Wintering, by Katherine May (Riverhead). This timely memoir details seven months that the author, suffering from a mysterious illness, spent sequestered at home. For May, who saw life as “linear, a long march from birth to death,” the enforced hiatus comes to feel like nonexistence. Yet it inspires unusual investigations—into hibernating animals, deciduous trees, the cultures of places with long winters, and the ritual pauses that once shaped human society. May’s message isn’t about how to be cheery during a personal winter but about how to embrace the “negative presence” of these moments, and to allow the rebirth they naturally engender. “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us,” she writes. “Given time, they grow again.”
We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky Cooper (Grand Central). The woman at the center of this biography-cum-detective story is Jane Britton, a doctoral student in archeology at Harvard who was brutally murdered in 1969. Cooper, a Harvard alumna, tracks down people involved in the case—the neighbor who found the body, a policeman, university museum staff—and charts how Britton’s story has metamorphosed, through successive generations of students, into a “myth” about the dangers that women in academia face. While projecting her own life onto Britton’s, Cooper weighs the responsibility to accurately narrate the past: “Is it ever justifiable, I wondered, to trap someone in a story that robs them of their truth, but voices someone else’s?”
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf). Conceptual artists and sicarios share a capitalist Wild West in this Mexican writer’s phantasmagoric stories. A “personal memories coach” extorts his clients; a crack addict impersonates a famous writer; and, in the titular story, a film critic tutors the leader of a cartel who, bearing “the face of Quentin Tarantino,” has put a bounty on his doppelgänger. Giddily undermining authorial convention—one character delights in “depositing a little vomit on those readers who adore straightforward literature”—the stories show that, as the hapless film critic notes, “parody and the sublime are complementary, even at times interchangeable, aesthetic concepts.”
Music for the Dead and Resurrected, by Valzhyna Mort (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Memory, metaphor, and myth intermingle to sometimes nightmarish effect in this collection by a Belarus-born poet. Mort excavates the individual and communal traumas wrought by a violent and repressive national history, and calls herself “a test-child exposed to the burning reactor of my grandmother’s memory.” Her poetry can be stark in its sorrow and startling in its horror, but it is enlivened with gallows humor and a surreal sensibility. “Why does unfolding this starched bedding / feel like / skinning someone invisible?” she asks. “Why can’t the spoons, head-down in glasses, stop screaming?” Incantatory refrains evoke the wails of an accordion, an instrument that provides a leitmotif.