The Brooklyn Rail

By dramatizing the high-voltage, yet tender, minds of three legendary musicians, Boman Desai has written a When We Cease to Understand the World for nineteenth-century classical music. Desai knows his subject well and integrates music into character—or is it character into music? Those readers well-versed in Romantic symphonic music might see analogues in the speech of characters, maybe in their imagined gaits through Central European towns, but certainly in how Brahms metabolizes the vicissitudes of life and translates them into the electrical storm that becomes his Fourth Symphony.

Susie Vogelman, a protagonist who initially sees herself as “a failed attempt at form,” finds definition through outrage. Her roommate has overdosed on Oxycontin, causing Susie to retreat to Los Angeles. If you hear a simmer in the background of the prose, it’s likely because the author Luke Goebel lost his brother to an Oxy overdose. There’s an outraged urgency that keeps Kill Dick a glowing fireball meeting the friction of atmosphere. Although Susie describes herself as “anti-gravity,” her novel has both the inevitability and the fireworks of a disintegrating asteroid.

The colors that come to mind when reading Antoine Volodine, both here in The Monroe Girls and in his excellent 2017 novel Radiant Terminus, approach those of Francis Bacon: I see phthalo greens, cadmium red spikes, and the possibly-carcinogenic purples derived from coal tar. As in the work of Bacon, Volodine's fundamental materials seem to carry some kind of psychic weight. Can one describe hell in a non-pejorative sense, as a blurring between the living and the dead, as a matter-of-fact erasure of stability itself with the background hum of electricity and an ever-present urge to howl? If so, this seems to be the territory Volodine is mapping, which I recommend following closely.

Borrowing from Edmund White, in his introduction to Jean Giono's transitionary novel Melville, a new reader to Jean Giono should be ready for unrivaled mystical power and a non-anthropocentric foregrounding of nature. We're so accustomed to character-driven plot that it's hard to even conceive of character as background. But this is crucial to understanding the world Giono depicts.

When Bob Dylan invokes Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s relationship in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” it’s as the ultimate intensifier of a relationship gone bad. Paul Vaughn, assuming the role of Verlaine in Richard Hell’s novel Godlike, acts as the steward to sixteen-year old poetic “seer” T., this novel’s Rimbaud, as he spelunks the underground poetry scene of New York in the 1970s.

“In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality,” Virginia Woolf writes. This is the mode of Zach Powers’s The Migraine Diaries. Powers understands the instant obliteration of a headache and, brilliantly, juxtaposes that with the loss of a friend. Should someone ever take up Woolf’s challenge and assemble a literary anthology of maladies, they should look first to Powers for his descriptions of the headache.

If Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy invited Realism into the house of the novel—only for Gustave Flaubert to remove its coat, pour some tea, and draw out the depths of domestic confidences and desires—a doppelganger of Realism still wandered the moor. This shadow Realism, where the landscape generates emotion and character, emerges in the novels of George Sand only to condense and explode in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In contrast to Flaubert’s domestic Realism, the wild geographic Realism of Sand, Brontë, Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Knut Hamsun, and, importantly for this short introduction, Halldór Laxness, obeys an entirely distinct notion of time. Feeling forms over generations and recedes at a glacial pace. Like their ancestors in the Sagas, the Icelanders in the novels of Laxness are heroically stubborn, and investigations into the hidden motivations of their actions yield little more than one would get from psychologizing a stone. In Laxness, the boundary collapses between inward and outward. Nowhere is this more on display than in the novel released by Archipelago Books this month, A Parish Chronicle. 

Why not close out the year with the interiority of an incel heated to a rolling boil and transformed into an active shooter? If you like, think of it as someone putting Tom Waits’s “Little Drop of Poison” on the jukebox. The menacing, ersatz Travis Bickle narrating this cold open is the voice of the toxic online “streets” in Justin Taylor’s novel Reboot, out in paperback by Vintage this month. Taylor’s novel is Frankensteinian in that it attempts to gather strange, monstrous limbs of contemporary life—reptilian and hollow earth conspiracies, the manosphere, BoJack Horseman, Twitch streaming, QAnon, celebrity and its corresponding fandom—and reanimate the corpse of popular culture. It's also Young Frankensteinian in that the book never takes itself too seriously, even though the characters think nothing could be more grave than their particular hardships. In this way, Reboot is brilliant satire in the DeLillo mode. Taylor is one of the few unapologetic stylists out there, and whether he’s following protagonist David Crader’s hard reset or chronicling environmental collapse, every sentence is written with great care.

