I just love writing that is described as “lyrical,” so when this recent list arrived in my inbox courtesy of Oprah, I was so excited to share it with all of you! I have included an excerpt from the review and starred the titles I have read (and linked to my review). I would love to hear impressions of any of the others, though!
photo credit: Tony the Misfit
That Old Cape Magic
“Late middle age,” as Jack Griffin, screenwriter, college prof, and protagonist of Richard Russo’s novel That Old Cape Magic, “was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.”
Unaccustomed Earth: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
As in her previous works, such as her acclaimed novel The Namesake: A Novel, Lahiri is interested in the strangeness of our lives, in the gaps between who we thought we’d be and who we are, where we’re born and where we end up.
Brooklyn: A Novel
In America Eilis discovers all manner of things unimaginable to those she leaves behind in Enniscorthy: Coney Island, Ebbets Field, heat that stays on all night in winter, and a soul-wrenching homesickness she can scarcely shake off.
Olive Kitteridge
Perceptive, deeply empathetic, and even more deeply flawed, Olive is the axis around which these 13 complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories, Olive Kitteridge.
Netherland
The chill and clarifying breeze wafting through Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (Pantheon) comes from Holland, the childhood home of Hans, a Manhattan financial analyst, and the source of his persistent hunger for human connection.
Don’t Cry
“The world is tipping over, like a table, and everything on it is falling off,” writes Mary Gaitskill in the title story of Don’t Cry, her latest mind-searing, soul-rattling, gratitude-inducing collection.
2666
His final novel, 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), published posthumously, takes on the real-life subject of hundreds of women who have been found killed over the last 15 years in the desert outside Ciudad Juárez on the Mexican-American border, one of the most disturbing series of crimes in Latin American history.
Home
In her aptly titled Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of an aging paterfamilias, returns after 20 years to live with his sister Glory and their dying father. Those who loved Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning novel, Gilead, will notice immediately that Home is set in the same Iowa town, and that the Reverend John Ames, the center of that story, lingers notably along the borders of this one.
Lowboy
A breathtaking journey through the subway tunnels of Manhattan and the subterranean fantasies of a schizophrenic teen, the eponymous Lowboy careens toward disaster as the boy, a.k.a. Will Heller, disappears into the urban netherland.
Indignation
Indignation (Houghton Mifflin), his astute new novel, is about a young man named Marcus who is, like Roth, a Jew from Newark entering college in the early ’50s and, also like Roth, a prickly and unforgiving skeptic.
A Mercy
American history, the natural world, and human desire collide in a series of musical voices, distinct from one another—unmistakably Morrisonian in their beauty and power—that together tell this moving and morally complicated tale. “Sudden a sheet of sparrows fall from the sky and settle in the trees. So many the trees seem to sprout birds, not leaves at all. Lina points. We never shape the world she says. The world shapes us. Sudden and silent the sparrows are gone.”
Inherent Vice
Reading Thomas Pynchon again, one is reminded that fiction can clarify the world—capturing it as it seems to be—and it can also change the world by seeing it in new ways. Pynchon is a magician in the second category: He applies language to what we know and all we’ve missed—giving new shape to both.
I just finished That Old Cape Magic a couple of weeks ago and I agree that it is magic. The book is one of those that lingers in your mind after reading it. Russo has such a great way with words, he always makes me laugh out loud when I read! I also loved Unaccustomed Earth and Olive Kitteridge both of which I read with my book club!
A lot of these are on my TBR list (the few that weren’t now are). Although, I did read Brooklyn and was seriously underwhelmed. Thanks for sharing this list.