Books like How Are You Going to Save Yourself

After Clay Blackall loses his brother to suicide, he lights out for Twinrock, a decaying mansion perched on an island in Narragansett Bay, where he attempts to retrace his brother’s steps in his final days and hours. Winter’s quirky novel unfolds from multiple points of view. In addition to Clay, there is Vinco Vincenti, a failed author who has taken to impersonating the actor Judge Reinhold, and Alix Maus, an adjunct college instructor burdened by her past. All of them have ties to Clay’s lost brother. But the star of the show is Twinrock itself—a fictionalized version of Clingstone, the mysterious mansion that can still be seen off the coast of Jamestown, RI. Fans of writers like Robert Coover will enjoy Winter’s stylish prose, which convincingly evokes the bohemian atmosphere of the 1980s on Providence’s East Side.

This compulsively readable novel by Cape Cod native and television writer Kepnes (7th Heaven, The Secret Life of the American Teenager) begins in a New Hampshire middle school where nerdy Jon and sweet Chloe are best friends united against the provincial attitudes of their small town. Everyone is shocked when John is kidnapped and given up for dead. Years later he turns up in Providence, where he has been kept in a coma by a rogue neuroscience professor who wants to transform him into the monster of The Dunwich Horror by Providence’s own, ambivalently celebrated H.P. Lovecraft. When John learns that he now has terrifying powers that put him at odds with everyone he loves, he sets out to find the professor whose recklessness got him into this mess—and maybe saved his life.

In this baker’s dozen of stories, Jean McGarry reprises favorite topics—tight-knit families, fraying loves, intimations of mortality. A native Rhode Islander with ties to Providence’s blue-collar Irish community, McGarry paints the state and its inhabitants in shades as tender as they are unsparing. McGarry’s great theme is decline: Everything that starts out promising invariably goes bad. Steeped in this worldview, her characters are lively and quick with an insult—even when they’re confronted by experts who presume to know them better than they know themselves. One mordant example: A therapist finally gets a breakthrough with a tough-to-reach Rhode Islander. The patient feels relief, and the therapist urges him to attend sessions more regularly. “You’re at it again,” the patient remarks. “Save your advertisements for someone else.”

I’ve been reading Mary Gordon ever since a fellow writer put her novel Spending in my hands in 1999. Two decades later, I remain as impressed by Gordon’s moral intelligence as by her luscious prose. In this novel, Marian, an older woman living in coastal Rhode Island, relives her young adulthood, which she spent fighting Franco’s forces in Spain while posing as the wife of a politically engaged doctor who happened to be her dead brother’s former lover. Now Marian’s granddaughter has arrived on her doorstep in search of her history and is inspired to visit Spain herself. But what she discovers is only what Marian already knows, living by the coast: that a quiet life in a backwater can also be free and meaningful.

This book will remain on my list of favorite books of all time. I love how the author begins the story of the promiscuous doctor by jumping straight into the drama. Immediately, you are made aware of the well-respected cardiac surgeon’s character and how he loves women and plenty of them! Dr. Makkai Worthy is referred to by his many sex partners as Dr. Feelgood.

I became wrapped in the four women’s stories as they were introduced throughout this book. I found each character interesting, and there was never a dull moment as their disdain grew for the once-beloved doctor. I also found it interesting how the story takes you back to the place where it all began to explain the doctor’s love for sex and his inability to commit to just one woman. This page-turner is one that I plan to read again and again.

Noting my fortune to have been a reader of this book before its official surfacing to the national public, I was first drawn to those poems that again gave me back my memory. Poems reminisced on Migos, Blu & Exile, and others.

Soon after, it's display of self-portraiture unfolded into a mastery of wit, celebrating how music is always a task of discovery first.

“I saw stranger; looked again, I saw friend,” Watkins writes with an intelligence marked by the fruit of reorientation and heart that comes with inhabiting and celebrating your own tribe.

It’s funny because he wanted to call it My Nigs, but didn't like the idea of white people saying, I loved your collection My Nigs!

That first poem “My President” just floored me with how he heralded all his friends by nominating them for office, like “the boys outside Walgreens selling candy/ for a possibly fictional basketball team” or the guy who hooks him up with a free slice of pizza as long as Danez gives him time to say salat.

There’s a poem about getting beat up, at once an act of violence and an act of care for while they're beating you up, they’re weirdly making sure they don’t kill you. 

As a long-time fan of this author, I always find myself in his characters and very much engrossed in the story.

This story was filled with deep suspense wrapped around a good romance, and it kept me turning pages until the end. I received this book at a conference from the author and I was so engrossed in this book I finished it by the time I was home from the event.

I have always considered Philip Roth to be a master stylist and, even more, a brilliant author of the way that characters think and feel. This book is also wonderful for the way its ironies unfold in a story that is riveting, disturbing, and revealing.

I am intrigued by the way that Roth can confront important social issues. Even though this was written several years ago, I find it to be particularly relevant to the debates about diversity that seem to concern us most as a society today.

Bass Reeves, a real individual, was a slave in Texas and, as personal attendant and crack shot, accompanied his owner, an officer in the 11th Texas Cavalry Regiment, into battle during the Civil War.

The lyrical and colorful narrative closely resembles Bass Reeves’s speech and thoughts, so that one flows into the other. That’s fine writing. Thompson reveals in meticulous detail behavioral traditions between owner and slave and between the slaves themselves that reflect the injustice rife at that time.

This is the first novel in a trilogy, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next two books.