Crudo by Olivia Laing

Staff Pick

Olivia Laing’s amazing first novel, Crudo (W.W. Norton, $21) drives at a furious pace. This is key: the world is heating up, but it’s also speeding up. That’s part of the “numbing” process authoritarian regimes are using to beat down resistance. It worked with the Nazis, it may work for Trump, too. But it’s the artist’s job to stop this. To un-numb people, make them feel, care, think. This is where the book’s protagonist and muse, the post-modern/punk writer Kathy Acker (1947-97) comes in. Acker “wrote fiction…but she populated it with the already extant, the pre-packaged, the ready-made.” Laing, an accomplished nonfiction writer, also dips into “the grab bag of the actual” for her fiction, and in a frenetic rush of free associations, her Kathy broods on art, marriage, and emotions, as well as the horrors of August and September 2017—Trump’s tweets, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Houston flood, and the Charlottesville supremacist rally. But as much reality as it mirrors, this is a work of fiction. History would only “provide the furnishings,” while Laing is after “the attitudes.” Though her book has a blithe breeziness to it—“what’s art if it’s not plagiarizing the world?”—this mimicry would mean nothing without the deep compassion and moral outrage that fuel Laing’s every sentence.

Crudo: A Novel By Olivia Laing Cover Image
$21.00
ISBN: 9780393652727
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - September 11th, 2018

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Staff Pick

Told from the perspectives of prisoners, victims, and staff, The Mars Room (Scribner, $27) Rachel Kushner’s stunning depiction of a women’s prison centers on Romy Hall, twenty-nine and serving two consecutive life sentences plus six years. Technically, she’s guilty: she killed a man. But only after enduring all she could of his abuse. Because she worked as a lap dancer, however, her exhausted public defender believed she would hurt her case if she testified, so her story never came out in court. Kushner evokes this and other injustices in an even-toned manner, letting the outrages speak for themselves. They speak most volubly and poignantly concerning mothers and their children. Romy, mother of a seven-year-old, loses her parental rights, though no one tells her this until her own mother dies and she doesn’t know where her son is. Her instinct is to go to him. But she can’t. Nor is there anyone to call. In a brilliant narrative leap, Kushner juxtaposes Romy’s helplessness with that of Ted Kaczysnki. Outraged by the despoliation of nature, and with few resources to stop it, he turned into the Unabomber rather than into a second Thoreau. As Kushner powerfully shows, the road to prison is made of many small, irrevocable steps.

The Mars Room: A Novel By Rachel Kushner Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9781476756554
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: Scribner - May 1st, 2018

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Staff Pick

Using the trees that figure so prominently in his tremendous novel as models for its structure, Richard Powers follows nine characters in rotation, building a strong, complex narrative from their stories the way a tree grows from one growth ring to the next. Focusing on the many kinds of relationships people can have with trees, The Overstory (W.W. Norton, $27.95) dramatizes our casual appreciation of nature and our ignorance of it, our increasing exploitation of it, and our shock and regret at what we’ve done to it. But while some characters want the clearcutting to stop, and break human laws in favor of higher ones, others see only the economic reasons why logging should continue. Force doesn’t work for either side, Powers shows, so what is the answer? Meanwhile, another character builds video worlds of stunning verisimilitude. Yet another character collects seeds for a world seed bank, acutely aware of her inability to preserve the ecosystems that nurture these seeds. She’s also done pioneering research, discovering that trees communicate with each other, warn each other, heal each other; this is perhaps the true “understory” we’ve lost, so absorbed by the deafening “overstory” of our own kind that we can’t recognize anything else.

The Overstory: A Novel By Richard Powers Cover Image
$27.95
ISBN: 9780393635522
Availability: Not On Our Shelves—Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - April 3rd, 2018

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