Дейзи Эрнандес0.0 Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. Today, more than three hundred thousand Americans have Chagas.
Why do some infectious diseases make headlines and others fall by the wayside? After her aunt’s death, Hernández begins searching for answers about who our nation chooses to take care of and who we ignore. Crisscrossing the country, she interviews patients, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learns that outside of Latin America, the United States is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite. She spends a night in southwest Texas hunting the dreaded bug with university researchers. She also gets to know patients, like a mother whose premature baby was born infected with the parasite, his heart already damaged. And she meets one cardiologist battling the disease in Los Angeles County with local volunteers.
The Kissing Bug tells the story of how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden—and how the disease intersects with Hernández’s own identity as a niece, sister, and daughter; a queer woman; a writer and researcher; and a citizen of a country that is only beginning to address the harms caused by Chagas, and the dangers it poses. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.
Джой Уильямс0.0 In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.
Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a resort on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call Big Girl. In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this baggy seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons--against all reasonableness--to try and recover something of it.
Percival Everett4.5 Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
Каролина де Робертис0.0 From the acclaimed author of Cantoras comes an incandescent novel--political, mystical, timely, and heartening--about the power of memory, and the pursuit of justice.
At his modest home on the edge of town, the former president of an unnamed Latin American country receives a journalist in his famed gardens to discuss his legacy and the dire circumstances that threaten democracy around the globe. Once known as the Poorest President in the World, his reputation is the stuff of myth: a former guerilla who was jailed for inciting revolution before becoming the face of justice, human rights, and selflessness for his nation. Now, as he talks to the journalist, he wonders if he should reveal the strange secret of his imprisonment: while held in brutal solitary confinement, he survived, in part, by discussing revolution, the quest for dignity, and what it means to love a country, with the only creature who ever spoke back--a loud-mouth frog.
As engrossing as it is innovative, vivid, moving, and full of wit and humor, The President and the Frog explores the resilience of the human spirit and what is possible when danger looms. Ferrying us between a grim jail cell and the president's lush gardens, the tale reaches beyond all borders and invites us to reimagine what it means to lead, to dare, and to dream.
Дантиэль В. Мониз3.0 This is an electrifying debut that announces a major talent. Set in the author's home state (she is from Jacksonville, FL), each plot-driven and novelistic story follows characters who are grappling with a key moment in their lives— traumas past or present, losses of faith, love, or loved ones— and are searching for meaning in the self. Moniz is astonishing at depicting with nuance class, race, friendship, and familial inheritances and gifted in delivering sharp shocks within each story's plot. She is beloved and well-connected in the literary world and there has already been an outpouring of early praise for her and the book from Lauren Groff, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jamel Brinkley, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Danielle Evans, and T Kira Madden. We expect even more in the coming months, as we continue to get galleys to her friends and supporters including Joy Williams, Kristen Arnett, Teju Cole, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, to name just a few. Moniz has already won prizes for her stories. The titular Milk Blood Heat was awarded the 2018 Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction ( Ploughshares ), and «Outside the Raft» won the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award at the Key West Literary Seminar. She was the recipient of a Tin House Scholarship, and this year was selected as the writer in residence at Lighthouse Works (whose past alum include Anna Noyes). She was also one of ten finalists for the highly coveted Princeton Arts Fellowship. Milk Blood Heat will appeal to fans of A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, Florida by Lauren Groff, We the Animals by Justin Torres, Goodnight Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes, Antonya Nelson’s short story collections, especially Female Trouble ; as well as readers of fiction about sex, desire, and morality. Moniz’s work has been published in Apogee Journal , Ploughshares , Pleiades , Joyland , Tin House , McSweeney's Quarterly Concern , and most recently, The Yale Review , in April 2020.
