Biblio File

Book Notes From The Underground: Books From The Future!

Running out of things to read? Panicking because your “to read” pile has dwindled down to 10 books or so? Not to worry! Here are some well-reviewed new titles coming out next month that you can add to your wish list.

Gutshot: Stories by Amelia Gray
Gray’s fourth book (and third story collection) is a cabinet of wonders where you will find examples of surreal imagery, black humor, and fabulistic horror. In “The Year of the Snake,” a huge serpent bisects a town and threatens its very existence. In “A Contest,” the gods decide that the mortal who grieves the most will be be reunited with his or her loved one. In the end, a lonely old woman wins, but who she grieves for is not who you would expect. Consider this to be a thinking person’s collection of fairy tales—strange, eerie, beautiful and wryly amusing.

Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s by Richard Goldstein
Goldstein was the music and culture critic for the Village Voice in the 1960s. His nonlinear memoir weaves its way through the heyday of rock in the 1960s, the counterculture movement, and his own struggle with his sexual identity. A warmly personal, incisive account of what it meant to live in those heady times and why rock ceased being a revolutionary force.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A Viet Cong agent follows a group of South Vietnamese refugees to Southern California in 1975 where he will report on their activities to his Communist minders. This is the premise of Nguyen’s darkly cynical, political thriller that sheds light on the Vietnamese conflict from an Asian perspective. Nguyen’s debut novel is an extraordinarily powerful and compelling read.

Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir by Jamie Brickhouse
Brickhouse has written an amusing but sad, over-the-top but understated, and wholly campy memoir about growing up under the domineering gaze of his larger-than-life mother. She was always “a bigger star to me than Joan Crawford or Elizabeth Taylor.” After struggling with alcoholism, drug abuse and dangerous sex, the author finally sobered up and now he looks back on his escapades with a wry, knowing sensibility.

Feral Cities: Adventures with Animals in the Urban Jungle by Tristan Donovan
Think being in a city keeps you out of nature’s reach? Yes, of course we all know about rats, pigeons, seagulls and yet even more rats; but Donovan opens our eyes to a whole world of wildlife living in concrete jungles. He travels to cities all over the world and discovers coyotes in LA, leopards in Mumbai, boars in Berlin, and wild parrots in Brooklyn (just go to Greenwood Cemetery to see them). The result is an entertaining, anecdote-rich account of the “beasts” within our midst.