Resources By Department: New Books: Fiction

Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler
Banal Nightmare follows Moddie, a young woman recently returned to her hometown, as she throws herself at the mercy of her old friends who never left. Friends who all seemingly work at the local liberal arts college, who are all suddenly tipping toward middle age, going to parties, sizing each other up, obsessing over past slights, and dreaming of wild triumphs couched in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious New York artist to take up a winter residency in town, Moddie has no choice but to confront a trauma from her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become.
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of "learning all ways to survive." When her village is raided, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world. When Lewis and Clark's expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.
My Struggle: Book Five by Karl Ove Knausgaard
As a nineteen-year-old, Karl Ove moves to Bergen and invests all of himself in his writing. But his efforts get the opposite effect - he wants it so much that he gets writer's block. At the same time, he sees his friends publish their debuts. He suspects that he will never get anything published. Book Five is also a book about strong new friendships and a shattering love affair. Then one day Karl Ove reaches two crucial points in his life: his father dies, and shortly thereafter, he completes his first novel.
Three Novels of The 1980s by Don DeLillo
The Names is the story of an American risk analyst living in Greece whose investigation into a bizarre string of ritual murders provokes a reckoning with the terrifying power of language. In the National Book Award-winning White Noise, DeLillo creates a frightening yet wickedly funny portrait of a postmodern America where 'you are the sum of your data'--a world recognizably ours. A revelatory depiction of a defining event in twentieth-century history, Libra offers a feverish counter-history of the JFK assassination and a nuanced portrait of the president's murderer. This edition also includes the essays "American Blood" and "Silhouette City."
The Antidote by Karen Russell
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing--not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a 'Prairie Witch,' whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples' memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch's apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer with a time-traveling camera.

The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves confused and disembodied, blinking under the fluorescent lights of their high school music room. They are greeted by the man they know as their music teacher, who restores the ghostly teens to their corporeal forms with a flick of his fingers and explains: nearly a year ago they went missing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, and have long been presumed dead. Which they are. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the teenagers agree to the terms of a deal that their teacher proposes: they must compete to remain in the mortal realm.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past--toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard
February 20, 1933: on an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter, a meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi dignitaries is being held in secret in the plush lounges of the Reichstag. They are there to "stump up" funding for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its fearsome Chancellor. March 12, 1938: the annexation of Austria is on the agenda and a grotesque day ensues that is intended to make history: the newsreels capture for eternity a motorized army, a terrible, inexorable power. With this vivid, compelling speculative history, Éric Vuillard warns against the perils of willfully blind acquiescence.
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue
One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan--today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma--who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day--the Spanish are ensconced in the palace. Soon, one of Cortés's captains begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.
Big Jim and the White Boy by David F. Walker; Marcus Kwame Anderson
Big Jim and the White Boy is a radical retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, centering the experiences of Jim, an enslaved Black man in search of his kidnapped wife and children, along with his cheeky sidekick, Huckleberry Finn. Jim and Huck's high-stakes adventures take them on an epic voyage across the antebellum South and Midwest, through Confederate war camps and runaway safe houses, into Old West standoffs, and on the road as covert Underground Railroad agents.

New Books: Fiction

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