Debut Fiction: Different Worlds

How many novels by first-time authors are published each year? Do not seek to know the answers, Grasshopper, but to understand the questions. What does "published" mean these days, or even author? Is James Patterson an author? Is Ron Blagojevich? Ah, lets not dwell. Here, weve collected a bookshelf of literary fiction by writers who can now, in all seriousness, call themselves authors.

Museum of Human Beings

Colin Sargent

McBooks Press

978-1-59013-167-1

History buffs and elementary-aged children alike are enthralled with the Corps of Discoverys 1803 transcontinental crossing undertaken by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and crew. Scholars have increasingly recognized the young Shoshone woman Sacajawea as a pivotal leader in this expedition. Here, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the infant on Sacajaweas back, takes his own personal voyage of self-discovery as he is fostered by Clark in St. Louis, supported by Duke Paul of Wrttemberg in Europe, and haunted by his mothers spirit in the American wilderness.

Playwright and poet Colin Sargent resides in Portland, Maine, where he founded Portland magazine. His sophisticated use of language permeates this tale. For example, the color blue is used to create a path and stimulate memory: from the descriptions of the first sighting of the Pacific Ocean to the final viewing of an arrowhead around a babys neck, the color travels alongside Baptiste. [Sacajaweas] rib cage, so like a birds, bore the blue stigmata of your fathers most recent attentions, Clark tells Baptiste. Sacajaweas blue Lemhi beaded belt indicates her descent from a royal family, and Baptistes baby sister Lizette is wrapped in the same blue cloth that had originally warmed him.

Sargent explores language in another way at the opening of each chapter by displaying a Plains Indian sign language word along with its description. For example, to indicate alone, a person should hold right hand palm up in front of neck. Move outward in sinuous motion.

As Baptiste roams figuratively and literally, his two father-figures torment him: the distant William Clark, whom he initially strives to emulate, and the alcoholic Toussaint Charbonneau, whom he cannot escape. The age-old struggle to find true identity by testing different worlds becomes unique in this debut novel that belongs with the best of historical fiction. Beth Hemke Shapiro

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Daniyal Mueenuddin

W.W. Norton

978-0-393-06800-9

Work, children, gardens, homes, sins, moments of love and compassion-what do we leave behind when we die? No matter our social status or the lands we own or the money we have in the bank or the money we beg on the streets, we all return to the earth, equal in our final moments. Pakistani author Daniyal Mueenuddin knows this and his characters are sharper for it.

In this book of linked short stories, Mueenuddin explores the members of an extended network of friends, family, and servants centered around a man named K.K. Harouni. From the poorest servant who trades sex for tiny favors to the men whose money weighs them down and tips every hand around them, none are immune to the tides of both personal fortune and political effect.

The subject of class seeps onto nearly every page but somehow the book is not about class; its about people. With superb tenderness Mueenuddin writes about Husna, a young woman who seeks to escape her familys poverty by securing a connection to her distant relative, K.K. Harouni. Their relationship begins as a simple, kind gesture and ends as a specific kind of love, perhaps the only kind of love Husna is capable of. With adroit precision Mueenuddin examines Lily, a rich young woman who yearns to shed her life of superficial, drug-induced happiness but discovers her habits have followed into her clean, calmly ordered marriage. And with exacting distance he delivers Rezak, the poorest of the poor servants, who leaves the world no children, no wives, no greater wealth beyond a decadent gravestone and the rickety, portable shack he lived in. The door of the little cabin hung open, the wind and blown rain scoured it clean.

Mueenuddins web of connections is vast and complicated, but he teases out a myriad of tiny details to provide cohesion and honesty. A country so often portrayed in America as a threat becomes populated with lives we find familiar. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders offers a sly sense of hope hidden in the dark shadows of futility and despair. Andi Diehn

The Annunciations of Hank Meyerson

Scott Muskin

Hooded Friar Press

978-0-9817609-2-6

Hank Meyerson is not a charming character. Hes too clever, he cries and vomits fairly often, and he has sex with his brothers wife. By the end of the novel, though, author Scott Muskin puts us thoroughly on Hanks side, and not just because of the drastic changes that render him pitiful. Hank earns compassion by being utterly, recognizably human.

Hank grew up in the shadow of his more capable brother, Carlton. Carlton played stellar baseball, was successful in the toy business, and married the right woman. Hank was always on the chubby side, came out of graduate school as a freelance proofreader, and married Carol Ann because she wanted the security. Eventually Carol Ann has an affair and Hank gets permission to sleep with his brothers wife June. Afterward, he flees to Montana to live among people who simply shoot the thing that stands in their way, whether it be a threatening dog or a cheating husband.

