The best new books for March
There’s no such thing as required reading. From a literary romance to a surreal debut, this month's books span genres and topics.
In much the same way Catholic school can scold the religion out of you, majoring in English made me a bad reader for a while. Having had my fill of dull and difficult texts by important geniuses, I spent my post-college years in the easy lane of pulpy sci-fi, silly horror, and dubious alien abduction memoirs.
I found my way back to more challenging fiction slowly, and in phases, with a lot of short stories in the mix. Alice Munro and David Foster Wallace and George Saunders. Then Vonnegut and Eggers, Kazuo and Zadie.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was a revelation, a reminder that literature was more than comfort, escapism, and clever turns of phrase, that novels could be a powerful comment on (and predictor of) the world to come. Have you read Oryx and Crake? It’s about genetic experimentation run amok. Rocked my world.
Atwood’s got a new collection of stories due soon: Old Babes in the Wood (Doubleday, $30, March 7). It’s a sort of a Whitman’s Sampler of what the great Canadian author can do. In “The Dead Interview” she shoots the breeze with the ghost of George Orwell. “Metempsychosis” has a killer opening: “They were right about the soul: There is one. But nothing else we were told was correct.” “Freeforall” describes a futuristic dystopia in which those who have STDs are walled off from those who don’t. If you haven’t browsed the literature section of your local bookshop recently, consider this collection an entrance ramp with a wide shoulder.
While we’re talking about shorties: Mexican author Yuri Herrera — whose novel Signs Preceding the End of the World should not be slept on — has a new collection en route. Ten Planets (Graywolf, $15, March 31) is a swift, slender volume populated by cosmonauts, Martians, and monsters. “Whole Entero” recounts the short unhappy life of a sentient bacterium living in the colon of some dude on acid. The wayward sailors in “Flat Map” stumble onto the edge of the Earth.
Much like Atwood of Canada, Herrera has sometimes been crowned the greatest living author of his home country. And yet here they both are writing about crazy, weird sci-fi stuff. Still, somewhere there’s a lit major struggling through a John Milton migraine. Breaks my heart.
Monstrilio, Gerardo Sámano Córdova
In his masterful and surreal debut novel, Mexican author Gerardo Sámano Córdova revels in the mire of grief, then lifts the veil and gets playful with it, like the Brothers Grimm ghostwriting Stephen King. Monstrilio begins with the death of a small child, and his despairing mother rooting around in the body for some small, gruesome relic. She decides on a bit of liver, then watches it grow into a hideous creature she must keep hidden in the walls. To say more would spoil the fun. Monstrilio is full of surprises and delightfully messed up — at once precise and inscrutable and horrifying. (Zando, $27, March 7)
Thirst for Salt, Madelaine Lucas
In Madelaine Lucas’ sensuous literary romance, an unnamed narrator with a keen memory lets her mind wander back to a seaside relationship she had in her 20s with an older man. “Lonely and between lovers, I looked him up online,” she says, and seeing a recent snapshot of Jude — creased mouth, tired eyes, young child in his arms — she recounts their entanglements with melancholy and wonder, from their meet-hot on the beach to their bitter, inevitable breakup. Thirst for Salt is simple and direct but wise and textured, letting you linger on sandy legs, salty breezes, jellyfish stings, slipping swimsuit straps, silver temples, and the push and pull of doomed affair. (Tin House, $16.95, March 7)
Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton
Ten years after winning the Booker Prize for her historical fiction behemoth Luminaries — and seven years after being tagged a traitor for daring to criticize her country’s political and environmental policies — New Zealand author Eleanor Catton returns with a novel laced with wit, vision, and venom. With a title cribbed from Macbeth, Birnam Wood concerns a suspicious alliance between an American prepper billionaire and a collective of outlaw Kiwi gardeners all eyeing up the same unclaimed patch of rural paradise. In this page-turning thriller-slash-sneaky dystopian satire, everybody’s sure they’re the most moral and reasonable, but they’re all deliciously doomed. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28, March 7)
Buy it now on bookshop.org | Borrow it from the Free Library
Flux, Jinwoo Chong
Not sure I’ve ever called a novel “cool” before but that word came to mind as I raced through Jinwoo Chong’s brainy, brawny debut built around futuristic tech and corporate intrigue. Flux is brisk, stylish, and sexy, a high-stakes noir thriller that makes room for big philosophical ideas, sharp commentary on pop culture (particularly as it intersects with queer and Asian identity), a hint of Theranos, a touch of The Matrix, and why not, how about a bit of Back to the Future? (Melville House, $28.99, March 21)
Lone Women, Victor LaValle
The author of 2017′s beloved and well-decorated novel The Changeling returns with another suspenseful, cinematic tale that weaves a delicate thread of magic into the fabric of history. Lone Women begins in 1915 with young Adelaide Henry tucking her dead parents into bed, setting fire to the family farmhouse, and fleeing California. Her motivations are as mysterious as the heavy, padlocked trunk she hauls on her journey to a new life as one of the few Black homesteaders in vast, untamed Montana. With inventive storytelling and grim humor, LaValle spins a tense, tight literary horror story. (One World, $27, March 21)
Buy it now on bookshop.org | Borrow it from the Free Library
Also out this month:
Your Driver Is Waiting, Priya Guns
This snazzy satire about a rideshare hack on the emotional edge is billed as a queer, comedic, and (more?) feminist take on Taxi Driver. (Doubleday, $26, out now)
Buy it now on bookshop.org | Borrow it from the Free Library
Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older
The author of the futurist poli-sci adventure Infomocracy and its sequels returns with a “cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance” set on colonial Jupiter. (Tor, $19.99, March 7)
Heart Sutra, Yan Lianke
Some barbs in this sardonic novel about faith and government — which the author was unable to get published at home in China — may be hazy for Western audiences, but the illustrations and a little Googling should set you straight. (Grove, $28, March 14)
The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War, Jeff Sharlet
Veteran journalist Sharlet says he wrote The Undertow to amend his own previous miscalculations; modern America is indeed an incubator for old-school fascism. (WW Norton, $38.95, March 21)
Y/N, Esther Yi
A Korean American woman obsesses over a K-Pop star in this witty, worldly romp into a subculture of boy bands, fanfic, and online parasocial relationships. (Astra House, $26, March 21)
Buy it now on bookshop.org | Borrow it from the Free Library