July Publications

In Kathy Lette's wicked comic novel Dead Sexy, Shelly, a comely music teacher, swoons unexpectedly for Kit Kincaid, the roughneck American Adonis she's matched with on a British reality show. Tickled by Kit's sexual prowess, Shelly impulsively agrees to marry and cohabit with him before a TV audience in return for the promise of hot sex and £100,000. But once on the tropical beaches of Réunion Island, the honeymooning newlyweds lock horns in a battle of the sexes, surrounded by nationalist militants, ex-wives and a suspect television crew. (Atria, $24 352p ISBN 0-7434-5688-2)

A sort of "human enema" who "flush[es] the waste from the system," the titular protagonist of Michael Guinzburg's The Plumber of Souls is an enforcer for the Catholic Church, plying his trade in a darkly funny world of grotesque transgressions. Traveling the globe, he picks off scourged souls—pedophiliac priests, rapacious software billionaires and the sewer-lurking Merdistes, who seek the one true turd. Guinzburg's fast and playful wit whisks the reader along on an absurdist joyride. (Carroll & Graf, $13.95 paper 360p ISBN 0-7867-1323-2)

Elizabeth Gow's dream of being a self-sufficient schoolmistress is dashed when her biologist father moves them from London to the Pennsylvania wilds to lecture at the new state university in The Daguerreotype, Patrick Gregory's debut novel. As the disappointments and compromises of adulthood erode her youthful hopes, Elizabeth stoically reconciles herself to life's uncertain course. Although Gregory ably renders his heroine's Victorian sensibilities, the novel plods sluggishly through Elizabeth's coming of age, then speeds through her middle years to her death. (Syracuse Univ., $24.95 256p ISBN 0-8156-0825-X)

Pregnant, insomniac Lucette combs an old encyclopedia for an original and fortifying name to protect her future daughter against life's woes in Amélie Nothomb's brief, unorthodox French bestseller The Book of Proper Names. Years after Lucette's suicide, her daughter, Plectrude, blossoms into a bewitching dancer. But the Paris Opéra's school for ballerinas, which she enters at age 13, threatens to stifle her playful imagination despite her talisman name. Nothomb crafts this unconventional coming-of-age tale in charmingly concise prose, translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside. (St. Martin's, $27.95 128p ISBN 0-312-32055-8)

Dodie Bellamy sows poetic bedlam in Pink Steam, an introspective collection of bits of fictionalized memoir and reflection that explore everything from sexual desire to the temptations of shoplifting. Bellamy deconstructs Barbie's Dream House, recounts a run-in with "Venus" and reports from "the field" (read: her mother's couch in Indiana) on the 2000 Republican National Convention. Her offbeat, flirtatiously subversive prose puts a fresh spin on countercultural life in San Francisco and the Midwest from the 1970s to the present. (Suspect Thoughts, $16.95 paper ISBN 0-9746388-0-3)

The son of a cop meets the daughter of a crook in Seeking Salamanca Mitchel, a D.C. story of star-crossed African-American lovers by Kenji Jasper. When Benjamin Baker goes to work for Alfonse Mitchell, he knows him only as an ambitious restaurant owner and entrepreneur. Soon, however, Ben is the wheelman for Mitchell's burglary ring and dangerously in love with Mitchell's only daughter, Salamanca. Then Salamanca gets pregnant, and Ben cops a seven-year prison sentence. Their efforts to stay in touch and steer clear of vindictive Alfonse drive this heartfelt, breathless novel to its explosive conclusion. (Broadway/Harlem Moon, $12.95 paper 368p ISBN 0-7679-1675-1)

A commemorative 25th-anniversary edition of Let the Lion Eat Straw by Ellease Southerland (now Ebele Oseye) tells the story of Abeba, a quietly intelligent, eager-to-please girl wrenched from her Southern mammy when her mother summons her to Brooklyn, where she's cobbled together a better life. Abeba tries her best to please her cold, resentful mother, taking refuge in her talent for playing the piano. Marriage to a preacher brings more hardship, but Abeba soldiers on through childbirth and illness. Written in flowing, folksy prose, this is a moving, polished tale. (Amistad, $19.95 192p ISBN 0-06-072420-X)

"Crime is mankind on the edge... stepping out of the norm," Elizabeth George writes in the introduction to her anthology A Moment on the Edge, a wide-ranging collection of crime stories by 20th-century British and American women. Perennial favorites (Dorothy L. Sayers, Marcia Muller) mingle with more mainstream writers (Joyce Carol Oates, Nadine Gordimer). Arranged chronologically, the volume includes sterling examples of both British stories à la Agatha Christie and distinctively American tales, such as Susan Glaspell's stark story of frontier misery, "A Jury of Her Peers," which heads the collection. (HarperCollins, $24.95 560p ISBN 0-06-058821-7)

When $2 million and 40 kilos of cocaine go missing in a bungled drug bust, dealers, mob men, DEA officers and hired assassins sniff out a trail deep into the swamps of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin in David L. Fey's thriller Catspaw. In a plot as murky as the Red-Eye Swamp itself, the disparate worlds of computer salesman Dekeh Tanner, demolitions expert Jo Beth Delaney, a Bolivian cocaine ring and a family of swamp-bound Cajuns are impossibly tangled. While Fey excels at conjuring up Louisiana's sticky bayous, he picks a complicated, sometimes frustratingly meandering route to the resolution. (Falcon, $12.95 paper 356p ISBN 0-9746959-1-2)