17 Books That Should Be On Your Radar: March 2018
Every month, the Writer’s Bone crew reviews or previews books we've read or want to read. This series may or may not also serve as a confessional for guilty pleasures and hipster novels only the brave would attempt. Feel free to share your own suggestions in the comments section or tweet us @WritersBone.
The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith
Daniel Ford: Pardon the pun, but Michael Farris Smith’s latest novel The Fighter (out March 20 from Little, Brown and Company) knocked me out cold. Southern noir just doesn’t get much better than this. We’ve been following Smith’s work since his debut Rivers, and it’s been a true pleasure seeing his work progress with each new novel. The Fighter is an intense read for myriad reasons, and you’ll have to set it down a time or two to swig a shot of bourbon or take a cold shower, but Smith infuses this book with the honest, empathetic humanity that’s become the hallmark of his fiction. This is no holds barred, campfire storytelling, and, frankly, I’m jealous as hell that Smith is so good at what he does.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
Daniel: I made the mistake of reading the late Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark right before going to bed. I made sure my trusty Louisville Slugger was close by before I finally shut my eyes (after jumping at every shadow, of course). Sean Tuohy and I interviewed McNamara way back in 2014, and we came away from that discussion convinced she was more passionate about her work than anyone we had talked to up to that point (and maybe since). To see her words in print a few years after her death is a surreal experience, but a welcome one. Yes, McNamara’s investigation into the Golden State Killer takes her into some shadowy corners, however, owing to McNamara’s natural inner light, the reader never feels completely engulfed in darkness. I'll Be Gone in the Dark is an exceptionally well-crafted and researched narrative by a skilled writer and investigator who was taken from us much, much too soon.
All the Pieces Matter by Jonathan Abrams
Daniel: What better way to explore “The Wire,” truly the greatest television show ever made, than with an oral history? Jonathan Abrams’ discussions with the cast and crew yielded just as much magic as what ended up on the small screen. Andre Royo’s protective and brotherly feelings toward his character Bubbles. Idris Elba literally drinking J.D. Williams under the table. David Simon fighting with HBO in order to write and execute his exact vision. The City of Baltimore embracing a cinematic version of itself that hemmed closer to reality than any show on record. Fans of “The Wire” will love every word, and every television junkie will appreciate the craft and love that went into making it.
The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez
Melanie Padgett Powers: I read this book while traveling to Guatemala, which was fitting because it's about Latin American immigrants in the United States. It’s lovely and poetic, but sad and frustrating because of its timeliness. It really brings home what immigrants are facing in this country today. The book focuses on one family, but after a while you start to learn about their neighbors’ stories too. These are fully developed characters with lives you rarely see portrayed in books and whom most of us don’t get to know in real life. For that alone, it’s worth a read.
Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala
Daniel: Uzodinma Iweala’s incredibly powerful second novel Speak No Evil is staring at me right now. I feel like it’s been glaring at me since I finished it. His characters are still speaking to me, and his narrative is still punching me in the gut. Iweala’s first novel Beasts of No Nation was adapted as a Netflix original, and readers will be lucky if that happens again with this novel. Just masterful and utterly devastating.
The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara
Adam Vitcavage: Set in at the rise of drag culture in the late-1980s, The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara liberally takes historic members of the Latin New York City club scene and reinterprets them. Anyone who thinks this novel will simply be about drag competitions or the club scene will quickly learn it is a family drama. Angie and Hector Xtravaganza want to create a safe space for people like them. They are joined by a sensitive trans girl named Venus, a fashionista named Jaunito, and a butch queen named Daniel. There are only flashes of the club world. Instead, the novel follows the main characters navigating their personal lives. They turn to turning tricks near the piers to pay for money, attempt to pass as female models, and learn that love is even more complicated than they thought.
My Old Faithful by Yang Huang
Daniel: I marveled at what Yang Huang was able to pack into her slim short story collection My Old Faithful. Huang’s exploration of a close-knit Chinese family through everyday experiences (both in China and the United States) is expertly wrought, and her themes are as timely as they are timeless. The author employs an earthy, subtle humor that suggests an older soul at work. Very much looking forward to Huang’s appearance on the show so I can figure out how she pulled it off!
