Category: News

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November 2017 Books to Read!

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The year is winding down, and here the dark evenings are getting longer (though it’s not particularly cold yet) — it’s reading time! There are plenty of books I’m looking forward to this month, including a couple from authors in my Pantheon — Louise Erdrich and László Krasznahorkai — and Europa is bring more Jane Gardam, who should be in my Pantheon (and likely will be there some day when I update it). Amidst the others that excite me, I’ve put a fantasy novel up. I used to love fantasy but haven’t read much in years. So many people have told me that Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive (massive as it is) is exceptional and well worth the investment. Book three is out in a few weeks.

Which ones have I missed that you’re excited about?

The links to Amazon.com are affiliate links, so if you purchase the book (or any item) by going there from this page, we’ll make a bit of money for the site. Do not feel obligated, of course — we’ll keep going regardless! Release dates are based on the U.S. release date, but I’ve linked to U.K. pages as well.

November 7

Old Rendering Plant
by Wolfgang Hilbig
translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole
Two Lines Press

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Two Lines Press:

What falsehoods do we believe as children? And what happens when we realize they are lies — possibly heinous ones? In Old Rendering Plant Wolfgang Hilbig turns his febrile, hypnotic prose to the intersection of identity, language, and history’s darkest chapters, immersing readers in the odors and oozings of a butchery that has for years dumped biological waste into a river. It starts when a young boy becomes obsessed with an empty and decayed coal plant, coming to believe that it is tied to mysterious disappearances throughout the countryside. But as a young man, with the building now turned into an abattoir processing dead animals, he revisits this place and his memories of it, realizing just how much he has missed. Plumbing memory’s mysteries while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone indebted to Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, menacing tale refracts the lost innocence of youth through the heavy burdens of maturity.

Mrs. Osmond
by John Banville
Knopf

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Knopf:

Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl’s experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate. On a trip to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett on his deathbed, Isabel is offered a chance to free herself from the marriage, but nonetheless chooses to return to Italy. Banville follows James’s story line to this point, but Mrs. Osmond is thoroughly Banville’s own: the narrative inventiveness; the lyrical precision and surprise of his language; the layers of emotional and psychological intensity; the subtle, dark humor. And when Isabel arrives in Italy — along with someone else! — the novel takes off in directions that James himself would be thrilled to follow.

Special Envoy
by Jean Echenoz
translated from the French by Sam Taylor
The New Press

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from The New Press:

Jean Echenoz’s sly and playful novels have won critical and popular acclaim in France, where he has won the Prix Goncourt, as well as in the United States, where he has been profiled by the New Yorker and called the“most distinctive voice of his generation” by the Washington Post. With his wonderfully droll and intriguing new work, Special Envoy, Echenoz turns his hand to the espionage novel. When published in France, it stormed the bestseller lists.

Special Envoy begins with an old general in France’s intelligence agency asking his trusted lieutenant Paul Objat for ideas about a person he wants for a particular job: someone to aid the destabilization of Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea. Objat has someone in mind: Constance, an attractive, restless, bored woman in a failing marriage to a washed-up pop musician. Soon after, she is abducted by Objat’s cronies and spirited away into the lower depths of France’s intelligence bureaucracy where she is trained for her mission.

What follows is a bizarre tale of kidnappings, murders and mutilations, bad pop songs and great sex, populated by a cast of oddballs and losers. Set in Paris, rural central France, and Pyongyang, Special Envoy is joyously strange and unpredictable, full of twists and ironic digressions—and, in the words of L’Express, “a pure gem, a delight.”

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November 14

Future Home of the Living God
by Louise Erdrich
Harper

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Harper:

Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.

Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.

There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.

A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.

Faith Fox
by Jane Gardam
Europa Editions

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Europa Editions:

The story of a motherless girl named Faith and her family and close friends, all of whom are determined to see her live a happy life.

Faith’s mother died in childbirth; her overworked father cannot raise his child alone; and her unconventional grandmother refuses to acknowledge the child whose birth took away the daughter she loved. And so a motley crew of family and friends converges to see that Faith is brought up correctly. The concerned parties include Faith’s uncle, who runs a commune in northern England; the Tibetan refugees who have moved in with him; and the splendidly bickering paternal grandparents. What ensues is a brilliant comedy of manners set equally amidst high society and low.

Faith Fox is a story that explores the wonder of the human heart in all its thunderous eccentricity. Gardam has mastered the essence of age and youth and above all noncomformity. Her memorable characters are sure to delight.

Ice
by Anna Kavan
Penguin Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Penguin Classics:

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive “glass-girl” with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author’s struggles with addiction — all crystallized in prose glittering as the piling snow.

Kavan’s 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Miéville, Patti Smith, J. G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics.

Oathbringer: Book Three of the Stormlight Archive
by Brandon Sanderson
Tor Books

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Tor Books:

In Oathbringer, the third volume of the New York Timesbestselling Stormlight Archive, humanity faces a new Desolation with the return of the Voidbringers, a foe with numbers as great as their thirst for vengeance.

