Hot News This Week
July 13, 2023
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According to Esquire, Eric LaRocca is one of the writers shaping horror’s next golden age. Everything the Darkness Eats (CLASH Books), LaRocca’s new novel, brings “his trademark extremity to a Stephen King-ian small town setting,” writes Neil McRobert in the piece, and his early work “announced him as an immediate talent.”
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| | An Astronomer in Love
by Antoine Laurain, trans. Louise Rogers Lalaurie and Megan Jones
Gallic Books • June 2023 • 9781913547462
“Antoine Laurain dazzles, as usual, with his latest charming love story couched in high adventure. A telescope connects two men, hundreds of years apart, in this part high seas escapade and part modern romance.” — Rebekah Rine, Watermark Books & Cafe (Wichita, KS)
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| Read This Next: Historical Fiction about Family Ties and American Identity
On July 6, the Washington Post interviewed Mary Kay Zuravleff about American Ending, a historical novel based on “her own family’s arrival in America—Russian Orthodox ‘Old Believers’ who immigrated about 100 years ago to work in the coal mines in Pennsylvania.” Explaining these inspirations, Zuravleff tells The Post, “I’ve been hearing these stories my whole life, but the impetus that I grew up with was to push that aside—to be American. . . . That makes for a good novel: pride and shame.” Zuravleff was also a recent guest on WYPR’s On the Record, and American Ending has received nice coverage in Oprah Daily, Daily Beast, Washington City Paper, Baltimore Fishbowl, Historical Novel Society, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and more.
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| A Queer Revolutionary Classic Book, Now Onstage with Music
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell has been adapted into an opera by composer Philip Venables and writer-director Ted Huffman. “Like the novel, [the show] covers thousands of years of human history,” the New York Times reported on June 30, “telling the story of the rise of an imperialist capitalist patriarchy called Ramrod . . . and its eventual defeat by a revolutionary queer coalition.” The opera, currently touring in Europe, is coming to New York City in 2024.
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 Click here for more top titles publishing next Tuesday, July 18.
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| | The Country of Toó
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, trans. Stephen Henighan
Biblioasis • July 2023 • 9781771965149
“When tasked with assasinating a friend, a Guatemalan gang enforcer flees to the Mayan countryside, where the struggle to keep community land from mining companies forces him to rethink his allegiances.” — New York Times Book Review
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| | Dreaming Home
by Lucian Childs
Biblioasis • June 2023 • 9781771965491
“Eminently accomplished, often deliciously droll . . . The novel asks provocative questions: At what age are we wholly accountable for our actions? To what degree do we hold a traumatized person responsible for perpetuating harm?” — New York Times Book Review
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“Melle’s illuminating memoir, translated by Luise Von Flotow, recounts three prolonged manic episodes he had between 1999 and 2010, events that profoundly affected his life and relationships. He conveys with wit and tragedy what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder.” — New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
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| | The Book of Eve
by Carmen Boullosa, trans. Samantha Schnee
Deep Vellum Publishing • May 2023 • 9781646052240
“This novel embarks on a sensuous retelling of the Book of Genesis from Eve’s perspective.” — New Yorker
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| | The Truth about Max
by Alice Provensen and Martin Provensen
Enchanted Lion Books • August 2023 • 9781592703753
“Hauntingly beautiful . . . The Provensens’ love for animals, like Beatrix Potter’s, was pointedly unsentimental. In The Truth About Max, the truth they record includes Max’s bad-cat high jinks and his raw knack for survival” — New York Times Book Review
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“A primer on the rich subject of Black studies, this interdisciplinary anthology presents writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler, bell hooks and others.” — New York Times Book Review
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| | Common Life
by Stéphane Bouquet, trans. Lindsay Turner
Nightboat Books • February 2023 • 9781643621531
“[Common Life] achieves something rare: an alignment between text and translation so seamless it seems to create a whole new object, neither original nor variant but a lustrous synthesis of sensibilities.” — New York Review of Books
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| New Digital Review Copies
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“I cried almost the entire time while reading this book. Mostly from relief that I’m not alone. This book is needed, has been needed for generations.” — Annie Carl, The Neverending Bookshop (Edmonds, WA)
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AIGA named Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis (Black Ocean) one of the 50 best-designed books and book covers from last year.
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