Contemporary Fiction Views: Dust Bowl dreams

In an alternate version of the world that exists in Karen Russell's The Antidote, the Dust Bowl conditions that ravaged the Great Plains are attacking the region. But not everything is exactly the same. And the differences illustrate our world.The little town of Uz, Nebraska, has been hit hard by the ongoing dust storms. Farmers have lost their land, the banks have collapsed, the utter bleakness of the landscape looks like a certain movie set before the tornado hit and a young orphan girl living in her uncle's house gets hit by a window frame.There are other characters that call to mind Baum's American fairy tale and the movie it inspired. Witches exist. They take in secrets others than to tell them, with the stories living in the prairie witches. But neither they nor their tellers remember them.One such witch, The Antidote, is forced by the local sheriff to take in memories that will keep him in power. He is cruel and a predator, including the witch as a victim. Although she doesn't remember what her customers tell her, even when they come to retrieve their memories, she knows they are there. Until, after one especially vicious storm, they are not. They have disappeared along with the good soil. It's a secret she must keep to survive.There are parallels between what the Antidote does and what a government photographer, Cleo Allfrey do. Cleo has been travelling across Nebraska. Her boss back in Washington does not like her work, especially the photos that include Black people suffering the effects of the dust storms even more than white people. Those are not the pictures the administration needs to persuade Congress to pass funding for New Deal programs. (What Russell writes about the famous photograph “Fleeing a Dust Storm,” seen above, is true. Cleo happens upon the farm of Harp Oletsky, the one farmer for miles around whose land is fallow and whose wheat is growing. The air is clean and living things thrive. There also is a Scarecrow that seems is becoming sentient.Harp's niece, Asphodel, was orphaned when her mother was murdered. She lives to play basketball and is on a team aiming for the regional championship. Her goal is not set aside when the team's coach leaves and their sponsor has to pull out.The murder of Asphodel's mother, and several other women, is blamed on a serial killer who leaves rabbit feet on the victims. The sheriff who bullies and rapes the prairie witch arrested a young homeless man, one who is not quite right in the head, for the murders. The first attempt to electrocute him fails.All the threads in the novel are twined together, whether it first seems so or not. As the various characters interact and seek what their hearts crave, it is tempting to compare and contrast everything in this novel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and various meanings attached to Baum’s work.Although there are points that meet, The Antidote is not a retelling. It is a new version of country folk coming up against nature's fury and corrupt people in power. Polish settlers who fled a German dictator, one who declared they were thieves on land they had farmed for generations, chase out tribes who have lived on the land for generations. Few of the white men see the irony. One who realizes it will be sickened for life.From the Pawnee who were chased off the land, those who survived, that is, to those who arrive much later, the story of Uz is a new parable.It is a parable of what happens when the land is not cared for. Of what happens when people are not kind to others. Of what happens when resilience may or may not be enough.The key to it all is the land and how it is treated. As one character learning about it notes:This land is inside me, teaching me how to see it.The Antidote is a novel to read more than once. It also is a novel that benefits from a slow reading. Russell paints gorgeous pictures of the landscape and the characters. Between that gift and pondering what should or does happen to the characters, The Antidote is a story to savor. Let it soak in the way land welcomes rain.---------------------------—Another week in which new books are being published, including some that may be treasure to you. Several short story collections are available. They are perfect for the times when it's hard to focus for an extended period with writing. Links are to The Literate Lizard and descriptions are by the publishers.The Bear and the Paving Stone by Toshiyuki HorieOwing a debt to French writers from La Fontaine to Proust, the three fable-like tales in this volume illuminate stories of loss, memory, and a longing to belong.There was “something about me” which made him talk about things he didn’t need to talk about, made him expose his wounds. That surely made me more dangerous than a stranger who was totally indifferent.Visiting a friend in the Normandy countryside, a man is drawn into conversations that plunge him into the complexities of historical chance, religious identity, and his own past. Sharing memories and looking at old photographs, the pair circle around the area’s disturbing wartime history.God-Disease by An Chang JoonWinner of the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Manuel Muñoz.Imagine a space where cities and municipalities are delineated only by letters. A place in flux, a freewheeling confluence that does not commit to being American, Korea, or even Korean American. This is where God-Disease takes place. Strange things happen here. Identities warp and shift; sometimes they vanish altogether. In the titular story, a museum insect curator returns to her birth town, J Municipality, feeling empty and searching for answers to her mother’s absence; was it insanity that plagued her, or was it shin-byeong—god-disease?Joyriders: Stories by Greg SchutzIn this collection of stories set across the Midwest and rural Appalachia, lonely people travel half-haunted landscapes and discover moments of light.In this debut collection, tangled bonds of love and family collide with a natural world both fragile and ferocious. Upended by grief, a widowed veterinarian seeks solace by fostering a litter of orphaned opossums. A young lawyer embarks on an affair, only to fall into a