Book of the Day Roundup: June 10-14, 2024
Sad Planets
Dominic Pettman
Eugene Thacker
Polity
Softcover $19.95 (488pp)
978-1-5095-6236-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker’s expansive book Sad Planets contemplates humanity’s troubled perception of climate change and perhaps diminishing cosmic presence.
The book sprawls across a captivating informational universe with Earth as its dubious center. The eventual disappearance of Saturn’s rings is noted (predicted within the next 300 million years) alongside Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens’s initial telescopic observation of the ringed celestial body in the 1650s. Further explored within the interplanetary realm are various space missions and resultant “space junk,” along with continuing speculation regarding alien life.
With eclectic references to Carl Sagan, Lord Byron, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the book notes that increased socioecological consciousness brought about the development of “climate culture,” which ranges from earnest activism, political polarization, “corporate ‘off-world’ initiatives,” to “the latest Hollywood disaster film.” The book’s extreme weather notations are summaries of recent environmental horrors and otherwise unsettling events; these include the “biblical kiln” of the 2020 Australian bushfires, and the fact that Earth’s distinct blue luster is reported to be dimming as the planet’s oceans become “too polluted to function.”
Linked to climate decline are the possibility of human extinction and growing universal malaise; beyond the cross-cultural connection of the internet looms an undertow of disinformation and “hyper-mediated environments.” Yet prior to accessible scientific resources, the book says, bewilderment once prevailed. Though 1816’s “Year without a Summer” was caused by the aftereffects of Indonesian volcanic activity, the season’s sunless skies, colder temperatures, and prolonged rains caused many Europeans and North Americans to fear an impending apocalypse.
Provocative, wry, and eloquent, the philosophy text Sad Planets muses on interplanetary topics to convey a sense of global urgency and inchoate loss.
MEG NOLA (April 25, 2024)
Amerikaland
Danny Goodman
LEFTOVER Books
Softcover $18.00 (275pp)
979-898510706-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Nazis threaten to take over America in Danny Goodman’s poignant alternate-reality novel Amerikaland.
The world’s eyes are on New York City, where World Day, the global celebration of peace, is set to take place, featuring baseball games and tennis tournaments. Sabine, the world’s best woman tennis player, is expected to win the City Open; shortstop Sandy is projected to bring his Brooklyn Atlantics to victory. Instead, disaster strikes in the middle of the celebrations: light bombs go off, causing mass destruction and leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead. The event is played live on television.
By some miracle, Sabine and Sandy survive. Struggling to make sense of the disaster while grappling with survivor’s guilt, they reach out to each other, reigniting the connection they had as young athletes on the cusp of greatness. But soon after they find each other again, the bomb’s aftermath propels them in different directions: Sabine is pulled into a web of family secrets when her mother, long believed to be dead, is revealed to be the neo-Nazi mastermind behind the bombing; as one of the most famous Jewish athletes in the world, Sandy becomes a high-profile target in a pogrom. In a serendipitous turn of events, Sabine and Sandy face each other, and Sabine holds Sandy’s life in her hands.
Amerikaland‘s sports angle adds dimension to its alternate-reality picture of fascist America. With its straight-to-the point details, the prose is cutting and emotional, using an alternating narration to mimic its sense of humanity coming together and being torn apart. And in the book’s unexpected ending, the story is projected into an uncertain future.
Personal integrity stands between life and death in Amerikaland, a riveting novel about fascism in America.
ERIKA HARLITZ KERN (April 25, 2024)
Mushroom Gastronomy
Krista Towns
Gibbs Smith
Hardcover $35.00 (240pp)
978-1-4236-6497-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Fungi are the resplendent stars of Krista Towns’s cookbook Mushroom Gastronomy, a treatise on an alluring variety of edible and medicinal mushrooms.
Alongside beguiling food photographs and unusual recipes, the book includes exuberant advice on buying and foraging new varieties of fungi and on their ultimate consumption. There are suggestions to eat only small amounts of unfamiliar mushrooms at first—and never to eat most mushrooms raw. There’s a primer on cleaning, cooking, and storing mushrooms, with instructions for drying, smoking, and pickling too, and a guide to stocking the kitchen with a small but specific array of tools and pantry ingredients, like mushroom brushes and delicate oils, to bring out the best fungi flavors.