The Beloved Wild by Melissa Ostrom
Daniel: Author James Tate Hill doesn’t mess around with book recommendations. When he shares a book with us, we know it’s going to be great. Melissa Ostrom’s young adult novel The Beloved Wild (out March 27 from Feiwel & Friends) is no exception. Harriet Winter, the novel’s indomitable main character, is so determined to decide her own future that she leaves home with her brother disguised as an orphan named Freddy. Ostrom charmingly crafts a tale filled with internal and external battles, and it’s no surprise that Publisher’s Weekly called the book, “Pride and Prejudice with a western backdrop.”
Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process by Joe Fassler (ed.)
Daniel: I picked up Joe Fassler’s Light the Dark at Sherman’s Books, one of my favorite bookstores in Portland, Maine. This book has been on my radar ever since Caitlin Malcuit’s interview with Fassler last September. I always look for an added dose of literary inspiration while on vacation, and this collection ended up being the perfect complement to treats from The Holy Donut. Fassler asked some of today’s best known authors, “What inspires you?” The answers, from the likes of Stephen King, Junot Diaz, and Roxane Gay, will be buzzing in your head long after the caffeine (or in my case, sugar) leaves your system.
Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor, an Island, and the Voyage That Brought A Family Together by Nathaniel Philbrick
Daniel: Nathaniel Philbrick, author In the Heart of the Sea, Bunker Hill, and Mayflower, is one of my favorite writers. I was completely charmed by his personal memoir Second Wind, which was recently re-published by Penguin Books. I don’t know anything about sailing, but, being an author myself, I know a thing or two about persistence in the face of adversity and disappointment. Philbrick’s quest to reestablish his Sunfish sailing bona fides is not only filled with watery mishaps and questionable navigation, but also spirited family competition and bonding. The author always infuses his historical narratives with some of history’s more colorful characters, but I’m glad to see his own personality on full display here.
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
Melanie: As a native Hoosier and fan of the movie “The Fault in Our Stars,” I have been curious about John Green for several years. When he first started publishing his books, I was too old to be in his young adult audience, but any avid reader certainly heard how he was changing people’s perceptions of young adult books. Reading Turtles All the Way Down makes me want to search out more of his books.
In this book, he gives us Ava, a 16-year-old girl with a severe anxiety disorder that affects her relationships with everyone around her, including her mother, best friend and a former friend she reconnects with. Green has OCD, which allows him to know exactly how to put Ava’s anxiety into words that many of us can relate to—or learn how our loved ones with anxiety feel. I quickly developed a big sisterly love toward Ava and her friends, and I cheered her on as she struggled with her disorder while also trying to play “Encyclopedia Brown” and unravel a local mystery.
Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Daniel: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra is deliciously erudite. Her use of language and her word choices perfectly match her characters. The story centers on Zebra, an Iranian exile living in New York City. The hyper-educated heroine is the keeper of her family’s vast knowledge, and attempts to retrace the journey she took with her father en route to the United States years before. I’ve been slow-reading this book, not wanting to rush through my time with Zebra and the rest of the novel’s eclectic cast of characters. I’ve laughed. I’ve gotten misty. By the time I’m finished, I know I’m going to be ready for more from this exceptional new voice.
Mercy Dogs by Tyler Dilts
Daniel: Find a fedora. Eat a good meal in Southern California (perhaps at one of Danny Beckett's favorite joints). Dig into Mercy Dogs. Repeat.
Author’s Corner
By Michael Farris Smith, author of The Fighter and Desperation Road
Gods of How Mountain by Taylor Brown
Taylor Brown writes like the landscapes he creates, the winding rivers and misty mountain tops want to drift into romance, but that ain’t gonna happen. His stories are wound with love and despair and I don’t expect this to be any different. (Gods of How Mountain is out 3/20 from St. Martin's Press.)
High White Sun by J. Todd Scott
You can’t help but get a little dust in your mouth when you’re reading about the reckless Texas of J. Todd Scott. High White Sun (out 3/20 from G.P. Putnam's Sons) is the follow up to The Far Empty and I can already feel the hot Southwestern wind pushing against my face.
Country Dark by Chris Offutt
I’m sneaking out of March and into April (April 10 to be exact) with this one. Country Dark is Chris Offutt’s return to fiction after too much time away, and this is a story that will make you grit your teeth and open your heart, at the same time.
