Ghosts of the Tsunami, by Richard Lloyd Parry (MCD). Among the thousands who perished in the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 were seventy-four children from a single elementary school, the focus of this examination of the tragedy’s aftermath. When, after months of digging for remains, municipal workers gave up, one mother, intent on continuing, acquired a license to operate heavy machinery. When officials sheltered behind bureaucratese with the “metallic tang of lawyerly advice,” the parents took them to court—a confrontational course that, Parry notes, was unusual within the quietist norms of Japanese democracy. With exemplary sympathy and detachment, he also writes of exorcism rituals, the many reports of ghosts reflecting the persistence of attachments between the living and the newly dead.
What You Did Not Tell, by Mark Mazower (Other). “How is it that the places we live in come to feel that they are ours?” a noted historian asks in this exacting memoir, which traces his family’s journey from tsarist Russia to postwar England. The story centers on his grandfather Max, the revolutionary leader of a Jewish labor movement. Max distributed fake passports, illegal weapons, and banned Yiddish tracts. By the time he was thirty-five, in 1907, he’d been arrested and sent to Siberia twice, and he fled to London. Max shared little about his life in Russia, but Mazower, plowing through letters, diaries, and archives, finds that his grandfather’s story encompasses many of the horrors of twentieth-century Europe.
The King Is Always Above the People, by Daniel Alarcón (Riverhead). The intimate stories in this collection are united by a “sense of dislocation.” The protagonists, mostly male, move through various metropolises, aspiring to escape or to embrace them. In the shortest story, thousands of people build a shantytown in the course of a single moonless night; in the longest, a city boy and his father behave arrogantly in front of friends in their old home town. “Geography is an accident,” one character says. “The place you are born is simply the first place you flee.” Alarcón affectingly describes the feelings of pride and loss that come with migrating to an unfamiliar neighborhood, city, or country.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, by Andrea Lawlor (Rescue). The shape-shifting protagonist of this sex-filled magic-realist novel, twenty-two-year-old Paul Polydoris, belongs to “all the genders,” able to change his body at will. Exploring the malleability of gender and desire, and paying homage to Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” the book follows Paul—sometimes Polly—as s/he searches for love and the “uncontaminated truest” self. The quest leads through New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, Iowa City’s queer punk scene, off-season Provincetown, a womyn’s festival in Michigan, and, finally, San Francisco. Lawlor successfully mixes pop culture, gender theory, and smut, but the great achievement here is that Paul is no mere symbol but a vibrantly yearning being, “like everybody else, only more so.”
