If your summer plans include lounging by the pool or taking a road trip, be sure to bring a good book with you. KCRW gets recommendations from Joumana Khatib, editor at The New York Times Book Review, and David Ulin, contributing editor for Alta Journal.
The Bombshell by Darrow Farr
By a Salvadoran American novelist, this is about a French politician’s daughter, named Severine Guimard, who gets kidnapped by a Corsican separatist group.
Khatib: “This ticked every box … a political thriller set in a French-speaking country … Frantz Fanon has a not insignificant part in this book. … I'm sold.
… The conceit of this, I think it could totally stray into stereotype. … Severin, she wants to be a Hollywood actress. She’s quite narcissistic. She's really vain in that way, that a sort of attractive and privileged 17-year-old girl, only they can really have that combination. And her character development, I thought was so interesting as the story went on. … The book does take a very big swerve at the end, and I think the author totally nailed it, especially for a debut. I thought it was very impressive, and it's a lot of fun.”
An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park
This is Park’s first collection of short fiction. He won the LA Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer for his novel titled Same Bed Different Dreams.
Ulin: “One of the things that I find consistently astonishing about his work is the way that he's always exploding lines, exploding genre distinctions, creating a really interesting weave.
So one of the stories is a story of someone's life through their passwords, right? His daughter's name is one of his passwords. It takes us through all of the passwords.
There are a number of stories that are written in the form of letters or found documents or things like that. One is a writer writing to his translator, giving notes on a translation.
What I love about his work is it's really smart, it's really playful.”
A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
This is a true story of a British couple stranded in the Pacific Ocean for four months in the early 1970s.
Khatib: “This is a happy ending as far as shipwreck stories go. … It's a British couple, Maurice and Maralyn. … They're polar opposites. And so they set out. They're chugging along. They make it. And then they're hit. And they basically have to survive on a raft in the middle of the Pacific for almost four months until they're rescued.
… This book reads very fast, and [the author] has what I think is a funny tongue-in-cheek point where she's like, ‘What is marriage, really, other than being stranded on a life raft with somebody for months?’
… They stayed married. … They published a work of nonfiction around the time it happened. I actually don't know if they're still alive. You would hope that they have the easiest time of their life after that, that all their trials and tribulations have been used up in that one adventure. But good story.”
A Truce That is Not Peace by Miriam Toews
This memoir explores Toew’s grief, guilt, and futility connected to the suicides of her sister and father. Toews grew up in a Mennonite community and wrote the book Women Talking, which Sarah Polley turned into an Oscar-nominated film.
Ulin: “[Toews is] a genre blur. … Much of the fiction that she's published has autobiographical elements. In this instance, she's writing a memoir, but it's a memoir through a very constructed filter. … What she does at the beginning of the book, she's asked to participate in a literary conference in Mexico City. The director of the conference says that he wants her to speak on the question: Why do I write? And then the rest of the book … it's framed through this filter. It explores all of this family trauma, but it's addressing those two questions, or moving back and forth between them.
It's in six chapters. Each … begins with … a status update on what's going on with this talk she's supposed to give. As the book progresses, the question of the talk becomes more and more fraught. As you get closer to the event, you get more and more stressed out. And she really captures that movement between the writer wrestling in the present tense with this obligation she has to fulfill, and also all of the memory that this is dredging up, and all of the family questions that are in many ways irreconcilable. It's a really remarkable piece of work.”
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis
Purvis’ first novel is about five sisters living on their grandfather’s farm in a village called Little Nettlebed, in 18th century England. The neighbors believe the sisters are transforming into dogs.
Khatib: “All is not well in Little Nettlebed. The girls are really intelligent, but a little wild. And the rest of the village really doesn't know what to make of them. And then before long, somebody swears that one of the sisters turns into a dog at night. … The priest knows, the barmaid knows, and it turns into this ridiculous moral panic. But it's so strange and so funny. And the characterization of all these figures, I think is really great, quite memorable.”
Tilt by Emma Pattee
Pattee’s novel transpires in one day, following a massive earthquake in Portland, Oregon. It begins with Annie, a young pregnant woman, shopping for a crib at IKEA.
Ulin: “It's both got heft and substance, and it's impossible to put down. … I read it in a single sitting.
… She's in IKEA shopping for this crib, she gets into a dispute with the salesperson at IKEA who's not being attentive enough. And then the great Cascadia earthquake hits. For those who don't know about the great Cascadia earthquake, Kathryn Schulz wrote this horrifying piece in The New Yorker about seven or eight years, describing what would happen. [It] will be when the triple junction off the Pacific Northwest breaks, and it'll be an earthquake … in the range of 9.0.
… What ends up happening is this pregnant narrator, Annie, has to get home, no cell service, no nothing, and she has to figure out where her husband is, he's an actor. … It's an incredibly pointed look at the bleakness of aging creatives who haven't quite made it and may never, and the compromises that they have made. And then on top of that, it's a portrait of this narrator in the course of seven or eight or nine hours, growing into a fierce mother of this child she hasn't [had] yet.”