Past Selections
July 2010 — The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.
About the Book
The sensational international bestseller by Australia’s “preeminent contemporary novelist” (“The Age”), in his United States debut. Winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Christos Tsiolkas’s “The Slap” is a riveting page-turner and a powerful, haunting rumination on contemporary middle-class family life. When a man slaps a child who is not his own at a neighborhood barbecue, the act triggers a series of repercussions in the lives of the people who witness the event-causing them to reassess their values, expectations, and desires. For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Tom Perrotta, this is a compelling account of modern society and the way we live today.
About the Author
Christos Tsiolkas is an award-winning novelist, playwright, essayist, and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
June 2010 — Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar
Book Description
Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city–and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.
In “Wish Her Safe at Home,” Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam’s oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.
May 2010 — Big Machine by Victor Lavalle
Big Machine paperback About the Book
A fiendishly imaginative comic novel, “Big Machine” is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt.
Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God.
Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.
Big Machine hardcover Resources
- Author website: http://www.victorlavalle.com/
- Publisher website: Random House
- Review in Washington Post
- Review as a contender in the 2010 Tournament of Books
- Review in Wall Street Journal
- Review in the LA Times
- Music playlist on Largehearted Boy
- REVIEW IN CALITREVIEW: http://calitreview.com/4653
- Q&A WITH LAVALLE: http://www.postbourgie.com/2009/08/14/big-machine-a-qa-with-author-victor-lavalle/
- VANITY FAIR Q&A: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/08/qa-victor-lavalle-talks-about-horror-church-and-fitzgerald.html
- VICTOR LAVALLE IN THE DAILY BEAST: http://www.thedailybeast.com/tag/victor+lavalle/
- LAVALLE PROFILE: http://authors.aalbc.com/victordlavalle.htm
- NPR INTERVIEW: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113465172
A Few of Victor Lavalle’s Awards & Nominations
April 2010 — The Missing by Tim Gautreaux
A masterful novel set in 1920s Louisiana, “The Missing “is the story of Sam Simoneaux, a floorwalker at a New Orleans department store. When a little girl is kidnapped on Sam’s watch he is haunted by guilt, grief, and ghosts from his own troubled past. Determined to find her, Sam sets out on a journey through a world of music and violence, where riverboats teem with drinking and dancing, and where dark swamplands conceal those who choose to live by their own laws. With the fate of the stolen child looming, “The Missing “vividly depicts an America lurching away from war, where civilization is only beginning to penetrate the hinterlands, and a man must choose between compassion and vengeance.
March 2010 — Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro’s revolution — a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.
Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom — three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child’s dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them — the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.
In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Maziere, whose seductive demeanor can’t mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raul Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of “yanqui” revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.
At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner’s first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.