It’s a few days into a new month, and you can probably tell what’s next: we have some May books we’d like to recommend. Stylistically, they cover a lot of terrain; you’ll find everything from experimental short fiction to haunting meditations of contemporary politics here. Read on for some suggestions for the weeks to come.
Chapter 18
Last weekend; Friday after lunch.
Morgen walked ahead with her gun barrel aiming at the ground while scanning the horizon and sweeping the tall grass with a killer’s intensity. All morning I’d been worrying how to operate this gun. I’ve never held or used one before. It seemed pretty simple. You pump it. You point it. You make something explode like a nanoscopic Big Bang Event.
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from Shannon Robinson’s new collection The Ill-Fitting Skin, out this week from Press 53. Danielle Evans had this to say about the book: “Robinson shifts seamlessly between approaching the world with a visceral clarity and building fantasy worlds that illuminate the strangeness of our own.” This excerpt is taken from “Origin Story.”
More horror fiction should have footnotes. Bennet Sims’s A Questionable Shape has forever connected the footnote to the concept of the undead, and I seem to recall a few turning up across John Langan’s nestled narratives. Matthew Cheney’s Changes in the Land features a few as well, which is understandable given that one of its characters is, in fact, an academic. “A horror novel with an academic at its core?” you may ask. “What’s so frightening about that?”
Ecocatastrophe science fiction was supposed to be a warning, not a roadmap. We need more hopeful stories of the future.
by Cat Sparks
A climate-rattled world, ravaged by extreme weather events, is now a popular backdrop for top-shelf fiction. From Booker shortlisted The New Wilderness by Diane Cook to The Coral Bones by EJ Swift, authors are exploring the dramatic possibilities of a post-apocalyptic future. There’s something decadent yet alluring about ruined landscapes littered with once grandiose, now crumbling structures – civilisation’s reset button having been well and truly punched.
Some reckon it’s no better than we deserve, but I’m not one of them.
Chapter 17
It’s that feeling that everything is so good that you try to think back to earlier that day to where you missed something. Because you must have missed something for you to feel this good. I try to explain this stuff to Butler and get no reaction. It’s another thing I can’t articulate well.
In our morning reading: thoughts on fiction by Sofia Samatar and Rita Bullwinkel, the appeal of movie theaters, and more.
Nicole Haroutunian’s new novel, Choose This Now, wrestles with a lot of big themes in the subtlest of ways. This is a book about creative struggles, intimacy, and families both found and biological. Over the course of this book’s timeframe, its characters make decisions that are rewarding and emiently frustrating; they go to bizarre parties and embark on ill-concieved relationships. It’s an immersive work with the ebb and flow of life, and I chatted with its author about the project’s origins and her own experiences while writing it.