Laila Lalami

“I like books that grapple with the big, unanswerable questions,” Susan Henderson says. “Bruce Bauman’s And the Word Was (Other Press) asks this: “How much must you love god to accept Auschwitz? Or whatever happened to you? To accept that god exists after that?” Neil Downs, an ER doctor living in NYC loses his only child in a Columbine-like school shooting. Unable to save his son in his own ER, he waits hours for his wife to arrive, learning then that she had spent the day with another man. In a tailspin against which his Judaism seems useless, he flees to India, not to set off on a spiritual quest so much as to become lost in a place as different and far way as he can imagine.

“Downs seeks out one person there: his favorite author, the controversial Levi Furstenblum. A Holocaust survivor who lost his wife and child in Auschwitz, Furstenblum later penned (among other works quoted within this novel) the chilling and satirical novella, “Chamber of Commerce” –a story about Hitler’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Downs hopes to learn from the cranky and reclusive Furstenblum how to persevere in what seems to be a cruel, meaningless world. Instead, his mentor teaches him a powerful lesson about the anguish of victims mirroring the hate of their oppressors. Downs faces a number of other challenges as the story progresses: a dogged media, a lawsuit filed against him by the parents of one of the gun-wielding students, an affair with an activist named Holika, and a surprising revelation from his grieving wife whom he’d hoped to stop loving. The triumph of this book is its ultimate hopefulness without any pat answers. Downs’ spirituality remains elusive but life continues to engage him, and he has not lost his ability to love. He’s retained enough, at least, to manage the pain and uncertainty of life.”

Susan Henderson speaks sign language, is learning Mandarin, plays soccer with Ritchie Blackmore, has an unrequited crush on Dylan Thomas, knows all the words to the Go Go Crankin’: Paint the White House
Black album and lives in NY with some pets, a costume designer, and two boys (see one eighth of one boy in photo).

“There are so many underappreciated books. It’s a tough question,” Elliot says. Instead of picking just one book, he rattled off a few that deserve more readers: “Tom Bissell’s Chasing The Sea was underappreciated, I thought. It’s a travel story about a former Peace Corps volunteer returning to Uzbekistan but it’s also a history of the region, and it’s also the story of the Aral Sea, the greatest man-made environmental disaster in history. Wow, what a book! Reads like lightning. It’s one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read even though I have zero interest in Uzbekistan (no offense to the Uzbekistanis).

There’s also the great Chicago novel, The Beggar’s Shore by Zak Muncha which was published by Andrew Vachss in paperback original. Also the illustrated novel Rent Girl by Michelle Tea and Laurenn McCubbin which came out last year and really pushed the mix of art and lit to its next level. People are going to be copying that book for years though I don’t think it sold that many copies.

Then there’s Craig Clevenger’s The Contortionist Handbook and Dennis Cooper’s Try, but both of those books have large cult followings. I could name some of Nelson Algren’s lesser works, and also Notice by Heather Lewis but if I’m going to push someone in the direction of something they should read I prefer to encourage indulging living writers and thereby taking part in our cultural conciousness.

At any rate, we should appreciate books that are more gritty, that have something to say about class stratification. Every book published by Softskull Press or Manic D Press is underappreciated, as are many, though not all, by Last Gasp.”

Stephen Elliott is the author of four novels, including the critically acclaimed Happy Baby, and the editor of the anthology Politically Inspired. His most recent book is Looking Forward to It, an account of his experiences on the campaign trail in 2004. His work also has been published in GQ, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Believer magazine. He lives in California.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“Emil Habibi’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist is classic satire and may also be one of the first examples of peculiarly Israeli Arab literature,” Jonathan says. “The Arab Israelis are ethnically Palestinian, but their experiences have been shaped by life in an Israeli society to which they simultaneously do and do not belong, and this has given rise to a distinct literary voice. Habibi – who was a communist member of the Israeli Knesset – experienced these contradictions in full, and the exploits of his absurd anti-hero illustrate how surreal they must have seemed to those living through them.

The term “pessoptimist” – the author’s coinage for a pessimistic optimist – is a good one to know for those who follow Middle Eastern politics, because the news from that region is often both hopeful and depressing. The continuing validity of Habibi’s satire a generation after it was written inspires the same mix of emotions.”

Jonathan Edelstein is a lawyer practicing in New York City and the author of The Head Heeb, which analyzes Middle East affairs and democratization in the developing world.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“I love basically anything published by The New York Review of Books, classics reprinted in beautiful covers, but this one was a particular find: The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott,” Greer says. “I’ve always been a fan of “tell not show” fiction, which is just to say careful storytelling like Ford Madox Ford, and here is perhaps the shortest, most subtle piece of observed life you can come across outside the works of William Maxwell. It is nothing more than an afternoon spent in the company of a wealthy Irish couple who happen to have, tethered to the wife’s arm, a peregrine falcon. Our narrator watches the next two or so hours with an intensity that lets nothing beautiful show without a shadow of ugliness, and nothing vulgar appear without an examination of its worth. In other words: it’s life. Barely anything happens, nothing is learned. And then it’s over. What is revealed is just complexity of a marriage, and the violence of our animal selves, and the ignorance of youth, and jealousy, and how to cook a pigeon. And somehow always the falcon sits trembling, hooded, on her arm.”

