Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘debut novel’

Reviews |

Some Things That Meant the World to Me, by Joshua Mohr

If you’re one of those anachronistic thirty-somethings who still quaintly reads books—let alone, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century form like the novel—then you may know the rare and exquisite pleasure of stumbling across one that seems to be written by, for, and about your contemporaries. I had that experience recently with Josh Mohr’s debut novel. Some Things That Meant the World to Me (Two Dollar Radio, June 2009) is the unsettling story of a thirty-year-old San Francisco man named Rhonda, who suffers from depersonalization disorder after a childhood of abandonment and abuse. In between cue-stick beatings, Rorschach tattoos, and botched batches of home-brew wine, he discovers a portal to his past in the dumpster behind a local taquería.


Reviews |

Book of Clouds, by Chloe Aridjis

by Erika Dreifus

Chloe Aridjis’s first novel, Book of Clouds (Black Cat, 2009), proves an immensely pleasurable and thought-provoking read. Tatiana, whose father owns the largest Jewish deli in Mexico City, finds herself still living in Berlin long after winning a year there from the Goethe Institute. As a self-professed “professional in lost time,” Tatiana may challenge writer-readers’ assumptions about good characterization. And yet the novel succeeds and keeps us engaged in not only Tatiana, but in the novel’s real main character: the city of Berlin.


Shop Talk |

Miles from Nowhere's Paperback Tour

by Anne Stameshkin

The paperback edition of Nami Mun‘s Orange Prize-nominated debut novel-in-stories, Miles from Nowhere, will publish Tuesday, September 1, 2009. And Chicago magazine just named Nami Best New Novelist in their “Best of Chicago” feature. Here’s my own reviewlet of the hardcover: Miles from Nowhere began as a collection of linked stories (two of which I had the pleasure to read in workshop at Michigan). As a novel, the chapter-stories work together beautifully; Miles remains episodic, but breaks between chapters feel hauntingly like lost years…perfect for this particular story. Set in New York City in the 1980s, the book follows a […]


Interviews |

Know Then Thyself: A Conversation with Jeffrey Rotter

by Lee Thomas

Lee Thomas talks to debut novelist Jeffrey Rotter about the social risks of homemade clothing, museums as metaphors, the parallels between As I Lay Dying and reality T.V., and the ways in which imagination can change the world – for good and evil. The title of Rotter’s novel, The Unknown Knowns, alludes to that Donald Rumsfeld speech of linguistic loop-de-loops that would have driven George Orwell crazy; the book, which looks askance at our modern take on “Us vs. Them,” tackles the ontological questions presented by our vague and shadowy paranoia, but ups the ante considerably beyond the present moment in history to the personal crises that drive all good stories.


Reviews |

How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely

by Richard Parks

What aspiring novelist doesn’t dream of early fame? Granted, it’s a willfully suppressed narrative—unwritten, unspoken, and perhaps for a noble few, unimagined—but most writers have contrived versions of a meteoric rise to literary success along with more prosaic early fictions. And, given the chance, who would shunt the regard of established authors, modest financial gains, and possible tenured teaching position that await? How I Became A Famous Novelist (Grove/Atlantic, July 2009), Steve Hely’s debut novel, uses this condition as pretext for rollicking satire.


Interviews |

Getting the South Right: A Conversation with Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. Her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (Agate, Nov. 2008), is about twin brothers navigating life after high school in a small Gulf Coast town. Where the Line Bleeds is an Essence Book Club Selection, a 2009 Honor Award recipient from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jesmyn Ward’s essays and fiction have been published in Oxford American, A Public Space, and Bomb magazines. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and she is currently entering her second year as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

Nico Berry spoke to the author by phone as she soaked up the summer heat back home in DeLisle, Mississippi.


Reviews |

Doghead, by Morten Ramsland

Hundehoved. See, it sounds a little more haunted, a little more rhythmic, a little more intense in Danish. But the English “Doghead” sounds good, too: blunt and pragmatic, both mysterious and common as dirt. Come to think of it, mystery and the commonplace both pervade Doghead(Thomas Dunne Books, 2009, trans. Tiina Nunnally), a Scandinavian saga obsessed with the convoluted telling of what goes awry in the gnarled branches of the Erikkson family tree.


Reviews |

I Do Not Come to You By Chance, by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

I had to go four or five pages into my junk email folder to find one. It was from a Dr. Obadiah Maliafia of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The email says that my $10.7 million in overdue inheritance funds: “HAS BEEN GAZZETED TO BE RELEASED TO YOU VIA THE FOREIGN REMMITANCE DEPARTMENT OF OUR BANK.”

After reading Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s debut novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance (Hyperion, May 2009), the missive from Dr. Maliafia read like a finely tuned piece of art: the formal language, the capital letters, the amount of money – a perfect example of the 419 email scam.


Reviews |

The Moon in Deep Winter, by Lee Polevoi

Like a cold, northeastern version of Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade, Lee Polevoi’s impressive debut novel, The Moon in Deep Winter, is the story of a misguided homecoming gone wrong. After years spent as a bit player on the margins of Southern California’s criminal underworld, Parker returns to his rural New England town, hoping to reconcile differences with his mother, his younger half-siblings, and his dictatorial step-father. He soon finds that his family secrets run even deeper and darker than he thought.




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