Over the weekend I read a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s non-fiction and found to my delight that, amongst other gifts, O’Connor spends a hefty amount of her genius complaining about publishing: her readers are IDIOTS, her bestselling peers are TRASH, critics are FOOLS OF THE HIGHEST ORDER (this from a woman who, Wikipedia informs me, wrote hundreds of book reviews in her lifetime). The only group stupider than the people teaching literature, as O’Connor tells it, are the people studying it; there is one particularly devastating essay in which she remarks in quick succession that she thought writing short stories was the “most natural and fundamental way… of human expression” with nothing “very complicated” about it, until “my calm was shattered when I was sent seven of your manuscripts to read”. Yikes!! But also, every writer I know has their own tiny—or indeed, grotesque and enormous—demons about the publishing industry. Writing is often (even usually?) hard but rewarding work and/or great fun. Publishing is something else, with its own pits and peaks.
The main reason I am, despite this, glad and grateful to be in the industry is because getting to share your work with other people is an insane and frightening and lovely thing to do. But the second and less complicated reason is because I love to read, and being in publishing means that sometimes I get to read cool things early, and sometimes I am friends with someone who writes something that rewires my brain a little bit, and that is just treats all the way down. So forgive me, but in this newsletter I am focusing on books that have not come out yet but are imminent — IMMINENT!!! — and you should preorder them, as a gift for future you.
How to begin to talk about Yael van der Wouden’s debut, THE SAFEKEEP? Okay, so it’s 1961 in the Dutch countryside, and thorny, dangerous, arguably mean Isabel (in case the adjectives don’t make it clear enough, I would die for her) lives alone in her family home; to her horror, she is asked to spend the summer cohabiting with her brother’s new and graceless girlfriend Eva. And you, the reader, are trapped there too, in the thorny and dangerous reign of Isabel’s mind, in a narrative that builds to a simmering, claustrophobic tension, in a love story that, without wanting to give too much away, starts to have a worrying Gone Girl-esque edge to it, in a sharp and brutal plot with a twist that I was told about in a smoky bar and I still yelped and nearly threw my laptop across the room when it actually happened. The good news about the trap is that you never want to escape. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read THE SAFEKEEP now; each read offers some new sentence (look, I don’t wanna be weird, but every sentence van der Wouden writes is hot), moment, idea that I missed on the last one, in a book that is thick with fury and desire, and also every time I get to go back to the kind of queer novel that I spent literal decades of my life longing for and now it’s here and it’s so, so good.
(preorder @ bookshop)
AND!Long-time readers of this newsletter will remember how much I loved Julia Armfield’s debut novel and short stories and therefore take the superlative seriously when I say that her new novel, PRIVATE RITES, is my favourite thing she has ever written. Long-time friends of mine will perhaps be unsurprised to learn it is about sisters. Stephen Carmichael, famous architect and difficult man, is dead; his three gay daughters wrestle with this fact, each other, and the end of the world. I always love to read Armfield’s work for the details — the tiny, surprising anecdotes, the throwaway lines that reshape the whole narrative, the endless creativity in these slim, lovely moments, so that I end up with a list of notes like chicken stock in juice glasses, Satan’s face, sunken church fallacy; it’s also particularly good with PRIVATE RITES’s dystopian setting, which unfurls with brutal practicality, like a stranger giving you directions in the apocalypse. Look out for the water taxis, the reality TV shows, the abandoned buildings and a rent crisis taken to its logical conclusion. But the story that this novel had to tell about sisters, about the ways sisters raise and ruin one another, is what has made it my favourite, and something I will return to again and again, when I’m missing my family, or when they’re driving me crazy. Follow my lead and buy a copy for each of your siblings. Then underline different lines depending upon which sibling.
(preorder @ bookshop)CONSIDER ALSO: if you would like something new that is for listening rather than reading, try Daniel O’Shea Clements’s glimmering & rockin’ Every Song You’ve Heard Before, an album that I love for many many reasons and only one of those is because my dad wrote it; Jane Flett’s forthcoming, riotous Freakslaw; I cannot wait for Jennifer Neal’s upcoming memoir, My Pisces Heart; some other preorders I am eagerly anticipating include Sarah Rees Brennan’s adult fantasy debut Long Live Evil and Marissa Higgins’ A Good Happy Girl which looks like an excellent time and Naomi Novik’s first short story collection which apparently features Elizabeth Bennet with a dragon, what more do you want; and then finish up by going to your local secondhand bookshop and grabbing something from a couple of decades ago for a change of pace, like when I was back in Australia last I got intrigued by the low-key Penguin paperback vibes of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave and my GOD it is a wild ride.
BTW DO YOU WANT MY UNDYING DEVOTION? You can also preorder my forthcoming novel, just saying. It is about sex and fear and feral dogs. Kisses!