Dalinar Kholin’s Alethi armies won a fleeting victory at a terrible cost: The enemy Parshendi summoned the violent Everstorm, which now sweeps the world with destruction, and in its passing awakens the once peaceful and subservient parshmen to the horror of their millennia-long enslavement by humans. While on a desperate flight to warn his family of the threat, Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with the fact that the newly kindled anger of the parshmen may be wholly justified.

Nestled in the mountains high above the storms, in the tower city of Urithiru, Shallan Davar investigates the wonders of the ancient stronghold of the Knights Radiant and unearths dark secrets lurking in its depths. And Dalinar realizes that his holy mission to unite his homeland of Alethkar was too narrow in scope. Unless all the nations of Roshar can put aside Dalinar’s blood-soaked past and stand together?and unless Dalinar himself can confront that past?even the restoration of the Knights Radiant will not prevent the end of civilization.

Mokusei!: A Love Story
by Cees Nooteboom
translated from the Dutch by Andrienne Dixon
Seagull Books

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Seagull Books:

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people — with its exoticism — and see Japan as it truly is? The Belgian has an idea: he helps the photographer find a model to shoot in front of Mount Fuji as the “typical Japanese.” The plan works better than either had imagined — in fact, it works too well: the photographer falls in love, neglects his friend and his career, and, feeling out of place and disillusioned in Holland, returns to Japan as often as possible over the next five years. A reunion is planned: the three will meet again at Mount Fuji. Time, it seems, has stood still . . . except the woman has a secret, and plans of her own.

This moving novel of obsession and difference is the latest masterwork from one of the greatest European writers working today, redolent with the power of desire and alive to the limits of our understanding of others.

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November 21

The Brahmadells
by Jóanes Nielsen
translated from the Faroese by Kerri A. Pierce
Open Letter

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Open Letter:

One of the first Faroese books to be translated into English, The Brahmadells is an epic novel chronicling the lives of a particular family — nicknamed “the Brahmadells” — against the larger history of the Faroe Islands, from the time of Danish rule, through its national awakening, to its independence.

Filled with colorful characters and various family intrigues, the novel incorporates a number of genres and styles as it shifts from individual stories to larger world issues. There are historical documents, including nineteenth-century medical journals, documents detailing the lives of real historical figures, digressions about religion, a measles outbreak, and many other travails, large and small.

Referred to as the “Faroese Moby-Dick” for its scope, importance, and literary approach, The Brahmadells is a playful, engrossing look at life in an island nation whose rich history is relatively unknown to most English readers.

Balcony in the Forest
by Julien Gracq
translated from the French by Richard Howard
NYRB Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the NYRB Classics blurb:

It is the fall of 1939, and Lieutenant Grange and his men are living in a chalet above a concrete bunker deep in the Ardennes forest, charged with defending the French-Belgian border against the Germans in a war that seems unreal, distant, and unlikely. Far more immediate is the earthy life of the forest itself and the deep sensations of childhood it recalls from Grange’s memory. Ostensibly readying for war, Grange instead spends his time observing the change in seasons, falling in love with a young free-spirited widow, and contemplating the absurd stasis of his present condition. This novel of long takes, dream states, and little dramatic action culminates abruptly in battle, an event that is as much the real incursion of the German army into France as it is the sudden intrusion of death into the suspended disbelief of life. Richard Howard’s skilled translation captures the fairy-tale otherworldliness and existential dread of this unusual, elusive novel (first published in 1958) by the supreme prose stylist Julien Gracq.

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November 28

The World Goes On
by László Krasznahorkai
translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet, and John Batki
New Directions

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from New Directions:

In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then tells eleven unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahoraki himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…” A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. The World Goes On is another amazing masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. “The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with this own original forms — there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”

Mrs. Caliban
by Rachel Ingalls
New Directions

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from New Directions:

In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research… Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates’s domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter?how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.

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Thank you to those who have reached out regarding The Mookse and the Gripes on Patreon, with a special thanks to those who have pledged support (two so far, and I cannot tell you how nice that is!), or who have donated a lump sum of money (thank you!), or who have in other ways shared ideas and encouragement. For those of you who missed the announcement, The Mookse and the Gripes is now on Patreon — please look at the end of this post to see the details about Patreon, how to support the site, and what the rewards are. See The Mookse and the Gripes Patreon page by clicking here.

Now, to The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast 2.0. The first goal at Patreon is to raise $100 per month to maintain version 2.0 of the podcast. While we are only 1/10 of the way to that goal (which I still hope to reach), the Patreon support plus lump sum donations and encouragement that have come in over the last week have given enough to get the ball rolling, and I’m looking to relaunch the podcast in early 2018.

I find myself in that pleasant state of planning and dreaming before the real work begins! Just what will version 2.0 be. Version 1.0¹ was focused on NYRB Classics (and I’m sure their books will continue to come up in whatever comes next); however, I want to find something more flexible and open. In the quest to create a pleasing book-centric podcast, I’d love your feedback.

Please let me know if you have any ideas for format or content that you’d like considered. There are several great book podcasts out there already, so I’m curious what else you might want or what you’d like to get from The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast. I know people will have different opinions, but . . .