When Carlton has an accident, Hank returns to Minneapolis both to help his brother recover and convince June to leave her husband. But darker gravity is at work; Carlton is slipping further from the man he tried to be and Hank has to balance his guilt against the tug of responsibility and old habits.

Scott Muskin is a very smart writer; each page is packed with literary, cultural, and historical references. Clichs are stood on their heads, metaphors barely kept from bleeding into each other. While his approach isnt inviting, it is truly compelling; Muskins skillful narrative gradually unfolds into touching, surprising observations on how we relate to each other and to the cruelty and beauty of our world. Andi Diehn

Tinkers

Paul Harding

Bellevue Literary Press

978-1-934137-12-3

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died, begins this lyrical meditation on life, death, and time. Immobile in his New England bed, surrounded by family and friends and sometimes imagining the ceiling collapsing around him, the grandfather and clock repairman remembers his father, Howard, who abandoned him when he was twelve. In a parallel narrative, Howard, a metaphysical poet, epileptic, and traveling salesman who makes his rounds in rural Maine by wagon and mule, recalls his own minister father and a wife ready to place him in a state-run mental hospital.

Paul Harding has a masters in fine arts from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and has taught creative writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa. This former drummer turned first-time author demonstrates a superb craftsmanship with language and form. Stunning, tender descriptions with sensory details reveal the hidden nuances of these tinkering men who constantly wonder about the one thing they cant fix-life-and their place in it. Focusing on introspection rather than dialogue, Harding also plays with time, interrupting the narrative with stream-of-consciousness musings, present-tense passages, and entries from The Reasonable Horologist, a fictional clock-repair manual from 1783. Slim but powerful, Tinkers puts a new spin on the father-son relationship and makes Harding an author to watch. Angela Leeper

In the United States of Africa

Abdourahman A. Waberi

David and Nicole Ball, translators

University of Nebraska

978-0-8032-1391-3

In his foreword to this first English translation, Percival Everett writes that Abdourahman Waberi, who was born in Djibouti, a tiny country on the east coast of Africa, has turned the globe upside down.

Yes, this slim novel, written in second person, presents a world where Africa is the worlds first power. With its ancient geography founded upon primeval continents called Pangaea and Gondwana, Africa is the true axis of the planet. African manÉsaw himself as a superior being on this earth, Waberi writes, without equal, since he was separated from other peoples and races by an infinitely vast space.É[His] throne is at the top. The others-natives, barbarians, primitives, pagans (almost always white)-are reduced to the rank of pariahs. In this world, it is the Euro Americans who are the illegal aliens, who wear cast-off clothing and accept other used handouts donated to charities by Africans. It is the Euro Americans who are filthy, poverty-stricken, and illiterate, who are AIDS-infected trash. Beauty is black, and disease is spread by stems of alabaster with lingerie-pink cheekbones and flat butts.

In the United States of Africa

, winner of the French Voices Award, is a splendid learning opportunity for readers in the US and Europe, many of whom may know little of the true history of the so-called dark continent that was colonized and raped by white men. Its a good vehicle for teachers, too, who will probably have to explain to their students the allusions and names on nearly every page. Alternatively, readers can consult Wikipedia to learn, say, where Asmara is (its the capital city of Eritrea) or who Ousmane dan Fodio was (founder of the Sokoto Caliphate). Western readers can be ignorant of vast areas of the world, and unfamiliar with a long, honorable history of literature, art, agriculture, and civilization. This winning, witty novel will help turn a flat globe, on which some people believe only the northern hemisphere is of any importance, into a round world where north and south are equally beautiful, heroic, and historic. Barbara Ardinger

The Rose Variations

Marisha Chamberlain

Soho Press

978-1-56947-538-6

In 1975, when Time magazines Man of the Year was the American Woman, twenty-five-year-old Rose MacGregor leaves the East Coast for a short-term professorship in music at a Minnesota college. What is supposed to be temporary becomes a years-long quest for tenure. After a relationship with a pensive stonemason, leaves her emotionally shattered, Rose seeks respite on an all-female farm run by an eccentric, hirsute lesbian cellist. Returning to teach, Rose strives to avoid the perils of romance by immersing herself in her friends lives, worrying about her reckless sisters young daughter, and beginning a symphony.

