Brainiac Summer Reading -- Part 1 of 5

OK, let's start with Fiction.

Here are a few new, recent, and forthcoming novels that I've put aside, over the past few months, in order to read while on vacation -- in the wilds of northern Minnesota, the woods of central New Hampshire, and of course the beaches of South Boston and Hull.

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION.

Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Slumberland" (Bloomsbury), by Paul Beatty. Beatty, whose first novel, "The White Boy Shuffle," was an intellectual-absurdist tour de force set in early-'80s gang-banging LA, is one of the very few contemporary writers (he's also a poet) for whose latest work I'm always on the lookout. (I interviewed Beatty for Ideas about "Hokum," a 2005 anthology of African-American humor that he edited.) "Slumberland" is a picaresque starring DJ Darky, a brilliant and obsessive turntablist who goes in search of the Schwa, a jazz musician who apparently disappeared into East Germany in the '60s. DJ Darky's quest for the Schwa, whose music he decides is the one missing ingredient from his own otherwise perfectly cobbled-together sound, takes a political turn when the Berlin Wall comes down.

"Matter" (Little, Brown) by Iain M. Banks. Along with fellow Scottish SF novelist Ken MacLeod, Banks has revitalized the genre for this jaded fan. I'd stopped reading new SF in the late 1980s, which is precisely when Banks published the first installments ("Consider Phlebas," "The Player of Games," "Use of Weapons") of his Culture Series -- interrelated novels about a galaxy dominated by a multispecies, technologically advanced society (the Culture) in which money, government, and even death have been abolished, and who regard Artificial Intelligences (embodied in awesome self-invented spaceships) as their equals. A couple of years ago, I realized that Iain Banks, whose straight novels ("The Wasp Factory," "The Crow Road") I enjoyed, was the same writer as Iain M. Banks, and started reading all the Culture novels I could find. Alas, it turned out that he hasn't written a new one since "Look to Windward," in 2000. So: "Matter." Hooray! It takes place largely inside a hollow planet, where a medieval-style human society on the brink of entering an early modern era accidentally awakens an ancient entity whose mission is to destroy hollow planets; only Anaplian, a princess from that society who was selected by the Culture to be trained and evolved into one of their special agents, can avert catastrophe. Armored knights and AI, good/evil aliens and ass-kicking princesses, an anarchist utopia and a hollow planet. Fun! (Annalee Newitz liked it.)

"The Stone Gods" (Harcourt), by Jeanette Winterson. Winterson, a talented and controversial British author known for her semi-autobiogaphical novel "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" (1985), the postmodernist/Magical Realist novel "Sexing the Cherry" (1989), and her New Yorker stories, has written a post-apocalyptic novel that a Times review described as "scary, beautiful, witty and wistful by turns." It takes place (mostly, and maybe) on a pristine Earth-like planet populated by dinosaurs, explored by three Earth women (one of whom is a "Blade Runner"-style replicant) considered troublesome by the dystopian government that will one day rule our environmentally ruined and war-torn planet.

"Woman's World" (Counterpoint), by Graham Rawle. A campy pulp thriller constructed entirely out of 40,000 text fragments, printed in facsimile, that the author (a British writer and collage artist) cut from 1960s British women's magazines. Unbelievable.

"The Drop Edge of Yonder" (Two Dollar Radio), by Rudolph Wurlitzer. This is the first novel in nearly two decades by Wurlitzer, bard of the weird American West. Wurlitzer's experimental novels of the late '60s and '70s ("Nog," "Flats," "Quake," "Slow Fade") are excellent; so are his counter-Western screenplays for "Two Lane Blacktop" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." So I have high hopes for "Yonder," about which Erik Davis, who is always correct about everything, says: "The western is revealed as a metaphysical landscape, but an absurd one, its absurdity falling somewhere between that of Beckett and 'Blazing Saddles.'" NB: Jim Jarmusch reportedly stole the plot of Wurlitzer's book, which got its start years ago as a screenplay, for "Dead Man."

Lucky me, I get to read advance review copies of these novels over the summer!

Back in April, I mentioned "Crust" (Two Dollar Radio, October 1), a novel by Lawrence Shainberg. (If you're interested in meditation, I also recommend Shainberg's nonfiction book "Ambivalent Zen," which I thought highly of when it was published over 10 years ago.)

"The Pets" (Open Letter, October 15), by Bragi Ólafsson. Translated by Janice Balfour. Open Letter, which, as I've mentioned, is a new literary imprint (housed at the University of Rochester) dedicated to publishing translations, is bringing out a 2001 novel of "cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity" by the former bassist for The Sugarcubes (Bjö rk's band). Ólafsson's most recent novel, "The Ambassadors," received rhe Icelandic Bookseller's Award as best novel of the year, so he's no flash in the pan. In fact, although the prose looks breezy and fun, he's something of an Oulipian: For most of the novel, Emil -- the protagonist -- is trapped under his own bed.