Today is noteworthy for the vice presidential debate, but it's also a big day because the latest Louise Erdrich novel has been published.
The Mighty Red is a tale of a community with a teenage love triangle, an awkward marriage, destiny, and the cosmos. The way Erdrich's characters look at and deal with the world remain as grounded and enchanting as ever. She is a treasure.
Whether it’s one of her earlier novels with characters who appear in each other’s stories, or the later works from The Round House on, Erdrich’s books are reflections of how the interior lives and outer acts of people can collide or sometimes instead collude.
Other new releases today are noted below, with links to The Literate Lizard, debtorsprison's online bookstore, and blurbs from the publishers.
In this enchanting tale–a blockbuster bestseller in Korea– the enigmatic owner of a magical laundromat that erases people’s painful memories must learn to find her own peace before she can truly help others.
A subtle and intimate accounting of a daughter’s final days with her mother, set amid the rush of Tokyo’s red-light district.
Drawing on her own experiences as a hostess and adult film actor, Gifted—Suzumi Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English—offers a nuanced, frank, and intimate portrayal of the lives of a mother and daughter getting by (or not) in an industry rarely depicted authentically in literary fiction.
A kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses between light and dark that live in all of us
For several days, a strange and bright new star in the sky above Norway has sown an unyielding sense of foreboding, of agitation, and of fear. Tove, a painter on holiday with her family, has spiraled into a psychosis that stirs her into a flurry of unbridled creativity. Geir, a policeman who has been investigating a grisly triple murder, comes to a sinister revelation he must keep to himself. Nineteen-year-old Line falls in love with the lead singer of a metal band and is lured into a secret and frightening world.
When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all?
A beautifully written short story collection that charts the lives of racialized women as they navigate their relationships, aspirations, and the burdens of memory and expectations
A captivating debut collection exploring longing, loneliness, and connection, in stories that feature Cuban American characters and uncanny, speculative twists.
Set during the Great Depression, an immersive and enchantingly atmospheric novel about a girl and a bear raised as sister and brother in a remote logging camp, and the lengths to which they’ll go to protect each other.
New Brunswick, 1934. When a cook in a logging camp finds an orphaned baby bear, he brings it home to his wife, who names the cub Bruno and raises him alongside her newborn daughter, Pearly. Growing up, Pearly and Bruno share a special bond and become inseparable. While life in the camp can be perilous—loggers are regularly injured or even killed—the Everlasting family form a close-knit community with the woodsmen, who accept and embrace the tame young bear.
Southern mythology and personal reckoning collide in this sweeping story inspired by the little-known history of Cumberland Island when a once-in-a-century storm threatens the natural landscape. Faced with a changing world, two timelines and the perspectives of three women intersect where a folktale meets the truth to reveal what Cumberland Island has hidden all along.
A small Southern town. An ordinary Saturday night. A little boy disappears without a trace.
Everyone in Wynotte, North Carolina, knows the name Davy Malcor. Knows the video clip of him juggling four balls, "All at the very same time!" Knows the Marty McFly jacket his mother made for his birthday that he wore proudly, and often. But no one knows what happened to him the night he went missing more than twenty years ago.
Marybeth Mayhew Whalen peels back the curtain on the inner turmoil of those who were left behind in the small Southern community as they pick up the pieces that remain and press forward into the light to find hope and healing.
New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.
It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what’s happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy’s carefully constructed life.
As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place—first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships—every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.
From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary storyteller Alan Moore, the first book in an enthralling new fantasy series about murder, magic, and madness in post-WWII London.
The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital stumbles Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?
Kamao is the son of a prominent Ghanaian academic and incumbent minister of health and is devoted to all that America symbolizes. After immigrating to the United States in pursuit of higher education and the American Dream, he becomes unwittingly entangled with American politics when he meets Lindsey McAdams, the daughter of an influential, anti-immigration senator.
As the couple’s feelings grow, so too does the senator’s animosity toward Kamao. Despite support from fellow immigrants Lazo, Ayefumi, and Dania—who follow American Dreams of their own—Kamao soon finds himself drawn into intrigues hidden from the American public that make him question himself and his adopted country. When Kamao is implicated in a murder, Lindsey’s loyalties are tested, Dania must decide if she is willing to risk her own future and security for the sake of justice, and Kamao discovers how far he’ll go to fulfill his American Dream.
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