Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best to wear a hardhat–that ruckus you hear is a whole bunch of incoming books. Over the next couple of months, report the People that Know, good books will be falling from the sky at a rapid rate. To be sure, I don’t mean (neither with this statement, nor with the post title) to tastelessly plug Don DeLillo’s new novel, in which our pop-culture-to-literature maestro trains his gaze on 9/11. DeLillo’s getting plugs enough, including an excerpt in this week’s New Yorker.

Jerome Weeks, at Book/Daddy, is keyed up about the fiction that’s on its way between now and the equinox, and pleading for somebody to send him galleys of Michael Chabon’s latest. (Couldn’t you just go up to Berkeley and knock on his door? That’s what I do when I don’t have the patience to wait two months and hand my credit card to the friendly folks at Cody’s.)

The Board of Directors at the National Books Critics Circle have a continuing series of posts noting the volumes they’re most looking forward to cracking open. Along with the expected excitement about Andrew Cockburn, Chabon, DeLillo, et al, a few shout-outs happily go to lesser-known writers, like Mike Davis, who drives up in the terribly topical Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb.

I’ll add to the proliferating lists The Fires, from Alan Cheuse, which will set you back a whopping $10. Technically, it doesn’t arrive until September 1, but Alan will be reading from it at conferences early this summer, which is, um, close to spring, before beginning a tour upon the book’s release.

If you only know Alan’s reviews on NPR, and have never sat down with his fiction, get thee to a bookstore. The Fires includes two of his novellas, a form he’s been perfecting for a few years now. Back in the MFA days, he concluded a workshop session with a thirty-minute reading from a work in progress, “Days Given Over to Travel,” which later appeared in Prairie Schooner. Even in an early draft, and at 6:30 on Tuesday afternoon, it completely entranced us.