Fraternity

February 1, 2020

Award-winning Métis author Dimaline makes her debut with an American publisher, Empire of Wild, the edgy story of Joan, heard fighting vituperatively with her now missing husband, who believes she spots him posing as a charismatic preacher in a battered revival tent (75,000-copy first printing). The youngest winner ever of Italy's prestigious Premio Strega, Giordano (The Solitude of Prime Numbers) returns with Heaven and Earth to limn the enduring bonds linking Teresa to three young men she meets one summer in Puglia, her father's childhood home. From debuter Mackenzie, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner, One Year of Ugly (60,000-copy first printing) takes a humorous approach to recount the travails of a Venezuelan family living illegally in Trinidad. A best-selling author in mass market, McKinlay moves into trade paperback original with Paris Is Always a Good Idea, the story.` of a young woman who revisits her gap year in Ireland, France, and Italy, looking for lost loves but finding something different. In the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Macomber's A Walk Along the Beach, shy Willa--especially close to sister Harper after their mother's death--is ready to follow Harper's advice about risking love until tragedy befalls Harper. Martin returns after his high-flying debut, Early Work, with the story collection Cool for America about the gap between what people want and what they achieve. Winner of the Terry Southern Prize, Nugent shows us all the stumbling antics of near-adults in Fraternity. In Poeppel's Musical Chairs, Bridget and Will hatch a plan to lure shining-star violinist Gavin Glantz back to their Forsyth Trio, which they founded together as Juilliard students, even as Bridget wrestles with multiple family complications (40,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 27, 2020
Terry Southern Prize–winner Nugent digs into Greek life at an unnamed western Massachusetts university in this winning collection (after Good Kids). In “God,” Delta Zeta Chi members admiringly nickname a classmate God after she writes a poem calling out Delta president Newton as an “early detonator” in bed. “The Treasurer” stars incoming Delta treasurer Pete, whose dedication to the brotherhood impairs his reasoning after he’s sexually assaulted during a leadership test, while in “Ollie the Owl,” Nugent conceives a comical alternate reality where the fraternity’s wooden owl mascot comes to life and attacks students. “Safe Spaces,” the lone tale featuring a female protagonist, ponders the aimless nature of a broken heart, as dropout Claire, high on cocaine, seeks refuge at Delta house after being rebuffed by a former lover. While Nugent shows consistent talent for capturing the voices and shallow ambition of college students, he stumbles when he leaves the campus—the collection’s weakest story, “Fan Fiction,” dawdles as Newton, the Delta president from “God,” moves to Los Angeles and dates a famous director. Despite this aberration, the rest of the collection pulses with energy, and Nugent commendably weaves humor and drama to shine an unflinching light on the young adults convening behind fraternity walls. One can almost smell the stale beer on the page.

May 1, 2020
Nugent won the 2019 Terry Southern Award, Paris Review's annual prize for humor, and this collection of eight interconnected stories makes it easy to see why. The comedy in Fraternity, as befits its subject, is dark, uncomfortable, even disturbing. The stories are set in a Massachusetts college town (clearly Amherst), and the focus is on young men who are in many ways the usual suspects: hearty-partying casual misogynists, macho tribalists, the toxically masculine. But Nugent understands that satire is a means not only of exposing or ridiculing its subject, but of making them, using the rules of their own skewed logic, understandable, even sympathetic. They're a varied group. There's the genuinely sweet, universally admired chapter president, Nutella, object of an unsanctioned desire in the brilliant opening story, "God" (and narrator of a subsequent story set years after he leaves college); there's Swordfish, whose atrocious sex-toy prank during an anti-rape march ends up bringing a wooden house mascot to demonic life in the magical-realist "Ollie the Owl"; there's Petey, the gung-ho frat officer who's always up for anything ("The Treasurer"); there's the thoughtful non-Greek freshman from Long Island (in the poignant "Cassiopeia") who comes to think of fraternities, despite an instinctive distaste for them, as a potential refuge from the anything-goes ethos of Amherst and wanders one night into a house where he has an utterly unexpected encounter; there are the idiot powers that be in "Hell" who, eager to concoct fresh humiliations for new pledges, invite an alumnus, a naval intelligence officer, to help them--and very soon find themselves contemplating deeper, darker types of initiation rituals than they'd intended. Nugent writes memorable women here, too: the title character in "God"; a wunderkind film director; the homeless, cocaine-selling dropout, Claire, who narrates the final story, "Safe Spaces." This is a book about the awkward, awful passage between adolescence and adulthood and about the way these unwary, ill-prepared boys negotiate it, or try not to. Nugent manages--the mark of the master satirist--to be simultaneously compassionate and ruthless. Splendid.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 15, 2020
Nugent (Good Kids, 2013) explores the depth of experiences radiating from the Delta Zeta Chi fraternity. This particular chapter is housed in Amherst, Massachusetts, and each character has a fraternity-bestowed nickname, such as Nutella or Oprah. The stories dovetail and spin around each other, never truly focusing on one protagonist; the fraternity functions as the main character. In God, Oprah waxes poetic about a girl who humiliated Nutella and was dubbed with that divine name. The unnerving Ollie the Owl brings in an element of magic realism when Delta Zeta Chi's stone owl mascot comes to life, with disastrous consequences. Other stories delve into issues of consent and hazing on college campuses. While the stories are light on plot, each vignette is highly discussable and written with a deft hand. This slim volume, which includes stories previously published in Tin House, Paris Review, and elsewhere, will appeal to readers of best-of-the-year short story anthologies and fans of Charles Baxter.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)