"Language is the beginning and end of everything."
Cult-speak, Erik Larson's first fiction, sci-fi noir, and more
It’s officially fall and I’m (mostly) ready. I’ve been trying to cultivate new, intentional practices—as a former Catholic raised in a close-knit family, I grew up with a lot of dearly held traditions that no longer feel as meaningful as they used to—and this year I’ve decided to look to the celebrations that came before Christianity, that Christianity took and then rebranded as their own. So, for the fall equinox (I know, I am a cliché) I focused on harvest. Which meant doing some baking, but also thinking about the very idea of harvesting, of gathering up goods to get me through the winter. Last year’s winter was bleak and lonely, and I do believe this year will be better, but also: What am I doing to take care of myself, to emotionally buck up for the coming months? How am I gathering with friends and loved ones before all that bonus seasonal depression kicks in? There aren’t broadly applicable answers, but the questions work.
To the books.
New York, My Village by Uwem Akpan (W. W. Norton, Nov. 2)
A minor gripe I have with the publishing industry is that it tends to overestimate how much the rest of the world is interested in the publishing industry, so when I look at a book description and see that it’s about a writer, editor, the New York literary scene, etc., etc., my curiosity usually takes a steep drop. And yet! I just could not brush off New York, My Village. (The beautiful cover helped.)
This is Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan’s first novel—coming more than a decade after his celebrated short story collection, Say You’re One of Them—and it continues in his examination of Nigerian conflicts, but where Say You’re One of Them was harrowing (from the New York Times review: “almost every story is a catalog of horrors”) New York, My Village is wry, biting. Ekong Udousoro is a Nigerian editor who’s won the Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship at a small publishing house in New York, where he plans to work on an anthology about the Biafran War from the perspective of minority ethnic groups. To say it’s a culture shock is putting it mildly. Akpan puts Ekong through the ringer—multiple attempts at securing a visa via demeaning embassy interviews; new colleagues who, despite the best intentions, can’t help but condescend to him; outright hostility; brutal competitiveness; bed bugs; abysmal food—but his status as an outsider, forced upon him in myriad ways, shifts his experience, taking him from curiosity and wonder to disillusionment and anger. It’s very funny but also genuinely illuminating about Nigerian history.
TL;DR: Immigration, publishing, liberal racism, Nigeria, New York, dark humor
The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel (Orbit, out now)
I'm not a big reader of hard sci-fi but Lincoln's is really accessible, and I never felt too in-the-weeds in his world-building. It's about Kobo, a self-made cyborg in a dystopian near-ish future—it's become commonplace to swap out body parts for better mechanical ones—but he's deep in debt for all of his “upgrades.” He works as a scout for the Big Pharma–run MLB, but looking for promising researchers instead of players since all of the players are now constantly pumped up with scary meds. His brother is a super-famous player for the Monsanto Mets (lol) but when he's murdered on the field, Kobo is determined to find out who did it. It's so, so fun and smart (some of his names for dystopian-future NYC made me actually laugh out loud) with a good amount of noir intrigue—reads very Blade Runner both in mood and in its critiques of capitalism.
TL;DR: Dystopia, cyborgs, baseball, murder, Big Pharma, noir sci-fi
The Perishing by Natashia Deón (Counterpoint Press, Nov. 2)
This is a tough one to summarize succinctly—there’s a lot going on, and a good amount of it is abstract—but the main narrative follows a Black woman who finds herself in an alley in L.A. in 1930 with no memory of who she is or how she got there. The city estimates she’s seventeen and places her with foster parents who give her a name and send her to high school, and over the next couple years she becomes the first Black journalist at the Los Angeles Times. As she learns how the city is developing—especially when she ends up on the death beat at work—she starts to understand how it functions at the expense of its nonwhite citizens. She also starts to figure out that she’s immortal, which we learn early on in the alternate timeline where she’s standing on trial for murder in the early 22nd century. Like I said: Hard to condense, and if you’re looking for clear answers this one probably isn’t for you—but it’s a really beautiful, poignant, philosophical examination of violence, prejudice, and human agency through the context of L.A.
TL;DR: Immortality, 1930s L.A., institutional racism, fantasy thriller, alternating timelines
Italian Folk Magic by Mary-Grace Fahrun (2018)
Glomming onto practices I have no connection to—i.e. practices based in Native traditions and beliefs—feels hollow and, well, icky. There’s a really rich history of Italian and Sicilian witchcraft, much of which got folded into the occult-ish rituals of Catholicism, and this book has been great for re-connecting to it. So much of it echoes traditions and beliefs and folk remedies I’ve heard most of my life from my mom and grandmother, and it’s been really fun to dive deeper into it.
Listening to:
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell, read by Ann Marie Gideon
If you binged LuLaRich, if you’re into cults, if you love true crime podcasts— you’ve got to listen to Cultish. It’s all about the power of language to inspire but also manipulate and control—“language is the beginning and end of everything,” Montell writes—which Montell shows in her investigation of cults and the cult-adjacent: everything from Scientology to MLMs to wellness influencers to QAnon and beyond. It’s the perfect balance between analytical and entertaining.
No One Goes Alone by Erik Larson, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt and Erik Larson
This is Larson’s first work of fiction, and it’s a horror novella available only as an audiobook, read by the absolute perfect narrator. It’s an extensively researched piece of historical fiction, taking place in 1905 on the (fictional) Isle of Dorn, where a member of the (NOT fictional) Society for Psychical Research is leading a group of researchers, believers, and non-believers to investigate a supposedly haunted house. It’s perhaps not surprising to learn I’ll eat up anything about Spiritualism, but this is objectively just a good old-fashioned very scary ghost story. Gave me nightmares!
I got to chat with Erik for his launch event, and you can watch that conversation here.
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, read by Lesley Manville
This is the second book in the Thursday Murder Club series, but you can go into it without reading the first. It’s really just a delight. Four friends in their seventies who live in a sleepy retirement community share a love of true crime and cold cases and then end up using that amateur sleuth vibe (minus the former MI5 agent who obviously is quite a pro) to solve actual murders. In this one, the former MI5 agent Elizabeth, is surprised by a visit from her ex-husband—still an agent—who angered a bunch of mob bosses by stealing a bunch of diamonds on a whim during a sting. These characters are easy to love and the stakes are, for the most part, very low. Classic.
Etc.
Some very good paperbacks are out this month.
And some very good virtual book events are streaming.
Lydia Kiesling reporting on the impossible struggles of being a parent in the restaurant industry—heartbreaking, infuriating.
Lynn Steger strong on Franzen—perfection.
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