I loved State of Paradise so much. I understand that some people may find it difficult to pick up a book about the early stages of the pandemic, but I am not one of those people. And honestly—who better than Laura van den Berg to reflect back to us the exceeding strangeness of that time? Also the exceeding strangeness of Florida, of going home again, of being and having a sister, of losing someone you love and then living with that absence, day after day?
Oh, also there’s a shadowy tech company, a virtual reality device that may or may not be disappearing people, an Institute, a mystery, a cult, and a stomach pocket. In other words, it feels pretty much like it has felt to live here lately: ten thousand things happening every day and, each one of them immanent with the threat—not so much of immediate and total apocalypse—but of a world that continues, irrevocably changed, and no path back to the world of yesterday.
Except, here, we are in the presence of a thoughtful and deliberate mind, which, I don’t know about you, but that may not have been how I experienced 2020 (and maybe some other years). Reading this book, I was reminded of Mariame Kaba’s credo that hope is a discipline. As is thinking, as is writing. State of Paradise also does one of my favorite things: words that appear over and over don’t mean the same thing at the end that they meant in the beginning.
Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND'S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it's not just the ominous cats, her mother's burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly…
I’ve been a fan of Fernando A. Flores for a while, since—from off a table at a bookstore and based entirely on the title—I picked up a copy of his Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, because how could I not? Yet somehow, I missed when his latest book, Valleyesque, came out in 2022. Hence why these stories about a bee wrangler who loses his mother, violence in a border town not too close to the border, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s band are in a list of my favorites reads in 2024.
Each story in Valleyesque offers up a world so vividly rendered I put down the book feeling I’d physically been to each one of them—notwithstanding that these worlds include feathered angels, wax babies, Chopin in a luchador mask, and a Greek chorus of City Girls in the Chulas Fronteras Ropa Usada. As a character in one story wonders: “perhaps living in a society where realism is the reigning literary form renders that society powerless against its own absurdity.” Perhaps indeed.
And I haven’t even gotten to the prose. I would read a hundred pages of Flores describing the sun. There’s a couple paragraphs when Chopin plays the piano—like Leonora Carrington’s Penultimate Sensation iykyk—that I’m not sure I will ever stop thinking about.
No one captures the border-its history and imagination, its danger, contradiction, and redemption-like Fernando A. Flores, whose stories reimagine and reinterpret the region's existence with peerless style. In his immersive, uncanny borderland, things are never what they seem: a world where the sun is both rising and setting, and where conniving possums efficiently take over an entire town and rewrite its history.
The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Frederic Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Juarez in the aftermath of his mother's death, attempting to recover his beloved piano that…
The Anthropologists—like the documentary its narrator, Asya, films each day—is fundamentally a story about the “unremarkable grace” of daily life. That’s the thing about grace though, it’s never unremarkable, only unnoticed. Not here though.
This is a story of an adopted city, an apartment, a cafe, a park—and the life happily married couple, Asya and Manu, live, moment by mostly quiet moment, in these places; the community and the language and the artifacts and the rituals and the daily practices that emerge—that are built—when one lives away from the place they were born, away from the community and the language and the artifacts and the rituals and the daily practices that are both specific to that other place and, also, a part of who one is.
Honestly, I don’t think I can do better at describing the magic of this book than Cara Blue Adams' essay in The Baffler—so check that out. But I’ll end by noting an interesting tension the text calls up with respect to form and shape, the specific and the universal, being rooted and living lopsided. As Asya states, “I’d begun to understand that there was, also, only way to live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of a day”—but also, sitting around a table with an elderly neighbor, reciting poetry, she notices how “[t]he poems cleared out spaces in us and filled us with their shapes.”
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
"The Anthropologists is mesmerizing; I felt I read it in a single breath." -Garth Greenwell "Savas is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows." -Bryan Washington
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family?
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from…
Swallow the Ghost traces the impact of a violent event on three different lives, each interconnected story further complicating the truth.
Things are going well for Jane Murphy, or so it seems. She's making it in New York, a sort of wunderkind at the social media marketing startup where she works. She's put an experimental writer, Jeremy Miller, on the map by helping him concoct a viral internet novel, told in fragments through various fake social media accounts. But privately, Jane feels trapped, ruled by her routines and her compulsions, caught up in an endless cycle of soothing and punishing herself. There is so much that she has to keep hidden, especially from Jeremy as their professional relationship transforms into something more.
But then, tragedy strikes, and the story changes track. As the perspective shifts, so too does our image of Jane and those in her orbit as what we think we know begins to unravel.
Audacious, emotionally precise and head-spinning in its ingenuity, Swallow the Ghost interrogates our public identities and private realities through the kaleidoscopic portrait of one woman's life.
