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Articles by Karin Lin-Greenberg
Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, May 12, 2023
The Night Flowers by Sara Herchenroether The gruesome discovery of three bodies deep inside New Mexico's majestic Gila National Forest in the '80s sets the gripping premise for Sara Herchenroether's unforgettable debut, The Night Flowers. Seasoned with supernatural suspense, including a killer who stalks the ghosts of his dead victims, The Night Flowers is an entertaining crime thriller enhanced with the engaging personal dramas of the two women investigating the triple homicide.
YOU ARE HERE | Kirkus Reviews
by Karin Lin-Greenberg ‧ This debut novel offers a group portrait of people in upstate New York trying to figure out how to build new lives. Every day after school, Jackson Huang joins his mom, Tina, at Sunshine Clips in Greenways Mall. She tends to the needs of a dwindling roster of clients. He does his homework and sweeps up hair. Her most loyal customer is Ro Goodson, an elderly woman with a prickly personality and a knack for being offensive.
Gone to the Wolves
John Wray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 (400p) ISBN 978-0-374-60333-5 Wray (Lowboy) returns with a masterly opus of Florida metalheads. Kip Norvald, Leslie Z, and Kira Carson bond as teens in the late 1980s during a drunken escapade that involves, among other things, a dude strapping himself to skis on the roof of an off-roading truck. Having survived the mischief, the three set out in search of something true.
The Covenant of Water
Abraham Verghese. Grove, $30 (736p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6217-5 Verghese’s breathtaking latest (after Cutting for Stone) follows several generations of a South Indian family as they search for the roots of a curse. The watery setting of Travancore (later Kerala) is described in dreamlike terms, with “rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds.” There, a member of the Parambil family has drowned in each of the last three generations.
Good Night, Irene
Urrea (The House of Broken Angels) transports readers to the Western Front of WWII in his stunning latest. Irene Woodward, a tough New Yorker, covers up the bruises received from her abusive fiancé with concealer and sweaters, throws her engagement ring down the drain, and joins America’s war effort as a member of the Red Cross Clubmobile.
You Are Here
Karin Lin-Greenberg. Counterpoint, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-64009-543-4 Lin-Greenberg’s exceptional debut novel (after the collection Vanished) explores a complex web of relationships at a fading mall in Albany, N.Y. Among the people drawn together by the mall are Tina Huang, the last remaining stylist at a struggling hair salon, and Ro Goodson, an 89-year-old white woman who is Tina’s only regular customer, and who Tina believes comes in because she’s lonely.
Night of the Living Rez
Morgan Talty. Tin House, $16.95 trade paper (296p) ISBN 978-1-953534-18-7 Talty’s smart and gritty debut, a linked collection, poignantly overlays a boy’s coming-of-age on the Penobscot reservation with a young man’s present-day struggles to overcome opioid addiction and economic precarity, implying that they might be the same person in different phases of life.
Calling for a Blanket Dance
Oscar Hokeah. Algonquin, $26.95 (272p) ISBN 978-1-64375-147-4 The Kiowa, Cherokee, and Mexican family members of a young man named Ever Geimausaddle tell stories that span from his infancy to his adulthood in this captivating debut. When Ever is six months old, he witnesses his father being nearly beaten to death by police on the way back to Oklahoma from visiting his paternal grandparents in Chihuahua, Mexico.
You Are Here
KARIN LIN-GREENBERG is a Chinese American, award-winning writer whose debut collection, Faulty Predictions, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and won gold in Foreword Reviews’s INDIE Award in the Short Story category. Her second collection, Vanished, was the winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.
You Are Here
Paperback Hardcover Ebook On Sale: | $17.95 9781640096431 | Paperback 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | 304 pages On Sale: | $27 9781640095434 | Hardcover 6 x 9 | 304 pages On Sale: | $14.99 9781640095441 | Ebook | 304 pages “Lin-Greenberg’s web of characters illustrate the complex lives of ordinary people.” —Time As a once-bustling mall prepares to shut its doors for the final time, the residents of an upstate New York town must reckon with a shocking act that forces them to reevaluate who they are in this...
Still Life
Today Alice’s students will draw the pheasants. Alice unlocks the props closet in Bantam Hall on the downtown campus and sees the two taxidermied pheasants on a high shelf, exactly where she left them last semester. The pheasants were purchased by the Department of Art thirty-seven years ago, Alice’s first year teaching at Juniper College. She places her tote bag on the floor and opens the brown stepladder in front of the metal shelf with the pheasants on top.
If the Body Allows It
Praise “Cummins’s innovative work delivers well-crafted stories, vivid characters, and unsettling emotional gravitas.”—Publishers Weekly “In this collection of stories, the art of truth-telling has been combined with the magic of fortune-telling. . . . Moving and haunting, edgy and searching, reaffirming and devastating. To read it is to be dazzled, and to be changed.
The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Throughout its years of continuous publication Prairie Schooner has consistently maintained a national reputation for literary excellence. Building upon this venerable history, the journal selects one short story collection from contemporary writers each year for this prize series. The series is sponsored and vetted by the staff of Prairie Schooner and a venerable committee of judges, and the selected volumes are published each year by UNP.
Boundless Deep, and Other Stories
Praise “Gen Del Raye’s Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a moving, shape-shifting collection that examines life at the margins of belonging. Haunted by war, ghosts, sea creatures, and existence itself, Del Raye’s characters are straddling worlds, wedging themselves into whatever space they can fit.
Thanks for This Riot
“Janelle Bassett’s voice is one I can’t get enough of. The stories in Thanks for This Riot are fresh and unique and wickedly off-kilter but also burn with a wry, age-old, ironic wisdom. This collection is bitingly funny but sincerely so, with little lies and harmless untruths taking on an edge and inflicting irresistible damage.”—Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief and The Titanic Survivors Book Club “Janelle Bassett is a phenomenal writer.
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