I don’t know if Ling Ma is an insomniac, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she is. For the sleepless, the veil between consciousness and the realm of dreams is worn thin; waking life is rendered fuzzy, but if you squint, it might glow. Ma’s new story collection, Bliss Montage, slips into the space that emerges when our grasp of practical reality eases and our sense for psychedelic possibilities expands. Rife with symbols of dreams and the unconscious, Bliss Montage explores abuse, immigration, and passive societal decline through prose as cool and fine as hotel linens. By draping her stories in the language and atmosphere of the surreal, Ma challenges us to try our hand at the lost art of interpretation—the humble recognition that our perception of any moment, traumatic or mundane, is at best a good guess.
In Factory Girls, however, Michelle Gallen breathes new life into Troubles literature, presenting a fresh, modern view of 1994 revolutionary Ireland. Gallen, who grew up in near the border of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, grapples with local violence but also sexism, abortion, desire, body image, mental health, and generational trauma, following three young women who take summer jobs in a shirt factory before they head off to university. In doing so, she weaves a story of small-town Northern Ireland that stretches far beyond its borders.
Drawing on her own experience of working in the aged care sector, Herbert writes with palpable warmth and empathy for her characters as she alternates between perspectives including those of long-suffering village manager Fiona and Harewood Hall occupants such as pernickety but good-hearted retired engineer Martin.
Books devoted to a solitary item, dubbed microhistories, are a relatively recent genre yet already an industry, generating volumes on everything from salt to pencils, rats to bananas and, yes, soup to nuts. It was only a matter of time before somebody hit bottoms, an investigation into that body part over which so many people obsess yet never glimpse without assistance from mirror, smartphone or partner.
Heather Radke’s winning, cheeky and illuminating “Butts: A Backstory” arrives with a voluptuous peach garnishing the cover. Filtered through a feminist lens, “Butts” is a hybrid memoir and investigation exclusively into women’s rears — and folks with an aptitude for drag. Though curious and wide-ranging in her investigation, Radke chose to leave some behinds behind. Her interest lies in glutei maximi that tend toward maximal. This book has back, as Sir Mix-a-Lot might say. (The song, which Radke describes as “deploying a warm, goofy jollity,” naturally earns its own chapter.)
Two young women hold the keen gaze of the photographer with equal intensity; a woman clasps a man’s hand and he greets her with a coy, perhaps shy, tilt of his head. There’s a timelessness to the black-and-white photos in “Last Day in Lagos,” unpublished until now. The first few images emerge like frames from a film long forgotten, rendering legible the everyday experiences of Black people — specifically, the 17,000 Black artists and musicians who in 1977 made their way to Lagos, Nigeria, for FESTAC ’77, a monthlong Pan-African celebration of Blackness in its many forms.