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      From Naples to New Orleans, Murder and Mayhem

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      This month’s column is all about firsts — debut authors, new series beginnings or both. I make it a point to pick up books by new authors whenever I can. Sure, there’s pleasure to be had in discovering someone 10 books into a series and binge-reading them all, but I like embracing promising careers at the ground level, too.MAY THE WOLF DIE (Penguin Books, 359 pp., paperback, $20), the first book from Elizabeth Heider, a physicist and former U.S. Navy research analyst, bowled me over with its descriptions of Naples — seedy, beautiful, baroque — and the trials and tribulations of its main character, Nikki Serafino. Nikki, a liaison between the local police and the American military, works in a unit called Phoenix Seven where the men, when they aren’t “barraging her with sex jokes,” undermine and condescend to her at every turn. Nikki, “short and compact and muscular with a dynamic, interesting face,” can handle them just fine, thank you very much.Then, within 24 hours, she stumbles across two bodies. The first, submerged in water, is an American naval officer, and the other has connections to the military base, too. The investigation unfolds with all manner of surprises, and Nikki, to the chagrin of her Neapolitan colleagues, will be the one to solve it.Delia Pitts begins a new series with TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN (Minotaur, 312 pp., $28), which introduces Vandy Myrick. A private detective who’s recently returned to her New Jersey hometown, she’s working in the shadow of her former cop father, who now has dementia, and grieving the death of her daughter, Monica. The sleepy Queenstown that Vandy remembers as a child has changed; it’s now a nest of secrets, teeming with corruption and bigotry.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Los Angeles Novels as Stylish and Wild as the City Itself

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      Elizabeth Stromme’s noir about a writer for hire; Karen Tei Yamashita’s magic realist dystopia.Beth Coller for The New York TimesDear readers,A few years ago I interviewed a writer who in a past life worked as a transcriber for people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries. Listening over and over to patients describe life-changing pain, she realized their realities bordered on the supernatural, and that adopting language more commonly found in science fiction or fantasy was the most honest way to convey their distress.I thought of her earlier this summer, around the time I realized my knowledge of the Los Angeles literary canon was basically nonexistent. It was stupid I’d never thought to approach the city — which despite my years of visiting family there has never felt like terra firma — through novels. The books I recommend today are both set in the region, but that’s almost incidental. More important: They convey a sense of place that had previously eluded me, using fantastical, intentionally stylistic language, and somehow rank among the truest things I’ve read.—Joumana“Joe’s Word: An Echo Park Novel,” by Elizabeth StrommeFiction, 2003This unsung stunner could credibly be called “pre-gentrification noir” — two words I wouldn’t normally put in the same room together, let alone the same clause.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Poet Goes to War

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      Deep in the sweltering jungles of Myanmar this spring, a rebel commander stood in front of 241 recruits for Day 1 of basic training. The troops — part of a resistance fighting an unpopular military dictatorship — were organized in rows by height, starting at less than five feet tall. A spotted dog patrolled the ragged lines before settling in the dirt for a snooze.The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.“In our revolution, we need everyone to join, even poets,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said.He amended his statement.“Especially poets,” he added.To his new recruits, though, Mr. Maung Saungkha delivered a lecture devoid of literary embellishments. The soldiers, roughly half from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, may have been lured by his social media presence, curated to appeal to romantic notions of resistance, or by the junta’s ordering conscription for all young men and women in the country. But no rhyming couplet — no matter how deft — would save them in battle. For that, they had to learn how to shoot and fight.The jungle simmered. Over the next few hours in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, more than a dozen enlistees would collapse from the heat, exhaustion or simply nerves. Ko Rakkha, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s chief drill sergeant, kept the soldiers moving. Otherwise, he said, they would not be ready for the front lines in three months’ time.“Whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a poet, forget your past, forget your pride,” said Mr. Rakkha, himself a poet. “The point of training is to learn how not to die.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Queer Mountain Lion Leaps From the Page to the Little Island Stage

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      Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” narrated by an animal in peril in the Hollywood Hills, is adapted for a staged reading.The concept behind Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” is an eyebrow-raising one: It’s a story about overdevelopment and climate change narrated by a mountain lion who muses on the lives of hikers and loved ones.Hoke was loosely inspired by the mountain lion known as P-22 whose regular sightings in the hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, successful crossing of two freeways and eventual death captured the public’s attention in 2022. In “Open Throat,” according to the book’s publisher, the animal identifies as queer, and uses they and them pronouns.The book is “what fiction should be,” the novelist Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her review for The New York Times, and it made several end-of-year best-of lists and awards shortlists.With an internal monologue that has poetically broken stanzas and a fluid sense of time and reality, “Open Throat” does not immediately call for theatrical adaptation. Yet a staged version of the work is premiering Wednesday as part of Little Island’s ambitious summer series of live performances at its outdoor amphitheater.The narration is divided among three performers, including Chris Perfetti, who is holding the book, and Calvin Leon Smith. “I think the beauty of it, and the reason we’re intentionally having three different voices, is making it universal,” Perfetti said.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It reads beautifully,” Zack Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, said of the book. “The way it’s placed on the page is visually interesting. The way the voice exists is not like anything else. I kept thinking that it being so voice-driven would make an amazing show, and I didn’t know how to do it, which is the greatest thing in the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Try to Find the 12 Books Hidden in This Text

