The Great Night
By Chris Adrian; hardcover, 304 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $26
In Chris Adrian's reimagining of A Midsummer Night's Dream, three lovelorn people on their way to a party get lost in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park and become trapped in Titania and Oberon's secret faerie kingdom. As Titania's magical world collides with the unreality of the pediatric oncology ward where her changeling son is dying from leukemia, her mortal neighbors nurse fantasies of reclaiming irrevocably lost loves. Adrian's recurring idea that the line between reality and surreality is most blurred in either tragedy or ecstasy whisks this story out of the physically fantastic and into the emotionally real. A sweet fever dream of a book, The Great Night is playful, erotic, hilarious and, of course, heartbreaking.
The Ada Poems
By Cynthia Zarin; hardcover, 80 pages; Knopf; list price: $25
My husband and I love one of the poems from this book so much we had it blown up to poster size, framed it and hung it on our living room wall. Sexy and sonorous, they dazzle on the first reading but demand many more. Cynthia Zarin's collection is inspired by the title character of Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a novel that tells the story of lifelong lovers who discover they are actually brother and sister. Zarin's poems intertwine that complex love story with a simpler kind of heartbreak. Nabokov's obscure symbols and motifs blossom in a recognizable landscape of pop culture, backyard gardens and quotidian concerns. Don't worry about reading the famously difficult Nabokov first; you'll have the guts to do it after you've fallen in love with Zarin's poems.
The Family Fang
By Kevin Wilson; hardcover, 320 pages; Ecco; list price: $23.99
Annie and Buster are walking works of art — or, rather, part of their parents' ongoing performance art, enlisted to create uncomfortable public spectacles. ("Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief.") Flashing back and forth between Annie and Buster's extremely odd childhood and tentative adulthood, the novel's madcap premise quickly deepens. When art is everything and all art is extreme, what does real life look like? How much of our life is our own creation, and how much are we only playing parts? As he did in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson asks big questions with subtle humor and deep tenderness.
The Sisters Brothers
By Patrick DeWitt; hardcover, 336 pages; Ecco; list price: $23.99
Think Deadwood, but directed by the Coen brothers — a classic western with deadpan comic narration. Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired henchmen tracking a thief through the 1850s West. As the thief eludes them and their quest drags on, Eli realizes he's had enough of this rootless and violent life. As he grows weary and suspicious of his blood-thirsty, hard-drinking brother, Eli is an utterly endearing narrator, longing for quietude and love, even as he displays his fair share of gun-slinging. By turns hilarious, graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the way to 300 — and I could have stayed on for many more.
A Moment in the Sun
By John Sayles; hardcover, 968 pages; McSweeney's; list price: $29
Independent filmmaker John Sayles has managed to create a work that is both cinematic and literary in its scope and style — a blend so entrancing that you could polish off its 955 pages in one long weekend. It begins in 1897 during the Yukon gold rush and takes us into the Spanish-American war, the Filipino fight for independence, racial injustice and the plight of working people throughout the United States. Short, powerful chapters follow four unconnected characters to create a mosaic of America as a nascent superpower, underscoring the personal and cultural consequences of its ambitions. If you only read one book this summer, make it A Moment in the Sun. It's not available in e-book format, but once you start, three pounds of paper will seem awfully light for the heft of the story they contain.
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