Cult Classic

January 1, 2022

International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Mis�rables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek--close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature--is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story--and the story of Cameroon's independence--on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.

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Starred review from April 4, 2022
Crosley (The Clasp) offers a witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City. After Lola, 37, bumps into two exes in two days, she suspects it’s more than coincidence. Then her friend Vadis, with whom she used to work at a prestigious psychology journal, drags her to a meeting held by a secretive startup named Golconda run by their charming former boss, Clive Glenn. Clive is putting an obscure theory to the test involving meditation and technological manipulation, in which participants can lure people from their past for a final interaction and closure. Lola balks at the cultlike reverence the others show for Clive, as well as their New Agey vibe, but also hopes to clarify whether she really wants to marry her glassmaker fiancé, Boots. With Boots away for two weeks in San Francisco, she signs up and spends every evening having brief interactions with exes, then returning to Golconda for debriefing. When a stressed-out Clive says they only have funding for one final encounter, Lola discovers something unsettling about the experiment. The accounts of Lola’s reckoning with her romantic history are thoroughly hilarious (describing the rush of boyfriends past, she narrates, “I experienced these men as no one is supposed to experience them, as if being propelled from a T-shirt gun”), and the details of online dating, which made her “the victim of a metric ton of rejection,” are also sharply perceptive, rooting this very much in the real world. Crosley has found the perfect fictional subject for her gimlet eye. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
An author best known for her essay collections--Look Alive Out There (2018) and I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008)--explores the inner workings of modern love in her second novel. Lola's whole life revolves around the magazine where she has worked for years. Her co-worker Vadis has become her best friend simply by being someone she sees every day and the person who knows more about her than anyone else. Lola's identified each and every shortcoming in their boss, Clive--she describes him as a man "animated by logic and brown liquor"--but she's still just a little bit in thrall to him. Even after Modern Psychology folds, she meets up with Clive and Vadis and another colleague for the occasional dinner. They're finishing a meal in Chinatown when she steps out for a cigarette and runs into her ex, a writer named Amos. They have a charged conversation, one that makes Lola ask herself uncomfortable questions about her engagement to an artist she calls Boots. The next night, after an old acquaintance drags her to the same Chinese restaurant, Lola encounters Willis, an Olympic athlete and another former lover....She soon learns that these encounters are not coincidences and there are more such encounters to follow. Crosley is nothing if not ambitious here, interrogating contemporary wellness culture and the very nature of love as Lola confronts a gauntlet of ghosts from her romantic past and questions her desire for a future with Boots. Clive, who parlayed his role as editor of Modern Psychology into a brief career as a talk show host, emerges as a self-styled guru using the free labor of his unquestioning acolytes to create a product that gives clients perfect emotional closure. Crosley has created the ideal protagonist/narrator for navigating this low-key-SF but very real world. Lola is skeptical and prickly while also being vulnerable--a wiseass with a heart. The story is plenty engaging, but it's Crosley's analytical acumen and gift for the striking metaphor that really gives the book life. Thoughtfully and humanely acerbic.

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Starred review from May 15, 2022
Lola is engaged to the perfect guy. He's a steady optimist, a talented and low-key artist, ""smart without being esoteric,"" and he lets her call him Boots (that's not his name). Plus, she's dated enough other guys to know he's right. Right? Out in Manhattan's Chinatown with friends, former coworkers at the now-folded Modern Psychology magazine, Lola runs into one of those guys. There's a latent frisson, but she's mostly happy to go home to Boots. Unusual circumstances send Lola to the same Chinatown spot the next night, where she runs into another ex. Soon she discovers that her friend Clive, Modern Psychology editor turned quasi-guru, is up to something, and the addictive result is like your favorite rom-com meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with a light soup�on of Ghostbusters. Narrator Lola, who can't even commit to a full cigarette, fears something's wrong with her, but when you're the prototype for a potentially lucrative, definitely unethical social-romantic-thought experiment, who's to say what's right and wrong? Novelist and essayist Crosley (The Clasp, 2015; Look Alive Out There, 2018) casts a spell with lightning wit, devilish dialogue, and walloping truths about how little reason there is to anything resembling love.

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