RELEASE DAY RECOMMENDS : 9.8.2020
Every week the publishing industry opens the gates of brand spanking new books and out comes a deluge of new and possibly amazing releases. And every week our Founder and sometimes reviewer, Noah Sanders, will act as your donut-shaped floatation device to keep you and your brainy little head above the waters of what you should read.
This week: the scariest of bestiaries, a much needed anthology of poetry, the newest from a major award winner and moooooore.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 9th
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song
Kevin Young, Editor
One World
Kevin Young is a force. No other way to describe it. He’s a Guggenheim-awarded poet (his collection, The Grey Album, is something to marvel at), author of the widely celebrated non-fiction work Hoax and, to place the cherry of impressiveness atop the immutable sundae of jaw-dropping wowness, he’s the director of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. So if anyone, anyone, was going to take on the great (and necessary) task of compiling an accurate and engaging selection of African American poets and poetry from the last 250 years, Kevin Young is the dude to do it. Well shit, here he’s gone and done just that. This book is a treasure. A compilation of work to lose yourself in for an entire day or pick carefully through over an entire lifetime. Do you need more?
What Are You Going Through?
Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead
I will admit that I never got around to reading Sigrid Nunez’s award-winning novel The Friend. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to. It wasn’t because I wasn’t drawn to the pleasant colors and imagery of the cover. It wasn’t that there was the promise of a precocious cat. It just fell through my reading cracks and I’m sorry. Please don’t strip me of my “guy who reads a lot” medallion because this I will promise you: I’m going to go back and read that goddamn book and then I’m going to go and read Sigrid Nunez’s new book - What Are You Going Through? - because that’s the kind of dedicated person I am. And also because this book also promises a precocious cat, has pleasing cover aesthetics and if you are one to believe literally every person who has ever basked in the glory of this piece of fiction, it is quite good.
The Ancestry of Objects
Tatiana Ryckman
Deep Vellum Press
I am used to reading what my Australian roommate would refer to as a “chonker” of a book. Weighty (in actual weight, not metaphorical weight) tomes full of plot and characters and descriptions that I can pull over my head like a blanket made of marshmallow cream and pleasantly drown in it all. As of late - and I’ll thank Jenny Offil’s thin, unnamed narrator works of genius for this and the pandemic push to gorge myself on as much variety as humanly possible- I’ve been drawn to smaller, more “fragmented” possibly - gasp - experimental work. Such as The Ancestry of Objects and its story of an affair told through the ephemera of such thing. This is no “chonker” but Ryckman’s prodding and dissecting of a tryst sounds fascinating. Also, the cover reminds me of books from the 1990s you might find in a, ahem, Lil’ Library on a Midwestern suburban street. Which, honestly, would’ve been all I needed.
Likes
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
FSG
Here’s the thing about recommends: the whole idea is that I have a good reason for wanting to read something and that this good reason is so good that I think you will also want to read this book if I recommend it. Well, this ain’t always true Buster Brown. Sometimes, as in the new story collection from National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, I saw the pretty cover, felt the buzz from the literary buzz machine and thought, “I could read this.” And who needs more reason than that? Oh, you do? Well then, it’s a collection of stories already getting the literary set clenching in anticipation. A collection of stories compared to George Saunders, Joy Williams, Lauren Groff and other glowing luminaries of the writing universe. And, and, and the description uses the one-two punch of “deceitful humdrum.” There, see? Totally, recommandable.
Bestiary
K-Ming Chang
Knopf
In the (paraphrased) words of someone else who also pre-enjoyed this book: I like novels by poets. I don’t want to start talking about poetry too much (because it will be a quick discussion and I will look foolhardy and this column is all I’m clinging to these days) but in the transition from stanza to paragraph, a writer like K-Ming Chang has the opportunity to not only spin a fine narrative - in this case one about the grisliest menagerie of all, the family - but to do so with the aching language and experimental wonder of the medium of poetry. It is, when done well (like here!) a truly breathtaking melange. Yes, I just wrote breathtaking melange and damn it, I mean it. Well, anyway, this has been nice and all, but really, I think I’ve presented you with at least five better things to do then read my rambling thoughts on things. ‘Till next time.
Noah Sanders is slightly on vacation and the freedom and fear of traveling the country in the time of COVID has clearly knocked something loose.
