The border between Argentina and Brazil had been closed by the coronavirus pandemic for nearly two months when, in early May, an unusual convoy approached the checkpoint in Puerto Iguazú. There were 15 people, all of whom had gone days with little sleep, and six vehicles, including a crane and a large truck.
Behind the truck was a specialized transport box.
Inside the box was an elephant.
“Summer,” says a character in Ali Smith’s new novel, “is really an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something.” Smith’s quartet of seasonal novels has also been heading for summer. Beginning with Autumn in 2016, they have arrived punctually, one per year, each in its eponymous season and as close to the events described as possible. The project has been an attempt to narrow the gap not only between a novel’s conception and its publication, but between art and the reality it consumes in order to produce itself.
Where O’Donoghue nails it is in her writing about women who make art, female collaboration, and identity. Here she is witty, tender and insightful, especially on the way oppression bleeds its way through the generations.
Alexis Daria's You Had Me at Hola had me at Latinx representation, sexy soapy plot, and a meta-telenovela addicting enough to actually get picked up by Netflix IRL. This book fizzes with sex, betrayal, lies, and family drama — but the good news is, it comes without an actual telenovela's requisite cliffhangers and tragedies.
Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, he makes the case for how and why to read Faulkner in the 21st by revisiting his fiction through the lens of the Civil War, “the central quarrel of our nation’s history.” Rarely an overt subject, one “not dramatized so much as invoked,” the Civil War is both “everywhere” and “nowhere” in Faulkner’s work. He cannot escape the war, its aftermath, or its meaning, and neither, Gorra insists, can we.
Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
In her elegantly written and boundlessly entertaining first book, The Sirens of Mars, Johnson not only answers that big “why”, making a case for how those frozen red wastes could support life, but also achieves something more remarkable: she makes wild goose chases gripping, and abandoned ideas beautiful.
Rain stuck in clouds along the ridge,
Kennesaw Mountain and yellow
crane, the metal road dead-ends in air.
It comes in deepest dark, riding
a nightmare. You wake yelping,
you think from your fear, but discover
A handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend.
Merry-go-round? No, the waltzer.