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In his latest, four timelines branch off the moment the main character is born, introducing four separate Archibald Isaac Fergusons that grow more different as the plot wears on. It’s a radically different way of imagining a self, too - Faye’s self.” (Edan)Ĥ321 by Paul Auster: Multiple timelines are nothing new at this point, but it’s doubtful they’ve ever been used in quite the way they are in 4321, Auster’s first novel since his 2010 book Sunset Park.
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Faye’s story contends for space against all these others, and the novel’s meaning is devolved out from its centre in her to a succession of characters. Both Transit and Outline are made up of stories other people tell Faye, and in her rave in The Guardian, Tessa Hadley remarks that Cusk’s structure is “a striking gesture of relinquishment. Transit by Rachel Cusk: Everyone who read and reveled in the nimble formal daring of Outline is giddy to read Transit, which follows the same protagonist, Faye, as she navigates life after separating from her husband. Within Kang tries to unknot “two unsolvable riddles” - the intermingling of two innately human yet disparate tendencies, the capacity for cruelty alongside that for selflessness and dignity.
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Kang’s forthcoming Human Acts focuses on the 1980 Korean Gwangju Uprising, when Gwangju locals took up arms in retaliation for the massacre of university students who were protesting. The Vegetarian, her first novel translated into English, arrested readers with the contempt showered upon an “unremarkable” wife who became a vegetarian after waking from a nightmare. Human Acts by Han Kang: Korean novelist Kang says all her books are variations on the theme of human violence. While much of Gay’s writing since then has dealt in political thought and cultural criticism, she returns in 2017 with this short story collection exploring the various textures of American women’s experience. In 2014, her novel, An Untamed State, and an essay collection, Bad Feminist, met with wide acclaim, and in the wake of unrest over anti-black police violence, hers was one of the clearest voices in the national conversation.
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(If you are a big fan of our bi-annual Previews and find yourself referring to them year-round, please consider supporting our efforts by becoming a member!)ĭifficult Women by Roxane Gay: Gay has had an enormously successful few years. And, continuing a tradition we started this fall, we’ll be doing mini previews at the beginning of each month - let us know if there are other things we should be looking forward to. You’ll notice that we’ve re-combined our fiction and nonfiction lists, emphasizing fiction as in the past. We hope the following list of 80-something upcoming books peps you up for the (first half of the) new year. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk, Jesmyn Ward? A lost manuscript by Claude McKay? A novel by Elif Batuman? Short stories by Penelope Lively? A memoir by Yiyun Li? Books from no fewer than four Millions staffers? It’s a feast. But this year! Books from George Saunders, Roxane Gay, Hari Kunzru, J.M. Although 2016 has gotten a bad rap, there were, at the very least, a lot of excellent books published.