Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Fall Collection Sweepstakes

Essays: Lydia Davis--Davis has been the subject of high praise by suchlike as Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody. Draw your own conclusions from that.

The Topeka School--synopsis:

Set in Topeka in the 1990s, far from the cities through which Lerner’s previous two protagonists have wandered, it tells the story of Adam Gordon, a high school senior “whose hair is drawn into a ponytail while the sides of his head are shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised.” This novel is the history of that “lefty household,” told in his psychologist parents’ voices; it is also a disturbing, if often very funny, exploration of the forces that have led us to Trump. Unlike Adam’s horrible haircut, The Topeka School is utterly uncompromising: it confronts topics ranging from sexual abuse to racial appropriation to the bankruptcy of what passes for our political discourse. It does so with a courage and a clarity that ultimately leave one full of hope.

Not being familiar with Lerner's previous works, I can't comment on the quality of his prose, but the subject matter in this novel sounds fairly hackneyed. However, one of the duties of the artist is to breathe new life into the hackneyed, so maybe Lerner succeeds at this. Not certain I'd be interested enough to find out.

Unfollow--Phelps-Roper's memoir of her life going from Westboro Church member to activist could be interesting, if it doesn't fall prey to the navel gazing many modern memoirs are guilty of.

Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge--I have a feeling Fisher's own volumes of the chronicles of her life are more entertaining, and probably as, if not more, revealing.

Nothing there I can't wait to read until it turns up in the remainders bin.