The Maris Review, vol 18

There are so many Big Books coming out and there is Trump saying bonkers shit all the time and everyone is already so overwhelmed.

What I read this week

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

“All stories are ghost stories and some stories turn us into ghosts,” says the primary narrator of Gabino Iglesias’s latest horror novel, and fuck if he isn’t right. House of Bone and Rain is very much about the human blood and guts and darkness of living through Hurricane Maria in San Juan, but it also touches on the paranormal in a complementary way. It’s a novel about chosen family and revenge and both the power and loneliness to realize that no one is coming to save you so you have to save yourself. Iglesias’s writing is intensely violent and intensely visceral (in the sense that Iglesias takes you right like how the weather feels and how emotions feel, as well as, you know, actual viscera), and it goes down brutal and fast.

More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for Enough by Emma Specter

“When will I eat normally again?” In her short but salient memoir-slash-reportage, Vogue staff writer Emma Specter asks that very question at a 12-step meeting for people with food issues in the 2010s. My heart breaks for so many different kinds of people out there, including myself, who, no matter what else is going on in the world and in our lives, long for a relationship with food that is “normal.” But what is normal? In More, Please Emma details her own struggles with binge eating and talks to so many writers I know and admire about their own struggles with food. There is comfort in finding so many voices feels lonely.

Oh how I want to be one of those people who can eat a cheeseburger and fries for dinner and say, that was great, and go on with their lives and not think about it all night. Couldn’t be me. Emma is a proponent of the Laurie Colwin model of thinking about food, which of course is the absolute dream: to see food as nourishment, as community, as joy. It’s so lovely to read More Please in a time when fatphobia runs rampant, (although I suppose that’s most of modern history?), and to take away the message that self-acceptance (feeling full) is a choice we can make every single day.

I said fall would be dead; I was wrong

Last week I wrote in my column for Lit Hub that my prediction that, due to the election, fall would be dead for publishing was dead wrong. I like to admit when I’ve made a mistake!

I was delighted to be able to give readers an idea of what to expect this fall without doing a bunch of copywriting, as my friend, the critic Ilana Masad, calls writing preview lists (no one critic can be expected to read 20-30 books per season before the season has even begun, so preview lists are tricky).

It’s a joy to realize how much fiction by so many of my favorite authors are on the way. That said, this brings me back to the same conundrum I had about March, the same one I return to again and again: there are so many books coming out that are deserving of copious review coverage — the book publishing side is doing its work —and there are simply not enough media outlets to cover all of the worthy books. I especially feel for the debuts this season (scroll down in my Lit Hub piece!): there are so many Big Books coming out and there is Trump saying bonkers shit all the time and everyone is already so overwhelmed. Cutting through the noise feels harder than ever, although maybe people have been saying this from the beginning of noise.

(Okay, but there’s something particularly heartbreaking about knowing that book coverage has been cut way back all over the place, particularly at the NYT, and then seeing a David Brooks essay on Tom Wolfe in the Book Review. Not that I’m particularly going to the TBR to find fresh new voices, but still, seeing his smirking face on the Books homepage was a lot.")

I’m so sorry, but:

New releases, 8/20

Loving Corrections by adrienne maree brown

Planes Flying Over a Monster: Essays by Daniel Saldaña París, trans. by Christina Macsweeney

The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country by Rosie Schaap

The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Bluff: Poems by Danez Smith

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

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