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the collection How It Was for Me, and the novels The Path of Minor Planets and The Confessions of Max Tivoli. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. He lives in San Francisco.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“The Gangster We Are All Looking For is poetry stretched long to tell a tale of immigration, heartache, and a touch of dysfunction,” Halaby writes. “Narrated by a young Vietnamese girl working herself into American culture, living in San Diego, this is the story of a family coming to grips with its past and present. Le thi diem thuy’s language is graceful, lyrical, and honest, (especially toward the second half of this short book) and you are left with a picture of a family, perhaps what is now a typical California family.”

Laila Halaby is the author of the novel West of the Jordan, which won the PEN Beyond Margins Award and a silver medal for literary fiction from Foreword Magazine.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“Part-Bombay travelogue, part-investigative journalism, all-hilarity, Justine Hardy’s Bollywood Boy is one of my favorite books about my favorite movie-making machine and the *only* book about the industry’s light-eyed heartthrob, Hritik Roshan,” Pooja says. “While she makes no new observations (that songs and dance stand in for sex or that the industry has possible Indian Mafia connections, for example), the book is an account of a year-long comedy-of-errors in which Hardy tried to score an interview with Roshan. Along the way, she meets a handful of interesting characters, real people whose connections with Bollywood are deep and genuine. What’s so refreshing about this book – other than the fact that’s it’s one of few non-academic books on Bollywood – is Justine’s respect for India and its entertainment. She loves the kitsch and craziness as much as I do.”

Pooja Makhijani is the author of Mama’s Saris and editor of Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“I came upon Wesley Gibson’s You Are Here with delight,” Trueblood says. “It’s a hilarious, energizing misery-fest of a book, about the attempt to live and write in New York when you arrive not so young as all that and without the cushioning illusions, with good work already behind you, and have to be, every day, younger, sexier and way cooler than you feel. Gibson knows how to fake being an upbeat guy; he is a bumbling knight to his writing students (one of the jobs to which he brings his guarded-against born tenderness is teaching four adult students on Saturday in an elementary schoolroom). The jobs appear and fade, his own work goes on behind the scenes as he struggles to make a living, a potential landlord finds him “not gay enough,” the apartment he takes (or that takes him) gives him, and us, the lonesome shivers, the roommate–here the book begins to soar–the afflicted roommate coughs his way into our hearts. You Are Here, a Memoir of Arrival: it’s a sad book, full of joy, the joy of life and of sentences like this: ‘Then she gave me a smile that was as slow as six deliberate paper cuts.’”

Valerie Trueblood is a writer based in Seattle. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Northwest Review, and One Story, among others. Her first book, a novel in stories, will come out this year from Little, Brown.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“Elsa Morante’s History is a book that should be known by more readers,” Romano says. “It’s a brutally tragic story of a woman who is widowed and then raped by a German soldier in Rome during WW II. Her relationship with her two sons, both of whom she loses, is very touching. Morante’s prose (an anonymous bystander narrates) is powerfully depictive and full of pathos. A jewel of a novel.”

Marco Romano was born in Rhode Island. He lives in New York, where he writes freelance music reviews.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“I would like to recommend Landscapes of a Distant Mother by Said, who, for security reasons, publishes only under his first name,” Treat says. “Landscapes of a Distant Mother is a memoir about exile and loss. A slight 112 pages, the book is spare but also wrenching. It centers on the reunion Said has with his mother whom he has only seen once since birth (he is 43). Exiled from his native Iran for political reasons, living in Germany, Said writes of the terrible anticipation of meeting his mother, the meeting itself, and its aftermath. Beautifully written, honest and at times, painful, Landscapes is written like a letter, addressed to his mother, “Alone with a note in my pocket, on which there is written the name of a stranger who is to lead me to you–to a mother I have never known.” It can be read as a love letter, a love that is full of misgivings.”

Jessica Treat is the author of two books of stories: A Robber in the House and Not a Chance.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“I recommend Gayle Brandeis’s The Book of Dead Birds. The novel won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize, an award in support of a literature of social responsibility, and earned praises from Toni Morrison who was one of the judges. This is an evocative and moving story narrated by Ava Sing Lo, the daughter of a Korean mother and African-American serviceman. Ava accidentally kills her mother’s pet birds before she begins to try and save endangered birds along the shores of the Salton Sea. Her story crosses cultures and merges generations. The author’s prose is pristine and I particularly appreciate the way in which she handles every character with dignity. The Book of Dead Birds is such a graceful story, as unusual as its characters.”

Sefi Atta was born in Nigeria, has lived in England and is now based in the United States. She is the author of the novel Everything Good Will Come and has completed her second novel Swallow.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.