Wicoff ran a real-life literary salon in London (along with her friend, the late Diane Middlebrook), and then another in New York (with Nancy K. Miller) before setting up She Writes. She spoke to Salon about the voracious response to her online forum, and why women still need a support site of their own.

Why did you choose to set up SheWrites.com now?

Because it was the soonest that I could get it up and going! Every woman writer I know, whether she is just starting out or has written five novels and been nominated for the National Book Award, is in need of some new ideas and fresh sources of support. Writers have been getting dwindling advances and less and less of what they need from publishers; at the same time they are being asked to do more than ever before, to market, to promote, to brand, angle, to blog, and all on their own dime.

I know how much is expected of authors even if they publish with a major house. I also know, however, that many authors have become extremely skilled and expert in this new marketplace even if they’ve done so begrudgingly. Why let all that knowledge effectively go to waste, to die when an individual author’s book reaches the end of its publicity life cycle? She Writes was founded on the psychology of abundance. More is more. None of us has anything to gain by withholding what we’ve learned from each other.

The idea behind She Writes is to share our knowledge, to aggregate and harness the information each of us has hard-earned, and make it available to our community in an organized, efficient way that will make all of our lives easier. Why should every writer have to reinvent the wheel every single time she publishes something new? Why not help each other out so we all have more time to write, and write well? She Writes also makes it possible for writers who live outside of New York to find each other locally, to form writing groups, salons and form other offline relationships that writers, who work in isolation, really want and need.

How does the site work?

At its most basic level, the site functions a lot like Facebook – which is nice because it’s very intuitive for new members as long as they are familiar with social networking. Writers can join and make a page where they can upload book covers, post excerpts, blog, post events, import existing blogs, start discussions with other writers, join or start groups based on genre, region, or anything else they fancy (there are more than 80 groups already on She Writes), friend people, and seek out professional and artistic support.

A crucially important part of She Writes, however, will be our She Needs Help section, which we are building out now. We will be hosting webinars from the best in the business on everything from “Twitter for Writers,” coming up next week, to fiction workshops, offering vetted, top-quality services to authors, including editing, event production and marketing help, and organizing a grass-roots network of She Writes salons all over the country and the world to support and host our writers when they publish and tour.

As of now we have members in all 50 states and 71 countries, after just four weeks. The potential for growth is enormous.

Why focus on women?

Women write important books, they are published and they are powerful, but at the same time women who write are still treated as “women writers” and not as writers, period. I would say to my sons — you are welcome to join She Writes (all men are welcome) — but as long as it remains true that a book about a man coming of age in New York can be considered a literary work, while a book written about a woman coming of age in New York will almost certainly be labeled chick lit and given a pink cover, as long as the major literary prizes are almost always awarded to men, and the editors in chief of the major literary magazines are almost all men, and as long as 85 percent of the bylines on our Op-Ed pages are written by men, women need to band together and organize in an effort to have our contributions taken more seriously.

Women are no longer on the outside of publishing banging on the door and to get in, but women continue to be excluded from the kind of status that men are granted by default.

Don’t male writers need support networks?

I am sure male writers are also in need of networks and new ideas when it comes to publishing and promoting their books. The problems in the current publishing model are deep and widespread. But all you have to do is ask yourself what it would mean to start a network called He Writes and the answer to this question is self-evident — men do not start from a point of being labeled and pigeonholed by their gender. Until they do, it’s hard to imagine a need for a group that specifically supports their efforts. 

Published in 1996, “Infinite Jest” was David Foster Wallace’s second, and ultimately final, completed novel, and has become known equally for its sprawling attention to detail, its near impenetrability and its effectiveness as a doorstop. Often compared to experimental fiction like “Ulysses” and “Naked Lunch,” its list of characters (and their fictional filmographies) alone may be longer than some entire novels. In the foreword to the paperback release, penned by Wallace’s friend and contemporary Dave Eggers, he promises that the book isn’t actually daunting, and that its author is indeed a “normal person.” But that’s no consolation to the legions who have quit reading the book partway through. Baldwin admits that before he started the project, he had only read about 75 pages — but they’d stuck with him. “It sat in my library for so long that I no longer even saw it when I scanned the shelves,” he said. “But based on what little I had read, I knew for a fact that I would enjoy all 1,000 pages. I can’t say that with such certainty for, say, ‘Don Quixote.’”

