Two forthcoming titles from Dorothy both look promising.
(Parenthetically–I finished Dorothy’s recent publication, Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat the other night and found it confounding, upsetting, engaging, and very, very funny. Should have a proper review in the next few days, if I can commit to writing about a novel that zapped and perplexed me.)
Here’s the blurb for Giada Scodellaro’s collection Some of Them Will Carry Me:
Giada Scodellaro’s stories range in length, style, and tone—a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art. What brings them together is a focus on experiences of black women in moments of dislocation, and a cinematic prose style saturated with detail: a child’s legs bent upon the small bosom of their mother, three-piece suits floating in a river, a man holding a rotting banana during sex, wet cardboard, a woman walking naked through a traffic tunnel. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct contemporary life while building a surprising new reality of language, intimacy, and loss.
And here’s the blurb for Amina Cain’s essay collection, A Horse at Night (which I dipped into this afternoon):
In Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book, a series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. A Horse at Night: On Writing is an intimate reckoning with the contemporary moment, and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or William H. Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for—and beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing and life.
Biblioklept 