author:
ELISE BLACKWELL

Fiction
144 pages
Unbridled Books

In Elise Blackwell’s second novel, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, she tells a compelling story of the 1927 flood in Louisiana. Louis Proby, the main character, now living in New Orleans, is ninety-five, and looks back on his life when he was seventeen years old awaiting the first flooding of New Orleans.

This is a tale of sacrifice and heroism with a delicate balance of history and fiction, as it portrays a family in the mid nineteen-twenties. The authentic characters come alive as Louis narrates his account. He remembers Cypress Parish was destroyed because the city fathers said dynamiting the levees was necessary to save New Orleans. Louis always knew his own father had played an important role in the decision that allowed Cypress Parish to go under.

Proby lives through a complex time in history. Louis writes detailed descriptions of seedy clubs in Crescent City (New Orleans), of bootlegging, of levee construction, of the Carville leper colony and the philosophy of Pliny the Elder. Louis falls in love with a French girl by the name of Nanette Lancon, only to have her wander away from him.

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author:
TIM LAWRENCE

Non-fiction
498 pages
Duke University Press

On a recent trip to a party in Hackney, East London, my friend and I got to talking about how much we missed skimming for those old pirate-radio stations that filled the British capital’s airwaves in the days before wireless broadband. The songs sounded so wonderful, we drunkenly agreed, because they felt so fragile: only people here and now could hear this.

Anyway, I was reading Tim Lawrence, a journalist and academic brought up in eighties England, a day or two later. He wrote Love Saves the Day, the first volume of his grandly titled “History of American Dance Music Culture,” which covers the city’s disco scene in seventies New York. It’s a portrait of a time at once recognizable—Studio 54, Chic and Disco Sucks, the seventies’ economic malaise—and lost from view. The downtown scene he draws is full of beautifully rendered characters, from the utopian DJ David Manscuso, whose template-forming Loft was modeled on birthday parties thrown by the nuns who raised him in an Utica orphanage, to the shy, slight Walter Gibbons, who after single-handedly inventing the remix disappeared into evangelical Christianity. What makes this exhaustive account is not its three hundred interviews, countless unique photos and sometimes tiresome level of detail, but his raw passion to record, collect and analyze what happened.

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author:
GREG MELVILLE

Non-fiction
288 pages
Algonquin Books

In his novel Greasy Rider, author Greg Melville and his good friend Iggy (a mechanically gifted, recently divorced, college buddy) take the reader for a coast-to-coast ride in their Diesel Mercedes Benz that has been professionally retrofitted to run on discarded cooking grease. Their goal: to reach California (their journey begins in Vermont—go figure) without filling-up on unleaded at any point in time. According to the author, this has never been accomplished, making their grease trek supposedly all the more significant and attention worthy. Along the way to the eco-record books, Greg and Iggy suffer a few minor technical problems (filters, hoses and such), lose patience with each other, and brief us on the current status of alternative energy sources in the U.S.A. such as: Solar Power, Wind Energy, Bio-Diesel, and those companies that are at the forefront of this movement.

Melville, a travel journalist by trade, makes some strong cases for the government to begin regulating the private sector as they do within their own branches. As a case in point, he visits Fort Knox and explains how by re-engineering their heating and cooling, they have cut their costs (and ultimately our tax dollars) by roughly thirty per cent. He also makes stops at private industry such as Wal-Mart and Google, the latter a pioneer in the green movement. These stops are really more PR jaunts than investigative journalism, and we come away with little more than anecdotal insights.

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author:
ELIZABETH HAND

Fiction
300 pages
Harvest Books

Cass Neary had her fifteen minutes of fame in the underground art scene of New York City in the seventies, photographing the dead and dying for a book that became notorious. But thirty years have passed, and Cass lives a marginalized life; abused and abusing, she is a damaged person who can no longer create the art that enlivens her. When she is asked to travel to an isolated island in Maine to interview a famous, reclusive photographer, Cass jumps at the chance to meet her idol, another broken woman whose demons and alcoholism have halted her creative life. But once on remote Paswegas Island, Cass uncovers a deep undercurrent of mistrust and mysteries surrounded by vanishing people and the human refuse from an old, failed commune.

The characters in Generation Loss—a term referring to irretrievable damage done by repeated printing of a photograph—are deeply flawed and disturbed to the point that it’s difficult to feel sympathy for them, but Hand forms her characters carefully; it’s not easy to empathize with them, but we are given glimpses of each one’s potential, whether lost or yet to be regained. Hand makes stunning if stark work out of each character’s strained and multi-faceted soul.