• Do you prefer short and frequent shows (20-30 minutes a few times a month) or long and less frequent (over an hour, once or twice per month), and why?
• Would you prefer a podcast focused solely on books, or one more generally focused on reading?
• Any particular authors or books you’d love to hear a podcast about?
• Is there any approach you would like me to avoid?
• All of the above? None of the above?

This is very much in the all-ideas-are-valid-and-welcome stage. I have some ideas of my own that I’ll share in future updates as this gets a bit more shape. For now, please feel free to comment below, message me on Twitter (@mookse), or send me an email at mookseandgripes@gmail.com. Your input will be welcome and most appreciated!

¹Currently the episodes from 1.0 are not available, but I will be re-uploading them when the hosting service is re-engaged.

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What is Patreon?

I announced last week (here) that I put The Mookse and the Gripes on Patreon, a place where anyone can go and sign up to make a monthly contribution to The Mookse and the Gripes. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (and every little bit helps!), and you can stop your patronage at any time. Depending on how much you give, you may also be eligible for one of the rewards (books, chocolate, bookish treats, etc.).

And, by the way, if you look at the rewards and you think, hmm, I would love to support The Mookse and the Gripes but none of this tickles my fancy, just let me know. All of this is new, and I’m happy to try to run things differently to make this a pleasant experience.

I also love your encouragement and comments here and everywhere!

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The 2017 Man Booker Prize Winner!

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Tonight, the Man Booker Prize winner was announced.

Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders

Click here to purchase on Amazon.com
Click here to purchase on Amazon UK

See Lee’s review here.

Well, Lincoln in the Bardo is quite an accomplishment, if not one I ended up loving. I’m also not in love with the fact that this is the second year in a row this quintessentially British prize has gone to an American author, for a book that is very American (last year Paul Beatty’s The Sellout won).

Still, congratulations are in order, and I know many are going to be thrilled with this winner!

You should also check out the shortlist and the longlist.

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I love the end of the year — it often feels like a pleasant evening, and I don’t like it to speed by — but I cannot help but get excited for the new year when I see what The Criterion Collection is releasing just beyond that horizon, especially when one of the titles means The Eclipse Viewer is back in business!

The Criterion Collection announced six new releases today, and it’s a varied slate: two early G.W. Pabst films, an Eclipse set covering 1940s French cinema, a 1980s staple, a recent winner of the Palme d’Or, and an upgrade of a John Ford film. It’s a strong start to the new year!

The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.

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January 2, 2018

The Breakfast Club (1985)
d. John Hughes

From The Criterion Collection:

What happens when you put five strangers in Saturday detention? Badass posturing, gleeful misbehavior, and a potent dose of angst. With this exuberant film, writer-director John Hughes established himself as the bard of American youth, vividly and empathetically capturing how teenagers hang out, act up, and goof off. The Breakfast Club brings together an assortment of adolescent archetypes—the uptight prom queen (Molly Ringwald), the stoic jock (Emilio Estevez), the foul-mouthed rebel (Judd Nelson), the virginal bookworm (Anthony Michael Hall), and the kooky recluse (Ally Sheedy)—and watches them shed their personae and emerge into unlikely friendships. With its highly quotable dialogue and star-making performances, this film is an era-defining pop-culture phenomenon, a disarmingly candid exploration of the trials of adolescence whose influence now spans generations.

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January 9, 2018

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
d. John Ford

From The Criterion Collection:

Few American historical figures are as revered as Abraham Lincoln, and few director-star collaborations embody classic Hollywood cinema as beautifully as the one between John Ford and Henry Fonda. This film, their first together, was Ford’s equally poetic and significant follow-up to the groundbreaking western Stagecoach, and in it, Fonda gives one of the finest performances of his career, as the young president-to-be as a novice lawyer, struggling with an incendiary murder case. Photographed in gorgeous black and white by Ford’s frequent collaborator Bert Glennon, Young Mr. Lincoln is a compassionate and assured work and an indelible piece of Americana.

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January 16, 2018

I, Daniel Blake (2016)
d. Ken Loach

From The Criterion Collection:

An urgent response to the political realities of contemporary Britain, this bracing drama from celebrated filmmaker Ken Loach takes a hard look at bureaucratic injustice and ineptitude through the eyes of an unassuming working-class hero. After a heart attack leaves him unable to hold a job, the widowed carpenter Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) begins a long, lonely journey through the Kafka-esque labyrinth of the local welfare state. Along the way, he strikes up a friendship with a single mother (Hayley Squires) and her two children, at the mercy of the same system after being evicted from their home. Imbued with gentle humor and quiet rage and conceived for maximum real-world impact, the Palme d’Or–winning I, Daniel Blake is a testament to Loach’s tireless commitment to a cinema of social engagement.

