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2020 Visions: Great New Fiction from The New School Community

We follow up last week’s review of notable non-fiction titles with works of fiction from New School faculty and graduates that caught our attention this year.


Compiled and edited by Sierra Lewandowski and Bruce Cory


King and the Dragonflies

by Kacen Callender, MFA Creative Writing (2014). Scholastic Press.

Winner of the prestigious National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. After his 12-year-old brother Khalid suddenly passes away, Kingston is convinced Khalid has become a dragonfly. In navigating grief, belonging, and friendship, Kingston must confront who he truly is.


What Are You Going Through 

by Sigrid Nunez, Part-Time Faculty, MFA Creative Writing. Penguin Random House. 
 
Nunez, winner of a 2018 National Book Award, returns with a novel very much for our time, centered on the experiences of a woman accompanying a terminally ill friend through her last months. Describing this exploration of human connection, a reviewer in the New Yorker concluded that she was “dazed by the novel’s grace.”


True Love

Sarah Gerard; MFA Creative Writing (2012). HarperCollins. 

The protagonist – and unreliable narrator – of True Love is Nina, back home on the Florida Gulf Coast after dropping out of college in New York, and spending a stint in rehab. She thinks a lot about the nature of love and desire. In its review, the Chicago Review of Books concluded that “The last scene of the novel is simple and devastating… what we choose to imagine happens next will say a lot about what we think love is, and what it isn’t.” 


Perfect Tunes

by Emily Gould; BA Liberal Arts (2004). Simon & Schuster. 

A story with a familiar set-up – aspiring Midwestern songwriter strikes out for New York to make her career – starts taking some unexpected and often comic bounces and poses the perennial question: Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she had you?  
 


Sex and Vanity

by Kevin Kwan; BFA Photography (1998). Penguin Random House. 

The author of the insanely popular Crazy Rich Asians is back with another modern love story filled with deceit, heartache, and big-budget glitter (this time, set in Capri and the Hamptons). Get ready for over-the-top couture, world-class snark, and a heroine who asks “Can’t I please call a helicopter?” when trying to escape from a family gathering. 


Broken People

by Sam Lanksy, BA Literary Studies (2012). Hanover Square Press. 

At a Hollywood dinner party, Sam hears about a shaman able to spiritually heal anyone’s problems in three days, and signs right up. The New York Times found that in his debut novel Lansky — the West Coast editor of Time magazine — “proves himself a talented writer of fiction too: unsparingly honest, but also funny and mordant.”


Look How Happy I’m Making You

by Polly Rosenwaike, MFA Creative Writing (2009). Penguin Random House.

A debut story collection about four women in “the baby years” and their feelings about being mothers, or not being mothers. Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot Seewrites that, “Among the thousands of books for prospective and new parents, I doubt any will make you feel more understood and less alone than this one.”


K-Pop Confidential

by Stephan Lee, MFA Creative Writing (2018). Scholastic Press. 

Young adult fiction that goes inside the arduous, round-the-clock world of rehearsing and grooming K-Pop trainees with a young Korean American who travels to Seoul to chase her dreams of stardom.


The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

by Christopher Beha, MFA Creative Writing (2005). Tin House Books. 

Beha, the editor of Harper’s, catalogues New York’s ambitions, passions, and neuroses in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. From the broadcast booth at Citi Field to tense negotiations with the FBI’s financial crimes unit to the guard-changing in journalism from old-school shoe leather to spreadsheet analysis, he presents a kaleidoscopic story, long-listed for the National Book Award. 


The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe, BA Liberal Arts (2006). Penguin Random House. 

A darkly comic story of two oddly matched teen misfits desperate for connection that explores how far they will change for love – and, in the process, how much closer they can come to who they truly are. 


Now That I’ve Found You

by Kristina Forest; MFA Creative Writing (2011).  Roaring Brook Press. 

Aspiring actress Evie Jones has seemingly wrecked her own shot at stardom. To salvage her career, she needs the consent of her legendary – and now reclusive – actress grandmother Gigi to reprise a cult classic movie role that made Gigi’s reputation. Can she locate her suddenly gone-missing grandma, fulfill her dreams, and learn some life lessons in the process? There’s a Hollywood ending answering those questions.