10 years ago, one book re-imagined how a gay love story could be told. Deft, honest and straightforward, The New York Times’ best-selling author David Levithan’s book “Boy Meets…
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Award winners and near-winners to read this Spring
While the Huffington Post blazed the way for new media winning a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, the literary world was stunned by the board’s refusal to name a Fiction winner for the first time since 1977. They did, however, reveal the three finalists—a posthumously completed novel by David Foster Wallace, 29-year-old Karen Russell’s debut novel and a hardcover re-release of Denis Johnson’s 2002 novella. In the spirit of fostering a rich community of conflicting ideas, we’re taking advantage of their indecision to stockpile our spring reads. Here, Pulitzer’s uncrowned picks along with three titles that did snag some prestigious awards in 2011 to get you through the season.
The Fiction Pulitzer is designated “for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”, and the committee notes Foster Wallace’s last work as a story “animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace.” Published more than two years after the author’s suicide in 2008, “The Pale King“—which is actually a compilation of unfinished pages and notes pulled together by his editor Michael Pietsch—tells a deeply sad story of stagnant mundanity in a Midwest I.R.S. office, jumping to the other end of the spectrum from the pleasure bender of “Infinite Jest”. Those un-annointed in Foster Wallace’s singular prose will benefit from diving into his repertoire from here.
Unfolding the wild Florida Everglades world behind the short story Zoetrope published in 2006, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator”, “Swamplandia!” marks Russell’s enchanting first go at a full-fledged novel. Between her masterful grip on protagonist Ava’s teenage narration of her life on her family’s swamp-set theme park and a commanding knack for presenting environmental, economic and societal issues against a lovably dysfunctional family dynamic, Russell is off to a resoundingly strong start.
In just 116 pages—the expanse of one quiet afternoon, perhaps—Johnson shares the life of Robert Grainier, whom the Pulitzer committee describes as “a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm.” As we chart today’s uncertain path of everyday life on the brink of another kind of new frontier, it’s comforting to follow Grainier through “Train Dreams” as he faces Johnson’s beautifully drawn world with courage and vulnerability.
With the 2011 National Book Award emblazoned on its cover, Ward’s second novel represents literature’s most respected contribution for the year. The story, chosen from 315 nominees and five finalists, spans the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina as seen by a pregnant 14-year-old girl, Esch Batiste. Zeroing in on the tiny moments threading through mostly tragic lives, Ward has established the lyrical, powerful voice of a master storyteller in “Salvage the Bones“.
Beyond the popular buzz it garnered, “The Tiger’s Wife” established credibility with Obreht’s selection as one of the National Book Awards’ 5 Under 35 in 2010 and NBA Finalist in 2011—the first author to earn such a distinction. Written primarily during her college years, the book follows a Balkan family (their exact country is never specified) through the region’s conflicts from the present day and stretching back to WWII. Conveying wisdom in her rich narrative, Obreht’s first novel promises a bright future from the prodigal writer.
The well-established author of various story collections drove her point home with the success of her latest collection, which continues with her expert ability to weave significant feeling and cultural statements into a series of beautifully captured narratives about being Jewish after WWII. Score one for independent publishers, too—”Binocular Vision” was the first volume published by Lookout Books, christening the house by going on to earn NBA Finalist status and then winning the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Contributions by Ami Kealoha and Kelly O’Reilly
Novelist Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts on Harlem, gentrification and the power of unconscious style
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ debut novel “Harlem is Nowhere” finds the young author discovering herself in a foreign place that seems all too familiar. Pitts moved to Harlem after completing a Fulbright Scholarship in England, and lived in the upper Manhattan neighborhood for seven years. In that time she saw a neighborhood separated from the city within which it exists become bombarded by the outside and witnessed a community under siege. Taking her title from a Ralph Ellison essay, Pitts recounts her interactions with local historical and literary figures both real and imagined, creating a rich portrait of one of the most interesting and important cultural landmarks New York City has to offer. Cool Hunting sat down with the author to discuss her work and the neighborhood that inspired her novel.
The book is imagined as the first part in a trilogy on African Americans in utopia, and the three parts are Harlem, Haiti and the Black Belt of the South. It’s interesting that you should ask whether it’s the foundation of that series, because you could argue that one of the other places that has a longer historical reach, which is the beginning of that idea is Haiti. Haiti was the first black republic, which is why it enters the list as the place it was first imagined where enslaved Africans could throw off their chains and create and imagine the republic. The whole history of Haiti flows from this original act, for which the people of Haiti were punished by the entire world.
It’s hard to say yes or no. All of that history, all of those myths that I talk about were so much a part of my mind from having read all those books that I read about Harlem and the poets, the photographers—studying all of those pictures. Of course all of those stories and history were part of why I ended up there, but once I arrived there I was conscious not to be caught in some daze of nostalgia or uncritical celebration of, “Oh ,the Harlem Renaissance wasn’t it fabulous!” If I wasn’t in this rhapsody of celebration it was because I was conscious of balancing out the myth and the reality.
I think it’s rich in ways I didn’t expect it. In simple everyday ways, just the way that people greet each other and look out for each other and a certain way of being a neighbor. I imagine in some neighborhood that’s the norm, but in Harlem it’s exemplified, that feeling of community in an urban setting. I think there’s a reason they call it the village of Harlem. For me there was an attempt to become a part of the place, not just to live there and sleep there, and in my attempt to become a part of the place I began to care about its future and what is going to happened to it.
It’s interesting, because what’s happening in Harlem is happening in a lot of other neighborhoods in New York. I remember reading—and it made me furious—a high-powered broker in the New York Times said, “they think they’re special up there why should they be different than any other neighborhood that will have retail shops and boxy condominiums?” To her obviously that’s a great thing. Why is it so different? Why is it so special? Not to discount what’s happening in other places, or to say it is not destructive in other places, because Harlem is alike other neighborhoods in New York in that way. Harlem is going through a rash of re-zonings under Mayor Bloomberg, more so than any other time period in its history, which is changing the landscape, and will change the face of the city for generations to come, period. Even if the current economic situation means you can’t see development in some places, the laws have been changed so that when the money comes back into Harlem and in other places, the band will play on.
Style is unconscious in many ways it is informed by everything I’ve ever read. I’ve certainly read a lot of Borges. One that comes to mind is W.G. Sebald, a German writer who died in 2001. He had that sense of is it fiction, is it non-fiction? Is it a diary, is it history? And of all of those things being able to co-exist on the page. When I first read his work when I was just out of college it was a huge relief and a door opening into all of those possibilities, to work across genres and to follow one’s own nose. I always say if it’s a first person narrative, it’s my eyes and my brain shifting through what I see and what I read and what I’ve heard about. What happened and what’s about to happen, and those things come through my eyes. But its not a first-person narrative in the way a memoir is. It’s more impressionistic where my personal experiences show up when they can throw light on a bigger question. In terms of storytelling, that’s the way my style is inspired.
“Harlem is Nowhere” sells online from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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