<\/p>\n
Rejoice, dear readers, and prepare to welcome a publishing event that’s almost as rare \u2014 and potentially as disorienting \u2014 as the emergence of a brood of cicadas<\/a>. Thomas Pynchon, our literary recluse par excellence, has peeked out from wherever he’s been hiding and shared with the world some much-appreciated proof of life: his first new novel since 2013<\/a>.<\/p>\n Shadow Ticket promises vintage Pynchon: a madcap mystery set in a discrete historical moment \u2014 in this case, the depths of the Great Depression \u2014 and beset by virtually every bonkers conspiracy you can conceive of, and many you can’t yet. Hicks McTaggart, the private eye unlucky enough to ply this trademark Pynch-topia, can expect his hands full and dance card filling fast, if only he could make out its inscrutable jottings.<\/p>\n Now, some will protest that front-page news each day provides more than enough paranoia fodder already, to which I’d say \u2026 well, fair enough. For those folks, this week’s book releases also offer another celebrated novelist, a journalist mapping her hometown’s decline, and a variety of angles on embodied political resistance.<\/p>\n Shadow Ticket, by Thomas Pynchon Purchase BookShadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon <\/p>\n Venetian Vespers, by John Banville<\/p>\n Among writers currently at work, few can match Banville’s combination of fecundity and critical acclaim. Simply put, the Irish high stylist<\/a>, genre technician<\/a> and Booker Prize winner<\/a> can really churn ’em out. His latest one-off novel is a moody period piece that finds an unhappy British couple stalked by an uncanny menace, as sinister-seeming as it is difficult to define, among the socked-in canals of fin de si\u00e8cle Venice.<\/p>\n Purchase BookVenetian Vespers by John Banville <\/p>\n Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by Beth Macy Purchase BookPaper Girl by Beth Macy <\/p>\n Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age, by Joy Harjo Purchase BookGirl Warrior by Joy Harjo <\/p>\n Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance, by Ben Passmore Purchase BookBlack Arms to Hold You Up by Ben Passmore <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rejoice, dear readers, and prepare to welcome a publishing event that’s almost as rare \u2014 and potentially as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-72310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
But first, back to our man Hicks. Just a week or two after another Pynchonian picaresque, 1990’s Vineland, received a loose and lauded screen adaptation \u2014 Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another \u2014 it’s clear the printed page isn’t exactly safe either. Even at 88 years old, America’s most venerable paranoiac continues to display a preternatural feel for the Venn diagram of silly, surreal and genuinely frightening. This time it’s the disappearance of a cheese heiress that gets the action moving, and draws our hapless protagonist into a rabbit hole whose depths he \u2014 and by extension, we \u2014 can only hope to guess at.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Dopesick, and in its TV adaptation, Macy applied a lens wide enough to contain the victims, villains and complicated context of the opioid crisis in Central Appalachia. This time, it’s personal, as the journalist heads for home. Paper Girl layers memoir with reporting to produce an unsettling portrait of her native Urbana, Ohio, battered all but unrecognizable by opioids and other malignant social currents.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Earlier this year on NPR’s Wild Card<\/a>, Harjo acknowledged that her writing has a habit of leading her back to adolescence \u2014 both the memory of her own and the dramatic, occasionally traumatic transformation itself. “I went through so much during that coming-of-age period,” said the former U.S. poet laureate, author of Poet Warrior<\/a>, who has woven this hybrid of memoir and advice to girls who stand on the precarious cusp of growing up. “Maybe I’m just working out trauma, but I want to be helpful. I think even in trauma, that’s where you learn about yourself \u2014 who you are and what you’re made of.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Passmore won an Eisner Award<\/a> for Sports Is Hell, a trenchant invention brewed from violence, riots and that NPR’s reviewer described<\/a> as “a myth without a moral.” In Your Black Friend, the shortest of NPR’s 100 favorite comics<\/a>, the moral \u2014 or thesis, at least \u2014 seems a bit clearer<\/a>: a quick, cutting comment on the little indignities inflicted on Black people even by their well-meaning white friends. In this new work of comics nonfiction, Passmore raises the scale from the personal to the historical, tracing a lineage of racial injustice and radical resistance with his characteristic acerbic wit and impetuous visual style.<\/p>\n