Barrett Bowlin’s Anticipated Books of 2017

Patty Yumi Cottrell, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney’s)
When you see Cottrell’s work in so many literary mags and online ’zines, and when every sentence of hers stands out to you like a sutured line of poetry, you’re waiting for her work to get its proper introduction. And that’s hopefully what will happen when her debut novel (which focuses on the return of a woman to Milwaukee after her adoptive brother’s suicide) comes out in March.

Keith Lesmeister, We Could’ve Been Happy Here (Midwestern Gothic)
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of reading a brilliant short story by Lesmeister called “Blood Trail,” and then, last year, the same story that would serve as the title of his debut collection of short fiction. Both works were incredibly, sharply good, as have each of the other stories I’ve read of his, and I’m looking forward this spring to seeing how his Midwest collection connects and builds a narrative of place.

Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments (Graywolf)
The poet and diarist extraordinaire returns this February with a collection of threaded and interwoven aphorisms. Hearkening back to some of her early, standalone pieces with McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the collection looks like it will function as a philosophical tapestry in miniature, with every sentence of hers serving as a thought worth repeating aloud.

Joe Oestreich, Partisans: Essays (Black Lawrence)
This is a collection that’s been on my wish list for a long time now, and I’m glad to see it’s finally coming to print in May. One of the genre’s most rocking-est authors, Oestreich is not only a frequent contributor to places like Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, and The Best American Essays “Notables” list, he’s also one of the founding members of the band Watershed, which is quite possibly the best thing to come out of Columbus, Ohio. Ever.

Ian Stansel, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Stansel’s debut story collection, Everybody’s Irish, was so deservedly excellent that I promised myself I would pick up whatever would come next from him. As it turns out, Stansel’s next book was to be a western, a novel that looks to put him up into the ranks of Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx, and John Vernon. (Plus, as he’s Memorious’s former fiction editor, he can do no literary wrong in our proud, beaming eyes.)

Other Amazing Authors to Look out for in 2017
This January sees the publication of the unimaginably busy Roxane Gay’s second(-ish) collection of short stories, Difficult Women (Grove), along with her memoir, Hunger (Harper), which is slated for June. For the stacked month of February, I’m looking feverishly forward to John Darnielle’s second novel, Universal Harvester (FSG), along with Pulitzer-winning badass Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first collection of short stories, The Refugees (Grove), and then George Saunders’s (!) debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House). Later in the year comes Eleanor Henderson’s second novel, The Twelve-Mile Straight (Ecco), which is as hopefully punk as her first, and then Memorious contributor Benjamin Percy’s new novel, The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Barrett Bowlin is a contributing editor for Memorious. Recent stories and essays of his can be found in places like Ninth Letter, Hobart, The Rumpus, Mid-American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Bayou, which awarded him last year’s James Knudsen Prize in Fiction. He teaches film and literature classes at Binghamton University, and he writes inappropriate things on Twitter (@barrettbowlin).

For original poetry, fiction, art song, and more interviews, please visit our magazine at http://www.memorious.org.

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