deeper, stranger entrancement with her lover’s nine-year-old daughter during a weekend on the Lake Huron coast. In the depths of a Wisconsin winter, a recovering alcoholic risks everything to plot a careening course toward atonement. And in the title story, two teenagers steal a car, discover a loaded rifle in the backseat, and set off consequences both devastating and tender for a series of strangers they’ll never meet.Outside: Stories by Barry LopezSix short stories about the natural world by the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams.With a reverence for our exterior and interior landscapes, these stories offer profound insight into the relationships between humans and animals, creativity and beauty, and, ultimately, life and death. Again and again, whether describing a Navajo rug possessing the essence of its maker, a boy who can change places with his half-coyote dog (named Leaves), or a teacher whose presence brings into question the meaning of friendship, Lopez portrays elemental and sacred places.Liquid : A Love Story by Mariam RahmaniThe unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just "marry rich."But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern and Western views of marriage in film and literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet and outlines a goal: 100 dates with people of all genders and a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with dating: martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills and a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a “socialist” trust fund babe; and an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County.The Darling of Blackrock Desert: Three novellas set in the West by Laura NewmanIn The Darling of the Black Rock Desert, Julia loves Howi, but never intends to marry him until she realizes she’s pregnant with few options; it is, after all, 1960. Life becomes more complicated and yet richer when their darling daughter, Nia, is born with a physical disability. Despite her infirmity, Nia manages to have a fairly normal, happy childhood, beloved by her best friend Wynona and their male sidekicks until tragedy strikes and family life comes undone.It’s 1986 in City of Angels when Henri and Simone Bouchard meet in the iconic Los Angeles Central Library. Simone is a college art student, and Lenny is a Viet Nam vet trying to survive extreme PTSD. They strike up an unlikely acquaintance that is interrupted when the great Los Angeles Library fire of 1986 happens, a substantial portion of the books -— and their tenuous connection -— going up in flames. Will they find one another again?It's 2006 in The Saints of Death Valley, a nun in a San Francisco convent adopts a baby left on the doorstep and in order to raise her must leave the faith. Named Grace, the baby grows up; however, after committing what she fears to be an unforgivable sin, Grace takes her bag of holy cards and hits the road, winding up at the Burning Man Festival and then in Death Valley where she is taken in by a family of pastry chefs and landscapers and tries to reinvent herself in a secular world.Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories edited by Sarah CoolidgeA young storm-chaser welcomes a jaded woman into the eye of a storm. The last man of a peculiar family, implausibly tiny in stature, attends a Mozart opera with his dedicated wife. A medical student coolly observes an adolescent boy as he contorts his body into violent positions. With tension and wit, the writers of Unusual Fragments, among them Nobuko Takagi, Yoshida Tomoko, and Inagaki Taruho, trace their taboo, feminist, bizarre themes to complicate what we think of as 20th century Japanese literature. What’s hiding just beneath the fiction of our perfectly ordered, happy lives? Something unusual. Something far more interesting.North Sun: Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan RutherfordSetting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.Counterattacks at Thirty by Won-pyung SohnFrom the bestselling author of Almond, a witty, ruthless examination of office culture, wherein a group of young workers rebel against their bosses to challenge an oppression that is all too familiar.Ji-hye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary in her thirty years of life. Even her name Ji-hye is one of the most ordinary in Korea. And just like every ordinary person, she’s not one to make waves by pointing out the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy or the small acts of injustice around her. Ji-hye puts up with her superiors at the Academy where she works who, in big and small ways, create a semi-hostile work environment in the office. She has become the master of tedious tasks, from lining up chairs and distributing lecture materials to photocopying pornographic materials for “presentations.” Inappropriate as some of her tasks might be, Ji-hye has long accepted them as part of ordinary young adult life. But when Kyu-ok Lee, a new intern, joins the Academy, Ji-hye recognizes him as the man who once publicly accused a professor there of plagiarism. But this Kyu-ok seems different from that angry young man Ji-hye once encountered. In the office, he seems to be just another hard-working employee... until he shows his true colors.A pacifist version of V in V for Vendetta, Kyu-ok recruits likeminded people to carry out plans for minor revenge. All four “rebels” he’s recruited in their office have their own reasons to resent society at large: a single dad who’s stuck in the past, a screenwriter whose script was stolen by a large filmmaking corporation, and Ji-hye, who’s never felt like an individual and now has to deal on a daily basis with a bully who’s come back into her life as an instructor at the Academy. Together, these four rebels begin to protest the older generation in the form of harmless antics: graffiti, throwing eggs, anonymous exposé, and more. But as their attacks increase, they (and the reader) will discover that even these tiny protests can make change in a world where everyone’s been too busy just getting by.The Anatomy of Magic by J.C. CervantesPerfect for fans of Encanto and Practical Magic, a young woman learns to embrace all the messy imperfections of