Karan Mahajan
THE LINGUIST ROSS PERLIN is an encyclopedist of New York City’s microworlds. In 2016, when he took me and ten others on a tour of Ridgewood, Queens, he alerted us to the presence of a dozen languages spoken in a two-square-mile radius, including Syriac, Yiddish, Malayalam, Haitian Creole, and Kichwa. He led us into an ancient, black-and-white-tiled, espresso-scented Sicilian social club, where a retired nonagenarian factory worker proudly discussed his dialect, Partanna. Later, we drank beer and ate bratwurst at the Gottscheer Hall, a tavern and cultural center for the Gottscheers, a tiny community of Germanic people who fled their That Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s caustic and absurdist collection Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems is being released in time for Father’s Day resembles nothing more than a joke you might find in the collection itself: A well-meaning father (here, the publisher) misinterprets the son’s book (a work of emotional terrorism aimed at both fathers and sons) as an act of love and exalts it within a stifling tradition of filial affection (Father’s Day). Dark hilarity ensues. 
New York makes so much noise about itself, discusses itself so endlessly on its streets and in its bars, lends its name so freely to magazines and websites and newspapers, that the novelist foolhardy enough to engage with this nonstop tantrum of a place has little choice but to turn himself or herself into a noise-comprehender (The Fortress of Solitude, Netherland) or a noise-amplifier (Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Puttermesser Papers). I wasn’t aware that a third path exists until I read Teju Cole’s Open City—a novel that simply blots out the noise in favor of moments of eerie tranquility Pearl Abraham’s fourth novel, American Taliban, is the story of an American family riven by the disappearance of a young man, John Jude Parish, into the ranks of the Taliban weeks before 9/11. Though glancingly based on the life of John Walker Lindh, the novel differs in particulars: The eighteen-year-old Parish is a popular, intellectually curious character rather than a troubled teenager, and his journey from Washington, DC, to Afghanistan feels less like a radical quest and more like a pilgrimage that ends at the wrong shrine.