Although new to fiction, Marisha Chamberlain is an accomplished playwright of original productions and adaptations, which have been staged in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Turkey, and South Africa. She has also written numerous short stories and essays for literary magazines. She is the author of Powers, a collection of poetry and winner of a Minnesota Voices Award, and she collaborated as a librettist, supplying the words to A World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass, a unique transformation of the Catholic Mass.

As Rose clings to other families, never establishing one of her own, Chamberlain weaves the social and sexual mores at the cusp of feminism into this absorbing story. Always turning down love for luck, the lonely thirty-something professor discovers that love may be all thats left when luck runs out. Revealing her dramatist and poetic backgrounds through multi-faceted characters and insightful prose, Chamberlain delivers a resilient heroine who not only masters love but independence. Angela Leeper

Last Night in Montreal

Emily St. John Mandel

Unbridled Books

978-1-932961-68-3

How deep in our genes is the longing for flight embedded? Emily St. John Mandel asks in her debut novel, Last Night in Montreal. At seven, Lilia is abducted from her mothers house by her father and spends the next nine years sleeping in a different hotel room almost every night, hiding in the backseat of the car, and continually dying her hair in an effort to evade those who believe she should be returned to her mother. This is Lilias worst fear. When her father finally tires of the road and settles in New Mexico with a newfound love, Lilia finds she cant stop moving from city to city and reverts back to a nomadic lifestyle with only herself for company.

But she leaves people behind who cant remove her from their lives even though she has removed herself: Eli, the student of dying languages; Christopher, the private detective who continues the search for Lilia long after the contract has run out; Michaela, Christophers daughter who blames Lilia for her own abandonment. In their own unique searches, Lilias followers find depths to their own selves they never knew existed; some can handle these depths with grace, some cannot.

Mandel chooses her words with careful love and arranges them to exquisite effect. At its heart this book is a mystery, a few mysteries; we wait and we wonder while being charmed by Mandels intricate narrative dance which threads three different moving plot lines together into a perfectly tangled tapestry. Like a tightrope walkers steps above a cobblestoned alley, her lines follow each other with near breathless precision and echo delicately long after the final page has been turned. Andi Diehn

The Sound of Building Coffins

Louis Maistros

Toby Press

978-1-59264-255-7

Father Noonday Morningstars call to comfort the sick infant son of a recently lynched Sicilian immigrant turns into an exorcism. The voodoo demon was released out of revenge by a mambo back in 1853. Doctor Jack, abortionist and local witch doctor, is enticed out of a Big Easy gin joint to participate, along with Beauregard Church, a prison guard holding the Sicilians right hand in a tin box; Buddy Bolden, a rising coronet player at the dawn of the Jazz Age; and Morningstars nine-year-old son, Typhus, who rebirths aborted fetuses into catfish. In 1906, fifteen years after the botched exorcism, which left Morningstar dead, this cinematic story follows the interconnected lives of the remaining participants, as well as Morningstars grown children, each named for a disease.

Only a longtime resident of New Orleans, such as author Louis Maistros, can depict this complex city where life and death mingle. A jazz record shop owner and contributor to the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Baltimore City Paper, Maistros has created a page-turner of gritty magic realism, voodoo lore, effective dialect, and swift pacing. Ever-present is the river, with a life force of its own, ready to take out the city. It does take a hurricane and its ensuing flood to cleanse New Orleans of the lingering demon, with Morningstars remaining daughter, Malaria, offering hope amongst ruin. The Sound of Building Coffins is for any reader fascinated with New Orleans and its history-and who isnt? Angela Leeper.

Andi Diehn

holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and an M.F.A. from Vermont College. She writes book reviews, parenting articles, local interest stories and fiction from her home in rural New Hampshire.

Angela Leeper

is an educational consultant, freelance writer and author of Poetry in Literature for Youth.

Beth Hemke Shapiro

holds B.A. and J.D. degrees from Northwestern University. She enjoyed working at the Art Institute of Chicago for a decade and is now involved in the arts in Columbia, Missouri. In addition to reviewing for ForeWord, Beth writes for BookBrowse.com and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D.

(www.barbaraardinger.com), is the author of Pagan Every Day: Finding the Extraordinary in Our Ordinary Lives (RedWheel/Weiser). To date, she has edited close to 200 books, both fiction and nonfiction, on a wide range of topics. Barbara lives in southern California. Andi Diehn