WHAT TO READ THIS WEEK : 10/16
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: Claire Messud’s gorgeous essay collection, P. Djèlí Clark’s Klan-as-demon novella, new poems by Éireann Lorsung and more, more, more.
THE WEEK OF 10/12
Ring Shout
P. Djèlí Clark
Tor.com
P. Djèlí Clark has written a handful of solid novellas - including the awesome steam-punk, African-gods-in-New-Orleans-at-the-turn-of-the-century jaunt The Black God’s Drums - and we are a little foamy at the mouth to get our hands on his newest, Ring Shout. Set in 1915 America, the Klan is growing due to Birth of a Nation, and now just any group of degenerate white supremacist scum - a demonic KKK seeking to suck the souls of Americans and take over the world. In classic Clark fashion, a rag-tag band of resistance fighters are the only thing who might be able to stop them. Clark has a true gift in crafting alternate worlds with humor and grit while punching home the intricacies of the Black experience in America’s past. This’ll be a mind-bending hoot.
I’ve never read Claire Messud, never read The Woman Upstairs or The Emperor’s Children , never anything. And after consuming her “autobiography in essays” Kant’s Little Prussian Head I now see my very glaring error. Messud is a gorgeous writer, an elegant thinker, the rare author whose every word and sentence adds weight without dragging down the fine detail of her thinking. Broken into three sections - about her life, about writers, about artists - each is a window in the unknowable self Messud is so fascinated by, the interior life we keep within that nourishes everything else. The world inside that writers feed upon to craft the work they put out into the world. It is sad and funny and a delight to slowly consume.
No Heaven For Good Boys
Keisha Bush
Random House
The debut novel by Keisha Bush already has slavering critics describing it as “Dickensian.” Which makes sense as the book a modern take on Oliver Twist in which a young boy in a rural village of Senegal is sent to learn the Koran in the big city of Dakar, but is instead put out on the street to beg for his living. The boys escape and their odyssey back to their parents is fraught with organ-dealers, rival gangs of beggars and so much more. At the heart is the beautiful relationship between Ibrahim and his cousin Etienne and how their love, amidst everything going south on them, continues to pull them through the darkness.
The Century
Éireann Lorsung
Milkweed Editions
When it comes to poetry, I like it dark. And thus, I recommend to you Éireann Lorsung’s new collection, The Century. It is about the small, mundane, quotidian acts of violence perpetuated by the average citizens throughout history. And not just these at-the-time, seemingly normal horrors, but how they coalesced and compounded into the great violent moments - the nuclear bomb, American slavery - of history. I won’t say it’s an easy book to get through - the jacket flap describes it as “thorny” - but no one ever said reading should be easy. Or maybe they did, but I didn’t read that quote. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. So, let’s get dark and dirty, let’s read The Century.
Noah Sanders is pretty sure he’s on tract to read everything ever written. Yup, totally going to happen.
