Heartbreaking, gorgeously written even if its darkest passages, and truly epic in terms of breadth and scope, The God of Endings chronicles almost two centuries of one woman's journey while also exploring the beauty of brevity, the power of love, and the importance of art.
“Monstrilio,” a debut novel by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, is aptly titled — an unearthly hybrid that’s part horror, part literary meditation on grief, part wildly entertaining tale of an impossible being forced to live in the shadow of the dead boy he replaced. At once heartbreaking and unapologetically strange, this is a cross-cultural, syncretic, folksy, razor-sharp narrative about the horrors of grief and the eternal debate over nature versus nurture.
In Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, the New Yorker writer Michael Schulman provides just what we need as the same old love-hate drama plays out yet again for Oscar fans and shunners alike: a rich array of unflattering but spellbinding stories about the feuds and failures of judgment that the Academy has thus far managed to weather. Schulman explores nine decades of Oscar-related turf battles, examining the institution’s constant missteps and often bumbling self-reinvention as it strives to sustain its influence. “If there’s a common thread running through the decades of Oscar wars,” he writes, “it’s power: who has it, who’s straining to keep it, who’s invading the golden citadel to snatch it.” As everyone in the movie business knows, that particular story line appeals to brows high and low.
Gregory Day wants us to listen. Not to the bells of civilisation – the colonial pealing that keeps our trousers up, shielding us from our true beastly selves – but to the cacophonous medley of the land itself. The novelist, poet and essayist, whose accolades include the Patrick White Literary award and a Miles Franklin shortlisting, has a long history writing about the symbiotic relationships between place, nature and language. The Bell of the World is the crescendo of these preoccupations.