Forthcoming Fiction

John Wilson and what he is reading next.

Faithful readers will recall that near the end of my February column, I took up the subject of AI and fiction, a prospect that has depressed me so much that I have generally avoided thinking about it. Just recently, though, as I reported, I’ve wondered if AI (in the right hands) might not midwife some very interesting novels.

Here's an example. In 2020, Oxford University Press published a book called You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English, by E.J. White; the minimal author bio on the flap of the dustjacket said she “teaches the history of the English language at Stony Brook University.” That book is at once learned and entertaining, with a distinctive flavor. In the same year, Stanford University Press (in a series called “Stanford Briefs”) published A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet, also by E. J. White, as she was identified on the front cover; on the back of the book, she is Elyse White, “Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Stony Brook University. A self-professed dog person, she’s now the human associate of Aaron Purr and multiple foster kittens.”

Then, last fall, Ecco published Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, by Elyse Graham. Inside the back flap, with a whimsical photo in which she is cradling a dog, Graham is described as “a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, a flagship school in the SUNY system. She holds degrees from Princeton, Yale, and MIT, and is the author of three academic books”; the third of these is one I haven’t yet read, The Republic of Games. (It was published in 2018.)

I’ve kept an eye out for a substantial piece about Graham, who would seem to be a very interesting subject, but if such has appeared, I haven’t seen it. (There is an online interview occasioned by Book and Dagger, worth your time if you’re intrigued; be sure to read it all the way to the end.) In any case, thinking about her and her books made me wish for a novel about a shape-shifting academic with an unusual turn of mind. And that made me think about AI and fiction: how such a project could be facilitated by AI.

On another front: Michael Connelly has a novel coming in May, Nightshade, in which he will introduce a new protagonist. I’ll devour this book within 24 hours of its arrival. Connelly, who will turn sixty-nine in July, is a marvel, a national treasure. I love interesting sentences, whether in fiction or “nonfiction”; that’s part of the reason I have spent a substantial chunk of my life reading. I’m not sure that Connelly has ever written an interesting sentence. But he has written one compelling novel after another, starting with his first, The Black Echo, in 1992, and he’s never lost his moral compass. Like his signature protagonist, Harry Bosch, he’s driven, in the best sense, and we’re the beneficiaries.

Also coming in May is Andrey Kurkov’s The Stolen Heart, translated by Boris Dralyuk, the second novel in the crime-fiction series that began with The Silver Bone. Kurkov is one of Ukraine’s foremost writers; Dralyuk, in addition to being a superb poet, is much in demand as a translator. I’ve mentioned this novel earlier, but now is a good moment to bring it to your attention again.

And speaking of Boris Dralyuk, on X just recently, someone mentioned his translation of Mikhail Zoschenko’s Sentimental Tales, which I love. It was published in 2018 in the “Russian Library” series from Columbia University Press. Hard to believe that was seven years ago! I decided it was time for a reread and have installed the book in a stack right next to the bed that also includes Viktor Shklovsky’s Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot. As you know if you have followed me for a bit, that’s a book I’m routinely dipping back into. If you love reading and thinking about fiction but haven’t ever tried Shklovsky, best known as one of the founders of the literary movement known as “Russian Formalism” yet hardly contained by that label, you owe it to yourself to dive into Energy of Delusion. Perhaps it will set your head spinning enjoyably as it does mine.

I’m also (still!) rereading fiction by Elizabeth Ferrars (published as E.X. Ferrars in the United States), whom I mentioned in an earlier column. She wrote a lot of “mysteries” in the course of a long writing-life, excelling both in standalone novels and when working in a series. Younger readers I know (not “young”: on that front I’m largely out of touch) seem mostly unfamiliar with her work—some have never even heard her name. She’s worth a look. She may not be your cup of tea, but if she is, you have a lot of books to look forward to.

My brother, Rick, is a fellow lover of mysteries and crime fiction, and we often trade recommendations, including now-obscure British writers whose books are available via Kindle, often very inexpensively. As an example I often cite the prolific George Bellairs (a pseudonym), whom Rick blessedly nudged me to read. (Some of his are to be found in well-produced paperback editions as well.) Bellairs was a bank manager who took up fiction-writing on the side and then continued to produce books “in retirement.”

And here we loop back to where we started. As I typed those words about Bellairs, I suddenly thought how much I would enjoy a good novel about such a writer, about his double life (so to speak) working at an “ordinary” job while at the same time writing crime-fiction. That could be tasty.