author:
K.B. DIXON

Fiction
142 pages
Academy Chicago Publishers

Forget stream of consciousness. I don’t know about you, but my stream of consciousness generally consists of fully formed sentences latched together into comprehensive paragraphs, often incorporating plot and lots of action verbs. This may be why The Sum of His Syndromes works so well. Composed of the narrator’s notes from a sixth floor bathroom as he avoids work, K.B. Dixon’s short novel hits life from workplace gossip to the larger questions of love and happiness. And it works. Protagonist David uses blunt emotion and unintentional humor in describing his depression, his frustrating tête-à-têtes with his pill-pushing therapist, his boring and nondescript job, and his budding relationship with a woman he’s pretty certain won’t stick around.

The story with its tenuously connected notes parses out brilliantly, from the thoughtful (“Aren’t you ever afraid of catching something from us – like an overwhelming sense that it is all for nothing?”) through the sad (“We pretend I am brave because I am here, but I can’t believe in our heart of hearts that either of us feels this is true”) to the completely mundane (“Angie Huffman’s four-year-old daughter killed her pet guinea pig, Max. She thought he was cold so she put him in the microwave to warm him up.”) Throughout, the topics return to life, depression, friendship, and relationships as David struggles to align the pieces of his life, but it’s the little jewels of the everyday that make this book both a piece of humor and a fiction that actually relates to its audience.

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author:
BENJAMIN GREENMAN

Fiction
225 pages
MacAdam/Cage

Benjamin Greenman makes me want to be single for the rest of my life. Seriously. Never before has a collection of stories about “love” left me so jaded, miserable and repulsed at the thought of committed relationships. If I had a boyfriend, I would have left him after reading the story about the girl who broke Bigfoot’s heart and made him want to die. Thanks Ben, you have officially ruined my life.

A Circle is a Balloon and a Compass Both is a collection of short stories, all written by Yale graduate, editor, freelance writer, journalist, etc., Benjamin Greeman. Each story is centered around a relationship and loosely based on an aspect of love such as art, music, sports, power and humor. These relationships are anything but functional and most of them end in one character being utterly miserable.

“Clutching and Glancing” is about a young artist who takes a summer job at a hotel with the intention of seducing her way through the season. She begins a brief affair with a married doctor and after meeting his wife, inconspicuously turns him in after wearing her wedding band while she has sex with him on the hotel room floor. We can only assume she goes on to keep breaking up marriages and he goes on to sleeping on the couch.

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author:
ROY BLOUNT JR.

Fiction
384 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Roy Blount, Jr. shares his passion for words in this delightful, rollicking book. He mixes etymology with anecdote to create as entertaining a book about the origins of words as one could hope for. Blount fairly gushes with enthusiasm for words which he deems “sonicky” that is, any word “whose sound doesn’t imitate sound, like boom or poof, but does somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: queasy or rickety or zest or sluggish or vim..” He goes on to state that, “If you were a caveperson earnestly trying to communicate how you felt digestively, you might without benefit of any verbal tradition come up with something close to nausea.” You get the picture. Mixed in with all the wordplay and bon mots are oodles of examples of how slippery and dynamic our language is, as well as how ridiculously silly it can seem. Blount makes no attempt at being objective; though he’s obviously done his research over the years, this is far from a straightforward reference book, though at first glance it looks kind of like one. The book is arranged alphabetically, with each section beginning with a discussion of the letter in question, sometimes criticizing the placement of a letter in the alphabet, such as T (“It ought to be the last in ours”) or merely expressing appreciation (“Let us pause to enjoy the movement between sliding and sidling”).

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author:
KATHRYN STOCKETT

Fiction
464 pages
Putnam Adult

In the Deep South of the early 1960s the civil rights movements gained force and the institutions that had held back African Americans for generations fought to keep their laws and traditions in place. It was a time and place of assassinations, lynching, riots, and demonstrations. It was also a place where regular people dealt with racism in everyday lives. This is the Jackson, Mississippi, of The Help, the story of three women, the quiet constraints on them, and the measures they take to rebel.

Skeeter is just back from college and expected to marry, though she chafes under the control of her parents and her upright Junior League friends. Aibileen, a maid, has lost her own child and finds that she can’t raise her white charges after they are old enough to echo their parents’ casual racism. Minny might be the best cook in the city, but her short mouth and temper prevent her from keeping jobs even as she struggles to raise her own children and avoid an abusive husband.

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author:
KATIE KITAMURA

Fiction
208 pages
Free Press

I will not lie, I bought this book because it had tattoos on the cover and the author and I had the same name. Pathetic criteria for selecting reading material but we all have our methods, and thankfully they led me to this novel. It had been a long time since I read a book so gripping that after I finished I spent the rest of the afternoon continuously re-reading the last thirty pages or so thinking that by some miracle there would magically be more book left to read.

This is Katie Kitamura’s first novel and without a doubt not her last. While her writing style has been compared to the beautiful simplicity brought to literature by the great Ernest Hemingway, I don’t see it. With her there is more of an edge; a greater intensity in her storytelling.

