Book Notes

This has been another year of posthumous books. A new edition of The Autobiography of Mark Twain came out late last year, and The Pale King, the unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, finally was published by his editor. These and others (2666 by Roberto Bolaño, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson) made us think about the many books that became famous only after the author was no longer around to reap the praise. Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention was released just days after he died, and he had fully completed the book, but other authors did not consider their manuscripts to be ready for the world, and were even tormented by the sense that their work was incomplete. Geoff Dyer wrote: 

As time goes by we drift away from the great texts, the finished works on which an author's reputation is built, towards the journals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, jottings. This is not simply because, as an author's stature grows posthumously, the fund of published texts becomes exhausted and we have to make do not only with previously unpublished or unfinished material but, increasingly, with matter that was never intended for publication. It is also because we want to get nearer to the man or woman who wrote these books, to his or her being.

- Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence (Picador, $15)

Gilbert Cruz wrote more about the subject in a 2009 Time Magazine article about readers' appetite for dead authors' unpublished works. Click here for more posthumously published books that we believe deserve to be read.

MAY IS SHORT STORY MONTH
May is short story month and our booksellers have created a display of some of their favorite collections.

No more boots stomping above, no more football games turned up too high, and best of all, no more front doors slamming before dawn as they trudge out for their early formation, sneakers on metal stairs, cars starting, shouts to the windows above to thrown down their gloves on cold desert mornings. Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.

And so begins YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE (Amy Einhorn, $23.95), eight stories in which Siobhan Fallon takes us into the world of Fort Hood during wartime: a place where families struggle, wives miss their husbands and children rebel. For most of us, the sacrifice of war is left to others, but in this collection we’re allowed to peek in the windows of the people who give up the most: a wife who hacks her husband’s email overseas searching for clues of infidelity, a wounded soldier returning home, a runaway teenager. Each story is emotionally acute, beautifully written and will leave you haunted and in awe of this world that feels foreign, but is not so far away. - Jennifer Close

Yes, it's absolutely true: T.C. Boyle is a master storyteller. In "Balto," a young girl is asked to lie in court for her alcoholic father; in "Sin Dolor," a young boy living in squalor astonishes a community—including its detached doctor—with his inability to feel physical pain; in the title story, WILD CHILD (Penguin, $16), Boyle chronicles the heartbreaking tale of the Savage of Aveyron, implicitly asking, “who are the real savages?” Boyle frequently works with issues of social and environmental justice. These tales of humanity brought to weakness by the natural world and our own flawed nature prove that Boyle captures human folly and frailty better than any of his contemporaries. - Lacey Dunham

Mailie Maloy's second collection of short stories, BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT ( Riverhead, $15), is so quiet that many climaxes tiptoe by, only to make themselves felt later, as you turn them over in your mind: You'll be washing dishes or brushing your teeth and realize, suddenly, why the perversely casual relationship between a dead woman's father and her murderer's girlfriend in "The Girlfriend" resonates with so much truth; or why you felt so uncomfortable reading the benign "Travis, B.,” where a lonely young man with a limping gait falls in love with a young lawyer he will never see again. Meloy draws her characters through each story with simple, unfettered prose it is easy to lose yourself in. - Lacey Dunham

So you think Pevear & Volokhonsky's translations have introduced you to Russian literature? Think again, and meet your contemporaries. A WEREWOLF PROBLEM IN CENTRAL RUSSIA: And Other Stories, by Victor Pelevin (New Directions, $13.95) and THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHO TRIED TO KILL HER NEIGHBOR'S BABY: Scary Fairy Tales, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Penguin, $15) will introduce you to the rough impact on ordinary citizens during the transition at the end of the Soviet period to the failures of the new economy. In classic yet shockingly current Russian style, Pelevin plays with the surreal and absurb; Petrushevskaya explores the realm of strange occurences and fantasy; throughout their stories, there is a relentless hope and longing for a better, more deeply meaningful existence. Aren't these elements what make everyday reality so shockingly brutal and harsh, but also bearable? Because if we can't laugh at bizarre twists of fate and escape into dreams, what else does the world have to offer? - Andrew Getman

Each of Julie Orringer’s short stories in HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER (Vintage, $14) features a young woman on the cusp of something—an adolescent on the brink of adult experience, a teenager caught between childhood and independence, a college student hovering nervously on the edge of the "real world." Orringer approaches these thresholds with precision and grace. But each story is also shot through with darkness—an undercurrent of violence that disrupts her characters' coming-of-age. Orringer's debut collection emotionally unsettling and completely, compellingly original. - Liz Sher

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