victimize Mildred at the end. Mildred does do this horrible thing; there is definitely blood on her hands. And that, to me, added to her dignity as a character. Part of her agency comes from this power to inflict harm and from her own greed, which she’s totally entitled to, I feel. But she’s not only that—she’s also this wonderful person in addition. I think we also get to see in the end that Bevel, although he’s this vainglorious shell of a person, also feels enormous love for his wife, and that is redeeming to some extent.
Trust received a starred review in the March 1, 2022, issue.
