The Woman Upstairs is a novel about female experience and about the coexistence of power and powerlessness, metastasized through the tight prism of Nora’s friendship with Sirena (and her husband and son) while sharing an artist’s studio for the year, at Sirena’s behest. Nora and Sirena might almost be one woman, two parts of one female being, living in a world (our world) rife with contradictions and fraught with self-betrayal. 

Anyone familiar with his work knows this is Tom Drury’s world and the rest of us just happen to live in it. Ever since chapters from his first novel, The End of Vandalism, appeared in The New Yorker some 20 years ago, readers understood they were in the presence of a unique voice—deadpan yet deeply insightful, slightly off-kilter yet in its assessment of the ebb and flow of the human spirit, wonderfully on target. Pacific is a sequel of sorts to The End of Vandalism, revisiting the fictional Midwestern domain of Grouse County (might be in Iowa, might be in Minnesota) and inhabitants known to readers of his earlier work. 

South Korean pop stars and actors are still riding the Hallyu wave, feeding international audiences on Billboard chart-toppers, addictive dramas and horse-riding dances. But despite the seeming enthusiasm around all things Korean, the nation’s beloved literature has remained niched, out of the limelight and still struggling to find its place in the American market. Translated literature, in general, only makes up 3 percent of the American literary market to begin with, and literary fiction and poetry comprises about 0.7 percent of that. 

Here and Now is a collection of letters between the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee and the American novelist Paul Auster. The correspondence began in 2008 when Coetzee, author of the Booker-prizewinning masterpiece, Disgrace, sent a letter to Auster, author of The New York Trilogy, suggesting that an exchange of letters “might be fun, and we might even, God willing, strike sparks off each other.”

Capitol Hell is certainly a book that challenges preconceived notions.  Do Republicans with their moral grandstanding and fear mongering even have a sense of humor? In this debut novel, they try. Two former Republican Congressional staffers, Jayne J. Jones and Alicia M. Long are co-authors of Capitol Hell. They tell the tale of a young, naive, exuberant scheduler, Allison Admundsom and the dog-eat-dog world that is Washington, DC politics.

In the picture I have of my grandfather, he is standing next to General de Gaulle. You can’t see his face, though. What you see is the General in the midst of a crowd, and beside him is a man wearing a bowler hat with his back to the camera. The owner of that hat was my grandfather – according to him, anyway. “General de Gaulle is dead. France is a widow,” he’d say, shaking his head this way and that. Actually, President Pompidou said it on the radio, on a day as cold as hell when crows gathered on skinny branches covered in snow.

Sometimes our stories will end on that happy moment, a hero back from hell, even if reductive or just a moment in time; and sometimes the return will involve a different kind of hell, a reckoning with memory and the past, a reckoning with the schism between a then and a now. This cohesion and possibility for healing—and sometimes art—happens in the telling of the tales, the shaping of experience, character, setting, wherever the story may take us on that narrative arc. 

One of the ongoing themes in the variety of AWP Conference panels that focused on the future of publishing this year had to do with the role of technology in the marketing of books, and how much of that marketing must be done by the writers themselves.  Time and again agents, publishers, and editors emphasized the symbiotic technological relationship between publisher and author. Synced Facebook and Twitter campaigns, the use of Goodreads as a forum to cultivate readership, book/author websites and blogs all play into promoting a book.

In her new novel, Marisa Silver richly re-imagines the subject of this photograph as Mary Coin, struggling to keep her ever-growing family alive. The photographer who captures the melancholy image is a polio-stricken artist named Vera Dare. Silver tells their stories both before they cross paths in California’s Imperial Valley and as they diverge in the years thereafter. For different reasons, the well-known photograph haunts their lives: 

The truth is, Zelda has become the stuff of myth.  It’s no surprise, then, that St. Martin’s Press has just released Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler.  It’s a daunting enterprise, putting words in Zelda’s mouth, imagining her rich emotional life, whether jumping in a fountain in Washington Square, pinioned against a wall by Ernest Hemingway in a supposed sexual assault, painting watercolors from within sanitarium walls, or listening in bed to a husband’s cobbled dreams that may involve a sexual tryst with the same Hemingway.