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author:
SAMANTHA HUNT

Non-fiction
272 pages
Houghton Mifflin

Nikola Tesla got a raw deal. The man invented alternating current and wireless communication, two of the most important innovations of the twentieth century, but our history books instead teach us about Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi. Tesla’s imposing stature, eccentric nature, and foreign heritage (he emigrated from his native Serbia to the United States in 1884) often led to ridicule in the press. Because of his altruism, and desire to give free electricity to the world, he often did not patent his ideas, and they were stolen from him.

Samatha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else is an astonishingly beautiful evocation of Tesla’s last days in New York City during the nineteen-forties, as well as his unlikely friendship with Louisa, a chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla lived. Poignant, and with an honest enthusiasm for the age of invention (which was halted by the advent of corporations and the commodification of the natural world), Hunt manages to bring Tesla to life through his interactions with Louisa, his long-term relationship with a pet pigeon (whom he thought of as his wife), his letters to Mark Twain, and his close friendship with Robert and Katherine Johnson.

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author:
SASA STANISIC

Fiction
345 pages
Grove Press

Aleksandar Krsmanovic, the precocious narrator of Sasa Stanisic’s debut novel, declares that a good story should be like “our river Drina: never calm, it doesn’t trickle along, it is rough and broad, tributaries flow in to enrich it, it rises above its banks, it bubbles and roars, here and there it flows into shallows but then it comes to rapids again, preludes to the depths where there’s no splashing.”

Stanisic carefully heeds this advice in How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, and the immensely satisfying result is a novel that owes as much a debt to Auster’s The New York Trilogy as it does to O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Set in the early nineties in the ethnically mixed town of Višegrad (located in present day Bosnia-Herzegovina), Aleksandar initially lives a charmed childhood under the tutelage of his eccentric Grandpa Slavko. Slavko instilled in Aleksandar the exuberance for storytelling and a fearless love of the absurd. Under his Grandpa’s tutelage, in between trying to set frogs and school blackboards on fire, Aleksandar delights in stuffing himself full of plums with minced meat, and drawing unfinished portraits of the world around him (Neil Armstrong without the moon, or Van Gogh with both of his ears).

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author:
BOB GRUEN

Photography
159 pages
Abrams Image

In 1971, five guys from New York City formed an androgynous, drug-fueled rock band called the New York Dolls. Nothing like it had existed before. The band developed a cult following in the United States’ large urban areas, but not much beyond that.

The famed photographer, Bob Gruen, who is responsible for all the images in this book, managed to capture the Dolls, who redefined the term “burning out bright,” in all of their sexed-up, outrageous glory. When you see some guy nowadays wearing mascara and ribbons in his long, unruly hair, sporting patent leather pants and high-heeled boots, you’re bound to be dismissive. You’ll think he is a nostalgic poser. Thirty-five years ago, you didn’t know what to think.

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author:
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Fiction
288 pages
Simon & Schuster

Chuck Klosterman is one of the most popular American writers of the last decade. He became a sought-after culture critic during his tenure at Spin, and went on to contribute to the New York Times Magazine, ESPN and the men’s magazine Esquire, where he writes a monthly column, “Chuck Klosterman’s America.” He has published four widely read books, all non-fiction. It’s about time he tackled the great American novel.

Klosterman is a Midwesterner from a small town. His book takes place in a similar setting, Owl, North Dakota, which typifies the mythology of small-town existence: Everyone is obsessed with the high-school football team, the popularity of the adults is gauged on how they performed on the football team however many years ago, everyone drinks aggressively, and the high-school kids hang out by driving nowhere particular, saying nothing in particular.

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author:
NICK HORNBY

Fiction
308 pages
Riverhead Books

Have you read High Fidelity? About a Boy? How to be Good? If you answer yes to any of those questions then you know exactly what to expect from Nick Hornby. Slam, like most of his books, focuses on the conflicts of growing-up, emotional maturity (or lack thereof), and the ever-present battle between responsibility and living in the moment.

In Slam, a sixteen-year-old boy named Sam experiments with sex, the unfortunate outcome being one pregnant girlfriend. She wants to keep the baby, setting up the drama that unfolds throughout the story, which includes Sam’s parents, friends, and Tony Hawk. Tony Hawk? Yes, that Tony Hawk.

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