Latest news with #HarperVia
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
A debut novel explores family relationships and cultural displacement
In her debut novel, Misophonia, Dana Vowinckel explores the cultural diaspora through one teenager's summer across Berlin, Jerusalem, and Chicago. It's a coming of age story that balances the narratives of a daughter and her father as well as the fifteen-year-old protagonist's abrupt (and reluctant) reunion with her mother. The book is also a semi-autobiographical trek through parts of Vowinckel's own life. Born in Berlin into an American-Jewish-German family, the author grew up between Chicago and Berlin and her novel manages to capture the sometimes awkward, oftentimes tender, dynamics of a family pulled across continents and histories. Though it explores the travails of teenage girlhood, the book also delves into the nuances of being Jewish and German and the challenges of reconciliation when your goals and feelings collide with world events. 'Language is at the core of the book, not identity,' Vowinckel explained in a recent interview in New York. 'It would be a mistake to read it as purely an identity novel,' she says. Critics have praised the novel for its rich, contrasting ingredients and Vowinckel's ability to narrate the emotions of its teenage protagonist with warmth and clarity. The book won the Mara Cassens Prize, a German literary award given annually for the best German debut novel, and earned Vowinckel the literature prize of the Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy. It was also shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize which celebrates outstanding new publications written in German. The 27-year old Vowinckel, who studied linguistics and literature in Berlin, Toulouse and Cambridge, was in New York to promote the recently published English translation of Misophonia by HarperVia. (The book was translated from its original German by Adrian Nathan West.) Vowinckel's visit included events at Germany's Consulate General of New York - which promotes cultural, intellectual, and artistic exchanges with Germany - and Deutsches Haus at New York University. Misophonia opens in Chicago, with parts set in Berlin and Israel. It follows a teenage protagonist, Margarita, as she travels to her father's birthplace in Israel with the mother who left her when she was a toddler. Margarita shares a special bond with her father, Avi - a doting Israeli who is a cantor at their local synagogue - ever since her mother, Marsha, abandoned the family. Eventually, arrangements are made - without Margarita's knowledge - for her to meet Marsha in Israel before returning to Germany. Blindsided, she wants no part of this overdue reconciliation with a mother she hardly knows. Meanwhile, in Germany, Avi tries to fill the hole left by Margarita's absence with a trip of his own, embarking on a personal journey, both hope-inducing and despairing. Writing the book through the prism of dueling narratives - switching between a teenage girl, and her father - allowed Vowinckel to engage readers in an unusual point-of-view combination, she says. Accounts of Jewish congregational life in Berlin are mixed with detailed descriptions of the awkwardness and lust that go along with living inside a female teenage body. 'Both perspectives were very interesting to me,' Vowinckel told the Chicago Review of Books in May. 'With a 15-year-old, there's early sexuality and kind of being lost in the world, contrasted with the very lonely, quiet life of Avi,' she said. Straddling the two narratives also helped balance the exploration of imperfect family relationships and larger cultural displacement, the author says. 'I think it was very helpful for me to have a protagonist with a very specific job description because that gives you rhythm to the text,' Vowinckel says. 'It made it very easy for me to start this big novel project with this very calm, laconic voice, and then mix it with Margarita.'
Japan Times
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
'Uketsu': The internet phantom haunting Japan's bestseller lists
Japan's bestselling books often converge around practical life advice: Mental math tricks for kids, tips on how to sound smart and personal finance hacks have all been top sellers in recent years. Wider pop culture trends break through, too: In 2020, Japan's top five bestselling books were all related to either the gory smash-hit manga 'Demon Slayer' or cozy escapist video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. A new mania now has the country's readers rapt: A set of odd books, somewhere between mystery and horror, between manga and novels, by the even odder writer known as 'Uketsu.' Strange Pictures, by Uketsu. Translated by Jim Rion. 240 pages, HarperVia, Fiction.
