My Most Anticipated Reads for 2024
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Last year, I pledged to read more classics and I did, including Brothers Karamosov, The Bible, A Christmas Carol, Jane Eyre and Brideshead Revisited (twice!).
This year, I’d like to continue reading more classics, but I’d also like to read new work! I’ve been missing out on so much!
Here are a few I am really looking forward to reading……and a few are available for pre-order!
Click on any of the bold text to order
Flannery O’Connor and Jessica Hooten Wilson
Brazos Press is publishing Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage along with Jessica Hooten Wilson’s meticulous research into the story of its creation. Hooten Wilson explored “the 378 pages of typed and handwritten material of the novel--transcribing pages, organizing them into scenes, and compiling everything to provide a glimpse into what O'Connor might have planned to publish.”
Flannery fans are twitching with excitement. I can’t wait.
Beyond Ethnic Loneliness: The Pain of Marginalization and the Path to Belonging
April 16, 2024
by Prasanta Verma
From Amazon:
"So what are you? Go back where you belong!"
Majority white American culture has historically marginalized people of color, who at times feel invisible and alienated and at other times are traumatized by oppression and public discrimination. This reality leads to a particular kind of aloneness: ethnic and racial loneliness.
An Indian American immigrant who grew up in white Southern culture, Prasanta Verma names and sheds light on the realities of ethnic loneliness. She unpacks the exhausting effects of cultural isolation, the dynamics of marginalization, and the weight of being other. In the midst of disconnection and erasure, she points to the longing to belong, the need to share our stories, and the hope of finding safe friendships and community. Our places of exile can become places where we find belonging―to ourselves, to others, and to God.
April 16, 2024
by Julia Walsh
I have had the honor of meeting Sr Julia twice and praying together in a Zoom prayer group at the beginning of the pandemic. It has been a joy to watch this story move from her heart to publishing.
From Amazon: “A questioning novice nun’s coming-of-age story. Readers will be moved to reflect on the universal human experiences of being broken and the pull to be part of something bigger than themselves.
At the age of 25, just a month into her novitiate as a Franciscan Sister, Julia Walsh fell from a cliff and became disfigured. While working toward healing, she felt pulled to religious community life, but also toward unresolved feelings regarding her own sexuality, identity, and injustice.”
May 7, 2024
Bryan Bliss
Bryan taught fiction at my MFA program. I love bantering with him like a brother. His novel, We’ll Fly Away, about a high school senior facing the death penalty and the road that led there was absolutely gripping. I have high anticipation for Dispatches from Unknown Parts, the story of a grieving daughter who hears the voice of her dead father running commentary on her life---only her father was a professional wrestler! Grief can be funny sometimes.
The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity
Catherine Ricketts
April 16
I am a big fan of Catherine’s essays and have been following her interviews with Mother Artist's on Instagram.
From Amazon: “Forged in the stress of early motherhood, The Mother Artist explores the fraught yet generative ties between caregiving and creative practice. As a young mother working at a museum, essayist Catherine Ricketts began asking questions about the making of motherhood and the making of art. Now, with incantatory prose and an intuitive gaze, she twines intimate meditations on parenthood with studies of the work and lives of painters, writers, dancers, musicians, and other creatives.”
May 7
Colm Toibin
Long Island is the sequel to the novel (and subsequent film) Brooklyn. When an Irish stranger knocks on Eilis's door in Long Island, it upends her comfortable life and she finds herself turning towards her native Ireland.
May 30
Chigozie Obioma
Chigoizie taught fiction at my MFA program. I am reading his vivid novel The Fishermen right now, a modern telling of Cain and Abel set in his native Nigeria, which I am savoring as a reward each day after my work is complete.
Set in the 1960s, The Road to the Country is a coming-of-age story about a university student in Lagos who decides to search for his missing brother in the midst of Nigeria's civil war. Chigoize was a finalist for the Man Booker prize. His writing otherworldly.
What books are you looking forward to? Let’s amply writers.
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