{"id":23910,"date":"2018-05-01T00:01:14","date_gmt":"2018-05-01T04:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=23910"},"modified":"2018-04-30T16:17:08","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T20:17:08","slug":"may-2018-books-to-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2018\/05\/01\/may-2018-books-to-read\/","title":{"rendered":"May 2018 Books to Read"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/span><\/div>

May 2018 Books to Read!<\/h1><\/div>

The prairie fire crabapple tree in our front yard exploded in deep pink blossoms this past weekend, and all I want to do is spend time in the yard with a book as the weather keeps warming up. There are some great ones coming out this month, too, including William Trevor’s final collection of short stories and a wonderfully strange collection of stories from Robert Aickman.<\/p>\n

What are you most excited about, and have I missed any we should all read?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

May 1<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"Ivory Pearl<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Jean-Patrick Manchette
\ntranslated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n

Out of the wreckage of World War II swaggers Ivory Pearl,\u00a0so named (rhymes with girl) by some British soldiers who\u00a0made her their mascot, a mere kid, orphaned, survivor of\u00a0God knows what, but fluent in French, English, smoking,\u00a0and drinking. In Berlin, Ivy meets Samuel Farakhan, a rich\u00a0closeted intelligence officer. Farakhan proposes to adopt\u00a0her and help her to become the photographer she wants\u00a0to be; his relationship to her will provide a certain cover\u00a0for him. And she is an asset. The deal is struck…<\/p>\n

1956: Ivy has seen every conflict the postwar world\u00a0has on offer, from Vietnam to East Berlin, and has published\u00a0her photographs in slick periodicals, but she is sick to\u00a0death of death and bored with life and love. It\u2019s time for\u00a0a break. Ivy heads to Cuba, the Sierra Maestra.<\/p>\n

History, however, doesn\u2019t take vacations.<\/p>\n

Ivory Pearl<\/i>\u00a0was Jean-Patrick Manchette\u2019s last book,\u00a0representing a new turn in his writing. It was to be the\u00a0first of a series of ambitious historical thrillers about the\u00a0\u201cwrong times\u201d we live in. Though left unfinished when\u00a0Manchette died, the book, whose full plot has been filled\u00a0in here from the author\u2019s notes, is a masterpiece of bold\u00a0suspense and black comedy: chilling, caustic, and perfectly\u00a0choreographed.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Mars Room<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Rachel Kushner
\nScribner<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from Scribner:<\/p>\n

From twice National Book Award\u2013nominated Rachel Kushner, whose\u00a0Flamethrowers<\/i>\u00a0was called \u201cthe best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year\u201d (Kathryn Schulz,\u00a0New York\u00a0<\/i>magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women\u2019s Correctional Facility, deep in California\u2019s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.<\/p>\n

Stunning and unsentimental,\u00a0The Mars Room<\/i>\u00a0demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner\u2019s work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>, her fiction \u201csucceeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

May 8<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
\n<\/strong><\/em>by Zora Neale Hurston
\nAmistad<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from Amistad:<\/p>\n

A major literary event: a\u00a0newly published work from the author of the American classic\u00a0Their Eyes Were Watching God,\u00a0<\/em>with a\u00a0foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker,\u00a0brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade\u2014abducted from Africa on the last “Black Cargo” ship to arrive in the United States.<\/p>\n

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile,\u00a0to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation\u2019s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo\u2019s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.<\/p>\n

In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo\u2019s past\u2014memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the\u00a0Clotilda<\/em>, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo\u2019s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston\u2019s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century,\u00a0Barracoon<\/em>\u00a0masterfully illustrates\u00a0the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.<\/p>\n

\"\"Compulsory Games<\/i><\/strong>
\nby Robert Aickman
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n

The best and most interesting stories by Robert Aickman, a master of the supernatural tale, the uncanny, and the truly weird.<\/b><\/p>\n

