To Catch a Fascist, by Christopher Mathias (Atria). This absorbing book documents attempts by activists who are part of the Antifa movement to expose and sabotage far-right-wing groups. Mathias, a seasoned journalist who has long covered the far right, shows how activists variously confront and infiltrate such groups and reveal their members to the public. These campaigns rely on the notion that being found to be part of a white-supremacist group has social costs, like the loss of a job. But, as a former member of Patriot Front, a fascist organization, tells Mathias, the rise of figures such as Donald Trump could be taken to indicate that, in the U.S., “there’s almost already no stigma” around white nationalism.
Southern Imagining, by Elleke Boehmer (Princeton). A lyrical study of global literature, this book, by a professor at Oxford, seeks to explore “what it is to inhabit the far south of our planet in the mind.” A section on pre-modern Polynesian knowledge traditions reveals a world view dominated by a profound awareness of water and stars; other portions, on twenty-first-century fiction from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, highlight a shared concern with environmental fragility and the ways in which land, ocean, and living beings continually intersect. The theme of exploitation runs through many of the works under consideration, such as the Aboriginal Australian writer Alexis Wright’s novel “Carpentaria,” in which a mining corporation descends on a largely Indigenous town.
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Good People, by Patmeena Sabit (Crown). This devastating début novel takes the form of an oral history about a tragedy that shatters a family. At its heart is a couple who arrived in the U.S. in the late nineteen-nineties as refugees from Afghanistan. They prospered, and brought up four children in an affluent suburb in Virginia. Rotating testimonies from people they know—family friends, a cousin, lawyers—offer theories about what led to the novel’s central catastrophe. Once the nature of the tragedy has been revealed, the book transforms into an intimate study of an Afghan immigrant community forced to reëvaluate what it means to raise children in America. One friend says, “The money wasn’t the issue. . . . It was about one thing and one thing only: They forgot who they were.”
Every One Still Here, by Liadan Ní Chuinn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The stories in this début collection grapple with the Troubles, in part through an accretion of charged moments: cars are hijacked; people protest a museum’s display of human remains. The names of Northern Irish civilians killed by British armed forces are listed, accompanied by frank descriptions of their deaths, for ten pages. Ní Chuinn maps tense ideas onto a strikingly varied cast of characters. As sharp details accrue stealthily in the author’s subdued prose, the effect is one of chilling recognition. The Troubles, which ended in 1998, the year Ní Chuinn was born, sing the same plain and painful tune as our present.