“Bruma” was, for me, the standout novella in the excellent collection, Three Stories of Forgetting, by Djaimilia Periera de Almeida. The “forgetting” in this collection is oftentimes a deliberate erasure of colonial wrongs, and each story investigates memory as process, both conscious and unconscious. Bruma was sold into slavery at age thirteen, and has been encouraged to forget himself. The saudade that he feels is not the longing for some gauzy, soft-focused Beulah. No, Bruma longs for his own life. In this story, Perieria gives him the chance to reclaim interiority in a semi-sacred space. The cabin becomes a Walden, but far more powerful because it is the only place where Bruma, often fog-like or spectral, is able to condense into full personhood. In the other “home,” Bruma is reduced to the bare life of enslavement. All this alters what might appear to be a scene of bushcraft or wilderness survival into a transcendent effort of one man making his own space for selfhood—specifically the selfhood that was erased in Portuguese colonialism.

Wiesław Myśliwski’s seventh novel, Needle’s Eye, presents a memory of an ancient gate in the writer's hometown of Sandomierz, Poland. You can see the halation, that salty glow of daylight memories, right from the outset. An elderly man muses on love and says he will give the narrator his life, only to collapse down flights of stairs, lifeless. The ensuing investigation will remind readers of Kafka, but there is an escalating doubt and pervasive confusion that put me in the mind of Ferenc Karinthy’s excellent novel Metropole. As the narrative tumbles forward, the diffusion of time and memory swells. Characters speak like people speak in dreams, paying out chains of semi-logic that assume profound weight in the moment. The undeniable brilliance of this work, and the other Myśliwski books I've read, makes me suspect he’s not far from being the sort of obscure Central European writer who shocks everyone and wins a Nobel.

To me, as an illuminator of the dark logic of power, Mark Doten is peerless. This story from their new collection, Whites, is told from the perspective of Elon marching through his insulated world with all the sensitivity of an astronaut in a spacesuit. Yet Elon walks through our world, increasingly of his making. Less an act of mimesis or even parody than an earnest attempt to sort through the jumbled wires of another mind, Doten’s story manages to be both rigorous and perversely playful—a hard balance to find. With words like “interface,” “innovation,” “sector,” “flow.” and “hosed,” Doten succeeds in grokking the grokker.

“They were easy to ignore.” The narrator of Tate Gieselmann’s story “Prey” dismisses his two high friends in the same way that a discerning reader might auto-reject a story about white-male freestyle rappers on an acid trip in California. To do so, in this case, would be a mistake. Gieselmann does something in this story that is on a short list of my favorite things great literature can do: handle a memory with care. 

Leonora Carrington wrote The Stone Door in the early 1940s in Mexico City, but the novel wasn’t published until 1977. This month, NYRB Classics brings the Surrealist dream logic of Carrington’s vision to a wider audience. Reading this work requires suspending one’s own vision—just as a reader can’t really read The Red Book without first putting on Carl Jung’s spectacles. Where Carrington swerves from Jung is in attempting to dismantle the one-to-one correspondence of symbolism and move into a stranger space. For example, a stone door presents a paradox of symbolic meaning: the stone (solid, immovable, foreclosing, masculine) versus the door (liminal, fluid, latent, feminine). In this way, Carrington’s novel feels more like a dream that’s been fed a diet of dreams, a second-order interpretation of the world, perfect for reading aloud on a humid summer night.

Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut novel, The Dwelling, comes out this August from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Caught in a “Revitalization” program, which includes the spontaneous mass-removal of all New York’s renters from their apartments, Evie Cavallo heads for a distant relation’s house in Gulluck, Texas. Her second cousin, Terry Lang, guides her as she tours the town’s idiosyncrasies and eventually installs Evie in the cowboy-boot-shaped house of a cobbler. From here, things get delightfully weird and speculative, juxtaposing late-capitalist unaffordability with the sardonic tone of fairy tales. As one character reminds us, “Fairy tales used to be real.” Throughout the novel, the dark potential and eerie winds of fable are never far away.

This month, Mo Ogrodnik publishes a propulsive, polyphonic novel about life in the Gulf. The story follows five women as they struggle to overcome a patriarchal architecture and rigid class hierarchies. The selection here follows Dounia, transplanted to the ‘dream city’ of Ras-al-Khair and questioning how circumscribed the life of her future offspring might be. 

With their new book, People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has written what may become the definitive time capsule of our debased American literary minds. Both novels were written with an assist from large language models (LLMs), but the latter—which we’ve chosen to excerpt here—serves as a warning tale from AI about how not to write. 

This month sees the publication of a new Aurora Venturini novel, and I'm hoping a widespread bloom of this Argentinian novelist's work sweeps through English-language bookshops. As in the much-lauded 2023 novel, Cousins, the narrator of  We, the Casertas is a young woman whose intellectual gifts offer some hope of transcending her monstrous home life. Translator Kit Maude has succeeded again in delivering a darkly brilliant, compellingly wry voice—which is essential, as each novel is a wondrous exploration of the narrator's mind.

This story from Marie-Helene Bertino’s newest collection, Exit Zero, confirms her status as a master of slippery twilight, a true believer that if one sidles up to a threshold just right, she can pass through whatever veil keeps our logic in this universe separate from neighboring realities. The stories in Exit Zero, like all of Marie-Helene Bertino’s fiction, climb to the rarest heights by combining intuition with emotional wisdom.

