THE UNNAMED NARRATOR of Small Rain will be familiar to readers of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You and Cleanness: poet, teacher, expat, gay. Those two books of fiction trace the poet’s life in Bulgaria, where he teaches English literature to high schoolers, though a difficult childhood under a violent patriarch in Kentucky intrudes on […]
MEET THE CAST: David Crader, a washed-up child actor, author of the celebrity memoir that constitutes the bulk of Justin Taylor’s second novel, Reboot; Amber, David’s long-suffering second ex-wife, mother of his child, in whose life David appears, in his own words, as “an occasional cameo”; Grace Travis, David’s first ex-wife and former costar, diversifier-of-portfolio par excellence (“We can’t all be Gwyneth or Busy,” Grace says, “but we do what we can”); Shayne Glade, David’s best frenemy and former costar, a buffer and more talented foil; Molly Webster, culture writer, bartender, holder of an MFA in “speculative nonfiction”; Corey Burch, once
LORRIE MOORE’S NEW NOVEL STARTS TWICE. The first chapter is a letter from one sister to another, an old one, probably, because who writes letters anymore and I don’t even know what a “desk cartonnier” is but it sounds old. I can’t quite place the year or state but the period and region are clear: the Reconstruction South. “I have also sent Harry some old rebel coins for pounding into cufflinks,” our narrator, an innkeeper named Elizabeth, writes, as if to say, There will be no Confederate relics in my lodge. Canadian coins, oddly enough, circulate, but one senses that
ANGELO HERNANDEZ-SIAS: A funny story about the title story of Liberation Day (Random House, $28) is that you woke up one night from a dream and wrote something on your notepad, thinking it was the most brilliant idea. And when you woke up, you found it said: “Custer in the Bardo.”
I spent the last days of 2019 with family in a Panamanian duplex, across the street from a “village” of high-end apartments where men worked the yards. Fernanda Melchor’s new novel, Paradais, takes place at a Mexican luxury development that shares the Panamanian complex’s name: Paradise. The coincidence is banal, if illustrative. “Páradais,” the phonetic rendering of an English word, is a clichéd, empty signifier of colonial “luxury,” sort of like an American apartment complex called “Royal Glen” or “High Manor.” But Melchor’s novel owes less to the unimaginative naming conventions of developers than to its chief intertext: José Emilio
