NewPages Blog

The holiday season brings families together, for better or worse, leading many of us to face the makeup of our identities across the dining room table. Whether it’s seeing your own mannerisms in your parents, or it’s basking in grandparents’ old stories from before you were born, we can recognize the ways in which our families have shaped our identities. In her graphic memoir, Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil explores her own identity as a granddaughter, a daughter, an artist, and a Jew.

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Obsession is a nasty beast whose claws sink deep and anchor inside its victims. Nora Gold’s book, The Dead Man, follows a heartbroken Eve Bercovitch, who has spent the last five years bleeding out in the grips of her obsession. The Dead Man straps readers into the passenger’s seat of a roller coaster ride through the world of Israeli music. Gold weaves a narrative so intricate that readers everywhere will find themselves questioning the reality of this world. Eve is the perfectly imperfect vehicle through the wild world that’s unearthed inside these pages.

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Imagine you’ve discovered a way to assassinate anyone you please, with guaranteed anonymity, and it’s as easy as a single click of a button. Maura Nelson makes this discovery in what seems to be an epiphany. This knowledge is too heavy a burden for Maura to carry alone, so she enlists the help of Jack Plymouth. Together the two of them must battle morality and sense in My Immaculate Assassin by David Huddle.

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If you’ve ever flown anywhere, you’ll identify with many of the short essays in Airplane Reading, edited by Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich. Even if you’ve never flown, it’s still worth reading for sentences like this: “A flying problem is the opposite of a drinking problem: it starts when you lose interest in the free booze.” So writes Ian Bogost in his essay “Frequent Flight.” Bogost is indeed a frequent flyer at more than 200,000 miles in a year. His piece is joined by essays from fellow travelers, including several doctors who take to the sky.

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Armando Lucas Correa’s novel The German Girl is a sad Holocaust story, one not heard before. Based on an historical tragedy, never acknowledged by the Cuban government, it nevertheless includes the names and pictures of many of the 937 passengers on the St. Louis ship, fleeing Nazi Germany, who were not allowed to disembark at Havana on May 27, 1939—nor allowed into Canada or the U.S. They had to return to Europe where England, France, Belgium and Holland each took some but by then Germany declared war and only the English refugees were safe. Before that, some passengers with precious cyanide capsules committed suicide, because so few were allowed into Cuba, where more discrimination followed them, forcing many other outsiders to make the perilous journey to Miami. This story made is individual, personal and emotional by the focus on the Rosenthal family fleeing Berlin.

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Written in a voice and style reminiscent of memoir, Laurie Stone’s collection of linked short stories My Life as an Animal traces the strengthening and breaking of friendships and family ties in twenty-six stories. The narrator of the stories dances through time—from adolescence to her current life at sixty—and place—New York, Arizona, California, and England. True to life, characters appear and reappear in unexpected ways, affecting others in the past and present.

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Within our world, ripe with the over-thinking of experience, it’s rare to encounter a coming-of-age story quite as visceral or unselfconsciously honest as that found within Jessie van Eerden’s My Radio Radio. Perhaps it’s the subtly surrealist thread that weaves its way through the tale that disarms the reader, setting her up, even readying her, for the unpacking of whatever symbolic gifts of meaning might emerge from the text. Wings. Radio. A baby chick. The click whirr, hiss hmm of a dying man’s machine. Yet, in spite of all that is foreshadowed, in spite of every ounce of allegory, it is within the journey of twelve-year-old Omi Ruth that each of the answers reside, should one choose to listen.

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Melody S. Gee’s new book of poems is a compelling catalog of inheritance and family history—of trying to make a home in a world divided between incarnation and separation, life and death, past and future. The book itself is divided into two sections: “Separate Blood” and “Bone.” So not surprisingly, the poems here deal with bodies and their relation to other bodies, particularly the mother-daughter relationship, but other heritages as well.

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You and I are filthy but it is / our filth” — “The Flying Phalangers”

Popping with pop culture. Zinging with Net slang. Formless yet formed. Slick and rough. Dating-sites and Netflix and Martha Stewart and Kendrick Lamar and Kim Kardashian and TMZ and ENVY and funerals and coke and religion and love and names become algebra and no one knows where they stand except on the cusp of a new paradigm, a new aesthetic—Take This Stallion is a force of poetic nature.

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Amina Gautier’s third collection of short stories The Loss of All Lost Things is an accomplished reflection of our terrible reality. Abducted children, rent-boys, old maids, drop-outs, mourning parents, aging-regret filled parents, widowers eating uncooked Thanksgiving turkey with canned stuffing, the ugliest faces of divorce riddle each page with regret and melancholia.

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Vi Khi Nao, born in Long Khanh, Vietnam in 1979, came to the United States when she was seven years old. In her book, The Old Philosopher, she has given us poems in vigorous experimental language. Reading through the book the first time, there is a feeling of a balanced worldly eye, even as the pervasive indistinctness of mixed and matched images/metaphors leaves a sense of no orientation. By the third reading, the seemingly unmoored fragments begin to come into focus: the book feels like the interlacing of two cultures initiated by the wreckage of the Vietnam War.

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Lawrence Raab poses the question Why Don’t We Say What We Mean? as the title of his newest book. To answer the question, he dissects various poems and comments on their authors. The title was pulled from a 1931 essay by Robert Frost called “Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue.” Frost wrote: “People say, ‘Why don’t you say what you mean?’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets.”

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Those who have read Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog might see echoes in Nicola Gardini’s Lost Words in that this later novel has main characters of a concierge, here called a “door woman” and an adolescent, here a thirteen-year-old. Chino/Luca is the doorwoman’s son and like in Barbery’s book, he finds inspiration for his intellect in someone living in the apartment building, here on the outskirts of Milan instead of Barbery’s Paris. Lost Words, however, is a darker view of the apartment dwellers and the labors of the narrator’s mother, which makes the unusual inspirers who enter the scene that much more exciting. In addition, the contrast between the intellectual newcomers and the backbiting and hypocritical tenants makes for drama and humor.

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To undertake a cycle of poems on the life of Helen Keller is to throw oneself at an interesting poetic problem: how to capture the perspective of one who lived in a wholly different perceptual world than most other people. To be sure, there are plenty of fine collections on the experiences of disability—Nick Flynn’s startlingly original Blind Huber comes to mind—but Helen Keller is a singular historical figure who, in our cultural imagination, bears a particular burden as the standout radical subject who, as if through magic, was able to speak from beyond an impassable veil.

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Charlotte Holmes’s The Grass Labyrinth weaves an equally heartwarming and heartbreaking path through the intertwined lives of its characters. It explores the consequences of passion and the difficulties of an artistic life. The stories span thirty years and the consequences we read about unfold through generations of one painter’s wives, lovers, and children.

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The title of Emily Leithauser’s debut poetry collection, The Borrowed World, hints at the theme of impermanence that runs throughout the book. Whether it is the fleeting nature of childhood in the poem “Chest of Dolls” or the dissolution of a marriage in “Haiku for a Divorce,” Leithhauser gestures toward the price we pay as finite beings living in a world that is on loan to us. What is borrowed must eventually be returned. There is sadness in this, but sweetness and nostalgia too, for such fleeting moments of experience can be treasured precisely because they cannot be repeated.

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They Could Live with Themselves by Jodi Paloni is a strong collection of short stories linked by the rural town of Stark Run, Vermont. The stories range in point of view and voice, from first-person perspectives of children to third-person point of view closely following a grandfather. Each story is self-contained yet enhanced by the others so that the collection ends with a clear picture of the New England town. Full of quiet tensions and unforgettable characters, Paloni’s collection presses into the daily conflicts and triumphs of the characters in ways that are both familiar and new.

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One of the gifts of great literature is to allow us passage into the lives of others unnoticed. Such is the case with Ranbir Singh Sidhu’s novel, Deep Singh Blue. His story takes us to a small town in northern California during the mid-1980s. It is the type of community where anyone “different” is sometimes cruelly focused upon. Being neither Hispanic nor African American, Sidhu’s hero, Deep Singh, is Indian. He is different from the usual different, which does not make his sixteen-year-old life any easier. He must come of age in a geography and culture very different from his land of origin, with parents who unabashedly refuse to adapt to their new country. Theirs is still a land of arranged marriages and caste systems and Deep Singh is plunged between two worlds.

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