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January 23, 2018

Eclipse Series 45: Claude Autant-Lara — Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France
–Le mariage de Chiffon (1942)
–Lettres d’amour (1942)
–Douce (1943)
–Sylvie et le fantôme (1946)

From The Criterion Collection:

Too often overlooked after his work was spurned by the New Wave iconoclasts as being part of the “tradition of quality,” Claude Autant-Lara was one of France’s leading directors of the 1940s and ’50s. He began as a set and costume designer and went on to direct French-language versions of comedies in Hollywood, but it was back in his home country that Autant-Lara came into his own as a filmmaker. He found his sophisticated and slyly subversive voice with these four romances, produced during the dark days of the German occupation. Sumptuously appointed even while being critical of class hierarchy, these films—all made with the same corps of collaborators, including the charmingly impetuous star Odette Joyeux—endure as a testament to the quick wit and exquisite visual sense of the director whose name they established.

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January 30, 2018

Westfront 1918 (1930)
d. G.W. Pabst

From The Criterion Collection:

G. W. Pabst brought the war movie into a new era with his first sound film, a mercilessly realistic depiction of the nightmare that scarred a generation, in the director’s native Germany and beyond. Digging into the trenches with four infantrymen stationed in France in the final months of World War I, Pabst illustrates the harrowing ordeals of battle with unprecedented naturalism, as the men are worn away in body and spirit by firefights, shelling, and the disillusion that greets them on the home front. Long unavailable, the newly restored Westfront 1918 is a visceral, sobering antiwar statement that is as urgent today as when it was made.

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January 30, 2018

Kameradschaft (1931)
d. G.W. Pabst

From The Criterion Collection:

When a coal mine collapses on the frontier between Germany and France, trapping a team of French miners inside, workers on both sides of the border spring into action, putting aside national prejudices and wartime grudges to launch a dangerous rescue operation. Director G. W. Pabst brings a claustrophobic realism to this ticking-clock scenario, using realistic sets and sound design to create the maze of soot-choked shafts where the miners struggle for survival. A gripping disaster film and a stirring plea for international cooperation, Kameradschaft cemented Pabst’s status as one of the most morally engaged and formally dexterous filmmakers of his time.

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The Mookse and the Gripes, currently with over 1,750 reviews and discussion posts, has been up and running since July 2008! As we approach the ten-year anniversary, there is no plan to stop or slow down or do anything other than, hopefully, continue to write reviews and posts about books and movies and stories, trying to implement any improvements along the way.

I have always really appreciated the support folks here have given, whether it be through comments and kind words or through donations. We’ve now created a space at Patreon where you can support the show as a regular patron if you’re inclined. No section of this website will ever require payment — it will always be completely free. And, as always, the best way to support is to read and, if you like, share your comments. However, any financial support is always greatly appreciated as well.

You’ll notice that there is now a button on the side bar that directs you to the Patreon page (or you can see it here). There I discuss the first goal ($100 per month to restart the podcast), and I have set up five reward levels, trying to have a bit of fun with book titles!

• 1Q84: $1.00 per month
• Life of Pi: $3.14 per month
• 2666: $26.66 per month
• Slaughterhouse-Five Oh!: $50 per month
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: $100 per month

Each level has a different reward for anyone who offers that support, including books, chocolate, bookish surprises, etc. Please go check them out. If you have suggestions, feel free to comment there or send me a message.

Anyway, thank you for your continued support in any way you care to render it. And thank you for your patience in reading this post related to the business side of the site!

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This year’s Noble Prize in Literature has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” I have read all but two of his books, and I’ve loved several of them. Still, I didn’t see this coming!

Here is the list of Ishiguro’s work:

• A Pale View of Hills (1982)
• An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
• The Remains of the Day (1989)
• The Unconsoled (1995)
• When We Were Orphans (2000)
• Never Let Me Go (2005)
• Noctures: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009)
• The Buried Giant (2015)

Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day is one of my favorite novels of all time. Add to that another masterpiece in The Unconsoled, and I’m very happy his work has been recognized on this scale. Unlike many others, I liked but did not love Never Let Me Go and really had a hard time seeing the magic in The Buried Giant. However, such is my esteem for Ishiguro, regardless of what comes next I plan to read it, and I am certainly willing to give all of his work another go.

Since most of his work was done before I started this blog, I have relatively few under review. From the earliest days of the site, here is my review of The Remains of the Day. And, from 2015, my disappointed (but wrong?) review of The Buried Giant.

For lots of extended coverage, go to this post at The Complete Review, where M.A. Orthofer has been and will continue to be updating his post with links.

For some discussion, well, I could recommend this thread over at The Mookse and the Gripes Goodreads page.

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This morning, the four shortlists for the 2017 National Book Award were announced!

The Amazon links below are affiliate links, so if you use them a small cut of your purchase comes back to and helps support The Mookse and the Gripes.