When Wallace died last year, I felt an itch of hard-to-place sadness for this man I did not know, whose work I had barely began to graze. His writing seemed made for me, set on the outer cusp of the television generation and the dawning of an Internet era; the humor, the tennis and the weed all mixed in a curious haze. With his long, stringy hair, eternal stubble and ubiquitous bandanna, Wallace was like an untouchable older brother, his stereo bass bumping from down the hall and his intrigue limitless.

As I ease into my 20s and the one-year anniversary of his death approaches, “Infinite Jest” suddenly seems within my grasp — in large part because the Infinite Summer project injected a fun and contagious competitive spirit into something that had come to seem like a Herculean solo undertaking. The Web site lays out a “summer syllabus” of target page numbers by date, dividing the novel’s intimidating 981 pages (plus 388 endnotes) by the number of days in the summer, which adds up to about 75 pages per week. Infinite Summer provides playful (but helpful) tips and guest essays — largely personal accounts, including one from a seasoned four-time reader of the book and another from the singer of indie-rock band the Decemberists, Colin Meloy, who admits that “Infinite Jest” has lingered on his shelf ever since an impulse buy in 1997.

On the hyperactive discussion forums, everyone from Wallace virgins to connoisseurs can offer interpretations and suggest topics (organized by the reading schedule in order to prevent spoilers). One reader wondered about the book’s setting — a futuristic hybrid of the United States, Canada and Mexico referred to as the Organization of North American Nations or by the acronym ONAN — sparking a conversation about the biblical character Onan and the notoriously wasteful practice of masturbation (i.e., onanism). Elsewhere, the novel’s reference to a “trial-size dove bar” sparked a debate about whether Wallace was referring to the chocolate or the soap. Eventually, a fan — whose source claims to have asked the author personally — announced definitively that it was, in fact, a reference to the ice-cream bar. Puzzling over this kind of pop cultural minutiae is all the more fun when reading along with a few thousand of your closest Internet friends.

Of course, “Infinite Jest” also captures what Wallace called “a real American type of sadness” — that of “a white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated” guy who is successful, and yet terribly lonely and adrift. Which makes the idea of bringing so many people together for a communal reading of the book all that more meaningful. To some, the “book club” may seem like an archaic social experience — connotations of housewives and airport novels abound — but many Infinite Summer participants enjoy the, well, infinite possibilities of this Web project. Paul Debraski, a New Jersey librarian who finds himself reading 20-25 pages on his one-hour lunch break, was initially attracted by “the camaraderie of achieving something big in a group” without the geographical limitations of a traditional book club. Cynthia Newberry Martin, a 52-year-old fiction writer, had kept “Infinite Jest” on a “to-be-read” shelf since 1996, but sets a goal of only 11 pages a day, keeping her on schedule. Baldwin insists that the greatest strength of an Internet-based book club is the concept of an archive, allowing someone on any schedule to check in whenever it is convenient. “Someone could read ‘Infinite Jest’ a year or five years from now, following along with the site as they do so, and feel as if they are part of the community despite the temporal separation,” he said.

Also reading along are blogging superstars like Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress (reading on the Kindle) and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, while essay contributors to the site include Jason Kottke and even Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch. In good company, I resolve to keep plugging along, even as I fall behind, fearing the online shame and personal disappointment that would accompany surrender. In a book where one paragraph can sometimes stretch across three pages, an army of fellow readers provides not only extra aid in deconstructing this intricate epic, but also playful pep talks that cement solidarity and make finishing this book both a private and social experience.

As for Baldwin (who is about 100 pages ahead of schedule), he says he is surprised by the viral success of the project. Though he claims to have “zero reliable metrics” on Infinite Summer’s participants, Baldwin monitors the project’s presence on social networks including a Facebook group, blog comments and Twitter followers, who have taken to discussing the project using the #infsum hash tag. “It’s important to understand, my goal in organizing this event was simply to encourage myself to read the book,” he said. “That Infinite Summer wound up encouraging thousands of others to do likewise is just gravy.”

