Kalani Pickhart0.0 In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. “Only a Russian could do that," says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.”
A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is an Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death from radiation sickness; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent who climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano.
As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.
While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy.
Матео Аскарипур0.0 There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.
An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.
After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.
Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.
Александра Климан0.0 Set in a darkly unsettling near-future Hollywood, a novelist trying to fix his troubled marriage reckons with connectedness, ambition, and corruption in the age of ecological collapse in this piercing novel from the prize-winning author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
East-coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Partnering with Cassidy--after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks--the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second.
In this poised and all-too-timely story, Kleeman grapples with an issue that is very much front-of-mind: the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. She does so with a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and ultimately, our responsibility to truth.
Том Лин0.0 Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon’s henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad.
Battered, heartbroken, and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant known only as the prophet. Together the two set out to rescue his wife and to exact revenge on the men who destroyed Ming, aided by a troupe of magic-show performers, some with supernatural powers, whom they meet on the journey. Ming blazes his way across the West, settling old scores with a single-minded devotion that culminates in an explosive and unexpected finale.
Written with the violent ardor of Cormac McCarthy and the otherworldly inventiveness of Ted Chiang, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is at once a thriller, a romance, and a story of one man’s quest for redemption in the face of a distinctly American brutality.
Дантиэль В. Мониз3.0 This is an electrifying debut that announces a major talent. Set in the author's home state (she is from Jacksonville, FL), each plot-driven and novelistic story follows characters who are grappling with a key moment in their lives— traumas past or present, losses of faith, love, or loved ones— and are searching for meaning in the self. Moniz is astonishing at depicting with nuance class, race, friendship, and familial inheritances and gifted in delivering sharp shocks within each story's plot. She is beloved and well-connected in the literary world and there has already been an outpouring of early praise for her and the book from Lauren Groff, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jamel Brinkley, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Danielle Evans, and T Kira Madden. We expect even more in the coming months, as we continue to get galleys to her friends and supporters including Joy Williams, Kristen Arnett, Teju Cole, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, to name just a few. Moniz has already won prizes for her stories. The titular Milk Blood Heat was awarded the 2018 Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction ( Ploughshares ), and «Outside the Raft» won the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award at the Key West Literary Seminar. She was the recipient of a Tin House Scholarship, and this year was selected as the writer in residence at Lighthouse Works (whose past alum include Anna Noyes). She was also one of ten finalists for the highly coveted Princeton Arts Fellowship. Milk Blood Heat will appeal to fans of A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, Florida by Lauren Groff, We the Animals by Justin Torres, Goodnight Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes, Antonya Nelson’s short story collections, especially Female Trouble ; as well as readers of fiction about sex, desire, and morality. Moniz’s work has been published in Apogee Journal , Ploughshares , Pleiades , Joyland , Tin House , McSweeney's Quarterly Concern , and most recently, The Yale Review , in April 2020.
