Myth, Motherhood, and Mystery: Four Novels

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. His first book was Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas. His debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig  (MCD X FSG) has been named one of The Daily Beast's Best Summer Beach Reads of 2019, and one of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019. A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers. Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, and an introduction to a staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction.

Jake Wolff was born and raised in Maine. He received an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Florida State University. His writing has appeared in journals such as Tin House, One Story, and American Short Fiction. In Wolff’s first novel, The History of Living Forever (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) a chemistry student falls for his teacher and uncovers a centuries-old quest for the elixir of life. The morning after the death of his teacher and lover, Conrad Aybinder receives a bequest. As it turns out, the professor was not just a chemist, but an alchemist, searching for a mythic elixir of life. His death was sudden, yet he somehow managed to leave twenty years’ worth of his notebooks and a storage locker full of expensive, sometimes baffling equipment in the hands of his star student. The notebooks contain cryptic “recipes,” but no instructions; they tell his life story, but only hint at what might have caused his death. As Conrad pieces together the solution, he finds he is not the only one to suspect that the professor succeeded in his quest. The History of Living Forever takes us from Maine to Romania to Easter Island and introduces a cast of unforgettable characters, from drug kingpins to a group of immortalists masquerading as coin collectors. A review in the New York Journal of Books noted that “[…] At times, the novel reminds one of the work of Thomas Pynchon in its paranoid sense of a dark, secret world underneath what we think of as normal reality, but Wolff has his own, unique vision and a gripping poetic style.”

Born in the Philippines, Joanne Ramos moved to Wisconsin when she was six. She graduated from Princeton, and worked in investment banking and private-equity investing for several years and later became a staff writer at The Economist. The setting her novel The Farm (Random House) is Golden Oaks, a luxury retreat nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley that boasts every amenity: organic meals, personal fitness trainers, and daily massages. Moreover, you’re paid big money to stay there. But for nine months you cannot leave the grounds, your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby -- for someone else. Golden Oaks, The Farm as residents call it, is a facility housing surrogates carrying the children of the one percenters of the one percenters. In her novel, Ramos pushes to the extremes our thinking on motherhood, money, and merit and raises crucial questions about the trade-off's women will make to fortify their futures and the futures of those they love. USA Today noted that “What’s so striking about The Farm isn’t that it imagines a frightening dystopia. This isn’t a hundred years in the future, it’s next week. This is reality, nudged just a touch to its logical extreme. Its very plausibility is a warning shot.”

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she is a books columnist for the Boston Globe and has written for publications including the Paris Review Daily, the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, Bookslut, the Daily Beast, Cosmopolitan, and Huffington Post. She was also recognized in Refinery29's list of "21 New Authors You Need to Know."  In her latest book, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG Originals) the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid’s narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature.