The best indie gems hidden in plain sight

I savor and relish stories that play with the dynamics and boundaries of reality and fiction, truth and illusion, and Nicholas Rombes’s Lisa 2 is dissonantly steeped in these hybrid conceptual relations.

Revolving around a snapshot of an idyllic family vacation, that morphs into a portrait of family disintegration, with a Lisa 2 Apple computer (1984 model) enacting the role of devil’s advocate, this novel plays out new-wavishly lo-fi, generating its own glitchy nostalgia in a liminal haunt.

What is not there casts a visceral and auditory spell, or a space in which memory and imagination proliferate like incubi rabbits. There is a line spoken by a character in David Lynch’s film, Lost Highway —a creed that I liken to the unstable calculus of Lisa 2: “I like to remember things my own way…not necessarily the way they happened.”  

One of my favorite contemporary authors is the Ukrainian-born Yelena Moskovich, and her third novel, A Door Behind A Door is crime story in a house of broken and mostly blacked out mirrors.

Centered around brother and sister, Olga and Misha, who relocate to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1991, the jittery contagions of violence, longing, and desire for absolution pepper the spiritual core of the novel, while the phantom ties that bind family—sometimes as breath-damming corset, other times as a cortege of tenderness—serve as lynchpins. 

Moskovich’s multi-layered novel speaks to mercy and salvation, on undisclosed terms, and her architecting of the narrative is rendered in a series of scintillating poetic drive-bys. 

Katya Apekina’s debut novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, compelled me to do something that I have not done in a very long time: read an entire book, cover to cover, in a single night.

There are certain writers who excel at meting out their prose with deceptive flatness, or muted lucidity (Raymond Carver and Marguerite Duras being two prime examples), and it is this “awesome simplicity,” of which the jazz musician Charles Mingus raved, which Apekina deftly demonstrates in her rendering of a searing family drama and modern American gothic.

Subtly weaving together a tapestry of voices and shifting perspectives, the novel centers on two teenage daughters—Edith, sixteen, and Mae, fourteen—who go to live with their dad in New York, after their mother has been hospitalized for a suicide attempt and breakdown.

Their dad, about whom Mae has no memories and Edith has a scattered scarcity from her earliest years, is a famous writer and cultural icon, renowned for both his literary legacy and civil rights activism in the 1960s.

To spend intimate time with Apekina’s fractured characters was to enter a circle of fire consecrated over a void, where I could deeply feel everyone trying to get their needs met, everyone vying to be seen, heard, witnessed, held, and cherished, at whatever cost. 

Discovery has its own timeline and date with destiny, and in the case of Meridel Le Sueur’s small masterwork, The Girl, that is unequivocally true.

Written in 1939, it had to wait nearly forty years until it saw the light of publication day (1978), thanks to John Crawford of West End Press, whose mission was “to print works by American writers neglected by publishers in the mainstream."

The Girl is set in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the Depression, with most of its action centered in a speakeasy known as the German Village. This is where the protagonist, a young naif known only as “Girl,” works as waitress and initiates her crash course into a harsh and unsentimental education—an extended blues song chronicling her passage from innocence to experience.

There is a raw and taut musicality, a nerve-strung throb to Le Sueur’s prose, as she wrings hard-boiled lyricism from passages that ache and palpitate. She distills the lives of her characters, as well as their hardscrabble environment, with startling immediacy and freshness, casting a “great rowdy light” on their joint drama.

Or, as Le Sueur attests in the novel’s afterword, written in 1978: “This memorial to the great and heroic women of the depression was really written by them. As part of our desperate struggle to be alive and human, we pooled our memories, experiences, and in the midst of disaster, told each other our stories or wrote them down. We had a writers’ group of women in the Workers Alliance, and we met every night to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of sagas, poetry, cry-outs.” 

Efficiency has become the catchword and hell-hound in our society. And in Hiroko Oyamada’s mordant fable, efficiency has taken on the form of a sprawling factory, a city unto itself, which is regulating, ordering, and arranging its brave new world one rote directive after the next.

Here’s what I saw when metaphysically touring the interior: An emaciated Kafka stooped over one of the desks, half-obscured behind a tower of documents, staring out bleary-eyed at the ledge of a window where black birds are gathering.

Across from him, a nerve-bitten Nietzsche paces, furiously smoking a cigarette, and refashioning his notions of the abyss to fit the conditions in which he finds himself atrophying. The abyss, now an omnipotent complex, an unnamable morass with a bottomless capacity for soul-feeding.

People are no longer staring into the abyss, they are wearing it, breathing it, speaking it, and perpetuating its slow-drip filtration to the staccato of the walking dreamless dead.

And while Sartre might be hiding out in the basement decrying—Hell is other people—some asthmatic clerk on the fifth floor counters by scrawling on the wall in red marker: Purgatory is the void manifest as something you clock into and out of. 

I exited Oyamada’s "factory," illuminated, disturbed, darkly amused, and speculating to no end.