Robert Aickman\u2019s self-described \u201cstrange stories\u201d are confoundingly and uniquely his own. These superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws of nature and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the \u201cvoid behind the face of order,\u201d is a surreal region that grotesquely mimics the quotidian: Is that river the Thames, or is it even a river? What does it mean when a prospective lover removes one dress, and then another\u2014and then another? Does a herd of cows in a peaceful churchyard contain the souls of jilted women preparing to trample a cruel lover to death? Published for the first time under one cover, the stories in this collection offer an unequaled introduction to a profoundly original modern master of the uncanny.<\/p>\n

\"\"Warlight<\/i><\/strong>
\nby Michael Ondaatje
\nKnopf<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from Knopf:<\/p>\n

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of\u00a0The English Patient:<\/i>\u00a0a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.<\/p>\n

In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself–shadowed and luminous at once–we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings’ mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn’t know and understand in that time, and it is this journey–through facts, recollection, and imagination–that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.<\/p>\n

\n

May 15<\/h3>\n

\"\"Old Masters<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Thomas Bernhard
\ntranslated from the German by James Reidel
\nSeagull Books<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from Seagull Books:<\/p>\n

Thomas Bernhard\u2019s\u00a0Old Masters<\/i>\u00a0has been called his \u201cmost enjoyable novel\u201d by the\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/i>. It\u2019s a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto\u2019s\u00a0White-Bearded Man<\/i>, on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as two typically Viennese pedants (serving as alter egos for Bernhard himself) irreverently, even contemptuously take down high culture, society, state-supported artists, Heidegger, and much more.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a book built on thought and conversation rather than action or visuals. Yet somehow celebrated Austrian cartoonist Nicholas Mahler has brought it to life in graphic form\u2014and it\u2019s brilliant. This volume presents Mahler\u2019s typically minimalist cartoons alongside new translations of selected passages from the novel. The result is a version of\u00a0Old Masters<\/i>\u00a0that is strikingly new, yet still true to Bernhard\u2019s bleak vision, and to the novel\u2019s outrageous proposition that the perfect work of art is truly unbearable to even think about\u2014let alone behold.<\/p>\n

\"\"Last Stories<\/i><\/b>
\nby William Trevor
\nViking<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from Viking:<\/p>\n

The beloved and acclaimed William Trevor’s last ten stories.<\/p>\n

With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor is regarded as one of the best writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in\u00a0Last Stories<\/i>, the master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered tales–nine of which have never been published in book form–that illuminate the human condition and will surely linger in the reader’s mind long after closing the book. Subtle yet powerful, Trevor gives us insights into the lives of ordinary people. We encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano-teacher who accepts her pupil’s theft in exchange for his beautiful music. This final and special collection is a gift to lovers of literature and Trevor’s many admirers, and affirms his place as one of the world’s greatest storytellers.<\/p>\n

\"\"Time within Time: The Diaries, 1970 – 1986<\/i><\/b>
\nby Andrei Tarkovsky
\ntranslated from the Russian by Kitty Hunter-Blair
\nSeagull<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from Seagull:<\/p>\n

\u201cTarkovsky for me is the greatest,\u201d wrote Ingmar Bergman. Andrey Tarkovsky only made seven films, but all are celebrated for its striking visual images, quietly patient dramatic structures, and visionary symbolism.<\/p>\n

Time within Time<\/i>\u00a0is both a diary and a notebook, maintained by Tarkovsky from 1970 until his death. Intense and intimate, it offers reflections on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and others. He writes movingly of his family, especially his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, whose poems appear in his films. He records haunting dreams in detail and speaks of the state of society and the future of art, noting significant world events and purely personal dramas along with fascinating accounts of his own filmmaking. Rounding out this volume are Tarkovsky\u2019s plans and notes for his stage version of\u00a0Hamlet<\/i>; a detailed proposal for a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky\u2019s\u00a0The Idiot<\/i>; and a glimpse of the more public Tarkovsky answering questions put to him by interviewers.<\/p>\n

