The Occidental Book of the Dead, by T. Geronimo Johnson (HarperCollins). This flamboyantly ambitious novel, which takes place in a version of Atlanta known as Atlantis, follows the life of George Washington Jonson, a Black cop with a liking for white women. The story’s pivotal event is the police shooting of a white teen-ager; a coverup ensues, in which Jonson, at first, participates. The buildup to and aftermath of the shooting are narrated in a variety of forms, including a four-hundred-page memoir within the novel, ostensibly written by Jonson. Each retelling sifts through layers of extortion and betrayal to trace the complex loyalties connecting white and Black cops, and the cost of the upward mobility afforded by putting on “blue skin.”
Luna, Phoenix, Queen, by Julie Orringer (Knopf). At the center of this kaleidoscopic novel lies another: a handwritten manuscript about two women desperately in love. When Barr, a middle-aged writer, finds these pages hidden in his home, he quickly recognizes in the characters his wife of some thirty years, Dava, and her best friend, Svetlana. But Barr cannot confront Dava about his discovery: she’s in the throes of early-onset Alzheimer’s, trapped behind a “curtain” that “seemed to fall between her” and the world. So, instead, Barr begins transcribing Dava’s work—but transcribing turns into editing, and editing into claiming. Told in the course of four decades, and alternating between the perspectives of the couple’s colleagues and children, friends and lovers, Orringer’s novel examines justice, truth, fate, and freedom.
What We’re Reading
Illustration by Henri Campeã
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
The Minimalist, by Kailee Pedersen (St. Martin’s). “To compose is among the bitterest of self-mutilations,” begins this novel, which depicts a young composer, Mia, as she attempts to complete the final work of her recently deceased mentor. Mia’s life has been fraught with loss: as a baby, in China, she was left by her biological mother, and ended up in an orphanage; and her mentor’s adopted son, with whom she had a romance, died by suicide. As Mia’s creative ambitions and grief begin to blur together, she starts to inflict physical violence on herself. Pedersen is a student of opera performance, and the novel is studded with terms of art, but its most apparent musical influence may be the high tragedy and melancholic tumult of that genre.
The Decadent Movement, by Laura Kolbe (Pittsburgh). This “diary in poems” documents, in reverse chronological order, the nine months of the speaker’s pregnancy and her first year of motherhood—what the book’s opening entry describes as “a span of life ranged with newish / mountains,” and pledges “not to smooth or numb.” Kolbe’s distinctive use of language brings to life this period’s wonders and difficulties, and her maximalist approach to metaphor creates many energetic images. Though visceral, musical, and tender, the collection takes a cerebral, almost scientific attitude toward maternity (the author is also a physician)—not by drawing a clinical distance but by treating it as something to be observed from every possible angle.