WYPR Arts

What We're Reading, March 15-21

Published March 15, 2011 at 11:26 AM EDT

Tea Obreht makes her sparkling debut with the folkloric Tiger's Wife, and another new author, Cara Hoffman, holds her own with the creepy but elegant So Much Pretty. A Jay-Z biography falls short, but Jonathan Coe's Maxwell Sim, a humorous novel about Internet loneliness, provides an acerbic glimpse of modern times.

The Tiger's Wife

by Tea Obreht

In The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht deftly weaves the past with the present, fantasy with reality and superstition with the cold hard facts of war and its aftermath. The book is set in a country presumed to be the former Yugoslavia and draws on the rich folk culture of that region. When the novel opens, Natalia, a young doctor, learns that her beloved grandfather has died alone in a remote village. As she tries to find out more about his death, she learns more about his life through two fables: the story of the deathless man whom her grandfather claims to have encountered several times during his life, and the story of the Tiger's Wife, a richly imagined tale of his encounter with an escaped tiger that haunted the village where he grew up. These stories are told against the backdrop of Natalia's own life. As Obreht follows her protagonist across borders that once did not exist into a country that was only recently enemy territory, she creates a vivid sense of the complexity of a region ravaged by civil war.

Hardcover, 352 pages; Random House; list price, $25; publication date, March 8

Empire State Of Mind

How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office

By Zack O'Malley Greenburg

Empire State of Mind tells the story of rapper Jay-Z (aka Shawn Carter) and his rise from drug slinger to tape slinger and, later, to corporation runner. The best-selling musician, who has had more No. 1 records grace the Billboard charts than Elvis (second only to The Beatles), no longer makes all his money from rapping — and he hasn't for years. According to author Zack O' Malley Greenburg, he invests in brands and then boosts their sales by dropping their names into his music. He ensures that his partnerships are as profitable as they can possibly be with savvy product placement and cross-promotional deals. Carter is also very good at realizing when the brands he invests in or represents are at the top of the market and cashing out (see: Armandale Vodka, Roc-a-Wear). Greenburg even suggests that Jay-Z's marriage to Beyonce is something of a corporate merger, and that any children the couple might have would allow both of them to move into more markets and make even more money.

Hardcover, 240 pages; Portfolio; list price, $25.95; publication date, March 17

The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

By Jonathan Coe

It was only a matter of time before someone wrote a novel examining the psychological impacts of social media and Internet addiction on our lives, and that person (this month, anyway) is Jonathan Coe, a British novelist who deserves more attention on these shores. His latest, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, is a meditation on loneliness and disconnection as it relates to the Internet era. Maxwell Sim, his schlumpy, downtrodden narrator, has 70 friends on Facebook, but no real shoulder to cry on when his wife leaves him. He decides to take a trip offered by a friend to drive a Prius to a remote British isle (as part of a promotional gig for an organic toothbrush company), and along the way he falls in love with the voice coming through his GPS system. Feeling as lonely as ever, Sim decides to court his ex-wife online by adopting a fake Web persona, an act that — as you can probably guess — does not have the intended results. Maxwell Sim is funny, acerbic and, most of all, a novel that could not have been born at any other time than the present.

Hardcover, 336 pages; Knopf; list price, $26.95; publication date, March 8

So Much Pretty

By Cara Hoffman

So Much Pretty is a haunting, gloomy novel that defies genre — it is one part crime thriller, one part ambitious novel, one part prose poem. Hoffman's debut tells the tale of a series of horrific events that take place in Haeden, a small town in upstate New York, drawing on multiple perspectives to glimpse all sides of the same story. Two girls go missing in Haeden — first, waitress Wendy White. Recent-transplant journalist Stacy Flynn — who wants to get a big scoop and get out of town — decides to cover the White case with a controversial angle, using the girl's murder as a chance to ask big questions about assault, women, blame and deceit in a small town. Fifteen-year-old Alice Piper, a local brainiac and the daughter of Gene and Claire (who narrate much of the novel), reads Flynn's story and decides to do some probing of her own into the White case, connecting several dots and nearly discovering the killer — until she too goes missing. So Much Pretty raises questions about denial, violence against women and when a citizen should speak up, even if it puts another at risk.