Odds are, the reason you read this article, or even open this article every week is to find a new read. Well guess what, these books are as new as it gets. These books below have been released just this week and you should be the first to read them. Be the first to introduce them to your book club and be first to flaunt them to all your friends.
Do you have any recommendations for me? Email mkotelchuck@whatsupmag.com with your most recent read and a quick review about it to be featured!
Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim: When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she's already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelg nger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of medical students. Henrik's inquiry expands beyond Fumiko's seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend's precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself.
Savage Tongues by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi: It's summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood. Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she's long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries.
Something New Under The Sun by Alexandra Kleeman: East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy--after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks--and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second.