Fiction

• Dark at the Crossing, by Elliot Ackerman (Amazon.com)
• The Leavers, by Lisa Ko (Amazon.com)
• Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee (Amazon.com)
• Her Body and Other Parties: Stories, by Carmen Maria Machado (Amazon.com)
• A Kind of Freedom, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (Amazon.com)
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward (Amazon.com)

Fiction Judges: Alexander Chee, Dave Eggers, Annie Philbrick, Karolina Waclawiak, Jacqueline Woodson (Chair)

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Nonfiction

• Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Amazon.com)
• The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald (Amazon.com)
• The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen (Amazon.com)
• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Amazon.com)
• Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean (Amazon.com)

Nonfiction Judges: Steve Bercu, Jeff Chang, Ruth Franklin, Paula J. Giddings (Chair), Valeria Luiselli

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Poetry

• Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965 – 2016, by Frank Bidart (Amazon.com)
• The Book of Endings, by Leslie Harrison (Amazon.com)
• WHEREAS, by Layli Long Soldier (Amazon.com)
• In the Language of My Captor, by Shane McCrae (Amazon.com)
• Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems, by Danez Smith (Amazon.com)
• Poetry Judges: Nick Flynn, Jane Mead, Gregory Pardio, Richard Siken, Monica Youn (Chair)

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Young People’s Literature

• What Girls Are Made Of, by Elana K. Arnold (Amazon.com)
• Far from the Tree, by Robin Benway (Amazon.com)
• I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, by Erika L. Sánchez (Amazon.com)
• Clayton Byrd Goes Underground, by Rita Williams-Garcia (Amazon.com)
• American Street, by Ibi Zoobi (Amazon.com)

Young People’s Literature Judges: Suzanna Hermans, Brendan Kiely, Kekla Magoon, Meg Medina (Chair), Alex Sanchez

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October 2017 Books to Read!

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It’s already October! I love settling into autumn with good books, and here are the ones coming in October that have me most yearning for some quiet evening at home! Look: a few scary collections from Penguin Classics; the three final books by Henry Green in lovely new editions; many NYRB Classics; a few film books; lots of good books in translation. Which ones have I missed that you’re excited about?

The links to Amazon.com are affiliate links, so if you purchase the book (or any item) by going there from this page, we’ll make a bit of money for the site. Do not feel obligated, of course — we’ll keep going regardless!

October 3

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling
by David Bordwell
University of Chicago Press

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from the University of Chicago Press:

In the 1940s, American movies changed. Flashbacks began to be used in outrageous, unpredictable ways. Soundtracks flaunted voice-over commentary, and characters might pivot from a scene to address the viewer. Incidents were replayed from different characters’ viewpoints, and sometimes those versions proved to be false. Films now plunged viewers into characters’ memories, dreams, and hallucinations. Some films didn’t have protagonists, while others centered on anti-heroes or psychopaths. Women might be on the verge of madness, and neurotic heroes lurched into violent confrontations. Combining many of these ingredients, a new genre emerged—the psychological thriller, populated by women in peril and innocent bystanders targeted for death.

If this sounds like today’s cinema, that’s because it is. In Reinventing Hollywood, David Bordwell examines for the first time the full range and depth of trends that crystallized into traditions. He shows how the Christopher Nolans and Quentin Tarantinos of today owe an immense debt to the dynamic, occasionally delirious narrative experiments of the Forties. With verve and wit, Bordwell examines how a booming movie market during World War II allowed ambitious writers and directors to push narrative boundaries. Although those experiments are usually credited to the influence of Citizen Kane, Bordwell shows that similar impulses had begun in the late 1930s in radio, fiction, and theatre before migrating to film. And despite the postwar recession in the industry, the momentum for innovation continued. Some of the boldest films of the era came in the late forties and early fifties, as filmmakers sought to outdo their peers.

Through in-depth analyses of films both famous and virtually unknown, from Our Town and All About Eve to Swell Guy and The Guilt of Janet Ames, Bordwell assesses the era’s unique achievements and its legacy for future filmmakers. The result is a groundbreaking study of how Hollywood storytelling became a more complex art. Reinventing Hollywood is essential reading for all lovers of popular cinema.

Fresh Complaint: Stories
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times. The stories in “Fresh Complaint” explore equally rich­­?and intriguing­­?territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.

To the Back of Beyond
by Peter Stamm
translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Other Press

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Other Press:

Happily married with two children and a comfortable home in a Swiss town, Thomas and Astrid enjoy a glass of wine in their garden on a night like any other. Called back to the house by their son’s cries, Astrid goes inside, expecting her husband to join her in a bit. But Thomas gets up and, after a brief moment of hesitation, opens the gate and walks out.

No longer bound by the ties of his everyday life — family, friends, work — Thomas begins a winding trek across the countryside, exposed as never before to the Alpine winter. At home, Astrid wonders where he’s gone, when he’ll come back, whether he’s still alive.

Following Thomas and Astrid on their separate paths, To the Back of Beyond becomes ultimately a meditation on the limits of freedom and on the craving to be wanted.

Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories
by Peter Taylor
The Library of America

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from The Library of America:

Born and raised in Tennessee, Peter Taylor was the great chronicler of the American Upper South, capturing its gossip and secrets, its divided loyalties and morally complicated legacies in tales of pure-distilled brilliance. Now, for his centennial year, the Library of America and acclaimed short story writer Ann Beattie present an unprecedented two-volume edition of Taylor’s complete short fiction, all fifty-nine of the stories published in his lifetime in the order in which they were composed.

