At the start of the pandemic, Arundhati Roy, the author who introduced much of my country to the Booker Prize, declared that “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” After having lived four years inside this “next world” I wonder if we can say with certainty what kind of a portal 2020 was? Has whatever was supposed to have metamorphosed done so?
There’s a long and storied history of tales of American academics becoming unmoored far from home. J.M. Tyree’s The Haunted Screen is an impressive entry in this literary lineage: its protagonist is dealing with the erosion of his marriage and a the echoes of a past relationship, even as he muses on the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. There’s also a possibly malevolent presence lurking in the woods and a sense that several characters know more than they’re letting on; it’s a concentrated dose of heady musings and travels into the uncanny. I spoke with Tyree about writing the book, the ways film can inform literature, and the nature of haunting.
Alex Ries’s illustrations encompass everything from prehistoric life to video game concept art and storyboards. The forthcoming book Other Worlds: The Art of Alex Ries includes an impressive overview of his work in all of its myriad dimensions. Here’s what Ries had to say about the creation of some literally otherworldly beings, along with a selection of images from the book, which is on Kickstarter now:
Nick Rees Gardner’s third book (So Marvelously Far, 2019 and Hurricane Trinity, 2023) is a linked story collection focusing on the fictional Westinghouse, Ohio. Right away, I was drawn to see Gardner’s world in connection with Sherwood Anderson’s linked stories in Winesburg, Ohio, and Gardner’s Delinquents didn’t disappoint. As the opening pages make clear, this Rust Belt collection is about a very different America than Anderson wrote about in Winesburg. They’re trapped; they’re often addicts; they’re seeking a means to escape Westinghouse; they’re looking to find love, meaning, connection, and some shred of satisfaction. Time passes or it doesn’t in Westinghouse, as the book points out. Too often, the characters struggle just to make it another day.
Poet Tracy Dimond’s debut collection Emotion Industry reads like an array of your funniest friend’s deepest divulgences, purged all at once in the corner booth of a bar–every word long-overdue. What comes out is the wryest examination of the outward through the inward–of pop culture through the lens of undiagnosed chronic illness, of feminine rage through a well-honed sense of humor. And vice versa. And vice versa again…
I’ve long been an admirer of Kristopher Jansma’s fiction and the way it blends an empathic view of the world with an abundance of stylistic verve. His new novel Our Narrow Hiding Places explores the complicated history of one family, beginning with the Nazi occupation of Holland and continuing on to the present day. (As an added bonus, Jansma and I grew up in adjoining New Jersey towns.) I spoke with him about his new book’s evolution, the real-life history he drew from when writing it, and his forthcoming nonfiction book Revisionaries.
Chapter 39
Frankenstein, we call them Frankie, puts on their little boots and their little jacket. We go outside and the trees are too green for October. A gust up high makes the top of the trees dance hypnotically.
Joselyn is still here but she is different now. She looks off in the distance and stares more often than she did before Frankie was born.
Reading Ryan Chapman’s fiction involves immersion in very specific milieus — including, for his most recent novel The Audacity, an exclusive gathering of the world’s wealthiest people, a kind of 1% of the 1%. Just before he jets off to one such gathering, protagonist Guy Sarvananthan learns that his wife’s highly-touted startup was not exactly honest with investors about the viability of its business, and that she’s now missing and presumed deceased. What emerges is a heady book of big ideas laced with a comedy of manners that moves with an enticing momentum. I spoke with Chapman about writing The Audacity and the challenges it posed.