eMusic Loves Iambik Audio

How best to begin a book chronicling the travails of life in a low-rent apartment complex? Obviously with the marauding jackasses who wake you up at 2:00 am as they joyously knock over trashcans, smash beer bottles and scream at one another. "I would kill them with a crossbow," thinks Elizabeth, the plucky protagonist of that novel that spans just one day in a New York slum. Like any good biologist might,... Tillman rigorously investigates every inch of Elizabeth's ecosystem, from the absentee landlord who rules by decree through a missive sent care of the United States Postal Service to the man who is paid to keep the common area clean (but doesn't) to Elizabeth's co-workers at her (underpaid) job as a proofreader. Of course, due scrutiny is paid to Elizabeth's fellow tenants, her own depressing life, and the assorted bums, drug addicts and lowlifes who haunt her block and, occasionally, her building. Tillman's genius here is to evoke Elizabeth's life through a day's meandering thoughts, to tell her story in the process of evoking every last detail of her home. The result is by turns wry, savage, and poignant, a novel that lays bare all the depredations of an impoverished woman striving for something better, yet that still, somehow, offers optimism without sacrificing authenticity.

You know the story: Man comes back to his roots. Man buys 612-acre tract in rural New York. Man renovates house on tract. Man discovers giant granite monolith on his property and starts seeing freaky ghost-deer. Welcome to Kafka, as sifted through J. Robert Lennon's prodigious imagination. Just as in Kafka's famous novel of the same name, Lennon's protagonist, Eric Loesch, becomes obsessed with the giant granite monolith — his castle —... that is always in sight but which he can never quite reach. As he investigates, he discovers that the castle exists on a small island of land within his 612 acres that is owned by a mysterious person that has been blacked out of the records. But Loesch keeps digging, and when he finally discovers who it is, "those words caused my stomach to turn over." In this surreal, slightly gothic tale, Lennon ably ratchets up the tension while letting us watch as Loesch slowly pieces together his personal history as he comes to figure out what the castle is. Lennon takes us deep into Loesch's psyche and his battles with his father (with overtones of humanity's battles with God), building Loesch into a rich, allegorical character worthy of a fine novel. In the end, Castle makes for a satisfying, and at times harrowing, journey into one man's heart of darkness — a psychological thriller that doubles as a potent fable for an age filled with massive oil spills and the ghosts of Abu Ghraib.

Detective fiction was at its height in the 1950s, when a small army of genre writers cracked out tales of murder and mystery one after another. By the end of the century, the genre had been thoroughly exhausted, which led writers like Paul Auster to reinvent it with playful, postmodern thrillers. That too became exhausted, prompting a good question: where does detective fiction go now? Dustin Long's Icelander offers one answer. A... gigantic parody of all that's come before (even noir legend Alfred Hitchcock gets mocked, as the victim here is named Shirley MacGuffin), Icelander comes replete with footnotes, in-jokes and a detective who declines to solve the mystery. It begins with the daughter of the super-famous detective Emily Bean-Ymirson, known only as "Our Heroine." Her friend — the aforementioned MacGuffin — has been murdered, and everyone is expecting Our Heroine to solve the case, but she resolutely declines to follow in her mother's footsteps. That's okay, though, because there's plenty of people willing to steal Our Heroine's spotlight: there's a festival for Magnus Valison, a master novelist who has chronicled Bean's exploits, the city is besieged by characters from Norse mythology, and there's comic relief (as if the story needed more) from two "philosophical investigators" reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Long's fecund imagination runs rampant, coming up with, among other things, an alternate, Internet-like library arranged not by Dewey Decimal but by an "infinite skein of interconnections" and a "two story house" where one story is written on the walls of the first floor and a second on the second. This exuberant, multifaceted attempt to chart where the genre of detective fiction might go after the noirs of the '50s and '60s and the postmodern fantasies of the '80s and '90s is a great guess and a great ride.

Part Vertigo, part post-9/11 novel, part inquiry into gender, Felicia Luna Lemus' second novel manages to fit an awful lot into a spry, short package. A transgendered, Southern Californian daughter-to-son of Mexican immigrants, Frank Cruz finds his life changed when his father dies: among his things he finds a haunting photograph of a beautiful, proto-feminist Mexican artist named Nahui Olin. Frank heads for a new life in New York, and there he... sates his obsession for Olin by falling in love with the sexy, bohemian Nathalie, who bears an eerie resemblance to the artist. All seems tied up — and then 9/11 happens, throwing everything into chaos and forcing Frank and Nathalie into a deep and satisfying inquiry into their true identities. Lemus' strength here is her sharp, witty prose, as well as her ability to take on frequently discussed questions surrounding gender and ethnic identity in fresh new ways. With an eye always on her galloping plot, Lemus integrates Frank's identity into the action — rather than letting it dominate it — ensuring that the book remains free of the heavy-handed preaching that has weighed down so many before it. Like Son heralds both a strong new voice in American fiction and a strong new approach to realities that inform our world today.

Some of the best fictions resemble labyrinths: they drop readers into a circuitous story, then challenge readers to find a way out. So it goes for The Impossibly, a viciously entertaining maze of a novel that reads like Beckett's brink-of-nonsense prose crossed with David Lynch's postmodern acid noirs. The narrator works for something called "the organization," a shadowy body that seems to control his city and regularly sends him terse commands that... he must decipher as best he can and carry out. (One example: "Dear Sir, Do not, under any circumstances.") However, after an odd vacation with a woman and a botched assignment, the narrator falls into paranoia — is the organization now targeting him? Things only become murkier as Hunt delves ever deeper into his protagonist's bewildered, perhaps schizophrenic consciousness, yet as the confusion builds Hunt's prose only becomes stronger. Does the narrator constantly contradict himself? Yes. Does he at one point split into two people, one walking behind the other? Yes, again. But does this book ever lose its intriguing edge? No. Hunt's inventiveness is such that each episode, no matter how nonsensical, demands your attention and makes you want to figure out how it all fits together. Perhaps it all does, or perhaps it is as inconsistent at the narrator's surely damaged mind — it doesn't much matter in this book that you'll want to listen to twice.

Call Century anything you want — heartbreaking, amazing, stimulating — but don't call it clich: it does open, after all, with a spectral Nazi haunting a woman's sleep. It scarcely gets less surprising from there, as we soon realize that Herr Himmler actually visits Jane Seymour in a novel being written in 1983 by a man who knows her. In the following pages, Century traces the life of Jane and her ancestors... back to 1893 in four chapters told from the perspective of a different person close to her. As if that weren't enough, Smith then abruptly shifts to two final chapters reminiscent of Henry James, in which an American named Kenniston Thorson discourses on art, life, and philosophy while adventuring through in Paris in 1892 and Germany in 1923. What's going on here? Plot-conscious readers will note that Thorson is briefly connected to Jane's mother, but the deeper connections between Jane's chapters and Thorson's are left wonderfully enigmatic. That mysteriousness is precisely the source of Century's power. A book that feels far more capacious than its short span would imply, Century draws you in because it makes you, as the author puts it, turn "its subject round and round as a sculptor considers his piece." It is a moving look at womanhood, an inquiry into what the modern world really is, and, most of all, a deep, enchanting, occasionally melancholy tour through the 20th century. It's also a chance to get to know one of the most innovative and under-appreciated Canadian authors working today.