A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - Novel - REVIEW

by Anthony Marra

In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.

For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His new novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, will be published in July 2022.

Hogarth
ISBN-13: 978-0770436421

There There - a Novel - REVIEW

by Tommy Orange

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. They converge and collide on one fateful day at the Big Oakland Powwow and together this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Tommy Orange is faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.

Vintage
ISBN-13: 978-0525436140

Tokyo Express - a Novel - REVIEW

by Seichō Matsumoto

In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Stood in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, a senior detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime...

Now widely available in English for the first time, Tokyo Express is celebrated around the world as Seicho Matsumoto's masterpiece - and as one of the most fiendish puzzles ever written.

Penguin Classics
ISBN-13: 978-0241439081

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - a Novel - REVIEW

by Susanna Clarke

In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England - until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers and becomes an overnight celebrity. Another practicing magician then emerges: the young and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes Norrell's pupil, and the two join forces in the war against France. But Strange is increasingly drawn to the wild, most perilous forms of magic, and he soon risks sacrificing his partnership with Norrell and everything else he holds dear.

Susanna Clarke's brilliant first novel is an utterly compelling epic tale of nineteenth-century England and the two magicians who, first as teacher and pupil and then as rivals, emerge to change its history.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635576726

Understanding Octavia E. Butler - REVIEW

by Kendra R. Parker 

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), a pioneer of science fiction and foremother of Afrofuturism, is among the most influential science fiction writers of all time. Butler's work blurs the boundaries of commercial genres, exploring themes of race, gender and sexuality, religion, politics, and environment. A recipient of the MacArthur "Genius Grant" and PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award, Butler is best known for her novels Kindred (1979), Parable of the Sower (1993), and Fledgling (2005).

In Understanding Octavia E. Butler, Kendra R. Parker surveys Butler's life, career, and major works, highlighting her ongoing interest in Black peoples' pasts, presents, and futures. After a biographical introduction, Parker evaluates Butler's career chronologically and thematically, with chapters covering her engagement with the African American literary tradition, her romance novels, and her nonfiction.

Kendra R. Parker is associate professor of African American Literature at Georgia Southern University. She is the author of She Bites Back: Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977–2011, and coeditor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler. Parker is president of the Octavia E. Butler Literary Society and has appeared on NPR's hit podcast It's Been a Minute.

University of South Carolina Press

ISBN-13: 978-1643365770

Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 - REVIEW

by Cheryl Thompson

Canada and the Blackface Atlantic traces the origins of theatre, dance, and concert singing in Canada and their connection to British and American song and dance traditions.

When theatrical acts first appeared in the late eighteenth century, chattel slavery had transformed into mass entertainment on minstrel stages across the Atlantic world. As railroads and theatres were built, local blackface troupes emerged alongside touring British and American acts. By the 1850s, blackface theatre could be found in remote Western outposts to stages in Central and Maritime Canada. This is one of the first books to connect the rise of Canadian blackface minstrelsy with the emergence of Black singers, and choral groups. It describes how Black performers who assumed minstrelsy's mask remapped plantation slavery on Canadian stages.

It begins with the conflicts that shaped North America - the American Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812. Next, it connects these origins with eighteenth-century British immigration, which brought folk dances and masking traditions to North America. From there, it unmasks when and how "Jim Crow" became an Atlantic world sensation, which set the stage for blackface to expand. Finally, it considers how Black acts reimagined the parameters of their own freedom.

Dr. Cheryl Thompson is an Academic, Public Speaker, and Director, Research and Creative Strategy of Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), a project that is reimagining Black archives in the province of Ontario by making Black archival collections accessible and searchable via an open access online platform. She is also Director of Black Creative Lab, an incubator for digital content. She is the author of Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (2025), Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021), and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019). Dr. Cheryl lives in Toronto, Canada.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press
ISBN-13 978-1771126540

The Black Box: Writing the Race - REVIEW

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with one another, over the course of the country’s history.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, legendary Harvard introductory course in African American studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Rich­ard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used words to create a livable world, a home, for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.

It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a group formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal subhuman bondage transformed itself through the word into a community joined in overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture of people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be Black, and about how best to use the past to create a more just and equitable future.

This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement in—the black box inside which this nation within a nation has been assigned, willy-nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

Penguin Books
ISBN-13 978-0593299807

Notes on Infinity: A Novel - REVIEW

by Austin Taylor

A singular, extraordinary debut about Zoe and Jack, Harvard students who find themselves propelled into the intoxicating biotech startup world when they announce they’ve discovered the cure for aging. A different kind of love story where the thirst for achievement consumes and the stakes are forever.

Zoe, the daughter of an MIT professor who grew up in her brother’s shadow, can envision her future anew at Harvard. Jack, a boy in Zoe’s organic chemistry class with unruly hair and a gleam of competitiveness, matches her intellect and curiosity with every breath. When Jack refers Zoe for a position in a prestigious professor’s lab, the two become entwined as colleagues, staying up late to discuss scientific ideas. They find themselves on the cusp of a breakthrough: the promise of immortality through a novel antiaging drug.

Zoe and Jack set off on their new project in secret. Finding encouraging results, they bring their work to an investor, drop out of Harvard, and form a startup. But after the money, the magazine covers, and the national news stories detailing their success, Zoe and Jack receive a startling accusation that threatens to destroy both the company they built and their partnership.

A captivating novel about young love, the allure of immortality, and the recklessness that can come with early success, Notes on Infinity asks: How far would you go to achieve your dreams?

Celadon Books
ISBN-13 978-1250376107