The National Book Foundation recently announced the winners of its 5 Under 35 category, which “now in its seventh year, honors five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists.” In an article from the news site examiner.com, Rebecca Keith, Program Manager for the National Book Foundation, explains the beginning of the program and also why it’s important:

“When the National Book Foundation introduced 5 Under 35 in 2006, we felt it was important to begin acknowledging the next generation of writers, and to do so by having our National Book Award Winners and Finalists pass the torch, in a sense, to the writers who might go on to become award winners themselves.

For many of the young writers, 5 Under 35 is the first honor they receive, a boost at the beginning of their careers. Indeed, many of them have gone on to win other awards, most notably Téa Obreht who was a National Book Award Finalist and won the Orange Prize, among other accolades. 5 Under 35 has also been an important program for the National Book Foundation, allowing us to reach out to a younger audience.”

This year’s winners are, drumroll please….

Jennifer DuBois for her novel A Partial History of Lost Causes

Stuart Nadler for his short story collection  The Book of Life

Haley Tanner for her novel Vaclav and Lena

Justin Torres for his novel We the Animals

Claire Vaye Watkins for her short story collection Battleborn

Congratulate these lauded new voices in fiction, and now you know, in case you’re in the market for a new voice, that you need not  look any further.  Here are your guys (and gals). I, for one, can’t wait to dig into The Book of Life and A Partial History of Lost Causes.

by Kaycie

In case you missed the Nightline interview with J. K. Rowling, you might like to hear Rowling’s thoughts on writing after Harry Potter and her reflections on the fame of Michael Jackson. There’s certainly lots of hype and reviews out there about The Casual Vacancy. We think you just have to pick it up and give the book a chance if you’re curious. We certainly are.

In Daniel Fights a Hurricane you meet Daniel Suppleton; a man with an affinity for pipes who has a phobia of Hurricanes and who seems to be losing his grip on reality.  Daniel is living somewhere between the real word and his own dream world.

In the real world Daniel has walked away from his job on a crew building an oil pipeline to the ocean and moved into the woods while his ex-wife searches desperately to find him.

As far as his dream world is concerned,  Daniel is searching for his missing wife and trying to build a pipeline to the ocean before his town’s wells dry up and encounters some amazing characters along the way.  However, as soon as the pipeline is finished a hurricane hits and author Shane Jones takes you on one wild ride.

“SOME DEFINITIONS OF WHAT A HURRICANE MIGHT BE

1.  Monster with sharp teeth

2.  Angry children

3.  A dozen layers of wind stuck together

4.  Black magic

5.  Godlike spirit

6.  Curse

7.  The horizon moving to the other side

8.  Everyone’s vision of death combined

9.  Optical-illusion hologram

10.  Mountain growing from the ocean floor to the sun

That list could be summed up in one word…Fear.”

Author, Shane Jones has an absolutely fantastic imagination and writes like a champ.

by Zita

The title of this post takes the words “great wars” from the epigraph to the book, a quote from Sandra Cisneros.

“Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.

This is how you lose her.”

This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz’s new book of short stories, takes it title from this ending to a story about Yunior, a Dominican guy whose love life this book sort of traces. It’s a book about the confluence of errors that it takes to learn how to treat people, or, what love looks like when it’s you doing the loving.

The words “this is how you lose her” might seem abrupt for a story’s ending, but no story here is an island. They come together as a book to do what many consider the work of a novel: they chronicle a change in a person. Many of these stories, for that matter, use the pronoun “you” to refer to Yunior, making the change seem all the more relevant, as you cannot possibly prepare for the shock of every instance of the word.

You.

Me?

You.

It’s pretty deep, but don’t be scared.

There are lines that mimic very real, day-to-day speech, and much of the dialogue uses an approachable vernacular—much of it Spanish, Spanglish, probably Dominican, and it all fits seamlessly. The stories are natural, yet they won’t leave you gagging by page four with gratuitous cussing. They just do what they have to do. Each story ends where it wants to. I think that the jacket artist and designer, Rodrigo Corral, captures the grace with which each story allows part of its meaning to be told in the negative space.

I first encountered a story from this book called “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” in the July 23^rd issue of The New Yorker. All I knew up that point were the wonderful things I’d heard about Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It is clear that the story was chosen for The New Yorker not because it is the “best” story or for its length, but for its fullness and clarity of the character’s story, despite a fragmented narrative movement. This is representative of the book as a whole. Perhaps Díaz began writing, in both the case of the novel and this book of stories, from the same starting point: the character. It is a patient but uncensored examination of the character’s decisions and how they affect the people around him, and himself, through time.

There is also an expatriate worldview in the pages of this book that reminds me of that of Hemingway’s war-torn characters. But, redeeming the suffering and confusion, there is a somehow optimistic, 21^st-century outlook on love and identity. Yunior is an expatriate Dominican guy in the black-and-white U.S., who has to learn that, in love and all things, you can’t just wake up one day and find yourself—you create the person that you are.

Read on.

You will like this if you liked/reminds me of: Rick Moody’s Demonology, Denis Johnson, Spanish/Spanglish, Dominican Republic, love and relationship stories.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, $26.95, Riverhead Books.