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author:
JONATHAN CARROLL

Fiction
320 pages
Tor Books

According to Benjamin Franklin, “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” And though it’s highly unlikely that author Jonathan Carroll would tackle the latter in one of his novels, he does seem to have a preoccupation with the former. Many of his long-form works deal explicitly with death, but it is in The Ghost in Love, Carroll’s 17th book, that the concept of death itself is turned on its head.

Right off the bat, Carroll does something remarkable in making us care about a protagonist who is a complete dick, and care enough to keep following him through to the end. Ben Gould slips on some ice, hits his head, and is supposed to die, but doesn’t; more weirdness follows, leading to a breakup with his girlfriend. Ben’s ghost, who is supposed to escort him to the afterlife and clean up any unfinished business, must stick around to see what happens next. Ben’s ex-girlfriend, German Landis, keeps coming back into his life, caught up in the side effects of his non-death (including meeting her past selves). Ben’s dog Pilot has the ability to talk (a favorite trope of Carroll’s). The Angel of Death is a plate of runny eggs.

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author:
DAMON GALGUT

Fiction
249 pages
Atlantic Books

How many of us have run away from things at some point in our lives? Personal failure is what Adam, the protagonist of Damon Galgut’s “The Impostor” is running from. Moving to the country, he seeks solace in solitude and poetry. Instead he finds himself embroiled, through an outlandish coincidence that still rings true, in a crooked scheme that encompasses a lot of what modern Africa is all about.

The novel never shifts from Adam’s point of view but the character that drives the book is Canning, an acquaintance of Adam’s from boarding school. Adam barely remembers Canning but he considers Adam to be someone that saved his life and calls him his best friend. Galgut weaves the contradictions of post-Apartheid South Africa into the very lives and thoughts of his characters. Canning displays an awkward ambivalence towards his vengeful and corrupt plan to destroy his dead father’s dream, although never towards money. Adam himself pursues an ill-conceived dalliance with Canning’s cold wife, a woman whose past has turned her into a cruel individualist with upward mobility her only goal. And there is Adam’s solitary and mysterious neighbor, a man from South Africa’s ugly past who seeks Adam out as his confessor.

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author:
CHARLIE OWEN

Fiction
448 pages
Headline Books

The third in Charlie Owen’s series of excellent police procedurals, Bravo Jubilee is set in the seventies—Owen’s “golden age of vocational policing”—and the fictional North Manchester district of Handstead: a penurious council dumping ground for the city’s most malevolent social housing tenants. Known by the bastardised phonetic “Horse’s Arse,” the division functions as a kind of police penal colony, where officers are transferred “if they had really fucked up somewhere else.” Consequently, Handstead’s cops constitute “an extraordinary collection of misfits, alcoholics, psychopaths, sociopaths, delinquents, sexual deviants, criminal masterminds and violent renegades.” The books chart a running turf war between cops and robbers that have more in common than either side would like to think.

Relentlessly scatological, Owen’s books seem at first like nothing more than a parade of anecdotes, loosely strung together. Uniformed coppers spike their colleagues’ drinks with acid, kill time on the late turn by taking blowjobs from prostitutes, and set fire to people’s cars. The reaction in the reader is that of hysterical and horrified disbelief. Yet Owen, a retired police inspector, adds enough procedural detail to keep you convinced and turning the pages, and what feels like a chaotic mess turns into disciplined storytelling.

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author:
JOHN NIVEN

Fiction
352 pages
Harper Perennial

Not for the faint hearted, easily offended, or politically correct, John Niven’s Kill Your Friends is as much a vision of depravity and self-obsession as I’ve ever read, and deserves comparison to American Psycho. The 1990s British music industry is the setting for the novel, which uses months as its chapters and begins each with a report on successful records and professional movements.

Niven’s narrator is one Steven Stelfox, an A&R man for a big record company. Despite mounting debts and a lack of successful acts, Stelfox is moved to do very little actual work to change his situation. What he is willing to do is to drug and murder those who threaten to make him look bad. Despite the title, Stelfox is no one’s friend. He briefly wonders if the forced domesticity associated with having a girlfriend might be helpful in taming his penchant for cocaine and prostitutes, but dismisses the prospect when he remembers that this would require conversation. Women want so much to talk. This is a problem.

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author:
TIM WINTON

Fiction
224 pages
FSG

Still water runs deep, it’s said, whereas the kind of water one surfs—curling, glass-walled water, a hollow of serenity tucked inside a roaring snarl—apparently runs turbulently and dangerously over shark-populated reefs. On the fraught knife-edge between surface and turmoil is where characters live in Tim Winton’s Breath, a lean and taut novel with prose that crests and crashes in impressive resonance with its promising but ultimately tragic subjects.

Bruce Pike, the novel’s narrator, and Loonie, his best friend (yes, he’s pretty loony), ride their bikes to the Australian coast and discover surfing. “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful,” Bruce writes, “Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.” And it’s not long before Bruce and Loonie are both hooked by the rush and smitten by Sanbo, a veteran of worldwide big waves, who takes the boys under his wing and takes their boards under his beach house.

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