TEN
MORE
NOTABLE
FICTION
DEBUTS
1 After receiving coverage on Bookslut fol- lowing its original release last year by the
indie press Publishing Genius, Shane Jones’s
Light Boxes (Penguin, June) attracted the
interest of Spike Jonze, who acquired the film
rights, and the William Morris Agency, which
sold reprint rights to Penguin. The short
novel, about a group of balloonists who wage
a war against the seemingly endless month
of February, has already been published by
Penguin UK, to glowing reviews.
2 Kira Henehan’s Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles (Milkweed
Editions, May) is no ordinary detective story,
but rather the “tortured quest of an existential inquiry,” starring Finley, an investigator
“of indiscernible origins and prowess.” Experimental fiction writer extraordinaire Ben
Marcus, in a back-cover blurb, calls the novel
“hilarious,” but even he admits that parts of it
are over his head.
3 The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay (Viking, July) is by Beverly Jensen, whose
life ended before the author could publish a
word. As J. M. Tyree wrote in an essay for our
January/February 2009 issue, Jensen died of
cancer at the age of forty-nine without publishing her work. In this, her first and only
novel, her writing lives on.
and her friend get high on a beach in East
Hampton, New York—readers know they’re
in for something unique.
5Taroko Gorge (Unbridled Books, July) by Jacob Ritari, who studied Japanese language and literature at Japan’s Sophia University, is the story of an American reporter and
his drunken photojournalist partner who are
the last to see three schoolgirls before they
disappear into Taiwan’s largest national park.
The journalists become investigators—or are
they suspects?—in this page-turning literary
mystery.
6Adam Ross’s Mr. Peanut (Knopf, June) could be called a murder mystery. It could
also be called “the most riveting look at the
dark side of marriage since Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?,” as Stephen King wrote in
a review. Really, it’s both of those things
and then some. There’s a good reason why
M. C. Escher’s drawings serve as a leitmotif
throughout the novel: Like the Dutch artist’s
visual paradoxes, there’s a lot more going on in
Mr. Peanut than is apparent at first glance.
7In The Madonnas of Echo Park (Free Press, June), a debut novel that is elicit-
ing seemingly inevitable comparisons with
recent books by Junot Díaz and Sherman
Alexie, Brando Skyhorse uses one working-
class community in Los Angeles to paint a
moving portrait of Mexican Americans who,
acknowledged by almost no one, live and love
and struggle and die among us every day.
8In The Bluesiana Snake Festival (Counterpoint, May), Aubrey Bart, a
former street sweeper, cab driver, and bartender, turns his ear to the streets of New
Orleans to imagine a blend of voices—Big Jim
Bullshit, Hidden Dave Crossway, Sushubaby,
and Brooklyn Bob—celebrating the lives and
languages of the city pre-Katrina.
9Last year Matt Stewart’s The French Revolution (Soft Skull Press, July)
became the first full-length novel to be
released—in approximately thirty-seven
hundred tweets—on Twitter. Beyond that
headline-worthy experiment in twenty-first
century publishing, however, there’s an entertaining, multilayered plot based on the
eponymous historical event.
10 In her debut story collection, Death Is Not an Option (Norton, July), San
Francisco–based author Suzanne Rivecca
tells provocative tales of honesty, sexuality,
and self-delusion—with protagonists ranging from a young memoirist who confronts a
sexually obsessed reader to a phone operator
for the Keystone Mental Health Helpline who
diverges from her script—that have earned
her comparisons with Mary Gaitskill.
4Self-published in 2003, Hilary Thayer Hamann’s Anthropology of an American Girl (Spiegel & Grau, May) follows the
precocious Eveline Auerbach from high
school through early adulthood. Newly edited and revised for commercial publication,
this debut novel has been likened to everything from Catcher in the Rye to Jane Eyre, but
from the opening scene—in which Eveline