Volume one offers twenty-nine early masterpieces, including such classics as “A Spinster’s Tale,” “What You Hear from ’Em?,” “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” and “Miss Leonora When Last Seen.” As a special feature, an appendix in the first volume gathers three stories Taylor published as an undergraduate that show the early emergence of his singular style and sensibility.

Volume two presents thirty stories including many of his most ambitious works, among them “Dean of Men,” a monologue delivered by a middle-aged father to his long-haired son about the limits of idealism; “In the Miro District,” a parable of the Old South’s enduring persistence in the New; and “The Old Forest,” one of Taylor’s most celebrated works, the story of a young man who jeopardizes his impending marriage by consorting with a girl deemed beneath his station. Here too are all five of Taylor’s remarkable prose poems, stories in free verse that demonstrate that great fiction is, at its highest pitch, a line-by-line, image-by-image high-wire act. Two of the stories in this volume, “A Cheerful Disposition” and “The Megalopolitans,” are collected here for the first time.

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October 10

A Working Woman
by Elvira Navarro
translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Two Lines Press:

Globally acclaimed as a relentless innovator and a meticulous explorer of the psyche’s most obscure alleyways, Elvira Navarro here delivers an ambitious tale of feminine friendship, madness, a radically changing city, and the vulnerability that makes us divulge our most shameful secrets. It begins as Elisa transcribes the chaotic testimony of her roommate Susana, acting as part-therapist, part-confessor as Susana reveals the gripping account of her strange sexual urges and the one man who can satisfy them. But is Susana telling the truth? And what to make of the story that follows, where Elisa considers her own life failures, blending her literary ambitions with her deep need for catharsis? And then, one last surprise makes us question everything we have just read. Masterfully uncovering the insecurity that lurks just beneath the surface of every stable life, A Working Woman shows Elvira Navarro’s strength for mordant storytelling and breathtaking insight into alienation, confirming her status as one of the leading voices of her generation.

The Best of Richard Matheson
by Richard Matheson
Penguin Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Penguin Classics:

Among the greats of 20th-century horror and fantasy, few names stand above Richard Matheson. Though known by many for novels like I Am Legend and his sixteen Twilight Zone episodes, Matheson truly shines in his chilling, masterful short stories. Since his first story appeared in 1950, virtually every major writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy has fallen under his influence, including Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, and Joe Hill, as well as filmmakers like Stephen Spielberg and J.J. Abrams. Matheson revolutionized horror by taking it out of Gothic castles and strange cosmos and setting it in the darkened streets and suburbs we recognize as our own. He infused tales of the fantastic and supernormal with dark explorations of human nature, delving deep into the universal dread of feeling alone and threatened in a dangerous world. The Best of Richard Matheson brings together his greatest hits as chosen by Victor LaValle, an expert on horror fiction and one of its brightest talents, marking the first major overview of Matheson’s legendary career.

Dark Tales
by Shirley Jackson
Penguin Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Penguin Classics:

After the publication of her short story “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller. This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the “The Possibility of Evil” and “The Summer People.” In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There’s something sinister in suburbia.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

North Station
by Bae Suah
translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
Open Letter

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Open Letter:

A writer struggles to come to terms with the death of her beloved mentor; the staging of an experimental play goes awry; time freezes for two lovers on a platform, waiting for the train that will take one of them away; a woman living in a foreign country discovers she has been issued the wrong ID.

Emotionally haunting and intellectually stimulating, the seven stories in North Station represent the range and power of Bae Suah’s distinctive voice and style, which delights in digressions, multiple storylines, and sudden ruptures of societal norms. Heavily influenced by the German authors she’s read and translated, Bae’s stories combine elements of Korean and European storytelling in a way that’s unforgettable and mesmerizing.

Uncertain Glory
by Joan Sales
translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush
NYRB Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:

Spain, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo—a beautiful widow with a shadowy past—puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís’s son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city’s morale, she leaves to spend the winter with Lluís’s brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on “dead” fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini’s decision will put her family’s fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, an old friend and a traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself.

Joan Sales, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth, and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The Power
by Naomi Alderman
Little, Brown and Company

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Little, Brown and Company:

What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power?

In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: there’s a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power–they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.

From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, The Power is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.

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October 17

Nothing
by Henry Green
NYRB Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the NYRB Classics blurb:

Years ago, Jane Weatherby had a torrid affair with John Pomfret, the husband of her best friend. Divorces ensued. World War II happened. Prewar partying gave way to postwar austerity, and Jane and John’s now-grown children, Philip and Mary, both as serious and sober as their parents were not, seem earnestly bent on marriage, which John and Jane consider a mistake. The two old lovers conspire against the two young lovers, and nothing turns out quite as expected.

Nothing, like the closely related Doting, is a book that is almost entirely composed in dialogue, since in these late novels nothing so interested Green as how words resist, twist, and expose our intentions; how they fail us, lead us on, make fools of us, and may, in spite of ourselves, even save us, at least for a time. Nothing spills over with the bizarre and delicious comedy and poetry of human incoherence.

