03/03/2014
Death is an imminent, lurking presence in this debut collection of seven stories, which explore the confluence of fate and circumstance that places men in situations of anguish and despair. The tales unfold in slow motion with moments of acute sensitivity. “The IED” is a 22-page depiction of the “paroxysms of memory” that a soldier undergoes as he steps on an explosive device. A homeless veteran suffering from PTSD continuously relives his combat experiences in “The Fugue.” Hemenway’s prose is dense and often quite beautiful at the sentence level, but the pacing slows momentum. “In the Mosque of Imam Alwami,” the war in Iraq and the subsequent violent tide of fundamentalism affects the lives of three Kurdish friends in devastating ways. In the heartbreaking title story, Hemenway spares no grim details in depicting the anguish of a father watching his eight-year-old son dying of a glioma on his brain stem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is vividly portrayed through the story of the death of a two-year-old burned to death by zealots in “The Territory of Grief,” which takes place in a futuristic town called New Jerusalem, located in the disputed territories and populated only by mourners. In “The Half Moon Martyrs’ Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas” an Army recruiter is blamed for the mortality rate of his town’s soldiers in Iraq. Hemenway’s earnest desire to reflect historical forces that tragically impact individual lives is admirable, but the collection is best read in small doses, and the cumulative effect can be overwhelming. (July)
The winners of the 2014 B&N Discover Awards have been announced! Evie Wyld’s gripping novel All the Birds, Singing, and Bryce Andrew’s ranching memoir Badluck Way have won in the fiction and nonfiction categories, respectively.
Every year, B&N booksellers handpick roughly sixty books for inclusion in the Discover Great New Writers program, which aims to introduce readers to the best new writers publishing today. From those sixty books, three works of fiction and three works of nonfiction are nominated for the Discover Awards. This year’s nominees are a treasure trove of compelling novels, indelible short story collections, […]
For 25 years, Barnes & Noble has been honoring some of the finest literary talent in the country with the Discover Great New Writers program. A committee of Barnes & Noble booksellers come together to choose about 60 books a year by blossoming authors they don’t think should go unnoticed. Of those books, six are nominated for Discover Awards. Many of […]
Each year Barnes & Noble selects a bookshelf’s worth of must-read works for the B&N Discover Great New Writers program. 2014′s summer picks range from searing memoir to black comedy to a fascinating study of bees, and represent some of the most exciting new voices in literature. Don’t miss a single one: The Steady Running of […]