The Bug by Ellen Ullman
The Bug is a mesmerizing first novel about a demonic, elusive computer bug and the havoc it wreaks on the lives of the people around it. This rare combination–a novel of ideas and a suspense–is a story about obsession and love that takes readers deep into both the personal and virtual life.
In 1984, at the dawn of the personal-computer era, Roberta Walton, a novice software tester at a SiliconValley start-up, stumbles across a bug. She brings it to its inadvertent creator, Ethan Levin, a longtime programmer who is working at the limits of his knowledge and abilities. Both believe this is a bug like any other to be found and fixed and crossed off the list. But no matter how obsessively Ethan combs through the depths of the code, he can’t find its cause. Roberta runs test after test but can’t make the bug appear at will. Meanwhile, the bug, living up to its name, “The Jester,” shows itself only at the least opportune times and jeopardizes the fate of the company.
Under the pressures of his obsession with the bug and his rapidly deteriorating personal life, Ethan begins to unravel. Roberta, on the other hand, is drawn to the challenge. Forced to learn how to program, she comes to appreciate the intense intimacy of speaking the computer’s language.
As she did in Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman brilliantly limns the space between human beings and computers–a space we all occupy every day as we peer into our monitors. Ullman has been a computer programmer for more than twenty years, and having switched from code to prose, she has shown herself to be a unique, revelatory writer. She is the insider who can articulate the realities of the technical world, taking readers to emotional and intellectual places fiction has never brought them before. With The Bug, Ullman proves she is not only a remarkable essayist but also a master storyteller.
If the Sky Falls by Nicholas Montemarano
If the Sky Falls is the debut short-story collection from award-winning fiction writer Nicholas Montemarano. These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano “an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams.”
Redemption in these intense and sometimes violent stories is found in the lyrical prose, in the act of storytelling itself. A young man tries to rescue his sister from her abusive lover, and in the process must revisit his own family’s violent history (“Note to Future Self”); a home healthcare worker pops pills and takes two men with cerebral palsy to a strip club (“The Usual Human Disabilities”); a man has a breakdown years after witnessing a brutal murder and doing nothing to help the victim (“The Other Man”). In “The November Fifteen,” a man is taken from his home and tortured, though he has no idea why; when he returns home he finds a different kind of torture awaiting him.
Two of the stories—“Shift” and the Pushcart Prize–winning “The Worst Degree of Unforgivable”—are stylistic tours de force. But style in this collection is always at the service of story. Montemarano’s fiction maintains that rare balance between traditional storytelling and experimentation: his work is innovative without being flashy, sincere without being sentimental. In an age of hype, If the Sky Falls truly is the real thing—an original and important achievement in the short-story form.
Blood of the Wicked by Leighton Gage
In the remote Brazilian town of Cascatas do Pontal, where landless peasants are confronting the owners of vast estates, the the bishop arrives by helicopter to consecrate a new church and is assassinated.
Mario Silva, Chief Inspector for Criminal Matters of the Federal Police of Brazil, is dispatched to the interior to find the killer. The Pope himself has called Brazil’s president; the pressure is on Silva to perform. Assisted by his nephew, Hector Costa, also a federal policeman, Silva must battle the state police and a corrupt judiciary as well as criminals who prey on street kids, the warring factions of the Landless League, the big landowners and the Church itself, in order to solve the initial murder and several brutal killings that follow. Justice is hard to come by. An old priest, a secret liberation theologist, finally metes it out. Here is a Brazil that tourists never encounter.
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
In the tradition of Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley and Greg Iles, Attica Locke spins a tale of mystery and intrigue, set in Houston, Texas during the oil-rich 80s. And as it entertains, the book offers a powerful message about race, class, how the decisions you make can change the course of your life, and how the past influences the present.
Jay Porter is hardly the lawyer he set out to be. His most promising client is a low-rent call girl, and he runs his fledgling law practice out of a dingy strip mall. But he has long since made peace with his path to the American dream, quietly and carefully tucking away the more radical parts of his past: the guns, the FBI file, and the trial that almost ended his life. But one night he makes an impulsive decision to save a drowning woman’s life, opening a Pandora’s Box in the process. Her secrets put Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him everything. But through it all, Porter stumbles upon a chance to become the lawyer…and the man he once dreamed of becoming. BLACK WATER RISING, with its universal characters in relatable situations, will resonate with multi-generational readers.
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
A comic novel that tells the story of Ray Midge of Little Rock, whose wife has run away with her first husband, Ray’s credit cards, and his car. Ray sets off to get his own back (especially his car). Along the way, he encounters an array of Portis’ unique characters: inner-directed and undeflected innocents, with Ray the most calmly determined of them all.
Borderlands by Brian McGilloway
Winter 2002. The corpse of local teenager Angela Cashell is found on the Tyrone-Donegal border, between the North and South of Ireland, in an area known as the Borderlands. Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin heads the investigation. The only clues are a gold ring placed on the girl’s finger and an old photograph, left where she died.
While Devlin searches for the girl’s killer, her father has his own ideas about who is responsible—and his own ideas about how to make them pay. Meanwhile, Devlin becomes reacquainted with an old flame eager to rekindle their affair.
Then another teenager is murdered, and Devlin unearths a link between the recent killings and the disappearance of a prostitute twenty-five years earlier—a case in which he fears one of his own colleagues is implicated. As a thickening snow storm blurs the border between North and South, Devlin finds the distinction between right and wrong, vengeance and justice, and even police officer and criminal becoming equally unclear.
A dazzling and highly lyrical debut crime novel, Borderlands marks the beginning of a compelling new series featuring Inspector Benedict Devlin.
Forensics: A Guide for Writers