Doting
by Henry Green
NYRB Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the NYRB Classics blurb:

Doting, the last of Henry Green’s novels, is, as its title would suggest, a story of yearning and lusting and aging in which a wife and a brash young woman run hilarious circles around a hapless hardworking civil servant suddenly seized by long-dormant urges. Like its immediate predecessor, Nothing, it stands out from the rest of Green’s work in its brilliant, experimental use of dialogue. Green was fascinated with the extravagance, ambiguity, absurdity, and unintentional implications and consequences of everyday human communication, and in Doting language slips and slides the better to reveal the absurdity and persistence of love and desire, exciting laughter while troubling the heart.

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
by Elizabeth Hardwick
NYRB Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the NYRB Classics blurb:

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form, criticism worthy of the literature in question. In the essays collected here she covers civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, describes places where she lived and locations she visited, and writes about the foundations of American literature—Melville, James, Wharton—and the changes in American fiction, though her reading is wide and international. She contemplates writers’ lives—women writers, rebels, Americans abroad—and the literary afterlife of biographies, letters, and diaries. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, the Collected Essays gathers more than fifty essays for a fifty-year retrospective of Hardwick’s work from 1953 to 2003. “For Hardwick,” writes Pinckney, “the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.” Here is an exhilarating chronicle of that history.

Blood Dark
by Louis Guilloux
translated from the French by Laura Marris
NYRB Classics

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the NYRB Classics blurb:

Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.

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October 24

Boathouse
by Jon Fosse
translated from the Norwegian by May-Brit Akerholt
Dalkey Archive

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from Dalkey Archive:

One of Jon Fosse’s most acclaimed novels, Boathouse is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator leading a largely hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Told partially in a stream-of-consciousness style and with an atmosphere reminiscent of a gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle leading to jealousy, betrayal, and eventually death.

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October 31

Concluding
by Henry Green
New Directions

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from New Directions:

Concluding — set in a single summer day — has at its heart old Mr. Rock, a famous retired scientist: he lives in a cottage on the grounds of a girl’s boarding school. Living with him is Elizabeth, his somewhat unstrung granddaughter; his white cat; his white goose; and Daisy, his white pig. Miss Edge and Miss Baker — the two inseparable spinster harpies who run the school — scheme to dislodge him from the cottage. Concluding opens with the discovery that two of the schoolgirls have vanished in the night: searching, eavesdropping, worrying, jostling, and giggling all ensue. A love affair, a dance, that magnificent pig, small joys, and low ambitions all stream together, crowding up to the reader’s eye, as Henry Green brews up an enchanting, heartbreaking, and darkly sunny novel.

The Philosophical Hitchcock: “Vertigo” and the Anxieties of Unknowingness
by Robert B. Pippin
University of Chicago Press

Buy from Amazon.com here.
Buy from Amazon UK here.

Here is the blurb from The University of Chicago Press:

On the surface, The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, is a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo. This, however, is a book by Robert B. Pippin, one of our most penetrating and creative philosophers, and so it is also much more. Even as he provides detailed readings of each scene in the film, and its story of obsession and fantasy, Pippin reflects more broadly on the modern world depicted in Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock’s characters, Pippin shows us, repeatedly face problems and dangers rooted in our general failure to understand others—or even ourselves—very well, or to make effective use of what little we do understand. Vertigo, with its impersonations, deceptions, and fantasies, embodies a general, common struggle for mutual understanding in the late modern social world of ever more complex dependencies. By treating this problem through a filmed fictional narrative, rather than discursively, Pippin argues, Hitchcock is able to help us see the systematic and deep mutual misunderstanding and self-deceit that we are subject to when we try to establish the knowledge necessary for love, trust, and commitment, and what it might be to live in such a state of unknowingness.

A bold, brilliant exploration of one of the most admired works of cinema, The Philosophical Hitchcockwill lead philosophers and cinephiles alike to a new appreciation of Vertigo and its meanings.

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Today The Criterion Collection announced their December 2017 line-up, which includes four releases. I’m only highlighting the three new ones below, since their major release of 100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912 – 2012 was announced a few weeks ago, and you can read about it here.

This is an interesting slate. Technically, only one is a new addition to the collection, the first one in the list. The other two are upgrades, with one of those being an upgrade of a film already on Blu-ray; folks wondered if the new 4K restoration of Monterey Pop would mean The Criterion Collection would have a release on a new 4K Blu-ray, but that is not the case.

The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.

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December 12, 2017

Election (1999)
d. Alexander Payne

From The Criterion Collection:

Perky, overachieving Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) gets on the nerves of history teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) to begin with, but after she launches her campaign for high-school president and his personal life starts to fall apart, things spiral out of control. In Alexander Payne’s satire Election, the teacher becomes unhealthily obsessed with cutting his student down to size, covertly backing a spoiler candidate to stop her from steamrolling to victory, and putting in motion a series of dirty tricks and reckless promises with uncanny real-world political parallels. Adapting a then-unpublished novel by Tom Perrotta, Payne grounds the absurdity of his central dynamic in the recognizable—the setting is his hometown of Omaha, and the accomplished cast is rounded out with nonprofessionals—and distills his closely observed take on deeply flawed humanity to its bitter but stealthily sympathetic essence.

