The Wild West — in 2075
Hurst
By Benjamin Percy (Amazon Digital Services, $.99)
Like any good Western, Benjamin Percy’s novella “Hurst” begins with a stranger arriving in town. Only this isn’t the old West — it’s the West of 2075 — and the stranger, Stephen, may or may not be human. Hurst is a remote, insular community of a thousand people that for the past 40 years has lived by its own laws. “You might consider yourselves separatists,” Stephen tells a local leader, “but you remain a part of this country and you are subject to its governance.” He’s on a mission to discover who killed Dave Tapper, a landowner who had threatened to make changes and sell property against the wishes of many in the community. But Stephen will find that to be a confrontational outsider in Hurst comes at great peril.
Percy has a talent for bringing the future alive without slowing down the movement of his scenes. He avoids excessive world-building by launching the story, environment and circumstances all at once. An award-winning literary stylist and also a sucker for a hook, Percy proves with his gift for describing landscape and the way it shapes people, and his equal penchant for unspooling great plots, that he is one of the finest genre-blenders writing today.
Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
By Mark O’Connell (The Millions Originals, $2.99)
Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” is a touchstone for Mark O’Connell’s update on the ironic pleasures of bad art. Just as Sontag argues that camp’s “essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails,” O’Connell gives historic and recent examples of artists turning out work that they considered brilliant, only to find it the subject of widespread derision. He begins with the case of a fresco in northern Spain that 81-year-old Cecilia Giménez took it upon herself to restore, then botched so badly that Christ “is transfigured into what looks like a beady-eyed baboon wearing an ushanka.”
“The Face-palm fresco,” which went viral in 2012, is just one recent example of an “Epic Fail,” which O’Connell defines as “the collective cry of elated schadenfreude that greets each new disastrous attempt to create art or entertainment.” Other examples include the “accidental surrealism” of “The World’s Worst Novelist,” Amanda McKittrick Ros; the 2003 “cult disasterpiece” “The Room,” arguably the “Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made,” by actor-director Tommy Wiseau; R. Kelly’s R&B opera buffa “Trapped in the Closet”; and the cringeworthy stylings of “American Idol” contestant William Hung. More than a rogues gallery of artists “we’d rather laugh at than with,” this smart, biting piece is an indictment of human nature.
Crazy Stupid Money
By Rachel Shukert (Amazon Digital Services, $2.99)
Rachel Shukert and her husband, Ben, had been scraping by in New York City on his advertising job and her $20,000 a year in freelance and book earnings. But when he decides after seven years as primary breadwinner to quit his job in favor of quixotic entrepreneurial projects, the marriage quickly unravels. Rachel ramps up the freelance work, and though she makes more money than she ever has before, it’s not nearly enough. Ben stews in his resentment, feeling it’s his turn to be supported. “Every time we fought,” Shukert writes, “we were also fighting about everything we ever fought about. ... We were broke, and we were scared, and we couldn’t remember any other way to speak to each other.”
Eventually their fights escalate to such a point that not only are they talking divorce, but the police are called in on multiple occasions. Feeling trapped in their 600-square-foot, $3,400-per-month apartment, they make a bold move and head for Los Angeles, where Rachel’s sister lives and where a friend holds out the possibility of a full-time position writing for television. How Rachel and Ben confront the darkest days of their relationship makes for a visceral, often funny and disarmingly intimate portrait of a modern marriage.
The Girls, Alone: Six Days in Estonia
By Bonnie J. Rough (Amazon Digital Services, $2.99)
Taking Rebecca Solnit’s advice to heart — “Never turn down an adventure without a good reason” — Bonnie J. Rough joins her friend Mary on a weeklong trip to Estonia. Though Rough is a quarter Estonian, she had never been to the country, but had long wanted to go. And as the days build toward the trip, she learns a secret about her family: Her great-great-grandmother Anna was murdered in the 1930s during Stalin’s purges. What begins as a lark becomes a quest, and we follow Rough from museum to library to graveyard, as she attempts to answer questions about Anna: “Was she alone when she heard pounding at the door? Did she curse the long life she’d led and the children and husbands she’d lost?”
Rough frames her memoir with scenes in the Estonian saunas, which become a metaphor for her travel forward and backward in time. She takes a leap of faith, steps naked into the unknown, withstands the overwhelming heat and emerges regenerated. Though the book is overlong, and indulges too much in travel plans and meditations on the writing life, “The Girls, Alone” is a frequently powerful journey into a unique personal and political history.