Signed copies available at the store.

by Whitney

I have been patiently waiting for Zadie Smith, one of my favorite authors, to publish her new novel NW for some time (It’s been seven years since her last novel.) I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advanced copy this summer (just one of the perks of being a bookseller) and dropped all of my other reading for Ms. Smith. The novel is set in the northwest corner of London, not exactly the desirable part of town, more like the kind of neighborhood where poverty reigns and does not invite many opportunities for upward social mobility. Centered around four characters from Caldwell, an enclave of northwest London,  NW follows Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan as they navigate their adult lives outside of Caldwell.

Like Ms. Smith’s other novels, White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, her beautiful prose and keen observation of daily human interaction surface in NW; however, I am experiencing mixed feelings about the novel as a whole, as are some other reviewers.

NPR’s book critic Maureen Corrigan shares her thoughts on Ms. Smith’s new novel:

This fall book season is bristling with lots of new novels that share the distinction of being long-awaited. Prominent authors like Martin Amis, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith have kept readers waiting for a while, which means, of course, that our expectations are as high as an elephant’s eye. Trim them down a bit. That’s my advice, at least in the case of Zadie Smith’s just-published novel “NW.”

For more of Ms. Corrigan’s review, read here.

Ron Charles of The Washington Post suggests that:

[Y]ou either submit to Smith’s eclectic style or you set this book aside in frustration. At times, reading “NW” is like running past a fence, catching only strips of light from the scene on the other side. Smith makes no accommodation for the distracted reader — or even the reader who demands a clear itinerary. But if you’re willing to let it work on you, to hear all these voices and allow the details to come into focus when Smith wants them to, you’ll be privy to an extraordinary vision of our age.

For the rest of Mr. Charles’s review, read here.

While I agree with Mr. Charles, I do believe that new readers of Ms. Smith would be better off starting with White Teeth or On Beauty; long-time readers should stay the course and see what they they think of the new novel for themselves. Even if NW is not a run-away hit like some of her other novels, I caught glimpses of Ms. Smith’s ability to put into words feelings that you as a reader may not have even realized you have felt before. She deftly seeps into your psyche and she just gets it. Reading NW has not discouraged me from patiently awaiting Ms. Smith’s next novel. Believe me, I will be just as excited for the next one.

by Anna

I have never really been attracted to biographies.  I feel like I read an author’s work to read an author’s work.  If the author comes out in the work at all, I can speculate.  I just don’t usually see the need to delve into someone’s life, especially when they weren’t intending for the public to be privy to that information.  I recently made two objections to my otherwise specified rule.  I took an evening to read Carolyn Brown’s Eudora Welty young adult biography A Daring Life.  There was a certain obligation with that book, considering how much we love celebrating Miss Welty.

The second objection is a new biography of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max called Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.   I can’t really explain why I decided to break my rule for biographies other than, “because I felt like it,” or “because he seemed interesting.”  The obvious response being, “well Simon.  Isn’t that why people read biographies in the first place and maybe you’re just a snobby little hypocrite?”  You’d be kinda right, but whatever. 

The first thing I realized when I opened this book is how smooth it reads.  Max is a sympathetic voice who chugs through Wallace’s life of addiction, depression, and brilliance with a level of composure that is appreciated by the reader.  Wallace was a literary giant who found his first novel spit out of his senior thesis at Amherst.  His life was stuffed with relationships that can be considered of great importance to the literary community, including friendships with Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Mary Karr.  Apart from his friendships of note, Wallace relied on the people close to him to keep his depression at bay.  He frequently wrote letters, which made Max’s recount of his life and times feel intimate.  

As far as literary biographies go, Max finds a way to be quite readable.  It is actually quite difficult to put down.

At twenty-five  Wallace returned to his alma mater Amherst to teach a writing seminar.

 “His syllabus was conventional, meant to teach basic tools of writing: character, dialogue, and plot.  He gave his students Eudora Welty’s ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ to illustrate the unreliable narrator and Lee K. Abbott’s ‘Living Alone in Iota’ to showcase voice.”

On the next page, Wallace “went to New York to receive a Whiting Award, and afterward told his class he had met Eudora Welty.”

In this same section detailing his small time teaching at Amherst houses one of my favorite little anecdotes:

One day he put the words “pulchritudinous,” “miniscule,” “big,” and “misspelled” on the blackboard.  He asked his students what the four words had in common, and, when no one knew, happily pointed out that the appearance of each was the opposite of its meaning: “pulchritudinous” was ugly, “miniscule” was big, “big” was small, and “misspelled” was spelled correctly.  The students had rarely seen him so happy.

Another thing that I found particularly enjoyable about this book, like the little quip about Welty, Max makes a point to illustrate which writers Wallace was primarily influenced by.  His immense love for Pynchon (duh) and Kafka (obviously) give me a bigger window into what his intentions were from his writing.  It seems it was his discovery of Derrida that merged his interests in philosophy and literature.  These little pieces of information open up a whole new world for Infinite Jest that I hadn’t considered the first time I read it.  The problem, of course, is that now I have to reread it.

This book is about a man’s life, but it is about more.  It is about a person dealing with depression.  A person who has the mental capabilities to master anything conceptual, but is still limited by his cognitive disease.  Max opens up Wallace’s life to show the dirty juxtaposition between his brilliance and his disease.  One of the greatest writers and thinkers of his time couldn’t be considered reliable.  At any point he could have a breakdown.

I’d like to leave all you nice people with a little poem Wallace wrote his friend after healing from a breakdown.

Roses are red.

Violets are Blue;

I am well

And hope you are too.

Wittgenstein,

Was a raving fairy;

I’ll be in Amherst

In January

by Simon