Jay
If you’ve been in the bookstore recently or at the library, you may already have met our newest bookseller, Jay. In addition to his role as a part-time bookseller for us, he’s a library assistant at the Key West Public Library.
He enjoys reading and recommending social satire such as the works of Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, Dawn Powell, Rachel Cusk, and Joy Williams
He has lived in Key West on and off for 35 years, drawn by the bohemian lifestyle and the weather. Ask him about the time he hitchhiked across the country to Key West.
He recommends No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.
George
I’ve just read two new books that share a subject, American Jews in the 1950’s, and a comedic style.
The protagonist in The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen is Ruben Blum, a young professor at Corbin College, a second rate upstate New York college, the only Jew on the faculty. When a new faculty candidate, the Jewish scholar Ben-Zion Netanyahu needs a guide, the job of course falls to Ruben, “poor Ruben” I should say. From the moment Ben-Zion appears on the scene, driving a beater car with, unexpectedly, his outspokenly critical wife (this isn’t New England, you told me New England) and two wild teen boys, the rollicking antics are the stuff of comic gold. Such demands, you wouldn’t believe.
By the time the boys finish trashing the professor’s house, and lead everyone on a wild chase through a snowy night, while their father is delivering a pompous and insulting lecture, and their mother is complaining about everything, you’ll be feeling Ruben’s pain.
And yet, there’s sly underlying truth. Benzion (alternate spelling) was an actual person. His trip to Corbin may be fiction, but his basic description and the fact that one of his sons was named Benjamin are right there in Wikipedia. And the underpinnings of Bibi’s personality and politics are crudely revealed.
The hero of The Vixen by Francine Prose is Simon, an unemployed underachiever living in Brooklyn with his parents (but he went to Harvard), when he lands a job at a prestigious New York publishing house. It’s just after Ethel Rosenberg’s execution, and his first assignment is to edit a trashy novel designed to counter growing sympathy for the executed woman by painting her as a voluptuous Mata Hari.
But Jewish Simon and his parents worship Ethel. What’s a young editor to do, especially when the author, his editing client, is a seductress herself, living in a mental hospital, but free to come out on day trips?
Here again, there’s an underlying historical truth, about the two sides of the Rosenberg story, and the efforts employed to demean her.
Learn a bit of history, and laugh all the way.
Judy
I’ve read so many good books recently. But the one that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go is The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller. I read it over a weekend and on the last day I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, until I’d finished. No, it’s not a mystery. It’s a family story with a love triangle at the center, told in real time with the characters’ back stories woven in seamlessly. Set in the backwoods of Cape Cod where the family has summered for generations, in a series of now rundown cabins – the descriptive writing is gorgeous – but it’s the characters and their lives that matter to me – sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always compelling. The perfect book to read this summer. Sexy and romantic, it left me breathless. I had to go back and read the ending again.
Coming out later this month is Hilma Wolitzer’s, Today a Woman Went Mad at the Supermarket, a book of short stories published over many years, with a chilling new story at the end. If you don’t know Hilma Wolitzer’s work, you are in for a treat. There is no one who writes as generously about men and women, often married, with as much heart and humor as Hilma. If you do know her work you’re probably panting at the thought of this new book, with a foreword by Elizabeth Strout. I’m grateful to call Hilma a friend, an inspiration. I hope to be chatting with her virtually when the book comes out.
Emily
Store manager Emily recently enjoyed another short story collection, Give My Love to the Savages by Chris Stuck.
The nine tales in Give My Love to the Savages illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of the American racial experience. Chris Stuck traverses the dividing lines, and attempts to create meaning from them in unique and unusual ways. Each story considers a marker of our current culture, from uprisings and sly and not-so-sly racism, to Black fetishization and conservatism, to the obstacles placed in front of Black masculinity and Black and interracial relationships by society and circumstance.
She’s excited about new releases All’s Well by Mona Awad and When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen.
When the Reckoning Comes is a new horror novel that is also on Lori’s list to check out. A haunting novel about a black woman who returns to her hometown for a plantation wedding and the horror that ensues as she reconnects with the blood-soaked history of the land and the best friends she left behind.
Lori
Lori enjoyed Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby, who also wrote staff favorite Blacktop Wasteland. Razorblade Tears “is about revenge and redemption, and I’m enjoying it a lot,” Lori writes.
Rio
Rio’s picks are two on a theme: The Wolf & the Woodsman by Ava Reid and the second is For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten. And she’s looking forward to
The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (Sept. 28).
Camila
Camila found a lovely spot to read Animal by Lisa Taddeo. She’s also trying to finish Written in My Own Heart’s Blood by Diana Gabaldon, in time for the release of the next Outlander series book, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (Nov. 23).
Over the summer, she also read The One and Only Bob by Katherine Applegate, with her son, Cannon, and is looking forward to Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where are You? (Sept. 7).
Robin
Robin loved A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, space opera with fantastic worldbuilding, great characters, a cool mystery and a side of epic poetry. Don’t miss the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace.
She’s looking forward to Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders (Aug 17) and Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Sept. 14).