life and love with some help from her magical family, in this next novel by New York Times bestselling author J.C. Cervantes.Lilian Estrada seemingly has it all: an OB/GYN star on the rise, a master at balancing work with whirlwind romances, and part of a family of fiercely loyal and exceptional women, all bound together by an extraordinary secret. Touched by an ancient magic, the Estrada women each possess a unique power and Lily shines with the rare gift to manipulate memories. Yet not even her mystical abilities can shield her from the fallout of a harrowing event at the hospital, one that sends her powers—and her confidence—spiraling out of control.Seeking solace, Lily retreats to her family’s ancestral home in Mexico, only to find herself face-to-face with a ghost from her past – Sam, the first love she never forgot. With nearly a decade of bewildering silence between them, Sam is hardly the boy she once knew and as old flames spark to life, Lily must navigate the mysteries of their shared history and the depths of her own heart if she hopes to control her unpredictable magic.Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories by Torrey PetersIn this collection of one novel and three stories, Torrey Peters’ keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.Counting Backwards by Jacqueline FriedlandNew York, 2022. Jessa Gidney is trying to have it all -- a high-powered legal career, a meaningful marriage, and hopefully, one day, a child. But when her professional ambitions come up short and Jessa finds herself at a turning point, she leans into her family's history of activism by taking on pro bono work at a nearby ICE detention center. There she meets Isobel Pérez -- a young mother fighting to stay with her daughter -- but as she gets to know Isobel, an unsettling revelation about Isobel's health leads Jessa to uncover a horrifying pattern of medical malpractice within the detention facility. One that shockingly has ties to her own family.Virginia, 1927. Carrie Buck is an ordinary young woman in the center of an extraordinary legal battle at the forefront of the American eugenics conversation. From a poor family, she was only six years old when she first became a ward of the state. Uneducated and without any support, she spends her youth dreaming about a different future -- one separate from her exploitative foster family--unknowing of the ripples her small, country life will have on an entire nation.The Californians by Brian CastleberryFor fans of Trust and North Woods, a daring novel that spans 100 years of American history, from the early days of cinema to the rise of NFTs, about parents and children, the drive to create even in times of crisis, and the inheritance of grand western dreams.It’s 2024, and Tobey Harlan—college dropout, temporary waiter, recently dumped—steals from the wall of his father’s house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey’s just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to an infamous tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon.A hundred years before, Klaus Aaronsohn—German-Jewish immigrant, resident of the Lower East Side—inveigles his way into a film studio in Astoria, Queens. In love with silent cinema, Klaus restyles himself Klaus von Stiegl, a mysterious aristocratic German film director. In true Hollywood fashion, he will court fame, fortune, romance, and betrayal, and end his career directing Brackett: a radical, notorious 60s-era detective show.Weaving between Tobey and Klaus is the story of Diane “Di” Stiegl: Klaus’s granddaughter, raised in Palm Springs, who claws out a career as an artist in gritty ‘80s NYC. As America yields the presidency to a Hollywood cowboy, as Diane’s grifter father and free-spirited mother circle in and out of her life, Diane will reflect America’s most urgent and hypocritical years back to itself, uneasily finding critical adoration as well as great fame and wealth.Goddess Complex by Sanjena SathianSanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face with what her life might have been if she’d chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger, and more tempting than she imagined.33 Place Brugmann by Alice AustenOn the eve of the Nazi occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever.Charlotte Sauvin, an art student raised by her beloved architect father in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the building and its people: how light falls on wood floors and voices echo off the marble staircase, the distinct knock of her dear friend, Julian Raphaël, the son of the art dealer’s family across the hall. Then the Raphaëls disappear, leaving everything behind but their priceless art collection, which has simply vanished.All else that’s familiar fractures when whispers of German occupation become reality, and the lives of the residents grow increasingly intertwined. Charlotte’s godmother Masha, a beautiful seamstress living upstairs, deepens her risky affair with a wartime compatriot of Colonel Warlemont in 3L—a man far more calculating than his neighbors believe. When a Nazi functionary with an interest in the Raphaëls moves into the building, knowing who can and cannot be trusted becomes a matter of life and death.VHS by Chris CampanioniPushcart Prize-winning author Chris Campanioni tells a story about the silences of generational trauma and the tenuous conditions in which stories get passed down in migration, a surface flimsy enough to allow the traffic between novel, notebook, reportage, and myth.While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULEDAYTIMEEST/EDTSERIESEDITOR(S)SUNDAY4:00 PMLet’s Talk BOOKSAngela Marx6:00 PMYoung People’s PavilionThe Book Bear(LAST SUN OF THE MONTH)7:30 PMLGBTQ LiteratureChrisloveMONDAY8:00 PMThe Language of the NightDrLoriTUESDAY8:00 PMContemporary Fiction Viewsbookgirl10:00 PMNonfiction ViewsDebtorsPrisonWEDNESDAY8:00 PMBookchatcfk et al.THURSDAY8:00 PMWrite On!SensibleShoes(FIRST THURS OF MONTH)2:00 PMMonthly BookpostAdmiralNaismithFRIDAY7:30 AMWAYR?Chitown Kev(OCCASIONALLY)8:00 PMBooks Go Boom!Brecht9:30 PMClassic Poetry GroupAngmarSATURDAYNoonYou Can't Read That! orPaul's Book Reviewspwoodford9:00 PMBooks So Bad They’re Good*Ellid (*on temporary hiatus)