New York Times
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
3 Chilling Horror Books to Read This Month, Including a Reissued Classic
Strange Pictures The Japanese author Uketsu, according to his biography, 'only ever appears online, wearing a mask and speaking through a voice changer.' His work mirrors the mysterious nature of his persona. STRANGE PICTURES (HarperVia, 236 pp., paperback, $17.99), the first of Uketsu's novels to be translated into English, is a labyrinthine and multilayered horror mystery, full of cryptic images, about a series of deaths. The book opens with two college students in Tokyo reading a sad, abandoned blog that chronicles a portion of a man's life. The blog is filled with personal details, including entries about the man finding out that he's going to be a father and posts about the death of the man's wife during labor. It also features mysterious drawings by the man's wife. The students are convinced these drawings contain secrets and work to unravel them. But that's just the beginning. In the past, a string of unsolved murders plagued the region. In one instance, a man was brutally beaten to death with a rock while hiking and painting. Among his things was an unusual drawing, sketched on the back of a receipt and rendered in a different style than his other work. Is the picture a clue like the drawings on the blog? Who's responsible for the murders? Nine drawings hold the answers, but cracking the case is much more complicated than it seems. The novel is split into four parts. The third can feel repetitive, but the entire mystery is wonderfully complex and carefully crafted, so the misstep is easy to ignore. This is a story where revelations and new questions wait around every corner, and Uketsu keeps readers guessing until the very end. At Dark, I Become Loathsome Most people associate horror with fear, but great horror can also incite a deeply rooted sense of discomfort and revulsion. The work of the author Eric LaRocca does just that. Blacker than the blood of a fountain pen and unapologetically queer, AT DARK, I BECOME LOATHSOME (Blackstone Publishing, 230 pp., $25.99) shares the gruesomeness of LaRocca's previous work while exploring the inner workings of a mind shattered by guilt and grief. Ashley Lutin lost his beloved wife to cancer; then his young son went missing. The authorities are sure the boy is dead, but Ashley can't accept that. He has nothing left to lose and the memories of the mediocre father he was haunt him. As a coping mechanism, Ashley has covered his face in piercings and is trying to help others by ushering them through a multistep ritual of death he created where, among other things, he buries people alive in a coffin for 30 minutes. His patrons hope that facing their mortality will be transformative. One night, Ashley connects online with a man named Jinx who is interested in the ritual. After setting up an appointment, Jinx shares a disturbing story of sex, violence and kidnapping. Later, when the two finally meet, Ashley learns that Jinx has much more to tell, forcing Ashley to reckon not only with a past he'd rather not face but also with the weight of all his recent decisions. LaRocca exploded onto the horror scene in 2021 with 'Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke,' a brutal novella about queer love and obsession that went viral because of the graphic content it contained and the twisted psyches it studied. 'At Dark, I Become Loathsome' picks up those same themes, using them to fashion another unique, relentlessly depressive, strangely sexual and extremely violent novel about how pain changes people. The Contortionist's Handbook Craig Clevenger's THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK (Datura Books, 250 pp., paperback, $18.99) — originally published in 2002 and now reissued 23 years later — is one of those stories that defy categorization. It is a cult classic, a crime book and an understated horror narrative, all about a brilliant man who constantly reinvents himself to evade the law. John Dolan Vincent is a talented forger with an extra finger on one hand. He also suffers from horrible migraines and blackouts. Doctors haven't been able to help, so John self-medicates. One night he accidentally takes too many painkillers, and when he wakes up, he's in a hospital in Los Angeles where doctors think he tried to kill himself. As a result, he must undergo a psychiatric evaluation. But the hospital isn't evaluating John; they're evaluating Daniel Fletcher, one of the fake identities John adopted to outrun a criminal past. Now, however, both the thugs who hunt him and the authorities who want to detain him are encroaching. In order to get to safety, John must successfully trick the doctor evaluating him before time runs out. This novel is a master class in tension. John lived through a rough and traumatic childhood, and the evaluations force him to be someone else while he also contends with the deep wounds he carries. With its re-release, this superbly written and very entertaining novel is sure to make its mark on a new generation of readers.