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December 12, 2017

The Complete Monterey Pop Festival
–Monterey Pop (d. Pennebaker 1968)
–Jimi Plays Monterey & Shake! Otis at Monterey (d. Pennebaker and Hegedus, 1986)

From The Criterion Collection:

On a beautiful June weekend in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, the first and only Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll. Monterey featured career-making performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few performers in a wildly diverse lineup that included Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, the Byrds, Hugh Masekela, and the extraordinary Ravi Shankar. With his characteristic vérité style—and a camera crew that included the likes of Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock—D. A. Pennebaker captured it all, immortalizing moments that have become legend: Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, Jimi Hendrix burning his, Mama Cass being blown away by Janis Joplin’s performance. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the most comprehensive document of the Monterey International Pop Festival ever produced, featuring the films Monterey Pop, Jimi Plays Monterey, and Shake! Otis at Monterey, along with every available complete performance filmed by Pennebaker and his crew.

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December 12, 2017

General Idi Amind Dada: A Self-Portrait (1974)
d. Barbet Schroeder

From The Criterion Collection:

In 1974, Barbet Schroeder went to Uganda to make a film about Idi Amin, the country’s ruthless, charismatic dictator. Three years into a murderous regime that would be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans, Amin prepared a triumphal greeting for the filmmakers, staging rallies, military maneuvers, and cheery displays of national pride, and envisioning the film as an official portrait to adorn his cult of personality. Schroeder, however, had other ideas, emerging with a disquieting, caustically funny brief against Amin, in which the dictator’s own endless stream of testimony – charming, menacing, and nonsensical by turns – serves as the most damning evidence. A revelatory tug-of-war between subject and filmmaker, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait is a landmark in the art of documentary and an appalling study of egotism in power.

 

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The 2017 National Book Award Longlists!

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Over this past week, the four longlists for the 2017 National Book Award were announced, concluding today with the fiction list. Here are the four lists!

The Amazon links below are affiliate links, so if you use them a small cut of your purchase comes back to and helps support The Mookse and the Gripes.

Fiction

• Dark at the Crossing, by Elliot Ackerman (Amazon.com)
• The King Is Always Above the People: Stories, by Daniel Alarcón (Amazon.com)
• Miss Burma, by Charmaine Craig (Amazon.com)
• Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan (Amazon.com)
• The Leavers, by Lisa Ko (Amazon.com)
• Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee (Amazon.com)
• Her Body and Other Parties: Stories, by Carmen Maria Machado (Amazon.com)
• A Kind of Freedom, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (Amazon.com)
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward (Amazon.com)
• Barren Island, by Carol Zoref (Amazon.com)

Fiction Judges: Alexander Chee, Dave Eggers, Annie Philbrick, Karolina Waclawiak, Jacqueline Woodson (Chair)

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Nonfiction

• Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Amazon.com)
• The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald (Amazon.com)
• Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman, Jr. (Amazon.com)
• The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen (Amazon.com)
• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Amazon.com)
• No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, by Naomi Klein (Amazon.com)
• Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean (Amazon.com)
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein (Amazon.com)
• The Blood of Emmett Till, by Timothy B. Tyson (Amazon.com)
• Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, by Kevin Young (Amazon.com)

Nonfiction Judges: Steve Bercu, Jeff Chang, Ruth Franklin, Paula J. Giddings (Chair), Valeria Luiselli

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Poetry

• Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965 – 2016, by Frank Bidart (Amazon.com)
• When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, by Chen Chen (Amazon.com)
• The Book of Endings, by Leslie Harrison (Amazon.com)
• Magdalene: Poems, by Marie Howe (Amazon.com)
• Where Now: New and Selected Poems, by Laura Kasischke (Amazon.com)
• WHEREAS, by Layli Long Soldier (Amazon.com)
• In the Language of My Captor, by Shane McCrae (Amazon.com)
• Square Inch Hours, by Sherod Santos (Amazon.com)
• Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems, by Danez Smith (Amazon.com)
• Afterland, by Mai Der Vang (Amazon.com)

Poetry Judges: Nick Flynn, Jane Mead, Gregory Pardio, Richard Siken, Monica Youn (Chair)

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Young People’s Literature

• What Girls Are Made Of, by Elana K. Arnold (Amazon.com)
• Far from the Tree, by Robin Benway (Amazon.com)
• All the Wind in the World, by Samantha Mabry (Amazon.com)
• You Bring the Distant Near, by Mitali Perkins (Amazon.com)
• Long Way Down, by Jason Reynolds (Amazon.com)
• I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, by Erika L. Sánchez (Amazon.com)
• Orphan Island, by Laurel Snyder (Amazon.com)
• The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas (Amazon.com)
• Clayton Byrd Goes Underground, by Rita Williams-Garcia (Amazon.com)
• American Street, by Ibi Zoobi (Amazon.com)

Young People’s Literature Judges: Suzanna Hermans, Brendan Kiely, Kekla Magoon, Meg Medina (Chair), Alex Sanchez

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