This week, we shine the spotlight on first-person narratives: A young backpacker’s life unravels on a trip to China; a novelist traipses around Italy in search of adventure; a girl grows up with a white dad who wants her to act black; a movie star helps a sensitive young woman make it through a turbulent childhood and a “mean little deaf queer” comes out (and grows up) with honesty and good humor.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

By Susan Jane Gilman

It was a plan inspired by a paper placemat at a Rhode Island IHOP, but Susan Jane Gilman and her friend Claire, newly minted Brown graduates, were too young and romantic to see this as inauspicious. They decided to team up for an around-the-world backpacking tour, beginning in China. They didn’t know each other that well, and they made something of an odd couple: Gilman a funny, voluble New Yorker from a family of modest means, and Claire (a pseudonym, for reasons that soon become clear) a wealthy WASP determined to prove to her overprotective father that she was “not some pampered little princess.” “Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one — except with lip gloss,” was what they told themselves.

Since the year was 1986 and the People’s Republic of China had been open to independent travelers for “all of about 10 minutes,” it took only about 10 more minutes before squalid guest houses, sweltering heat, weird food, the impenetrability of the Chinese language and the sudden realization that “we didn’t know one soul in the entire hemisphere” began to batter their resolve. Gilman found herself wondering how famous travelers like Hemingway and Captain Cook had managed it. “Then it dawned on me,” she writes. “Most of them had been completely drunk all the time.”

“Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven” is a frequently hilarious and ultimately moving coming-age-story disguised as a classic backpacker’s memoir. There are the homesick collect calls to relatives (“You’ve got three thousand dollars, an Ivy League education, and an enormous pair of bazooms,” Gilman’s grandmother told her. “The world should have your problems, bubeleh.“), the hellish wrangling with the Chinese bureaucracy, the intense yet fleeting alliances with people met on trains or in hostels, the unexpected and overwhelming moments of exhilaration, and of course the irritable sniping inevitable between any two people who spend most of the day together under stressful circumstances. Gilman, for example, bridled at what she regarded as Claire’s melodramatic “playacting” — the superimportant “reports” she went off to write at times, her insistence that people they met on boats and restaurants were “contacts” sent by her father and his associates, the fear she professed whenever she saw anyone who looked Middle Eastern.

The reader will recognize the true nature of Claire’s difficulties much earlier than Gilman did. When her friend disappeared in Guilin and their great adventure dissolved into a frantic search followed by nightmarish negotiations with Communist officials and police, Gilman got a growth experience far more transformative than the average Lonely Planet itinerary can offer. It’s a page-turner ripe with odd little ironies — the water purifier the women carried went unused, but that 900-page copy of “Linda Goodman’s Love Signs”? That wound up saving the day — and finished off with midlife update at once wistful, gratifying and wise. Which, when you think about it, is more than you can say of “On the Road.” — Laura Miller

The Last Supper

By Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk’s engaging memoir of three months spent roaming Italy begins with a desire to escape — not from anything specific, but from the dull, familiar feeling of familiarity. She is weary of Bristol, the British city where she and her husband are raising their daughters, and more than that, she despises the gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction that has crept over her. As anyone who’s read a bit of E.M. Forster knows, the English have long used Italy as an exotic escape valve. (“In novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment’s notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings. It was a cure for everything.”) As the family speeds along the French coastline she feels the dark clutter of her English world flutter away in the sunlight. And yet once they settle into their Italian farmhouse, she is frustrated to find that the family has not undergone a magical Mediterranean transformation. “Did we come all the way here to behave exactly as we do at home, while dogs bark at the wire fences and the mist hangs sodden on the hills?”

“The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy” is not your typical rosemary-scented, ready-for-cable ode to renovating a rustic house and rubbing shoulders with jolly peasants. A very talented novelist and observer, Cusk has a knack for drilling down into the thick of things and finding strangeness in even the most ordinary experiences. (Her autobiographical “A Life’s Work” is one of the most bracing, dark books ever written about new motherhood.) Rather than looking for a sensual vacation, Cusk has in mind nothing less than a rearrangement of her senses. Once in Italy, she dedicates herself to a twofold process: making herself at home with the locals (particularly the Scottish-Italian taxi driver who takes the family under his wing and forces them to play endless games of tennis in the staggering heat) and pursuing aesthetic enthrallment. As she writes self-mockingly, “We will learn to fillet an Italian city of its artworks with the ruthless efficiency of an English aristocrat deboning a Dover sole.”

