You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr
The New York Times’ scent critic criticizes religion in his new novel.
This new novel questioning the merits of religion comes as a bit of a surprise from The New York Times’ perfume critic. More than a few people snickered when the Grey Lady hired a scent critic at a time of rampant handwringing in the newspaper industry, but Burr has proved to be much more than a hack with a good sense of smell. He manages to write a novel that is, he says, “fundamentally critical of Judaism,” while fooling some into thinking it’s all about the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown. Partially based on Burr’s own experiences while traveling, the book focuses on the son of a Hollywood couple who is rejected from a yeshiva in Israel because his mother is not Jewish, setting off a chain of self-questioning for the whole family. Chandler Burr: Renaissance man. Who knew? Read an excerpt while it was still a novel in progress at Narrative magazine.
F My Life by Maxime Valette, Guillaume Passaglia, and Didier Guedj
A French Web site for comical existential angst turns into a paperback.
Leave it to the French to usher in the Internet age by providing a forum for people to share their, uh, how-do-you-call-eet, existential angst. Gone are the days of cafes filled with Gauloise-smoking philosophers musing over the futility of life and existence as a whole. Enter fmylife.com, an English version of viedemerde.fr, where people commiserate by sharing their days in short, wry sentences. The English site launched in January, and now Random House has released it as a collection of the best anecdotes. Here’s a taste: “Today, I texted my college boyfriend to tell him how terrible I felt about cheating. He replied saying he was so relieved because he had been cheating on me with a girl in his dorm. I was talking about my math exam. FML.” Maybe Groucho Marx would’ve gotten a kick out of it.
Relentless by Dean Koontz
A psychotic book critic terrorizes a writer in Koontz’s latest.
“Write what you know” is that great old standby for writers, both young and old, looking for inspiration. Well, it seems that after more than three decades of writing bestsellers, Dean Koontz knows literary critics. His most recent book is a part-horrifying, part-humorous thriller based on a psychotic book reviewer who terrorizes a writer whose book he just panned. (There’s a Taser involved.) In a review of the book (no pun intended, really), the Associated Press reports, “While some may find this a bit off-putting, Koontz’s many fans won’t be disappointed.”
K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist by Peter Carlson
A strange man in a strange land.
On the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s absurd tour of the United States, Peter Carlson, a former writer for The Washington Post, has released a comical book about the former Soviet leader that has critics bubbling over with excitement. The new release includes scenes of Khrushchev stuck in an elevator, struggling with a live turkey, and sitting in on a home ec class in Iowa. The Daily Beast’s Christopher Buckley describes it as “simply hilarious, while being about the guy whose finger was on the nuclear triggers during the hottest time in the Cold War.”
The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi
A debut novel by a Pakistani Harvard grad gives the news a little context.
With news of death, destruction, and imminent political takeover coming out of Pakistan nearly every day, this debut novel by Ali Sethi provides a little context, if not fantasy, for the news junkies among us. He chooses to write through the eyes of a woman (much like Jhumpa Lahiri’s male narrator in The Namesake) in Pakistan in the 1990s, a time of relative peace—more like a short period in between the violence. The story follows the story of two cousins, one man and one woman, as they navigate their way through the madness. Sethi himself has an interesting story: The son of two journalists in Pakistan, he went to Harvard and studied with Zadie Smith and Amitav Ghosh.
