Laish by Aharon Appelfeld
When he was eight years old, Aharon Appelfeld escaped a Nazi concentration camp in Ukraine, hid for three years, joined the Soviet Army as a cook, and then, after the war, immigrated to Palestine. His newest novel, Laish, is about a similar emigration at the end of the 19th century, as a group of Jews wander through Eastern Europe on their way to the Holy Land. Writing an appreciation in 1988, Philip Roth wrote, “[Appelfeld] is a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own. His sensibility—marked almost at birth by the solitary wanderings of a little bourgeois boy through an ominous nowhere—appears to have spontaneously generated a style of sparing specificity, of out-of-time progression and thwarted narrative drives, that is an uncanny prose realization of the displaced mentality. As unique as the subject is a voice that originates in a wounded consciousness pitched somewhere between amnesia and memory, and that situates the fiction it narrates midway between parable and history.”
The Glisterby John Burnside
If the direst economic forecasts are true, then you might want to familiarize yourself with the setting of John Burnside’s latest novel, The Glister. “The echoing grey streets, the poisoned woods,” of the book’s post-industrial location are, according to Euan Ferguson, “one of the most grim but enduring landscapes committed to print in recent years.” In the city of Innertown, boys disappear every year but the cause of their disappearances is unknown: The police say they are simply leaving, but the15-year-old narrator, Leonard, investigates rumors of their murders and their disappearances into a portal in the town’s abandoned chemical plant. Burnside is also a poet and so his lush prose is to be expected. More surprising, says Ferguson, is “By the end, you're reading Glister like a thriller, eating up the pages; snared in a story, in lives, more visual than most films.”
Revenge of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz
Lisa Lutz’s Revenge of the Spellmans picks up where Curse of the Spellmans left off: Isabel Spellman is in court-ordered therapy, still recovering from her previous adventure. Her parents, however, try to lure her back into the family P.I. business, and she privately takes on "the Case of Ernie Black's Not Terribly Suspicious Wife Who Probably Wasn't Cheating on Him." According to Booklist, “Those in the market for mayhem and mirth will revel in Lutz's irresistible blend of suspense, irony, and wit."
A Great Wall: Six Presidents and Chinaby Patrick Tyler
As the financial crisis erodes the United States’ authority and credibility, many commentators predict that China’s power will only grow. In 2000, Patrick Tyler’s A Great Wall examined the history of relations between the two countries. Tyler, a former investigative reporter and Beijing bureau chief for the New York Times, focuses on “the reconstructed inside story, obtained through interviews and newly declassified documents, of how every president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton has dealt with China,” according to Robert Kaplan. “Tyler's ability to weave a narrative, his intimacy with China itself and his overall fairness toward both Republican and Democratic administrations make this book a powerful statement in defense of pragmatism.” A Great Wall is, Kaplan writes, “an absorbing account of how ambitious men in every administration battled and undermined each other over China, with policy determined not so much by openness as by secrecy and mutual deception and by the luck of events.”
The Dark Knight Returnsby Frank Miller
A contemporary of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns stands as the seminal Batman story. Set 20 years in the future, the story features an old, broken down Bruce Wayne who once again dons the cape and cowl to reign in an out-of-control Gotham City. However, the lengths Batman must go to stop the rampant violence challenge the notion of what it means to be a hero, eventually earning the ire of Superman. The confrontation between the two icons is an undeniable classic moment in comic books. Much like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns examined superheroes through a bleak, pessimistic lens, setting the stage for the slew of deconstructions of the genre that followed.