Madonnas and altarpieces and relics fly by, as Cusk (and her remarkably patient, art-appreciative young daughters) traipse the Piero della Francesca trail and chase Raphaels and elbow their way through the museums of Florence. The author approaches everything she sees through the prism of history and literature, allowing herself to be captivated by her surroundings even while she is trying desperately to detach herself from the tourists all around. Cusk may hate tourists — her descriptions of them are usually hilarious and sometimes cruel — but she makes a passionate, sharp-tongued tour guide in this book about fleeing the ordinary in search of something beautiful. — Joy Press

 I’m Down

By Mishna Wolff

If you’re going to spin a tale about your impoverished, racially conflicted childhood, you might as well be funny about it. How else could Mishna Wolff explain to the reader of “I’m Down” that she grew up with a white dad who lived life as if he were black and expected her to do the same?

Wolff’s dad — who styled himself in a short perm, “a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains and a Kangol” — divorced her lily-white hippie mom when she was a kid, and took custody of Wolff and her younger sister. While her mom is laying one kind of politically correct guilt on her (“Honey, oppressed people of the world make Barbie so a big corporation can get rich. Now is it really worth that kind of karma for a doll?”), Dad is unleashing another kind of guilt — about skin color and privilege. He pressures her to fit in with their African-American neighborhood, goading her to toughen up and demand respect when kids call her names like “marshmallow turd.” It isn’t until Mishna learns the art of capping — throwing insults — that she starts to thrive and transform into the humorist she is today.

But just as Mishna is relaxing into her new role as ghetto smartass, her mother yanks her into an upscale white school on the other side of town where the unspoken rules couldn’t be more different. Getting into a fight isn’t a power play here; it’s a sign that you’ve lost self-control. And playing dumb is uncool among the angsty rich girls who sit around drawing horses (and later listening to the Cure). Wherever she is, Mishna is never quite at home: At school she is always a little too rough around the edges, and at their broken-down house, her father and his string of African-American girlfriends warn Mishna against getting too uppity.

“I’m Down” is full of funny incidents that probably weren’t so funny at the time — like when Mishna’s dad punished her for taking part in a faux-satanic ritual at a slumber party by forcing her to … join the local basketball team, populated entirely by African-American amazons hoping to get to college on a scholarship. That would teach her a lesson! Of course, it actually does teach her a lesson, as do so many other semi-traumatic events along the way. Although the book sometimes relies so heavily on wit that it’s hard to separate emotional turmoil from comedic setpiece, Wolff’s affection for her family and friends — and for the prickly, clueless honky girl she once was — makes “I’m Down” more than just a joke. — Joy Press

My Judy Garland Life: A Memoir

By Susie Boyt

Great movie stars are our magnifiers. They take some precious morsel of our humanity, a chip of diamond, and blow it up to the size of the MGM Grand, making it magnificent. Yet because they exist in a realm where ordinary people seem irrelevant, hardly anyone ever talks about how a star can change the way you feel about yourself. Susie Boyt, who became obsessed with Judy Garland after seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at the age of 3, does just that in her memoir, “My Judy Garland Life.” Her book is an unusual mixture of appreciation, biography and autobiography, but its most fascinating aspect, is, paradoxically, not the shimmer of the star, but the portrait that emerges, via a tantalizing trail of revelations, of the author herself.

“That girl should work two hours and then be taken home in an ambulance,” the actress Ina Claire once said of Garland; “how she gives of herself!” For Boyt, growing up in Britain as the conventional youngest child in a family of unflappable bohemians, Garland “proves something I’ve all my life believed, that nobody else in the world thinks is true.” The Judy Garland credo, as Boyt sees it, is that “to be the person with the strongest feelings in life is to be the best.” Garland’s determination to strip herself bare, to funnel every modicum of her energy into her performances and to sing with all of her engulfing emotions utterly exposed to her audience, communicated to Boyt that her own “highly sensitive” temperament was more than OK. It was heroic.