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      The famished road warriors drove down the cold mountain highway and across the bridge into the town. The September sun was setting and it was time to stop, as Benny’s increasing night blindness made him leery about driving late and his eyes still stung from a thousand acres of grass pollen. The ancient rental car was also wheezing like a mean spirit was trapped inside the engine.Aleksandar pulled out the notebook with his mother’s list of local tips. “Let’s try the Blue Flower Hotel — there’s a basement jazz lounge called Underworld there and maybe we can pick up a gig and dinner.”Benny parked the car and grabbed his saxophone. “I know this is your homeland, but at least I’m a native speaker in the universal language of music.”The famished road warriors drove down the cold mountain highway and across the bridge into the town. The September sun was setting and it was time to stop, as Benny’s increasing night blindness made him leery about driving late and his eyes still stung from a thousand acres of grass pollen. The ancient rental car was also wheezing like a mean spirit was trapped inside the engine.Aleksandar pulled out the notebook with his mother’s list of local tips. “Let’s try the Blue Flower Hotel — there’s a basement jazz lounge called Underworld there and maybe we can pick up a gig and dinner.”Benny parked the car and grabbed his saxophone. “I know this is your homeland, but at least I’m a native speaker in the universal language of music.”The famished road warriors drove down the cold mountain highway and across the bridge into the town. The September sun was setting and it was time to stop, as Benny’s increasing night blindness made him leery about driving late and his eyes still stung from a thousand acres of grass pollen. The ancient rental car was also wheezing like a mean spirit was trapped inside the engine.Aleksandar pulled out the notebook with his mother’s list of local tips. “Let’s try the Blue Flower Hotel — there’s a basement jazz lounge called Underworld there and maybe we can pick up a gig and dinner.”Benny parked the car and grabbed his saxophone. “I know this is your homeland, but at least I’m a native speaker in the universal language of music.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Long Island Compromise,’ by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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      LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE, by Taffy Brodesser-AknerWhat does it mean to come by one’s life honestly? This is the question at the heart of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s generation-spanning sophomore novel, “Long Island Compromise,” which tells the story of a wealthy, dysfunctional suburban Jewish family.Given the unavoidable success of her debut, “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I will spare curious readers the suspense and answer a more cynical question: Is this book as good? It’s better. Sprawling yet nimble, this is her Big American Reform Jewish Novel. In an assimilatory turn, it’s less reminiscent of Roth (Philip or Henry) than of Franzen (Jonathan), whom Brodesser-Akner profiled in her role as staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.A fictionalized account of a true story, “Long Island Compromise” begins in 1980, when the prominent businessman Carl Fletcher is ambushed in his driveway, taken to unknown parts and tortured by unknown parties. Bubble burst, the house is suddenly teeming with F.B.I. agents as Carl’s frantic wife, Ruth, finds herself taking her younger son, Bernard, on an elaborate ransom drop, a day that will scar both him and his older brother, Nathan, for life.Not to mention Carl himself, who, upon his release, is advised by his mother to compartmentalize his trauma (“Listen to me, boychick. This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in”). No dice. Carl spends the next several hundred pages on an ineffective cocktail of antidepressants, alternating between jags of hysteria and vegetation, a glass ornament of a father to Nathan, Bernard and Jenny, who has the questionable luck of being born just after the family tragedy. Ruth, who was so sure she’d escaped the paranoia hurricane of her scrappy childhood, finds herself back in its eye. “It started right now, the real division of her life,” Brodesser-Akner writes: “before the kidnapping and after it.”The novel is loosely divided into three sections, told from the third-person perspectives of the three children, now in their late 30s and early 40s, laying out the cornucopia of ways in which they are screwed up by latent generational trauma, their father’s repression and the affluence that insulates them. “They spent their money like third-generation American children do: quickly, and without thinking too hard about it.”Bernard, or Beamer, has become a handsome, BDSM-loving, shiksa-marrying, drug-addled screenwriter who cannot think of a single plot without a kidnapping at its core and is constantly pretending to take phone calls, sometimes for the sake of avoidance, sometimes for the illusion of importance. (Each character has a conversational tic; I’m partial to the way Ruth mumbles some iteration of “Leonard Bernstein over here” or “Julius Rosenberg over here” whenever she’s displeased with her seditious spawn.) Then there’s Nathan, a neurotic and servile land-use lawyer who has put all his eggs in a friend’s S.E.C.-violating basket and is married to a moral Orthodox woman who just wants to redo the kitchen. Finally, Jenny is a drifting intellectual snob who eschews attachment to friends, men, money or careers until the day she becomes aware of the concept of union organizing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More