From The Center for Fiction: "CULTURAL CONCOCTIONS"

Hi Everyone,

Here are five international book recommendations from The Center for Fiction. Holiday gifts, anyone?

Cultural Concoctions

Prophet Song

PAUL LYNCH

Lynch has just won the 2023 Booker Prize. This astonishing piece ofspeculative fiction is experimental inform (no paragraphs or quote marks) adding to the book's feeling of menace. Lynch creates a chilling 'it could happen here' atmosphere. "I wrote...to articulate the message that the things that are happening in this book are occurring timelessly throughout the ages, and maybe we need to deepen our own responses to that kind ofidea." Ireland is on the verge ofcollapse. The Dublin government is disassembling, people are disappearing, and a mother whose husband has been detained tries desperately to protect her children. A harrowing must-read.

The Annual Banquet ofthe Gravediggers' Guild

MATHIAS ÉNARD

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Énard’s highly anticipated new novelintroduces a young anthropology scholar who arrives in a small town inWestern France. There he eagerly researches the local traditions for his thesis, in particular, the frequency ofdeaths—animal, human, insect—that haunt the town. There is a strange recycling of life, as in each death becomes a rebirth in another form. This mysterious activity gives the marshland village an air of ghostliness. But once a year the gravediggers get a respite due to a three-day moratorium on death, celebrated with an enormous grand bouffe. This is a bawdy tale, full of ribald humor, and glittering prose.

Songs on Endless Repeat

ANTHONY VEASNA SO

We are fortunate to have this mixture of essays and fiction by the wildly talented So (Afterparties). These funny, poignant observations of Cambodian American life in the Stockton, CA community include portions of an unfinished novel, Straight Thru Cambotown, and pieces published in magazines like n+1(“Journey to a Land Free of White People”) that contain his philosophy of life and his feelings about race, queerness, and the various deaths in his own experience. What a loss to literature—he died in 2020 before his story collection was published—but such a gift to have these ‘outtakes’ to remind us of his extraordinary contribution.

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

LOUISE KENNEDY

With a title that echoes the theme ofthis week’s selection, Kennedy offers fifteen riveting, gut-punching stories that focus on women’s hardscrabble lives in Ireland. They juxtapose the extremes of their struggles with their fierce desires and search forredemption. In “Powder” an American woman (“It was as if Nancy Reagan had been cast in an am-dram production of a Tennessee Williams play”) brings her son’s ashes to Ireland to see his ex-fiancé in an excruciating but comically observed weeklong tour around Dublin’s hot spots. And Kennedy’s first appearance in the U.S. last year is now in paperback. She should be on your radar!

Orbital

SAMANTHA HARVEY

Six international astronauts from America, Britain, Japan, Italy, and Russia are circling the Earth sixteen times each day in a spacecraft. “Nine months of this sardine living, nine months of this earthward gaping, then back to the patient planet below.” In one day, including interstitial backstories, they conduct their experiments, and we are privy to their private thoughts. The author was inspired not to write a sci-fi version ofthe experience but “thought of it as space pastoral—a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of what’s disappearing.” The result is a brief but deeply reflective fictional meditation.

Enjoy!

Abrazos.

Cristina