If you’re like us, then you’re struggling to read these days. Not news stories or tweets– we check out plenty, probably too many, of those. We mean actual, many-page books. Something about the state of the world has shot our concentration to shit. We’re too jumpy, so stupidly distractible. (Plus, we’re riding public transit and bumming around cafés a lot less, which suggests less opportunities to lose ourselves in a paperback.) However that doesn’t make reading lesser. Perhaps, it’s more crucial than ever, the important things we can do to provide the finger to misery. We made ourselves check out. Simply took a seat and did it. Didn’t matter what: brand-new sci-fi, dream shorts, literary memoir, history. And to a one, we resurfaced revitalized, reminded of the shock-stabilizing power of words. These are our favorite new– in many cases new-ish– books from some of the weirdest, wildest writers working today. When you devote to any among them, it feels like releasing the pressure valve on the Immediate Pot of your brain– that hissing sound methods you’re breathing once again.
The Down Days, by Ilze Hugo
Available Now
The world of Ilze Hugo’s launching book, The Down Days, is a queasily familiar dystopia: a quarantined city besieged by an epidemic and festering paranoia. Still, The Down Days isn’t a Covid-19 novel (or I sure wouldn’t be suggesting it). Its plague is an outbreak of lethal laughter, more similar to mass hysterias like the Tanganyika laughter epidemic than a virus. Besides, the property isn’t what encourages page-turning. Hugo’s engaging characters do most of the work. There’s a remains collector who moonlights as a “truthologist,” a data dealer, a drug abuser, a hyena male, orphans with perhaps imaginary lost infant brothers, real-unreal dream ladies, all interleaved in a plot that is both oblique and a busy little bit of modern noir. Part of the book’s interest is caught up in the way its diseased, post-truth wasteland rhymes with our own– however, mercifully, Hugo’s performance of a confused, quarantined city is both stranger and more hopeful than reality. — Emma Grey Ellis
The Deep, by Rivers Solomon
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Every culture has their sea misconceptions, from tentacle monsters to cyclops to misogynists lost at sea, but this isn’t your common Eurocentric mermaid tale. Descending from the unborn children of African women thrown off slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, the Wajinru are a utopic undersea society. Long ago they decided to shed the unpleasant memory of their origin, and now these memories are delegated to just one: the historian. Our narrator, Yetu, is the most recent historian in a long line, and she alone holds the cumulative memory of her society’s past. Once a year, she leads the Remembrance and shares these memories, predicting them into the Wajinrus’ minds and directing them through the raw physical discomfort that results. The rest of the year she brings this discomfort herself so the rest can reside in peace, however it’s slowly killing her. Born from a creative cooperation with Daveed Diggs of the LA experimental rap group Clipping and their song of the same name, Rivers Solomon’s novella builds on an origin misconception very first envisioned by the electronic duo Drexciya in the early ’90 s. If you have actually missed out on Solomon’s genre-transcending output so far, this melodic narrative is the place to begin. — Meghan Herbst
Jagannath, by Karin Tidbeck
Readily Available Now
The main thing to do, now that we’re home throughout the day, is eat. 3 meals, five meals, continuously, whatever. Possibly you wish to know where this leads us, beyond easy weight gain. The answer is a short story by Karin Tidbeck, called “Aunts.” In it, 3 siblings have exactly one holy job to finish in this life: “to broaden.” So they eat themselves silly, and eventually to death, at which point their maidservants cut them open to liberate from their folds the fetuses that– well, let me not spoil all the meat for you. Just read Tidbeck. She’s a Swedish fantasist of stunning skill, though not at all stunned by the places her brain takes her. The 13 tales of Jagannath, which she translated into English herself, never sign up surprise at their own grotesque hilarity– whether it’s a love story in between a male and an airship (” Beatrice”), a parent-child legend in which the kid is a carrot-baby, or a soupy, biomechanical version of Osmosis Jones(the title story). Bodies, as both troubles and worlds in themselves, are the things of Tidbeck’s research study, however never ever in a manner that makes us, the recipients of her unusual discoveries, feel puffed up or uncomfortable. These stories are made to be consumed over and over once again. — Jason Kehe
A Burning, by Megha Majumdar
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In Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, the driver for the disaster the plot speeds towards is a Facebook post from a young Muslim lady called Jivan, residing in a Kolkata slum. After a dreadful firebombing attack at a neighboring train station in the opening pages, she publishes a lightly dissident concern online: “If the authorities didn’t assist common individuals like you and me, if the cops watched them pass away, does not that imply that the federal government is also a terrorist?” Her off-the-cuff commentary rapidly turns her into a scapegoat for the occurrence– she is detained and hauled off to jail less than a dozen pages later on. A Burning isn’t only Jivan’s story. Her English student, a hijra aspiring actress called Lovely, attempts to assist her clear her name, while her previous gym instructor, called PT Sir, gets caught up in a right-wing political movement, his sympathy for Jivan curdled into conviction that she is what’s incorrect with India. This is an unique about false information and political radicalization that achieves a narrative speed so swift and brilliant that it never even carries a whiff of didacticism. — Kate Knibbs
My Meteorite, by Harry Dodge
Available Now
The believing human is typically two things: tech-averse and alone. Consider the intellectual snob, who’s “off social networks” so that he might focus on his singular, self-edifying reading. It’s make-believe, of course, this conflict in between the life of the mind and technology, and it’s constantly exhilarating to view someone come to that awareness. Which is what occurs– if it’s even possible to catch the thrust of a work so uncategorizable as this– in Harry Dodge’s memoir-shaped thing, My Meteorite Specific re
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