NovelClass
Listen to the Season 2 premiere of NovelClass, live from The Dean Hotel in Providence, R.I.!
Also, start reading Swamplandia! by Karen Russell and tune into Dave Pezza and Caitlin Malcuit’s discussion on March 26.
7 Books That Should Be On Your Radar: September 2016
Every month, the Writer’s Bone crew reviews or previews books we've read or want to read. This series may or may not also serve as a confessional for guilty pleasures and hipster novels only the brave would attempt. Feel free to share your own suggestions in the comments section or tweet us @WritersBone.
Everyone Loves You Back by Louie Cronin
Daniel Ford: Louie Cronin’s debut novel Everyone Loves You Back features everything I could ever want in a novel: Angtsy radio personalities, a bumbling love triangle, a fight with encroaching hipsters, and a New England sensibility. Yes, perhaps I’m biased because the book is set in Cambridge (where I work and across the river from where I live) and Cronin was the producer on “Car Talk,” one of my all-time favorite podcasts, but that doesn’t change the fact that the writing contained in Everyone Loves You Back is top notch. Main character Bob Boland, a humble radio show producer (something else I can also relate to), is trying to hang onto his neighborhood’s identity in the face of “urban treehuggers and uppity neighbors," while also attempting to bed two women after a small lifetime of loneliness and jazz on vinyl. It doesn’t help matters that his buddy Riff’s show, as well as the small radio station as a whole, is in a constant state of flux, or that one of the women Bob desires happens to work with him and the rest of the overnight crew. Wonderful shenanigans ensure (I also wouldn’t come to this novel hungry; Bob likes to eat).
Everyone Loves You Back is a breath of fresh air in the literary market. It’s so hard finding solid, heartfelt prose like this these days. The novel almost had a throwback feel to it; I can almost imagine it being produced as a mid-1990s dramedy (More crunchy and serious than “Wings,” but perhaps featuring a similar amount of mom-jeans and baggy shirts). As I wrote in my interview with the author last month, “Cronin’s passion for storytelling and bubbly optimism is infectious, and translates to every page of her fun debut novel.” Everyone Loves You Back is sarcastic, warm, earthy, and real. Be ready to shower it with plenty of literary love when it comes out on Oct. 21, 2016.
Read Daniel Ford's interview with Louie Cronin.
Come Twilight by Tyler Dilts
Sean Tuohy: The Long Beach Homicide series reinvigorated my passion for the detective stories. Dilts breathed new life into the slowly decaying genre by refreshing the key elements all detective yarns need—interesting characters, a new city or culture to explore, and a solid who-done-it—and putting a modern spin on a gumshoe’s life.
In Come Twilight, we find an author firmly living up to all the potential we saw in the first three books of the Long Beach Homicide series. Danny Beckett's life is going well for the first time in a long time. He's got love in his life, giving him something to wake up for besides his job (which he’s still really good at). Of course, Beckett’s peace (although it’s still a begrudging peace on his part) is disturbed by trouble early on in the novel when someone tries to blow up his car.
Danny wants to put everything on the line to find out who is after him, and try to regain that peace, but is largely sidelined because he’s the victim for once and not the objective, determined investigator. This brings a completely new set of issues that Danny has to wrestle with, which is a perfect match for Dilts’s sensitive, conflicted prose. We’ve been saying Dilts is an author to watch since we started Writer's Bone. It’s time you started paying attention.
The Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne
Daniel: Yeah…
Listen, I loved being dropped in the world of Harry Potter again after all this time. I got goosebumps thinking about the gang at Station 9 ¾, I enjoyed seeing all of them become the corporate drones so many of us become after heroic beginnings (even if those heroics happened in your backyard while pretending you’re saving Lois Lane from harm), and I enjoyed the smaller moments between characters like Harry and his troubled son Albus.
But, whoa boy, does that storyline suffer from some serious high school creative writing class blues. Time travel plots? Was the ideas cupboard that bare? The Cursed Child was an amnesia subplot away from being an episode of “24.” And Ron, who I’ll admit wasn’t exactly my favorite character in the original series, is depicted as a cartoonish buffoon. I wouldn’t spend five minutes alone with his Dad jokes. The dialogue between all of the characters seemed forced and corny at times, the already meager plot kind of petered out at the end, and I felt more relief than satisfaction when I closed the book.
