Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette, a fabulist tale of a mother who becomes pregnant with an unusual child, is a fascinating debut that breaks genre conventions of all sorts. The novel begins with the narrator, Tiny, a professional cellist, disclosing that she has had an affair with her owl-lover, a companion from her youth, and she now… Continue reading Chouette by Claire Oshetsky
Tag: newfiction
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s 2018 debut, is a coming of age story set against the onset of the digital age, in other words the novel’s protagonist is coming of age with our modern world. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, has arrived at Harvard for her freshmen year in the 1990s, armed with a love… Continue reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff brings readers back to the Middle Ages in her new novel, Matrix, a fiction loosely created around the life of the twelfth century nun and poet, Marie de France. In Groff’s novel, Marie is an 17 year old orphan, deemed unfit for marriage because she is a “great clumsy lunk” with a “giant… Continue reading Matrix by Lauren Groff
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Reading Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, felt like the culmination of the many years of hype and interest surrounding her work, it’s the rare novel that builds upon the themes of the writer’s previous work in all of the best ways. The novel centers on Alice Kelleher, a successful Irish novelist… Continue reading Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Maggie Shipstead’s Booker Prize long-listed novel, Great Circle, is an impossibly wide-reaching piece of historical fiction that totally defies any effort to summarize briefly. The novel’s twin threads focus on two women living totally different lives: first, there’s Marian Graves, an orphan who survived a great tragedy in her infancy and grew up to become… Continue reading Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Virtue by Hermione Hoby
Humans have been attempting to answer the question of what a good and virtuous life looks like since the beginning of time. In her sophomore novel, Virtue, Hermione Hoby takes on this very same concern, contextualized within the Trump era. The novel centers on Luca, a young man trying to distance himself from his middle… Continue reading Virtue by Hermione Hoby
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood burst onto the scene with her bestselling memoir Priestdaddy, a humorous and raunchy reflection on growing up in a very unique family with a Catholic priest for a father. This year she released her sophomore effort, No One is Talking About This, a novel that explores the inner life of a woman obsessed… Continue reading No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed is an ambitious exploration of desire in all its forms. We meet our narrator, Rachel, in a state of intense repression. She has restricted her eating to the barest minimum, i.e. salads without dressing, small yogurts, etc., while also working out obsessively, in an attempt to burn all of the calories… Continue reading Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Transcendent Kingdom is the second novel by Yaa Gyasi, who burst onto the scene a couple of years ago with her brilliant and celebrated historical fiction novel, Homegoing, which followed several generations of a Ghanian family experiencing slavery in Europe and America. Gyaasi’s sophomore novel has a narrower focus than Homegoing, which spanned decades and… Continue reading Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Torrey Peters’ buzzy new novel, Detransition, Baby, reclaims the rare phenomenon of detransition, a tool used by transphobes to question the legitimacy of transitioning in the first place. Peters’ novel includes a character, named Ames, who has detransitioned, not because he had made a mistake transitioning to living as a female, or because he doesn’t… Continue reading Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters