Two new books I’m looking forward to reading.

Recent reviews of two different books that I am going to buy from my local independent bookstore, McNally Jackson:
Karen Russell‘s new short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. There’s one story in particular, “The New Veterans,” that sounds extraordinary – In her review, Kakutani describes a haunted Iraq war vet’s elaborate tattoo, “as detailed as a Dutch master’s painting”, of the day his comrade was killed – a tattoo that the masseuse treating him for back pain finds she can manipulate – moving the sun from one spot to another, or erasing an explosion. Kakutani says, “Karen Russell’s fiction belong to that wondrous world of fable that first captivated us as children and that still retains a magnetic hold over many of our imaginations.” I’m in.

Christa Wolf‘s posthumous novel, City of Angels, Or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud. I’m always fascinated by stories about good people who do bad things, and here Christa Wolf, one of the former East Germany’s best-known writers, attempts to come to terms with her own actions and her memory of working as a Stasi informer. As David Ulin points out in his excellent and concise review, the book is labeled a novel, but it is more “a public act of self-reflection, intensely autobiographical and vividly imagined at once.” That she sets the book during her year living in Los Angeles adds, I would guess, a fish-out-of-water, surreal tinge. Ulin says, “For Wolf, memory is like a dream half recollected, the residue not just of another time, another moment, but also of another life.” This one goes to the top of the To Be Read stack.