Following this thorough foundation, twenty-five mushroom varieties are examined in nutritional and gastronomic detail, with notes on their best flavor pairings. Button mushrooms, baby portabellas, and portabellas are introduced as part of the same common mushroom species, just at different stages of growth; there are suggestions for cooking these ubiquitous mushrooms in distinctive and delightful new ways as well, as in umami-rich vinaigrettes or pastry-wrapped Mushroom Wellington.
A parade of more exotic mushroom varieties is included, as with the bright orange, alien stalks of cordyceps, the pine-scented matsutake, and the lion’s mane, a shaggy triffid lookalike and lobster tastealike that Towns downright swoons over. While one could stick with classic mushroom preparations, like simple sautés with butter and aromatics, the book’s wide range of recipes involves cocktails, desserts, kimchi, jerky, and medicinal teas too. One could prepare an entirely fungal feast from these creative alternatives, from maple-perfumed Candy Cap Martinis to Chanterelle-Apricot Galette, with plenty of mushroomcentric mains and sides in between.
Elegant in its culinary presentation, Mushroom Gastronomy is a mycophilic delight that inspires broader and more playful kitchen experimentation with edible mushrooms.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (April 25, 2024)
Ballad for Jasmine Town
Eidolonia Series
Molly Ringle
Central Avenue Publishing
Softcover $17.99 (320pp)
978-1-77168-364-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Molly Ringle’s intoxicating fantasy novel Ballad for Jasmine Town, humans and fae band together to save their mystical island.
In Miryoku, known as Jasmine Town, Rafi feels like two halves of a whole: half human and half fae, he’s labeled a “wanderer,” and neither the fae nor humans will claim him. With his fae abilities, he manipulates his gender. Then he meets Roxana, a witch, who has romantic partners of all genders. The story alternates between each of their points of view, helping to flesh out both the human and fae sides of their island, Eidolonia.
The story’s action is parallel: Rafi and Roxana’s complicated romance is juxtaposed to the increasing threats leveled against their town from Rafi’s earth fae family, coupled with rising political tensions on Eidolonia. When the political issues come to a head with the election of a humanist, who would imprison or otherwise punish wanderers, the effect on Rafi and Roxana’s relationship is fraught. This catapults the story toward its climax, in which the fates of Rafi and Roxana, and of relationships between humans and fae at large, may be determined.
Queerness is no obstacle in this landscape, in which images of jasmine act as through line. Even when Roxana moves away, the sight or smell of jasmine transports her back to Miryoku and Rafi. At the end of the story, when the physical landscape of Miryoku has been altered, the jasmine vines persist. Such imagery grounds the story, giving its more imaginative elements a tangible center.
Set in a fantastical world populated by fae and human beings, Ballad for Jasmine Town is a buoyant novel in which people fight for what and how they love.
RACHEL TELLJOHN (April 24, 2024)
Prairie Edge
Conor Kerr
University of Minnesota Press
Hardcover $25.95 (272pp)
978-1-5179-1723-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Downtrodden heroes are the focus of Prairie Edge, an intimate, unsparing novel about the lives of Indigenous people in Canada.
Ezzy is an aimless young man of Métis descent who has been scarred by stints in prison. He struggles to find meaning in his life. Grey is a fiery student activist who fights to empower her people, contending with opportunistic colleagues who are more interested in marketing themselves than in effecting change. She takes Ezzy under her wing. They both may be “prairie poor,” but they find moments of warmth within squalor, whether they’re bonding over a spirited crib game or benefiting from the unconditional love of Ezzy’s Aunt May, who fights to overcome demons of her own. Raring to make a political statement, the duo carries out a reckless plot to relocate dozens of wild bison to downtown Edmonton. But when a chance encounter leads to violence and murder, they are forced to reckon with their past demons even as their futures are placed in jeopardy.
Written from both Ezzy and Grey’s perspectives, the novel is gritty and lyrical as it reckons with the lots of Indigenous people in contemporary times. It is also informed by flashbacks and visions. Telling details—stitchings made out of beads, dreams of wild animals and birds that carry symbolic weight—flesh out Ezzy and Grey’s roots. Floating between halfway houses, run-down trailers, and rehabilitation centers, it’s a sober picture of dispossessed lives on the margins. While there are no easy answers to Ezzy and Grey’s predicaments, the book’s bittersweet conclusion holds out hope for solidarity and progress.
Giving eloquent voice to Indigenous characters and acknowledging their challenges, Prairie Edge is a powerful novel about lives in flux amid the looming threat of cultural extinction.
HO LIN (April 25, 2024)
Kathy Young
