Books like Lisa 2, v1.0

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… show more.

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. 

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… show more.

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… show more.

Madievsky’s brilliant, weird, evocative debut begins with the kind of first line that lets you know you’re in good hands: “Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus.”

Debbie’s disappearance early in the novel forces the narrator to reckon with who she is outside of the sisters’ codependent relationship, and it raises questions about what we owe our more complicated family members.

While this book is a bio-memoir, I included it on my list as a correspondent homage to the cinematic shaman of twisted mysteries, David Lynch. For the past forty plus years, Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. Lynch’s oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap opera with an eye toward the numinous. Written in alternating chapters, between Lynch and McKenna, this book is a must-read for fans of Lynch, but beyond that, if you are a fan and lover of cinema, creative process, and following your bliss, Room to Dream strikes those chords with a down-to-earth immediacy. It is, in essence, one man’s multi-layered… show more.

The setting of this masterful story is contemporary London, but one dominated by water: rain, rivers, canal boats, ponds. As the novel progresses, the characters’ only partially successful attempts to connect feel hampered by the decreasing definition of the boundaries between land and water. A sense of hopeless inevitability pervades every page, that in the world of this drowning London something has changed. Something irreversible.

A true original. Arthur Conan Doyle working -to solve a series of grisly murders. Released in 1993, it sucked me in with the first paragraph.

It mixes genres and the historical with the fictional. There are Sherlock Holmes easter eggs everywhere, the idea being this thriller informed his writing. The characters, both good and evil, flesh out the great detective in a thriller-paced adventure.

You may not have heard of the author, but you definitely heard of one of his TV shows: Twin Peaks, which he created and wrote with David Lynch. While the TV show’s known for its quirkiness, it has a fantastic underlying mystery that drove the story. Much like Frost drives the story in The List of Seven.

What a sensible-sounding title to a series that was anything but. David Lynch is famously known for avoiding explaining his work lest he kills the mystery, but not only did Frost deftly provide an explanation while keeping the mystery alive, he aggrandized the lore behind it into mythology. 

This is Auster exploring all the themes he’s well known for now, and crafting them into a beautifully absurd almost surreal tale. Not strictly a noir book this has a protagonist struggling with his place in the world and his identity, whilst getting drawn into situations out of their control—all tropes which are seminal to the genre. 

Auster’s first book released under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, called Squeeze Play, is a more typical crime, or pulp noir. And it's easy to see his blend into literary fiction whilst holding the noir handles close for The Music of Chance.

Often writers start out literary then a genre attaches itself. Here, Auster appears to have hit big by penning a commercially aimed work, then shifting back to where his core themes ring out.

I’m a huge fan of these themes he’s so good at; stories within stories, back-tales of characters,… show more.