Moderation, by Elaine Castillo (Viking). In this biting novel, a fiercely independent young woman named Girlie works as a content moderator for a virtual-reality platform, Playground, that is at once a game-like diversion and an immersive therapeutic tool. Its inventor imagined that people would one day be prescribed alternate realities to help them recover from P.T.S.D. and depression—but, before he could see this vision to fruition, he died, possibly by suicide. As Girlie learns more about the inventor through the platform’s co-founder, she finds herself falling in love at the same time as she becomes ensnared in a corporate conflict over Playground’s future. Castillo explores the wonders and limitations of technology while skewering its stewards’ appetite for power.
Via Ápia, by Geovani Martins, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches (FSG Originals). This début novel is a chronicle of Rocinha, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, and follows the efforts of a group of male friends to score drugs, make a few dollars, and inch toward a better life. They work as caterers, party entertainers, and dealers; one dreams of becoming a tattoo artist, another just wants to get out of the army. Set in the tumultuous early twenty-tens, as Brazil prepared for the World Cup and the Olympics, the novel tracks how Rocinha changes as military police push into the neighborhood, attempting to wrest control from powerful local gangs.
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Misbehaving at the Crossroads, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper). In this genre-blurring collection, which shifts between memoir, history, and poetry, Jeffers charts her place in a line of women whose lives have been shaped by slavery, racism, and resistance. Organized by the concept of the “crossroads,” a place of “difficulty and possibility,” Jeffers’s essays recall a range of formative experiences, from her first encounters with Alice Walker’s writing to a searing meeting with James Baldwin. Her disappointments with political figures, including Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, are tempered by insight into the challenges they faced; Harris, for instance, was “expected not only to be perfect but to transcend perfection.”
The Key to Everything, by Margaret A. Brucia (Princeton). The pioneering poet May Swenson arrived in New York in 1936, when she was twenty-three, anticipating a personal and creative flowering. She came from Utah, where she was born to Swedish immigrant parents, devout Mormons who raised their children in kind. Imaginative and ambitious, May left the church and her beloved family to pursue an artistically, politically, and sexually liberated life, eventually establishing herself as a unique figure in modern poetry. Brucia’s vibrant portrait, set against the mercurial backdrop of mid-century Manhattan, draws on Swenson’s diaries and her extensive correspondence with her fellow-poet Elizabeth Bishop to examine Swenson’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project; her romantic relationships, most of which involved women; and her cultivation of the playful, experimental literary style that would define her career.
