2022 Fiction and Poetry from The New School Community
Walk the Vanished Earth, by Erin Swan (MFA Fiction, 2016); Penguin/Random House.
In a family epic told over seven generations, Swan describes how dreams change with our environment, in a novel about the end of the world and the beginning of something entirely new. A reviewer in The New York Times call it a “rich, endlessly engaging novel [that] is, one hopes, the first in a long career for an author who has the talent and imagination to write whatever she wants.”
The New House, by David Leo Rice (MFA Creative Writing, 2015); Whiskey Tit Press.
The author of last year’s A Room in Dodge City,Vol. 2 is back with this tale of a family of outsider artists roaming the American interior in search of the New Jerusalem. Rice has written a book one reviewer describes as “so infused with dreams that it seems to be dreaming us into being – you and me and the families that form us, the towns that try us, the shadows that want to wake us or take us away for good.”
Jazzed, by Jill Dearman (MFA Creative Writing, 2007); Vine Leaves Press.
“The crime of the century” is how the tabloid press of the 1920s described a sensational homicide involving two prodigiously gifted, troubled University of Chicago students. Dearman reimagines and recasts the story, setting it in Jazz Age New York City in what one reviewer calls “an ingenious gender-swapping take on the Leopold & Loeb case.”
Year of the Unicorn Kidz, by jason b. crawford (MFA candidate); Sundress Publications.
Meditating on sensuality, violence, and tenderness, Crawford’s poetry is, in the words of one reviewer, “a pastiche of flesh and frailty, sex and sadness, desire and danger. A seesaw of self-awareness and self-deprecation, self-acceptance and self-doubt. Most of all, it is uninhibited, and alive, holding all of the allure of the titular unicorn, magical and rare.”
Primal Animals, by Julia Lynn Rubin (MFA Writing for Children & Young Adults, 2017); Wednesday Books/Macmillan Publishers.
Enrolled in an elite college prep summer camp deep in the North Carolina wilderness and on her own for the first time, Arlee Gold is consumed by anxiety that she’ll be found out as a “freak.” Then she’s invited to join a secret sisterhood – and confronts a new set of challenges. Young adult fiction that one reviewer describes as “a relentless thrill ride with…staggering twists and a deeply human heroine.”
And don’t forget some recent books we’ve previously highlighted:
Something New Under the Sun, by Alexandra Kleeman (assistant professor of writing); Penguin/Random House.
Kleeman, winner of a prestigious 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, creates what a New York Times reviewer described as “an unlikely amalgam of climate horror story, movie industry satire, and made-for-TV mystery…. a screwball comedy in a sci-fi hellscape.” An unlikely pair of amateur detectives investigate corporate corruption in a near-future Hollywood beset by drought and wildfires, where even the water is fake.
Greetings from Asbury Park, by Daniel H. Turtel, (MFA Creative Writing 2022); Blackstone Publishing.
“It takes some audacity to name your book after a classic album,” writes novelist Tom Perrotta, author of the justly renowned Election, “but Daniel Turtel earns the right. Greeting from Asbury Park is a remarkable debut from a talented writer – ambitious moving, full of complicated, thorny characters and enough Jersey Shore ambiance that you can almost smell the boardwalk.”
The Suffering of Lesser Mammals, by Greg Sanders (MFA Creative Writing 2003); Owl Canyon Press.
“Greg Sanders is a beguiling, far-ranging fabulist,” writes novelist David Gates, “whose wily, hyper-smart inventions take us from Big Sur to Brooklyn, from Kafka’s Prague to a remote exoplanet – and to cyberspace, whose cold zones measure human value in ‘clickthrough rates,’ and whose dark corners register a world ‘in magnificent turmoil and unrepentant decline.’”
The Work Wife, by Alison B. Hart (MFA Creative Writing, 2001); Graydon House.
Fiercely competent personal assistant Zanne Klein earns a six-figure salary making sure the lives of her movie mogul employer and his family run smoothly. But things start to unravel on the eve of the over-the-top party she is managing, and a personal conflict between ambition and integrity takes center stage.
Don’t Call Me A Hurricane, by Ellen Hagen (MFA Creative Writing 2003); Bloomsbury Children’s Books.
A YA novel written in verse. High school senior Eliza Marino embarks on a passionate effort to save irreplaceable marshland from development, five years after a hurricane ravaged her Jersey Shore hometown – and also struggles with her conflicted feelings about the “summer people” who descend on the shore each year. A love poem to the people and places we come from.
A note to our readers: Urban Matters will resume its regular weekly publication schedule on January 11th, 2023. Best of the season to you all.
Andrea Patricia Llinás-Vahos is a research assistant and Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.