Twelve fiction and non-fiction titles for your reading pleasure.
Fiction
Something New Under the Sunby Alexandra Kleeman (assistant professor of writing); Penguin Random House. In her most recent novel (out in paperback this summer) Kleeman, winner of a prestigious 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, creates what a New York Times reviewer described as “an unlikely amalgam of climate horror story, movie industry satire, and made-for-TV mystery…. a screwball comedy in a sci-fi hellscape.” An unlikely pair of amateur detectives investigate corporate corruption in a near-future Hollywood beset by drought and wildfires, where even the water is fake.
Greetings from Asbury Park by Daniel H. Turtel, (MFA Creative Writing 2022); Blackstone Publishing. “It takes some audacity to name your book after a classic album,” writes novelist Tom Perrotta, author of the justly renowned Election, “but Daniel Turtel earns the right. Greeting from Asbury Park is a remarkable debut from a talented writer – ambitious moving, full of complicated, thorny characters and enough Jersey Shore ambiance that you can almost smell the boardwalk.”
JERKS by Sara Lippman (MFA Creative Writing 2002); Mason Jar Press. “The goal of all short fiction,” one appreciative reviewer notes, “is effective compression. Lippman’s mastery of this art is apparent from page one.” It’s a collection of 18 stories that are often simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious and in which remarkably deep character sketches are achieved in a matter of a few pages.
The Suffering of Lesser Mammals by Greg Sanders (MFA Creative Writing 2003); Owl Canyon Press. “Greg Sanders is a beguiling, far-ranging fabulist,” writes novelist David Gates, “whose wily, hyper-smart inventions take us from Big Sur to Brooklyn, from Kafka’s Prague to a remote exoplanet – and to cyberspace, whose cold zones measure human value in ‘clickthrough rates,’ and whose dark corners register a world ‘in magnificent turmoil and unrepentant decline.’”
The Work Wife by Alison B. Hart (MFA Creative Writing, 2001); Graydon House. Fiercely competent personal assistant Zanne Klein earns a six-figure salary making sure the lives of her movie mogul employer and his family run smoothly. But things start to unravel on the eve of the over-the-top party she is managing, and a personal conflict between ambition and integrity takes center stage. Hart’s debut novel comes out in July.
Don’t Call Me A Hurricane by Ellen Hagen (MFA Creative Writing 2003); Bloomsbury Children’s Books. A YA novel written in verse. High school senior Eliza Marino embarks on a passionate effort to save irreplaceable marshland from development, five years after a hurricane ravaged her Jersey Shore hometown – and also struggles with her conflicted feelings about the “summer people” who descend on the shore each year. A love poem to the people and places we come from.
Non-Fiction
Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movementsby Deva R. Woodly, (associate professor of politics and director of undergraduate studies at the New School for Social Research); Oxford University Press. “As far as we can tell,” Woodly writes in this book’s lyrical introduction, “my roots in this country go back at least seven generations on both sides. Those generations toiled to build and serve this nation while being brutalized, stolen from, disrespected, and disavowed…They are owed, for both their unpaid labor and their faith that this American idea could one day justly serve the entire polity. What that means to me is that this nation is mine. Mine to claim. Mine to hold to account. Mine to participate in reshaping.”
And the Category Is…: Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community by Ricky Tucker (lecturer, Eugene Lang School of Liberal Arts); Beacon Press. A valentine to the legendary Black and Latinx LGBTQ underground subculture, uncovering its rich legacy and influence in popular culture. One reviewer describes it as “a treasure trove of insider perspective – deeply respectful, full of critique and celebration, oral history and personal narrative. A little bit academic, a lot of wisdom, and glamour, yes, of course, and context…a crucial piece of queer history and contemporary queer culture.”
Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became Americanby Ian MacAllen (frequent New School creative writing guest speaker); Rowman & Littlefield. Evoking memories of savory aromas coming from nonna’s kitchen and of now-rapidly vanishing neighborhood red-checkered tablecloth restaurants, MacAllen’s debut book combines well-researched immigrant history, social insights, and scores of recipes. Red Sauce is an eminently readable endeavor, in the words of a Brooklyn Rail reviewer, “to save the original version before it becomes a mere nostalgic memory of the past, like a black and white photo album of our great-grandparents’ marriage.”
Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can edited by Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore (nonfiction coordinator of the New School’s MFA in creative writing program); Library of America. Shulman and Moore have collected an unprecedented half-century of works – many now hard to find or long out-of-print – telling the story of modern American feminism, from The Feminine Mystique to the #MeToo movement. Childcare and housework; gender, class, and race; birth control and abortion; domestic violence; feminist art and literature: Shulman and Moore introduce 50 years of personal and political writings on these and other topics that transformed American life.
Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration by Rachel Schreiber, PhD, (Executive Dean, Parsons School of Design); Temple University Press. During World War II, Yoneda, a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, spent eight months in a concentration camp – not in Europe, but in California, accompanying her husband to the Manzanar Relocation Center, even as they publicly supported the US’s decision to inter the West Coast’s Japanese Americans. Schreiber recounts Yoneda’s lifelong activism, including efforts to designate Manzanar a Federally recognized memorial site and to secure reparations for those detained there.
Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dreamby Tiffanie Drayton (BA Creative Writing, 2013); Penguin Random House. As a young girl, the author left Trinidad and Tobago with her siblings to join their mother in New Jersey, where she'd been making her way as a domestic worker. But the daily sting of racism threw the pursuit of the American Dream in a harsher light, and the 2013 killing of Trayvon Martin convinced her to return to Trinidad. A self-described “refugee from racism,” she reflects on her former home’s struggles with the Covid-19 pandemic and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
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