The Suicides, recently published by NYRB Classics, completes Antonio di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation. The nameless narrator, living in an unspecified Latin American city, waits in expectation of existential crisis or epiphanic revelation. His editor puts three photos of suicides on his desk and the narrator concludes that each victim saw something revelatory before the end. He wants to venture to the heart of these tragedies, perhaps even see what they saw, and enlists the aid of a partner named Marcela in his investigation. His question to her, at the end of the excerpt you are about to read, is whether or not she is capable of photographing an earthquake—not the effects, not the people fleeing tremors, but the earthquake in itself. In many ways this is the core distinction in The Suicides as a whole: how do we apprehend a process without mistaking it for a thing, or a series of things? How do we comprehend any of the events in any of our lives, or in the lives of those we love, in a snapshot rather than as an accumulation of all the decisions that brought the person to that point? The particulars drop away and the reader is left with an odd amalgam of page turner and quiet meditation on the human condition, all delivered with the tone of a Godard film.

Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo transmits the authoritarian abuses of Ahmed Sékou Touré in this novel of a female survivor, the eponymous Véronique, living in exile. Her initial entreaty to Madame Corre, that she write her own story, soon gives way to a contextualization of Guinean atrocities in the broader context of a century of devastation and the attempts writers have made to chronicle that destruction. One meditation from this excerpt particularly sticks with me, a notion building from Kundera's line that “Memory doesn't film, it photographs.” The narrator explains that all days contain all others, and fixing on the photographs mistakes the process of history for a dismal moment.  

The abiding lesson of Svetlana Alexievcih’s works is that emotional needs in no way diminish amidst calamity or cataclysm. Even in bare life we see the recognizably human. Similarly, Trofimov depicts the relentless assertion of humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances. No Country for Love follows one young woman, Debora Rosenbaum, from her arrival in promise-filled Kharkiv, Ukraine, through Holodomor, only to be wedged into a corner by the jackboots of Naziism and Stalinism. Her resilience and hope in 1930s Soviet Ukraine holds obvious parallels for modern readers, but it’s a virtue of this novel that the reader can drop the historical analogies and immerse in each moment.

This issue’s original story, “Her Blue Hat,” plays with the intersection of psychology and voice. In narrating, Ohringer’s speaker runs up and down the register of early adulthood with confident falsetto, stammering fry, and warm imagery deep from the chest.

We’re proud to partner with the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival to introduce the winners of the 2024 BCLF Short Fiction Contests. The awards were presented during a ceremony at the Center for Fiction on September 8, 2024. “Picking Crabs in Negril” by Diana McCaulay (Jamaica) emerged as the top short story among three shortlisted writers for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean. This category was judged by Cleyvis Natera, Richard Georges and Lasana Sekou.

“The Trouble with the Dog” by Stefan Bindley-Taylor was awarded the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Award from the shortlist of three stories. This category was judged by Lauren Francis-Sharma, Desmond Hall and Wandeka Gayle.

This month’s original story from Bijan Stephen puts us on the front line of a war between decency and decadence. Like Goya’s bats, the nightlife of Lisbon calls to the newly-sensible protagonist, luring him from a life of stability and reason into a sepia blur of irrationality. A pervading sense of tenderness and care adds depth to this very real struggle to reckon how life should be.

Initially, it might seem like Claudia Peña Claros is offering more of a word landscape than a story. “Room” dismantles traditional story structure—there’s no discernable beginning, middle, and end, yet there’s a striking sense that something real is happening. The closest analogue I can find is diachronic photography, when time itself becomes the protagonist and plot; a diachronic photographer documents changes in person (think of Noah Kalin’s “Everyday,” comprising twenty years of self portraits all stitched together in one youtube video) or place (David Maisel’s landscape photography and Library of Dust come to mind). Space is foregrounded in “Room” and characters are only briefly glimpsed at the edge of the frame. The result is a brilliant time-lapse, with conventions flitting at the periphery.

Here is the journal of Victoria Stevens, biohuckster whose purported cure for cancer catalyzes the action of Ryan Chapman’s new novel, The Audacity. She has fled to the desert amid impending charges of fraud and remains pathologically defiant. If the goal of fiction is to capture thought in action, the unique synaptic firings of inscrutable individuals particular to a moment in time, few will best Chapman’s contribution of the self-important, hypomanic capitalist. The content and tone of Victoria’s musings may prove invaluable to future historians puzzling over how we empowered our tech monsters.

Ledia Xhoga’s novel about a woman whose life is on the brink of unraveling because of her good intentions explores the complexity of translating our own trauma, even to the people we love. With lyrical prose and a propulsive plot, Xhoga delves deep into the shadows of the human psyche, challenging readers to confront the darker legacies of the past while pondering the delicate balance between empathy and self-preservation.