Sachdeva has a talent for creating moving and poignant scenes, following her highly imaginative plots to their logical ends, and depicting how one small miracle can affect everyone in its wake. Was it an accident, or part of a plan? All the Names They Used for God by Anjali SachdevaĪnjali Sachdeva’s debut collection spans centuries, continents, and a diverse set of characters but is united by each character’s epic struggle with fate: A workman in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills is irrevocably changed by the brutal power of the furnaces a fisherman sets sail into overfished waters and finds a secret obsession from which he can’t return an online date ends with a frightening, inexplicable disappearance. Still, each holds something back from the other-dangerous, even lethal, secrets that begin to accumulate as autumn approaches, feeding the growing doubts they conceal. Over the course of a punishing summer, Polly and Adam abandon themselves to a steamy, inexorable affair. Yet she stays and he stays-drawn to this mysterious redhead whose quiet stillness both unnerves and excites him. They meet at a local tavern in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ depicts a reluctant teenage astronaut idling away her post-apocalyptic adolescence huffing gasoline and fooling around with her five brutish shipmates, all named Tommy. In ‘Surfer Girl’, the title character drifts through time, tormented by the bizarre cliches of drive-in B-movies. I Am a Magical Teenage Princess is a thematically linked collection of short stories celebrating and re-examining 1960s and contemporary culture, magnifying such popular icons as Betty and Veronica and Wonder Woman through a literary lens of wit and pathos. (Aug.I am a Magical Teenage Princess by Luke Geddes Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.
Whatever her topic, Gay’s provocative essays stand out for their bravery, wit, and emotional honesty. Although Gay is aware of her privilege as a middle-class Haitian-American, she doesn’t refrain from advising inner-city students to have higher expectations. Gay bemoans that fact that role models like Bill Cosby and Don Lemon urge African-Americans to act like ideal citizens while glossing over institutional problems in the education, social welfare, and justice system that exacerbate racism and poverty. Writing about race, politics, gender, feminism, privilege, and popular media, she highlights how deeply misogyny is embedded in our culture, the careless language used to discuss sexual violence (seen in news reports of sexual assault), Hollywood’s tokenistic treatment of race, the trivialization of literature written by women, and the many ways American society fails women and African-Americans. Even though she loves pink, feels nostalgic about the Sweet Valley High series, and lets degrading rap lyrics blast from her car stereo, Gay is passionately committed to feminist issues, such as equal opportunity and pay and reproductive freedom. This trenchant collection assembles previously published essays and new work by cultural critic and novelist Gay ( An Untamed State).