Inside the Newsletter Welcome and Goodbye by Frank Kramer Flying the Fiction Flag by Chuck Pacheco Oh, the Places You'll Go by Carole Horne June Featured 50 Fellow readers of new fiction, rejoice! Our moment is here. In every season of new releases there are always fine novels and short story collections to be savored. But this time around there are so many more of them than usual, that there is real cause for shouting and flag waving. I’ve been immersed in advance reader’s editions for the last month or so, and as I tell you about books I’ve enjoyed, and books I’m looking forward to reading, I hope you’ll share my enthusiasm. Four new novels in quick succession have transported me to that other place that fiction readers know so well: The Human Stain by Philip Roth, Half A Heart by Rosellen Brown, The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter, and Edna O’Brien’s Wild Decembers. Roth tells the story of Coleman Silk, a brilliant and successful Classics professor, who thinks that he has perfect control over his life and his past, only to find himself trapped by events and changes in the world that he could never have foreseen. As in all of Roth, the language is magnetic. It has been some time since we’ve had a new novel from Rosellen Brown, and it was a great pleasure to be reminded how carefully she thinks about her characters, and how multi-faceted, and believable, they are. Half A Heart, set largely in Houston in the 1980s, describes the reunion of a white mother and her mixed race daughter who have been separated for eighteen years. Brown is especially skillful in showing us how politics, in this case the civil rights politics of the sixties, can overwhelm personal lives. Charles Baxter’s story collection, Believers, was a revelation for many of us. Like Alice Munro, he creates whole worlds in relatively few pages. The Feast of Love is a novel that is constructed from alternating first person narratives, the voices of young, old and middle aged citizens of Ann Arbor telling us about the joys, passions and sorrows that they have experienced in love. It glows with affection for these lives. Wild Decembers is a profoundly Irish story with the resonance of an ancient ballad sung in a modern key. Edna O’Brien’s prose is a marvel, sometimes lyrical sometimes blunt, always making the unexpected choice of word, always taking the unexpected turn. Her story concerns three people in a small community, a brother and sister and a newcomer, and the conflict that flares when change is thrust upon a traditional way of life. Each season, as new books are announced and sold, the buzz inevitably begins. This is not a bad thing at all, because the candid comments of sales reps, the heartfelt letters from editors and publicists that accompany advance copies, and early reviews all combine to help us identify the key titles that our customers are going to be most interested in reading. Sometimes, as in the case of Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, we know at once that here is a book for us. The author of The English Patient returns with a novel set in Sri Lanka, where he was born. In his elliptical way, gradually pieceing together the full picture, Ondaatje tells the story of Anil Tessira, a UN forensic pathologist who has returned to her homeland after fifteen years to investigate the atrocities that are the result of sectarian violence on the island. From time to time, a book by an author not heard from for several years explodes, and immediately stifles the perennial "whatever happened to" question. Such a writer is Anchee Min, the author of the memoir Red Azalea, whose new novel Becoming Madame Mao has already been called brilliant. This is the story of Jiang Ching, the white- boned demon, told in prose of great velocity that absolutely suits its angry, power hungry heroine. Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated fiction of the season is the debut novel or story collection. Many have crossed my desk, and some like Bee Season by Myla Goldberg and Like Normal People by Karen Bender have found enthusiastic support among booksellers. Darrin Strauss’s Chang and Eng reconstructs the lives of the original Siamese twins who were brought to the United States in 1825. Meticulously researched and beautifully imagined, the novel addresses the question of what is normal. I am particularly intrigued by a short story collection called The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon. This young writer from Sarajevo came to the United States in 1992 and began writing in English in 1995. His stories are funny, surreal, warm and engaging. They deal with childhood in Sarajevo, with the experience of immigration, with working in a sandwich shop in Chicago. He sounds like no one else. The most talked about debut novel this season may well be White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a young British writer whose exuberant story of the Jones and the Iqbal families has found a happy reader in our head buyer, Carole Horne. This is working class London as it exists today: Indian restaurants, Jamaican hair salons and Irish pool halls. There are of course a multitude of new books that I haven’t mentioned. This is also the season of Saul Bellow, of Jane Smiley, of Jim Crace, Julia Alvarez, George Saunders, and Jayne Anne Phillips. There is new work by Meera Syal, Victor Pelevin, Richard Powers and Denis Johnson. August will bring us Properties of Light, a new novel by the amazing Rebecca Goldstein. There’s plenty more to crow about, and when you’ve made your own discoveries, we’d love to hear about them.

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