UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction in the Libraries, Sept 15

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart
PS3619.H79 S87 2010

The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.

After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.

Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.

Please Come Back to Me: Stories by Jessica Treadway
PS3620.R43 P55 2010

Please Come Back To Me is another remarkable collection by an author the New York Times has called “a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth.”   In “The Nurse and the Black Lagoon” a woman tries to understand why her teenage son has been accused of a disturbing crime. In “Testimony” an adult daughter visiting her father does everything she can to keep herself from remembering what she believes she cannot bear. A man returns to his hometown in “Dear Nicole” to face the realization that he married the wrong woman out of misplaced guilt. “Oregon” portrays the internal struggle of a woman who, having years ago betrayed a secret entrusted to her by her best friend, is tempted to repeat the mistake with the same friend’s daughter. And in the collection’s novella, “Please Come Back To Me,” a young widow seeks faith and comfort—in both natural and supernatural realms—after her husband’s death leaves her alone to care for their infant son.   On the surface, Jessica Treadway’s stories offer realistic portrayals of people in situations that make them question their roles as family members, their ability to do the right thing, and even their sanity. But Treadway’s psychic landscapes are tinged with a sense of the surreal, inviting readers to recognize—as her characters do—that very little is actually as it seems.

The Name of the Nearest River: Stories by Alex Taylor
PS3620.A92 N36 2010

Like a room soaked in the scent of whiskey, perfume, and sweat, Alex Taylor’s America is at once intoxicating, vulnerable, and full of brawn. These stories reveal the hidden dangers in the coyote-infested fields, rusty riverbeds, and abandoned logging trails of Kentucky. There we find tactile, misbegotten characters, desperate for the solace found in love, revenge, or just enough coal to keep an elderly woman’s stove burning a few more nights. Echoing Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, Taylor manages fervor as well as humor in these dusky, shotgun plots, where in one story, a man spends seven days in a jon boat with his fiddle and a Polaroid camera, determined to enact vengeance on the water-logged body of a used car salesman; and in another, a demolition derby enthusiast nicknamed “Wife” watches his two wild, burning love interests duke it out, only to determine he would rather be left alone entirely. Together, these stories present a resonant debut collection from an unexpected new voice in Southern fiction.

To Music: A Novel by Ketil Bjørnstad
Translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin & Erik Skuggevik.
PT8951.12.J634 T5513 2009

At a family picnic, 16-year-old Aksel’s wild, beautiful mother drowns while swimming drunk in a fast-flowing river. Aksel’s father is unable to confront his wife’s death and the family sinks into isolation and bereavement. Gradually Aksel, a talented pianist, dedicates his life to honoring his mother’s memory by playing the music she loved. The novel leaves us with complex questions about the creative process itself, and ultimately asks whether it is possible to produce our most exquisite art forms without personal suffering. Ketil Bjornstad, an international jazz pianist, made his literary debut in 1972 as a poet. He has written novels, plays and essays, as well as fictionalized biographies of artistic figures.

An Impossible Balance by Mempo Giardinelli
Translated by Gustavo Pellón.
PQ7798.17.I277 I4613 2010

An Impossible Balance (published as Imposible equilibrio in 1995), the first novel written by Mempo Giardinelli after his return to Argentina from years of exile in Mexico, seduces us with a plot whose improbable premise is the importation of hippopotamuses to his native Chaco region. As in the previous cases of his adaptations of pulp fiction genres, the vertiginous though strangely plausible plot overflows the usual limits of the genre and evolves into an allegorical commentary about the political and moral condition of his country. An Impossible Balance brings readers back to the setting of Giardinelli’s earlier novel Luna caliente (1983)[Sultry Moon]. Both Sultry Moon and An Impossible Balance begin in a realist mode, meeting readers’ stylistic expectations of the hard-boiled novel and the road movie respectively, but as the action develops these novels abandon the conventions of realism.

Situated in the Argentine northeast, An Impossible Balance reclaims and recuperates textually the land lost and yearned for in exile. It is a homage to the Chaco, its people (with great emphasis on its ethnic diversity), and its flora and fauna (described with the meticulousness of a botanist and a zoologist).

An American Type: A Novel by Henry Roth
PS3535.O787 A74 2010

Discovered in a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages by a young New Yorker editor, this is the final novel by Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep was published in 1934 and who “staged the literary comeback of the century” (Vanity Fair) with Mercy of a Rude Stream in 1994. Set in 1938, An American Type reintroduces us to Roth’s alter ego, Ira, who abandons his controlling lover, Edith, in favor of a blond, aristocratic pianist at Yaddo. The ensuing conflict between his Jewish ghetto roots and his high-flown, writerly aspirations forces Ira, temporarily, to abandon his family for the sun-soaked promise of the American West. Fast-paced but wrenching, set against a backdrop of crumbling piers, bedbug-infested SROs, and skyscrapers in glimmering Manhattan and seedy L.A., An American Type is not only, perhaps, the last firsthand testament of the Depression but also a universal statement about the constant reinvention of American identity and, with its lyrical ending, the transcendence of love. This posthumous work was edited by Willing Davidson, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Kings of the Earth: A Novel by Jon Clinch
PS3603.L54 K56 2010

Following up Finn, his much-heralded and prize-winning debut whose voice evoked “the mythic styles of his literary predecessors . . . William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Edward P. Jones” (San Francisco Chronicle), Jon Clinch returns with Kings of the Earth, a powerful and haunting story of life, death, and family in rural America. The edge of civilization is closer than we think. It’s as close as a primitive farm on the margins of an upstate New York town, where the three Proctor brothers live together in a kind of crumbling stasis. They linger like creatures from an older, wilder, and far less forgiving world—until one of them dies in his sleep and the other two are suspected of murder. Told in a chorus of voices that span a generation, Kings of the Earth examines the bonds of family and blood, faith and suspicion, that link not just the brothers but their entire community. Vernon, the oldest of the Proctors, is reduced by work and illness to a shambling shadow of himself.  Feeble-minded Audie lingers by his side, needy and unknowable.   And Creed, the youngest of the three and the only one to have seen anything of the world (courtesy of the U.S. Army), struggles with impulses and accusations beyond his understanding. We also meet Del Graham, a state trooper torn between his urge to understand the brothers and his desire for justice; Preston Hatch, a kindhearted and resourceful neighbor who’s spent his life protecting the three men from themselves; the brothers’ only sister, Donna, who managed to cut herself loose from the family but is then drawn back; and a host of other living, breathing characters whose voices emerge to shape this deeply intimate saga of the human condition at its limits.