In addition to the Chevelle, there was a Maverick, two Impalas, a few Camaros and five or six more examples of the heyday of American muscle. There were about a dozen other late-model cars parked haphazardly in front of the old convenience store. The bass from the sound system in a nearby Chevelle was hitting him in his chest so hard, it felt like someone was performing CPR on him. Laughter filled the air only to be drowned out by a cacophony of revving engines as the moon slid from behind the clouds. Like those writers, Cosby gives readers a panoramic vision of a fallen America for instance, rural Virginia's empty industrial parks, steadily being reclaimed by honeysuckle and kudzu.īut Cosby is also a master of the small moment.Beauregard thought the night sky looked like a painting. A not-so-invisible player here is racism, which fuels Bug's determination to give his kids a better chance.Ĭosby has garnered attention for his short stories, but this is his first novel with a major publisher and he's a great new noir voice in the Gary Phillips/ George Pelecanos mode. It's only a small exaggeration to say that I felt like I read the rest of this marvel of a souped-up crime novel with the same intensity and speed that Bug drives that muscle car.įate is always a major invisible player in stories like this and Cosby does an exquisite job of slowly hemming Bug in by bad breaks. So Bug - once a crack getaway driver - settles in behind the wheel of his father's old Duster to win that desperately needed prize money. Tiptoe-ing past, she peers in and realizes that Aunt Pishima - who's, as usual, sitting, glaring in her chair - is stone cold dead. To do so, she has to pass the open door of the apartment of her great aunt-in-law, a bitter dragon who was married at 7 and widowed at 12. Stuck inside the crumbling family compound, Somlata decides one afternoon to climb to the roof for air. Soon after the wedding, Somlata's mother-in-law tells her it's her job to reverse the family's fortunes by 'pestering' her husband to work. The central character here, Somlata, is an 18-year-old woman from a poor family newly married to a handsome, 'blissfully unemployed' older man from a once wealthy clan. But there's nothing canned about this story, which has the allure of a feminist fractured fairy tale. A heartwarming multi-generational tale of three Bengali women sounded to me like a variant on a lot of mass-market women's fiction. The novel's flip title was a draw its plot summary wasn't. Dubbed a modern Bengali classic, it's just been published for the first time in the United States.

The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die is a short 1993 novel by the Benagali writer Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. They have nothing in common apart from the fact that, at first glance, they're easy to underestimate. Let's cut to the chase: I have two novels to recommend.

Blacktop wasteland