Summer Issue of Bookforum

Just in time for BookExpo, the summer fiction issue of Bookforum is now available in print and online.

This year’s special fiction issue is all about fiction forward:

We invited dozens of publishers to submit excerpts from books that will be published in the fall and winter, and we selected six of the very best. But “Fiction Forward” doesn’t refer just to this peek at forthcoming work. Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves are constantly moving forward, taking in the world apace and recalibrating to accommodate fresh news. Forward is also the direction in which good fiction takes its readers. In thrall to a gifted storyteller, we can discover—often with an astonishing degree of specificity—just who we, individually, collectively, are becoming. Even when addressing distant events and people, fiction speaks to us directly about what it means to be alive today and tomorrow.

The six featured authors—Ryan Boudinot, Michelle Huneven, Terrence Holt, Xiaoda Xiao, Michiel Heyns, and Holly Goddard Jones—all look pretty interesting, and each piece is paired with a graphic artist, and introduced by another writer. (I like Junot Diaz’s super-enthusiastic bit about Terrence Holt: “There is no one in the wide sea of English who writes like him (as far as I know); no one who is so profound and mysterious, so searingly human and so implacably apocalyptic. I always describe Holt as Melville + Poe + Borges but with a heart far more capacious than any of them were capable of mustering.”)

In addition to these six excerpts and the usual collection of great fiction and nonfiction reviews by very talented reviewers, there’s also a nice long piece on recent publications by African authors. Looking at four recent publications — Gods and Soldiers, edited by Rob Spillman, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Secret Son by Laila Lalami, and the NYRB reprint of Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih — James Gibbons’s piece is both informative and interesting:

Are we in the midst of an “African literary renaissance,” as Spillman contends, an el boom from the other side of the Atlantic? Perhaps, but the surge of African writing is tellingly different from the Latin American explosion of the ’60s. Besides being identified with magic realism (though not all its writers practiced it), the literature of the Latin American boom was already formed within the region’s own institutions and coteries before being packaged in translation and exported. The new African writing is emphatically not homegrown. Forged in the crucible of globalization, it is a literature largely of displacement and exile. Most striking in scanning the biographical notes in Gods and Soldiers is how few of its contributors, especially the younger ones, live in the countries in which they were born. Nearly all the Francophone writers have settled in France, and the typical English-language writer has an American MFA and professorship.