A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is not your grandfather’s expat novel. In this smart debut, Peter Mountford rolls up his sleeves and delivers a crash course in Latin American history, contemporary economics, and international politics—all within a page-turning story about the dreams and gaffes of a twenty-something American working for an unscrupulous hedge fund in Bolivia.
Alexi Zentner’s debut, Touch, began as a short story and grew to a mythical realist novel that delivers monsters, secret family histories and three generations of the Boucher family – all nestled in Sawgamet, a northwoods logging town. Casey Tolfree unpacks the book’s elegant mingling of past and present, reality and myth, and loss that gives the living strength.
The skill of disclosure is often at the heart of good fiction; never more so than in The Art of Losing, by Rebecca Connell, just out from Europa Editions. Contributor Sarah Van Arsdale explicates what makes this book work so well by looking at it alongside The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.
A tale of two Londons—present-day and the glitter and doom of the 1920s and 30s—and a shoebox containing a mystery lie at the heart of Kathleen Tessaro’s delectable fourth novel, The Debutante. Lauren Hall calls the book a “fast-paced and enjoyable ride,” equal parts historical mystery and smart, gossipy love story.
In Icelandic author Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets, the narrator spends the novel hiding under his bed as his “friends,” who assume he isn’t home, gather in his apartment. Aaron Cance reviews this voyeuristic tale, its quirky narrative, and its debt to Moby Dick.
In the tradition of Southern storytelling, Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia offers a window on the power of myth to transform one small town during the Depression. Leslie Clements explores how that tension between progress and tradition free the inhabitants of Baghdad, Georgia, for radical reinvention.
Carin Clevidence’s debut novel, The House on Salt Hay Road, tells the story of three generations of the Scudder family living on Long Island in the 1930s just before a catastrophic hurricane moves in. This novel’s careful balance of happiness and tragedy, success and failure, leads Dana Staves to consider how the writing achieves this alchemy.
In this review of Antonya Nelson’s fourth novel, Bound, Jackie Retizes examines the role of serial killers as literary signifiers, how Nelson navigates multiple points of view, and why the author succeeds (when many less expert writers don’t) in favoring ambiguity over conclusions, “offering delicate moments of attachment in a book that is less about permanence than it is about restoration.”
Tyler McMahon loves short stories but worries that collections might be the worst thing to have happened to the genre. However, books like Alan Heathcock’s Volt renew his faith in the collection as an art form of its own, one that makes its stories inseparable from one another—greater even than the sum of their parts.
Lee Thomas calls Michael David Lukas’s debut novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, an antidote to mid-winter malaise with “sun-drenched marble, the heat and clamor of the bazaar, and a warm, salt breeze off the Sea of Marmara.” The book features a precocious prodigy, eight-year-old Eleonora Cohen, as a guide through Lukas’s tale of political intrigue in late 19th-century Stamboul.
