What We’re Reading: November Round-Up
Today’s What We’re Reading features our staff picks for November. Everything from poetry to graphic novel to surreal worlds to fantasy horror: happy reading, folks!
Pachyderme by Frederik Peeters (SelfMadeHero, 2013)
Reviewed by Aaron
Plot-wise, Pachyderme is hard to describe—it follows Carice Sorrel’s journey through a hospital where her husband is recovering from a car crash. Her trip is interrupted, both by mundane disruptions (other patients, getting lost, spies) and extraordinary (talking corpses, ghost babies, physical doubling). While the unearthly occurrences are disturbing, the real tension in the story comes from the gender and sexual mores of the post-WWII era the story is set in. Carice is planning to divorce her husband, possibly for her youthful piano student, but she’s opposed by the hypersexual Dr. Barrymore who desires her for himself.
Peeters’s brushstrokes are light and flowing, and his coloring is mundane without being flat or bland. His realistic environments—the hospital, Dr. Barrymore’s home, and so on—are invitingly baroque, so when the walls sprout vines or a spy drips out of a pipe like water, the effect isn’t shocking—it’s inviting. The readers are as unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality as the characters.
The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (Del Ray, Aug 2016)
Previewed by Josh
This month I’m previewing China Miéville’s newest book, The Last Days of New Paris. This is the second pretty short book Miéville has put out recently (the first being This Census-Taker), and, like many of his books, it features a premise that seems, at best, not easy to convey. Surrealist fighters and weird Paris, wars that did and didn’t happen, and something called the “exquisite corpse.” It promises to be a strange and unique piece of fiction, and that’s all I ever hope for from Miéville. His book The Scar is still a favorite of mine, and its predecessor, Perdido Street Station, has one of the all-time greatest openings in fiction. I don’t know if The Last Days of New Paris will live up to those books, but I can at least count on a wild and weird trip.
Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova (Sourcebooks, 2016)
Reviewed by Cassidy
Halloween has technically come and gone, but it’s not too late to indulge in this incredible spooky read. Labyrinth Lost follows Alex, a teenaged bruja who is the most powerful witch in a generation, as she goes on a quest to save her missing family after a spell goes terribly awry. It’s not quite a horror novel, but a fun fantasy romp that draws from Latin American culture to balance perfectly between the ethereal and the eerie, as Alex and her friends Rishi and Nova traverse the treacherous other realm of Los Lagos. Cordova is the queen of world building; I was daydreaming about the rich imagery she draws in everywhere from the Bone Valle to the Poison Garden for days after. It’s the kind of book you actually want to see as a movie. Cordova also manages to explore common young adult themes—navigating shifting family relationships, friendship, and discovering sexuality—without causing the plot to come shuddering to a halt. The protagonist, Alex, is also bisexual, and I can’t describe how refreshing it was to read a queer book that didn’t revolve around coming out/homophobia/trauma.
Badass brujas + spine-tingling demons + the power of friendship = one stellar read
Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin (Coffee House Press, 2016)
Previewed by Wren
I’ll admit: I have a fan-girl crush on Sun Yung Shin. I am ever so thankful for the anthology she edited, A Good Time For the Truth: Race in Minnesota (my review here), and her previous books of poetry (alum H&W contributor Timothy reviewed Rough, and Savage here). Plus, I interact with her semi-regularly through my work at The Loft Literary Center. In every interaction we have, I come away not only learning something new about the world or myself, but also with something substantial to digest, consider, reflect upon. Unbearable Splendor seems to be no different. I heard Sun Yung read a poem from this book at a recent event, and when she introduced the book, she joked that poets can think of this as a poetry book, and prose-lovers can think of it as a book of prose. I haven’t dug into it in full yet, but upon flipping through the pages, I can see how both audiences will be satiated: some pages are covered in prose text, others have formally sparse and poetic lines, and yet others have images. I am someone who thrives on context, and reviews of this book assure me that this is a book rife with context, placing the whole mess of a person’s identity on the pages in beautiful text, and letting that complexity steep in its own kind of beauty. Join me in diving into what poet Ed Bok Lee calls “a dazzling collage of metamorphoses.”