The Cursed Child isn’t as awful by any means, and it’s certainly worth a read. I also think it may benefit from a live performance; maybe something is getting lost in translation on the page and would be better suited to the stage. If nothing else, The Cursed Child will remind you how much you loved reading the original series, and may inspire you to pick up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and begin again (which I promptly did).
Bobby Kennedy by Larry Tye
Daniel: There’s something to be said for writing a fair, balanced biography—based on more than 400 interviews and prodigious secondary reading—and walking away a bigger fan of your subject than when you started. Larry Tye managed to do just that with Bobby Kennedy.
Being a liberal Democrat from New England, I am also predisposed to liking the Kennedys, however, I always find myself more interested in their faults than in their glossy, somewhat manufactured public image. Tye strips away all those public perceptions and really gets to the heart of who Bobby Kennedy was and why he mattered. From working with Joseph McCarthy (!!!) and rooting out organized crime to leading John F. Kennedy’s successful Presidential campaign (at an insanely young age), serving as U.S. Attorney General, and being elected to the Senate from New York State, Bobby Kennedy undergoes personal and political transformations that culminate in his spirited, and, in the end, tragic 1968 campaign for President. He’s quotable, shaggy-haired, and fiercely dedicated to his family and his country. As Tye points out, RFK would be skewered in today’s political climate for his evolving views on a whole host of issues, but his legacy should provide evidence that good politicians can change over time without being burned in effigy or eviscerated on social media.
Again, Bobby Kennedy is incredibly balanced, meticulously researched, and totally engrossing. It is not to be missed.
Read Daniel Ford's interview with Larry Tye.
Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer
Sean: Jon Krakauer wonderfully tells the tragic story of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who gave up a $3 million dollar contract and joined the U.S. Army in the days following 9/11.
The book bounces between Tillman's life and the earlier events in Afghanistan—the Soviet invasion, the rise of the Taliban—and then details how Tillman’s life ended following the U.S. invasion. The following cover-up by the Army regarding Tillman's death by friendly fire, and how government officials tried to benefit from his death, are shown in troubling detail. Filled with great interviews and deeply researched, this is a great book that any reader of current events will eat up.
Dead Wake by Erik Larson
Daniel: A lot of nonfiction on this list! I love it.
As I mentioned in my feature essay about my recent trip to Canada, my older brother and I share an affinity for history. Erik Larson is one of the authors we follow religiously, and I’m ashamed how long it’s taken me to pick up Dead Wake. With some helpful nudging from Tom Ford (the principal, not the designer), I finally did and loved every harrowing page.
Dead Wake tells the story of the Lusitania’s doomed trip across the Atlantic. Larson expertly sets the scene, describing a world at war and an isolationist U.S. foreign policy led by a man more intent on getting some from Edith Galt than focusing on global issues. While the stories of those who survived the Lusitania’s sinking, as well as those who didn’t, are heartbreaking, the truly remarkable aspect of this work was Larson’s recreation of life aboard a German submarine. Who wouldn’t sign up for tight quarters, suspect craftsmanship, ever-changing weather patterns, a pissed off Royal Navy, and, oh yeah, the very real threat of sinking to the bottom of the ocean and never being found?
The best part of my reading experience was that Larson himself liked a snarky tweet I sent out while reading the book. You can’t beat that!
Totally engrossed in @exlarson's Dead Wake. Starting to think things don't turn out well for the Lusitania. #history #amreading
— Daniel Ford (@danielfford) July 23, 2016
The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott
Daniel: I lost a bunch of sleep reading J. Todd Scott’s terrific debut novel. The Far Empty rumbles like a freight train, picking up steam as it goes. The novel features meaty, broken characters that weave in and out of trouble throughout the story. The plot keeps the pages moving, but it’s the multiple narratives and internal struggles that forced me to mutter, “Just one more chapter…,” several times after midnight.
Much like Dilts, J. Todd Scott exhibits a muscular, yet sensitive, potential that’s only going to get stronger over time.
And in honor of Scott’s inclusion in this month’s “Books That Should Be On Your Radar,” I went back and fixed the audio on our podcast so we don’t sound like we recorded it in an oil drum. Give is a listen and add The Far Empty to your fall reading list.
Also listen to the audio version of "Books That Should Be On Your Radar!"