Swedish novelist Boström Knausgård (The Helios Disaster) brilliantly melds memoir and speculative nonfiction in her stirring account of the four years she spent in and out of a psychiatric ward. “I wish I could tell you all about the factory, but I can’t... soon I’ll no longer be able to remember my days or nights or why I was born,” she writes, before describing the many electroconvulsive therapy procedures she underwent from 2013 to 2017 at a mental institution she was periodically committed to for severe depression. (“I had a weakness inside me and all throughout my being, so I ended up at this place a lot.”) In dramatic juxtaposition, she pieces together dreamlike recollections of a childhood spent with a capricious actress-mother, and her adulthood, when she struggled with bipolar disorder and motherhood (“I frightened my children”), and married and divorced the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård. The loose narrative hauntingly evokes the uncertain haze and hallucinations she experienced during her repeated institutionalizations, before she was released at age 45 and reconnected with her four children. Part fever-dream, part quest to retrieve her memories (“because what good is a writer without her memory?”), Boström Knausgård’s account expertly plumbs the treacherous crevasses of a creative mind. Agent: Monica Gram, Copenhagen Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Diamant (The Red Tent) examines all things menstrual in this expansive collection of anecdote, history, and pop culture criticism. Spurred by the documentary of the same title (a producer of which asked Diamant to write “a book about menstruation”), Diamant traces the development of “period-positive” movements that aim to recognize the “full humanity of women and girls and everyone who menstruates.” In “Shame,” she details harrowing stories of period-related embarrassment around the world (in New Zealand and Australia, for instance, more than half of the teenage girls interviewed said they’d rather “fail a school test than have their classmates know they’re on their period”). “Period Poverty and the Tampon Tax” covers the economic toll of menstruation (“menstruators spend $17,000 during their lifetime” on period products), and “Indigenous Wisdoms” offers examples of cultures in which periods aren’t shrouded in secrecy, such as the Hupa’s celebratory Flower Dance. The wealth of information and anecdote can feel disjointed at times, but the effect is powerful nonetheless, and lands as a repository of information rarely in the spotlight. For young women, especially, this will provide a fascinating look back and powerful impetus to work for a shame-free future. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

This collection of seven stories and one essay from Kim (How Alike Are We) makes for a dazzling English-language debut. The essay, “A Brief Reflection on Breasts,” sets the tone for the gentle, humorous philosophizing of the collection as a whole. In it, Kim compares the value and necessity of science in science fiction to breasts on a woman, concluding that to focus on whether there is definitive science in a work distracts from the greater purpose of the genre. The slippery, mildly fantastical “An Evolutionary Myth” tells of an exiled prince in an era when evolution occurs at a much faster rate. “Between Zero and One” examines grief through the story of a bereft mother’s encounter with a strange woman who knows a surprising amount about time travel and quantum theory. And the title story finds robots debating a theory they consider to be laughable: that matter can grow organically. With a combination of subtle humor and poignant philosophy, Kim turns a genre-bending lens on human experience. This belongs on shelves next to Bradbury, Le Guin, and Murakami. Agent: Jinhee Park, Greenbook Literary (South Korea). (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Comedian Hughley and co-writer Moe follow Surrender, White People! with another impassioned, tragicomic treatise on racism in America. Noting that the life expectancy for African Americans is three years less than for white Americans, and that Blacks suffer higher rates of obesity, prostate cancer, and psychological distress, Hughley contends that “Black and brown folks are in a battle for survival every damn day in this country.” He delves into the sterilization of poor Black women in 1960s North Carolina; the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020; and the spread of Covid-19 in communities of color, finding in these and other examples a tendency to make Black people “the number one suspects in our own demise.” Though Hughley’s punchy tone hits hard, and he finds some galling evidence of discriminatory thinking in action, including Trump administration surgeon general Jerome Adams insinuating that “drinking and drug use and smoking” made people of color more vulnerable to Covid-19, much of the book feels like a rehash of Hughley’s previous outings. His fans will appreciate Hughley’s typically blunt assessments of American history and today’s political and social landscape; others will wish for more original analysis. (June)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Thistle traces his path from neglected child, then homeless addict, to lauded academic in his powerful debut. Born in 1976, he grew up in Saskatchewan in a volatile household after his mother left him and his older brothers in the care of their alcoholic father. “[A] brash troublemaker,” Thistle struggled in his studies, and after high school became addicted to alcohol and crack and ended up on the streets of Vancouver, where he’d “never seen such squalor.” The sections about this time are particularly grim, including a startling depiction of Thistle being stabbed in the face. Scarred both physically and mentally, Thistle at one point was so desperate that he attempted to rob a store by pretending that a submarine sandwich was a gun (“I thought, This has got to be the worst moment of my life”). After calling the cops on himself, he went to jail and eventually got clean in rehab. In his mid-30s, he became a student at Toronto’s York University where he now teaches Métis studies. Thistle’s judicious use of his own poetry between chapters captures his deep suffering (“i swill back the pain; it burns and it belches rage and despair”) and underscores how he ended up one of the lucky few to emerge from what he endured. Readers will be gripped. (June)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated that the author was at one point addicted to heroin.

