Today, I began reading "Great Expectations: A Novel" by Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer and theatre critic at The New Yorker. David, the protagonist, had seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his. Still, the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.
by Vinson Cunningham
Today, I began reading “Great Expectations: A Novel” by Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer and theatre critic at The New Yorker. David, the protagonist, had seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his. Still, the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.
Upon hearing the Senator from Illinois speak, David experiences conflicting emotions. He is fascinated by the Senator’s idealistic language yet ponders the balance between maintaining solid beliefs and making the necessary compromises to become America’s first Black president.
The book Great Expectations narrates David’s experience working for eighteen months on a Senator’s presidential campaign. During his journey, David encounters diverse individuals who raise questions about history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood. These inquiries prompt David to introspect his life and identity as a young Black man and father living in America.
Meditating on politics, religion, family, and coming-of-age, Great Expectations is a novel of ideas and emotional resonance, introducing a prominent new writer.
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by Leigh Newman
Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories by Leigh Newman, set in Newman’s home state of Alaska and an exciting virtuosic story collection about women navigating the wilds of a male-dominated society. Nobody Gets Out Alive is a collection of dazzling, courageous stories about women struggling to survive, not just grizzly bears and charging moose but the raw, exhausting legacy of their marriages and families.
There are moments when characters in a story leap off the page and become, for a few moments, our soul mates. Ms. Newman, in each of these memorable stories, engages so fully that each character becomes so alive that I wanted to know more about their lives.
The stores span both the recent past and the founding of Anchorage. I found all of them to be stories I would happily read again. The recent stories highlight the common desire for a freer, more inclusive world for women. A woman forced to sell her home or a new bride testing limits on her return home resonates as themes of the modern world.
The final story is set in 1915 in a railroad camp. The story highlights the founding of Anchorage. As one who likes historical fiction, I was so engaged that I could not take a break. I was not expecting the outspoken heiress would stage an elaborate theatrical to seduce the wife of her husband’s employer.
I may never visit Alaska at my age, but I now know enough to feel I have lived in Seward’s Folly.
I decided to read this book after reading Ms. Newman wrote a review of The Faraway World. Ms. Newman is a skilled writer, and I highly recommend this collection and look forward to reading more of her stories in the future.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
In “Howl Palace”—winner of The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, a Best American Short Story, and Pushcart Prize selection—an aging widow struggles with a rogue hunting dog and the memories of her five ex-husbands while selling her house after bankruptcy. In the title story, “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” newly married Katrina visits her hometown of Anchorage. She blows up her wedding reception by flirting with the host and running off with an enormous mastodon tusk.
Alongside stories set in today’s Last Frontier—rife with suburban sprawl, global warming, and opioid addiction—Newman delves into the remote wilderness of the 1970s and 80s, bringing to life young girls and single moms in search of a wilder, more accessible, more adventurous America. The final story takes place in a railroad camp in 1915, where an outspoken heiress stages an elaborate theatrical to seduce the wife of her husband’s employer, revealing how this masterful storyteller is “not only writing unforgettable, brilliantly complex characters, she’s somehow inventing souls” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light).
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by Yael van der Wouden
A house is a treasured possession, and “The Safekeep,” a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, presents a gripping story of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961. The novel provides a profound exploration of the legacy of World War II and the darker elements of our shared history.
It is 1961, and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have become lakes, buildings have been repaired or rebuilt, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.
Eva is the complete opposite of Isabel: she sleeps late, stomps around the house, and handles things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel becomes increasingly obsessed and furious, especially as items begin to go missing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl. As her suspicions grow, Isabel’s paranoia eventually leads to infatuation, culminating in a revelation that shatters everything she has ever known. It seems that the war might not truly be over, and neither Eva—nor the house they inhabit—is what they appear to be.
For my house will be called a house of devotion for all,” in Isaiah 56:7, serves as a closing that reminds us that a house not open to all is not a home.
Yael van der Wouden is a writer and a teacher. The Safekeep, her debut novel, was a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize and has been longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Time, The Economist, Kirkus Reviews, The Times (London), The Independent, BookPage, and others. She lives in Utrecht, Netherlands.
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by Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri is an incredible book. Each short story is a page-turner that I will re-read many times. As Ms. Lahiri writes, “The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children.”
Since 2000, Interpreter of Maladies has been on my reading list. For what is a writer, if not an interpreter of maladies? Perhaps, I waited until now so that I would have grief to help guide me thru this collection of short stories. I highly recommend Interpreter of Maladies.
The Goodreads summary provides a concise overview.
Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth. At the same time, their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.
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by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, it captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.
Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?
And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.
Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Everything; Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Priz My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London.
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by Chelsea Bieker
God Shot by Chelsea Bieker, one of NPR’s Books We Love from 2020, is about the town of Peaches, California, where drought has settled in for the long term. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms.
In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. Everybody is praying for survival through secret “assignments” to bring the rain.
God Shot is an enjoyable read. However, I first found it challenging to accept Pastor Vern’s assignments, especially to Lacey May and her fellow teenage girls. Would people believe in a cult leader and get “assignments” that involve women fully accepting male domination in the twenty-first century? When I had doubts, I would wake up, listen to the news, or read the papers and discover that it is plausible and does happen in our world.
After being god-shot, Lacey May becomes one day at a time feminist as she has to rely on herself and other women who do not accept Pastor Vern’s divine leadership. Slowly but surely, she and her friends find a miracle to help them escape not only the environmental disaster caused by the drought but the moral depravity of Pastor Vern.
Goodreads provides this overview of the God Shot.
Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.
Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit, humor, and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.
I recommend this novel without reservations!
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by Yrsa Daley-Ward
In “The Catch,” her captivating debut novel, Yrsa Daley-Ward creates a vibrant multiverse that delves into the complexities of daughterhood and mother-want. She explores the sacrifices women often make in their pursuit of self-actualization. The result is a remarkable novel that boldly poses the question: “How can it ever be a crime to choose yourself?”
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to connect, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants, they were adopted by different families: Clara went to live with a successful, upper-class couple, while a distant and unaffectionate city councilor took in Dempsey. As adults, the sisters have settled into a comfortable estrangement until Clara spots a woman on the streets of London who looks exactly like their mother. The twist? This version of Serene appears ageless and has lived a childless life — the very life she might have had if the girls had never been born.
As with most things, Clara and Dempsey cannot agree on the strange appearance of this woman. Clara, a celebrity author with a penchant for excessive drinking and one-night stands, is eager to welcome the confident and temperamental Serene into her home. In contrast, reclusive Dempsey, who makes a modest living doing menial data entry work from her apartment, is suspicious of the entire situation, believing it to be a cunning scheme by a con woman.
As the sisters clash over this stranger who increasingly intrudes into their lives, they hurtle toward a confrontation that threatens their very existence, ultimately forcing them to face their shared past together.
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a poet, writer, and actress. She is the author of The How, bone, and The Terrible, for which she won the PEN Ackerley Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
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