A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed Lemurs

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’ s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, in books that are coming out this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Kathryn Davis’s Versailles (Graywolf): I was a pretty girl; I glittered like the morning star. My red lips would open and it was anyone’s guess what would come out. A burst of song. Something by Gluck, a pretty girl in pain maybe, impaled on the horn of the moon. The Kings of France, starting with Charlemagne. A joke. From N. H. Pritchard’s The Mundus (Primary Information), a work originally begun in the sixties and described by its author as “a novel with voices,” “an allegorical romance, a poem in prose form,” and an “exploded haiku.” Paul Stephens, in his afterword, recommends that it is best “viewed, read out loud, meditated upon—possibly chanted or even absorbed as a collective trance.” From Izumi Suzuki’s Set My Heart On Fire (Verso), first published in Japan in 1996 and translated by Helen O’Haran: “Very womanly thing to say. Women are such realists.” Sabu had a different opinion to the comic-book artist. From Katherine Rundell’s Vanishing Treasures (Doubleday): Lemurs are strange in the way that the reclusive and wealthy are strange; having had the island of Madagascar to themselves evolve in, they have idiosyncratic habits. Male ring-tailed lemurs have scent glands on their wrists, and engage in “stink-fighting,” battles in which they stand two feet apart and wipe their hands on their tails, then shake the tail at their opponent, all the while maintaining an aggressive stare until one or the other retreats. It feels no madder than current forms of diplomacy. It’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs […]

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