Who are you anyway? This is a simple question. Just finish a name label at the welcome table and everything will be fine, right? But behind this fig leaf, there is a new group of complications, contradictions and other identity issues, especially what is: who can decide?
A handful of notable books that come out this week, each in their own way, offer stabs to an explanation – or, at least a deeper understanding of the questions involved. As different as their approaches may be – ranging from tribal policy to the mystery of acting, from criticism measured to one, uh, respondent Relationship with planes – These books all end up tangling in the (sometimes naughty) neck of the way we define ourselves.
Hearing, by Katie Kitamura
Of all the books on this list, Kitamura’s novel is likely to approach a literal interpretation of this question. Who exactly are the two tracks of this story exactly? It is not so easy to understand, because what starts like a man’s lunch between a veteran actress and an attractive young man soon brings together a layer and a layer of intrigue. It is fair to say that the lightly coiled glow of a story has surprises in store, for characters and readers, because it takes place.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Authority: tests, by Andrea Long Chu
This collection brings together many of the strengths published by the new York Essayist magazine and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Books, television, video games – subjects under his microscope here can vary widely, but the clear, cut and provocative voice behind it is undoubtedly hoked. This is the first book of the Critique since FemalesA meditation on gender identity published in 2019.
Tall chiefBy Jon Hickey
The narrator of the first novel of Hickey is a fixer for an Aboriginal tribe based in Wisconsin, responsible, in his words, for the realization of “the decisions of a several million dollars company which also happens to be a sovereign nation”. In other words, Mitch Caddo knows how to get things done. At least, he thought he had done so, before a few hectic days which preceded the tribal presidential election putting his life in a mixer, in this stretched story of ethical corruption and question points.
To save and destroy: write as another, By the Viet Thanh Nguyen
This collection of tests began as a series of conferences that the Pulitzer Prize winner delivered to Harvard University in 2023-24, which are always available to look online. Born in Vietnam, raised a refugee in the United States, Nguyen has always been taken in a contradiction: the divided identity of a privileged American with the protagonism on the screen and on the page and a Vietnamese person generally relegated to the B intrigue, if mentioned. These six trials are sounding the idea that there are possibilities, as well as pain, for artists to occupy the position of “the other”.
Sky Dad, by Kate Folk
We have an early pretender for Book Jacket Blurb of the Year: Linda, the star of sweet manners of the first folk novel, is constantly at the airport because she wants to know the planes – in the biblical sense. Linda is sexually attracted to planes, you see. SO. There is much more to say about this bizarre novel, surprisingly serious, but, frankly, if this synopsis alone is not enough to print your interest or scare you, I do not think there is something else I can say.
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