Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Fall fiction has eye for truth
NEW YORK — Some of the timeliest and most topical books in stores today and later this fall will be found in the fiction section.
Novelists and short story writers are addressing the news of the moment through imagined narratives. Some are set in the present, others in the distant past and others in the undetermined future.
It started Sept. 3 with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and, on Sept. 10, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and Lucy Ellmann’s epic Ducks, Newburyport.
“Fiction at its best is a journey toward the truth by an indirect route,” said Rushdie, whose novel brings the tale of Don Quixote into the age of YouTube and reality television. “If done properly, [it] can capture a moment in such a way that readers in the present can gain ‘recognition pleasure’ — ‘Yes, this is how things are.’”
Atwood has said the rise of Donald Trump helped convince her to write The Testaments, which returns readers to the ruthless patriarchy of Gilead and to those resisting it. Ducks, Newburyport is a 1,000-page journey through the worried mind of an Ohio housewife who makes pies and despairs about Trump.
Here’s a look at other titles, some of which are now in stores. Release dates for the others are listed after the title.
Jeanine Cummins’ highly anticipated American Dirt (due Jan. 22) tells of a bookseller in Mexico who is threatened by a drug cartel and attempts to flee to the United States. Rob Hart’s new thriller The Warehouse is set within a giant tech company called “The Cloud,” a story billed as “Big Brother meets Big Business.”
“Journalism is incredibly important, and data is great at making people angry, but a story sits with you the way data doesn’t,” Hart says. “Stories are about empathy. I think we’ve collectively decided our comfort is more important than someone else’s discomfort, and putting people in someone else’s shoes for a bit seems a good way to counter that.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ just-published first novel, The Water Dancer, is the story of a slave’s external and internal journey; the author has called the work a “myth” to counteract the racist beliefs of the present, explaining during last spring’s booksellers convention that fiction can change minds by taking us to a “bone-deep level.”
Other new fiction includes Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, Stephen King’s The Institute, Zadie Smith’s Grand Union” (Oct. 8) and Monique
Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits. Stephen Chbosky’s Imaginary Friend (Tuesday) is his first novel since his million-selling debut, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Andre Aciman’s Find Me (Oct. 29) is a sequel to his novel that was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie, Call Me By Your Name.
The country’s new poet laureate, Joy Harjo, has released An American Sunrise. Prize-winning poet Robert Hass’ first new collection since 2010, Summer Snow, is due Jan. 7.
Other poetry highlights include titles by Sharon Olds (Arias, Oct. 15), Nick Flynn (I Will Destroy You) and Daniel Poppick’s Fear of Description (Tuesday).
Cutting Edge, a crime and mystery anthology edited by Joyce Carol Oates, features poems and stories from Atwood, Edwidge Danticat and Aimee Bender, among other women. It is due Nov. 5.
“In noir, women’s place until fairly recently has been limited to two: muse, sexual object,” Oates writes in the introduction. “The particular strength of the female noir vision isn’t a recognizable style but rather a defiantly female, indeed feminist, perspective.”