\"\"A View of the Empire at Sunset<\/i><\/b>
\nby Caryl Phillips
\nFarrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from Farrar, Straus and Giroux:<\/p>\n

Caryl Phillips\u2019s\u00a0A View of the Empire at Sunset<\/i>\u00a0is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England.\u00a0A View of the Empire at Sunset\u00a0<\/i>is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936, a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later, she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips\u2019s gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized.<\/p>\n

A true literary feat,\u00a0A View of the Empire at Sunset\u00a0<\/i>uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.<\/p>\n

\n

May 22<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"The Seventh Cross<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Anna Seghers
\ntranslated from the French by Margot Bettauer Dembo
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n

A revelatory World War II novel about a German prisoner of war fleeing for the border and encountering a variety of Germans, good and bad and indifferent, along his way. Now available in a new English translation.<\/p>\n

The Seventh Cross<\/i>\u00a0is one of the most powerful, popular, and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today than when it was first published in 1942. Seven political prisoners escape from a Nazi prison camp; in response, the camp commandant has seven trees harshly pruned to resemble seven crosses: they will serve as posts to torture each recaptured prisoner, and capture, of course, is certain. Meanwhile, the escapees split up and flee across Germany, looking for such help and shelter as they can find along the way, determined to reach the border. Anna Seghers\u2019s novel is not only a supremely suspenseful story of flight and pursuit but also a detailed portrait of a nation in the grip and thrall of totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

Margot Bettauer Dembo\u2019s expert new translation makes the complete text of this great political novel available in English for the first time.<\/p>\n

\n

May 29<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"Some Trick: Thirteen Stories<\/i><\/b>
\nby Helen DeWitt
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from New Directions:<\/p>\n

At last a new book: a baker\u2019s dozen of stories all with Helen DeWitt\u2019s razor-sharp genius.<\/p>\n

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world\u2019s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. \u201cLook,\u201d a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove \u201cmore complicated than they had first appeared\u201d and \u201cat 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.\u201d In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt\u2019s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly \u201ctaken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Armand V<\/i><\/b>
\nby Dag Solstad
\ntranslated from the Norwegian by Steven T. Murray
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from New Directions:<\/p>\n

Armand is a diplomat rising through the ranks of the Norwegian foreign office, but he\u2019s caught between his public duty to support foreign wars in the Middle East and his private disdain for Western intervention. He hides behind knowing, ironic statements, which no one grasps and which change nothing. Armand\u2019s son joins the Norwegian SAS to fight in the Middle East, despite being specifically warned against such a move by his father, and this leads to catastrophic, heartbreaking consequences.<\/p>\n

Told exclusively in footnotes to an unwritten book, this is Solstad\u2019s radically unconventional novel about how we experience the passing of time: how it fragments, drifts, quickens, and how single moments can define a life.<\/p>\n

\"\"T Singer<\/i><\/b>
\nby Dag Solstad
\ntranslated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is the blurb from New Directions:<\/p>\n

T Singer<\/em>\u00a0begins with thirty-four-year-old Singer graduating from library school and traveling by train from Oslo to the small town of Notodden, located in the mountainous Telemark region of Norway. There he plans to begin a deliberately anonymous life as a librarian. But Singer unexpectedly falls in love with the ceramicist Merete Saethre, who has a young daughter from a previous relationship. After a few years together, the couple is on the verge of separating, when a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

The narrator of the novel specifically states that this is not a happy story, yet, as in all of Dag Solstad\u2019s works, the prose is marked by an unforgettable combination of humor and darkness. Overall,\u00a0T Singer<\/em>\u00a0marks a departure more explicitly existential than any of Solstad\u2019s previous works.<\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are some excellent books coming out this month, including two wonderful story collections. Check out some of the exciting things coming out this month!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"none","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"[]","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[798],"tags":[],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-23910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/May-2018-Featured-Image.jpg?fit=700%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-6dE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23910"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23926,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23910\/revisions\/23926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23910"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}