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Godin, a performer and educator who is blind, debuts with a revealing and humorous account of how blindness has been misunderstood by the sighted. At the age of 10, she was diagnosed with retinal dystrophy, a degenerative condition that gradually caused her to become blind. “Lack of sight does not give rise to specific types of personalities, behaviors... or conversions,” she writes, noting how blindness has long been treated by the seeing-world as either something to be pitied or something to be revered as a marker of “innocence and purity.” Oftentimes, she argues, sighted people like to believe that being blind is linked to secret supernatural abilities, as with the Marvel character Daredevil, whose blindness masks his superhuman crime-fighting abilities. The Bible, meanwhile, casts blindness as a symbol of “spiritual ignorance.” These pervasive biases are “not only misplaced but demeaning,” she writes, and rob the blind of their agency. Through her educational writing and “in-your-face, irreverent performance art,” Godin has worked to challenge such stereotypes, but she also realizes it’s not all on her. “If a sighted person wants to believe in my prophetic powers, why not? I mean, our practical abilities are so often doubted.... I might as well claim the blindseer superpower.” By turns heartfelt and thought-provoking, this is a striking achievement. (June)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Translator Bernofsky (Foreign Words) teases out misperceptions about “unwaveringly devoted” Swiss author Robert Walser (1878–1956) in this masterful biography. “Not so long ago,” Bernofsky writes, Walser was “the greatest modernist author you’d never heard of,” though now his life is “full of gaps.” Arguably best known for his microscripts, works discovered after his death composed in minuscule writing, Walser was born to a middle-class family, but financial hardship after the family business collapsed meant that at age 14, he had to leave school. Walser moved to Zurich, then to Berlin with his brother, and finally back to Switzerland, where he began writing his signature short-form pieces. In 1921, Bernofsky writes, “mental illness became a complicating factor in his life,” and he entered an asylum where he stayed for the last 28 years of his life: he died alone, while taking one of his beloved walks. With skillful and lucid readings of Walser’s work, Bernofsky succeeds in creating a portrait of Walser as a “master craftsman”—his short-form essays “constructed elaborate edifices around the simplest topics,” while his 1921 novel, Theodor, showed “a layer of self-reflexive complexity” not seen in his earlier work. This balanced and meticulous account shines a bright light on a misunderstood and influential writer. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

With this ambitious first novel, Rosenbaum (The Ant King and Other Stories) immerses readers in a complex and utterly alien far-future sci-fi world populated by multibodied, cybernetically enhanced humans. Young protagonists Fift, who uses the pronouns ze/zir, and Shria, who uses the pronouns ve/vir, feel constrained by their society’s rigid gender system, enforced through a social capital–based economy and a system of global surveillance. When the pair are involved in a riot sparked by a mysterious circus performance, Fift must choose: disavow zir friend, leaving Shria to face public censure alone, or speak up and risk destroying zir own family. As the consequences of this choice spiral outward, the pair become unwilling figureheads for a revolution. Embedded in a narrative frame about civilizational expansion and collapse, Rosenbaum’s story offers a complex meditation on fame, taboo, gender, and social control. Dense, inventive worldbuilding coupled with the use of neopronouns will present some readers with a steep learning curve, but it’s tempered by the competent plotting and deeply human emotional core. Readers of secondary-world science fiction and science fantasy will find this to be as mind-bending as it is satisfying. Agent: John Silbersack, the Bent Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

In this engrossing debut, urban planning professor D’Anieri takes a breezy trek through the century-long history of the Appalachian Trail. To provide a glimpse of the life of this well-traversed place as it’s developed over time, he compiles profiles of the individuals who shaped it. In the late 1920s, for example, Horace Kephart—who helped establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—was instrumental in devising the trail’s southern end, after its founding by Benton MacKaye in 1921, who saw it as “a recreational preserve to serve the people.” D’Anieri also chronicles the trail’s early hikers, among them Earl Shaffer—a “young loner” who charted paths in 1948 for others to follow—and Emma Gatewood, a septuagenarian who cared less about the “purity of nature” than the freedom the walk provided. Meanwhile, Bill Bryson’s influential book A Walk in the Woods—about his time on the trail—is given a local interpretation with criticism from the Appalachian Trail Club for its “apparent disinterest in the trail’s larger ideals.” In genial prose, D’Anieri captures the trail’s majesty and its power to inspire those who ramble on it. Hikers will be captivated by the rich history, as well as those in need of inspiration for their next escape. Agent: Regina Ryan, Regina Ryan Books. (June)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Memoirist Louise (Someone Has Led This Child to Believe) returns with an impressive collection of tenets intended to help build self-esteem. She begins by urging readers to identify their passions and to make a “pact with personal freedom.” Readers are instructed to give themselves permission, because doing so, Louise writes, allows the mind to focus on change and growth. Louise argues that by opening up to others, one can become more courageous and allow one’s “innate self-worth to shine through.” She also provides exercises for acknowledging aspects of one’s character that may not be ideal, as well as for accepting and moving on from difficult experiences. Throughout, there are questions for reflection, mindfulness practices, and affirmations, and Louise’s upbeat tone is undeniably motivational: “There is no need to wait for someone to grant us entry into our best selves and our best lives.” Readers will discover simple, effective ways for defining a personal sense of purpose here. (June)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink