PrizeMatthew Pearl (Harper). David Trent, the struggling writer whose demeanor defines this dark comic thriller, is elated to learn that his new neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Silas Hale—an “echo,” he at first thinks, of “Henry David Thoreau living in Ralph Waldo Emerson's backyard!” However, when it becomes clear that Silas is not interested in mentoring, David manages to bolster his status as a writer in other, increasingly reprehensible ways. Pearl revels in evil, imagining a literary world in which the arrogance of a successful writer is both encouraged and rewarded. At the heart of the novel is an existential question posed to David by his long-suffering girlfriend: “What is better: to be happy or to be a writer?”
Analogue daysDamion Searles (Coffee Shop). In this diary tale, written by the prolific translator of Norwegian Nobel laureate John Foss, the narrator chronicles several weeks in the summer of 2016 spent swapping stories with friends in New York, traveling to San Francisco, and nursing leg injuries. To chronicle their days, Searles' characters use methods that the Internet is slowly making obsolete: one friend starts a print-only blog, while another uses archival white pages to find a closed recording studio. Often opening the day's entry with news of mass shootings, police brutality, and the political rise of Donald Trump, the book's protagonist explores the horrors and indignities of modern life, and the still-evolving technology that subjects him to it all.
