Writing this list reminds me, at a time I so need it, that there’s much to look forward to—particularly emerging voices from small, independent presses. There are many talented writers who coming to us with urgent messages, and we are desperate to hear them.
The Education of Margot Sanchez, Lilliam Rivera (Simon & Schuster, February)
Rivera’s debut, a YA coming-of-age novel described by the publisher as “Pretty in Pink comes to the South Bronx,” reminds us of the danger against blanket boycotts of publishers—even when they’ve recently made very dubious choices. Rivera, who won a Pushcart Prize in 2016 and has published work in Tin House, The Los Angeles Times, and Bellevue Literary Review has written about the “many Latinx voices being launched” in contemporary publishing, and the influence of her own coming of age in the Bronx.
Among Other Things: Essays, Robert Long Foreman (Pleiades Press, February)
Winner of the 2015 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, Robert Long Foreman’s essays disarm us with their honesty and directness. Contest judge, John D’Agata calls the collection “a delightful reminder of how satisfying it can be to watch a single mind roll over the folds of its own thinking.” I first read Robert Long Foreman in Copper Nickel 20; in his essay, “Why I Write Nonfiction,” Long Foreman’s voice is a mixture of vulnerability and irreverence. Then, I found his Weird Pig stories, which I’ll only describe as “Bojack Horseman meets factory farming.” Long Foreman’s strange and flexible mind is not to be missed.
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf, October)
I found Carmen Maria Machado while lying on a pleather couch post dog walk, tired and sweaty, broken A/C unit heaving. My thighs fused to the pleather while Twitter buzzed about a short story in Granta called “The Husband Stitch.” I clicked the link and read that story on the couch on my cell phone in one unbroken breath. This, I thought. THIS. A Clarion alum, Machado twists horror genre conventions with literary prowess to spare. Experimental structures make for explosive originality, as in “Especially Heinous,” described by the publisher as the novella “in which Machado recaps every single episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, dropping Benson and Stabler into a phantasmagoria of doppelgängers and girls-with-bells-for-eyes.” I can’t wait for this collection. This collection. THIS.
Dead Girls, Emily Geminder (Dzanc Books, Fall)
Winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, the title of Geminder’s debut collection nods to Kim Addonizio’s poem of the same name, a reminder of the dead girl’s narrative power: “a dead girl can kick a movie into gear…just by lying there.” I first read Geminder in American Short Fiction, her darkly comic short-short runner up in the 2015 fiction contest. I then found Geminder’s marvelous essay in Prairie Schooner 89.2 Coming To: A Lexicology of Fainting.” Just weeks ago, I spotted Geminder’s prose poem in the KR Online, “Interior with Ghost,” proving she’s talented, prolific, and a triple-genre threat.
Other Notables:
Common Ancestor, Jenny Irish (Black Lawrence, January)
Swimming Lessons, Claire Fuller (Tin House, February)
South and West, Joan Didion (Knopf, March)
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky: Stories, Lesley Nneka Ariman (Riverhead, April)
The Gift: A Novel, Barbara Browning (Coffee House Press, May)
The Worlds We Think We Know, Dalia Rosenfeld (Milkweed, May)
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay (Harper, June)
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown & Co., June)
We Are All Shipwrecks: A Memoir, Kelly Grey Carlisle (Sourcebooks, Fall)
The Boat Runner: A Novel, Devin Murphy (HarperCollins, September)
The Impossible Fairytale, Han Yujoo, translated by Janet Hong, (Graywolf, October)
Looking to 2018:
Ponti: A Novel, Sharlene Teo (Picador/Simon)
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, Esme Weijun Wang (Graywolf)
Wendy Oleson’s forthcoming chapbook, Our Daughter and Other Stories, won Map Literary’s Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. In 2015, Wendy received the storySouth Million Writer’s Award and was a fiction fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry, prose, and hybrid works appear/are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Normal School, the Journal, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction online for the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.
For original poetry, fiction, art song, and more interviews, please visit our magazine at http://www.memorious.org.
MEMORIOUS: A JOURNAL OF NEW VERSE & FICTION 