#autofiction

#autofiction

Whatever you might think you're going to get from the familiar setup of Jennette McCurdy's Half His Age (a lonely high-school girl in Anchorage begins an extremely questionable sexual relationship with her teacher), any presumptions are dispelled from the very first page. When Waldo, the teenage narrator of the novel, observes her boyfriend's "slimy tongue that loop-de-loops over and over like a carnival ride, mechanical and passionless," she's setting a tone: irreverent, graphic, bilious.

One of America's greatest living fiction writers returns with his first novel since 2018's Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. In Vigil, the dying CEO of an oil company gets the Scrooge treatment when the ghost of a woman returns from the afterlife to help him cross over. If that sounds similar to Lincoln in the Bardo, don't be fooledthis one hits different. Despite its shorter length, Vigil is an equally powerful exploration of memory, compassion, and atonement.

The Polish poet Czesaw Miosz is famously credited with the line: When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. In contemporary European literature, a book these days is often the beginning of a familial feud. With thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife undergoing a sustained boom across the continent, it can increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms.

I met John Tottenham in LA because we have the same publisher, Semiotext(e). I was intrigued to read his first novel, Service, because I'm interested in first novels written by middle-aged people. In sport, it's good to be young, but not always in literature. You have to go through some kind of trouble before you can write a book. Service is about a character called Sean - a double of Tottenham - who is in his late forties

The book begins with the parents of Catt Greene (an avatar for Kraus) as they start a family and strive to attain the American Dream. Catt's family circumstances remain precarious, and bright-but-bullied Catt is going off the rails by the time she reaches her teens. The family's abrupt decision to emigrate to New Zealand reroutes her from what increasingly feels like a foregone dead-end.

Meanwhile, contemporary romance-smutty, cozy, saccharine, highly lucrative for the moment- has saturated the market, causing a panic over the tastes of the masses and the state of writing about marriage. It's been a long time since there's been a novel in the genre worth talking about. Thankfully and just in time, Erin Somers, journalist and author of the novel Stay Up With Hugo Best, has given us one of the best marriage novels of the decade.

In Hervé Guibert's book Ghost Image, he writes about preparing to take a portrait of his mother. It's so vivid in its description. Even though the book has no images, I can envision the photograph so clearly. He goes to great lengths to ensure the image is perfect, that his mother looks a certain way. At the end of the essay, we learn that the film was blank - there is no photograph.

English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way, Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015's Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn't know, and she's still in search of it. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.

Helm by Sarah Hall Faber, out now Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she's been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria's Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm the only wind in the UK to be given a name from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It's a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.