The daughter of painter Lucien Freud (whose grandfather was Sigmund), Boyt was raised by her mother, the sort of woman who, upon receiving a modest inheritance, bought a small cargo ship, pulled her four children out of school and set about raising them on the high seas. But this, like her parents’ separation, all happened before Susie was born. She grew up in an environment rather like a Victorian laundry, with pots on the stove boiling the yellow out of old bloomers for the vintage clothing store her mother opened after the ship project went bust.

Boyt portrays herself as an unexciting “old-fashioned girl,” a chubby, stagestruck child turned domestic angel (she likes to bake, wash her father’s dishes and fantasize about being Garland’s faithful housekeeper). But she offers ample hints — a college boyfriend who dies in a tragic accident, rock stars greeting the dawn on her roof — that her life has been anything but drab. Her ruminations on the spiritual cost of dieting, the delicate art of consolation, the dignity of suffering and the importance of hero-worship are unfailingly funny and perceptive. “Do psychoanalysts share their fellow human beings’ desire for a place where there isn’t any suffering?” she writes, wondering what her great-grandfather would have thought of Garland’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” “If so, they are very altruistic.” It would be altruistic to wish Boyt had a more comfortable childhood, but without it, we wouldn’t have this thoroughly delightful book. — Laura Miller

“Mean Little deaf Queer”

By Terry Galloway

The most significant moment of Terry Galloway’s life happened before she was even born. During a family stint in post-WWII Germany, her pregnant mother was given the antibiotic mycin to treat a kidney ailment. The drug helped cure the infection, but also led to fetal complications — and Terry’s creeping deafness. In her meandering, beautifully written memoir, Galloway recounts her path from Germany to Texas, from hearing to nonhearing and back to hearing again, and from her chronically insecure youth to a career as a stage performer and writer.

She also makes her way from bed to bed, men to women — having, among other dalliances, a foursome with a classics professor, his wife and her mistress, and an affair with a cocaine smuggler. “Mean Little deaf Queer” manages to be more intriguing and more entertaining than most coming-out memoirs, partly because it tackles the intersection between sex and disability (a sexually inexperienced Galloway can’t hear her early female lovers giving “urgently needed information” during sex) and partly because of the honesty and good humor of her prose (during a sojourn at a “camp for cripples,” she reacts to losing a swimming race by pretending to drown).

Despite the frequent darkness of her story, with trips to a psychiatric hospital and multiple suicide attempts, Galloway never lapses into preachiness or self-pity, and the result is an unusual memoir about an unusual life that is both oddly uplifting and  eminently readable. — Thomas Rogers

To prevent just such a catastrophe, here are four novels of crime and adventure, recently published or scheduled for release later this summer, and cherry-picked from a field of lesser contenders. But consider yourself warned: Don’t start any of these babies just before you plan to get a good night’s sleep or take a dip in the pool. You may find yourself, much, much later, looking up as you turn the last page and wondering just where the summer has gone.

“Dark Places”

By Gillian Flynn

Libby Day has a bad attitude. She’s surly, she’s never held a steady job and she spends most days lying around in her crappy rental house in her crappy Kansas City neighborhood, glaring at her unfriendly neighbors. She refers to suicidal ideation as “a hobby of mine.” Even her favorite aunt has stopped returning her calls. But as excuses for gloominess go, Libby has a doozy: Her mother and two sisters were massacred in the family’s farmhouse when she was 7, and her teenage brother, Ben, went to jail for the crime. Since that horrible night, Libby has lived off charity and the proceeds of a grotesquely dishonest “inspirational” book titled “Brand New Day! Don’t Just Survive Childhood Trauma — Surpass It!”

By the time Gillian Flynn’s sardonic, riveting “Dark Places” begins, however, the cash has run out. A desperate Libby agrees to speak to a “Kill Club,” a convention of geeks obsessed with famous crimes. Naturally, she demands a hefty fee; she even brings along select items of Day family memorabilia, hoping to sell them to some creepy collectors. To her astonishment, at the meeting she’s confronted by prison-house groupies convinced that her brother is innocent, women who blame Libby (and the therapists who coached her) for the testimony that convicted him. It’s a possibility that Libby — who has refused to examine her memories of that night for years — has never seriously considered. Soon she learns that hardly anybody thinks Ben was really guilty of the killings.

“Dark Places” is part mystery, part chronicle of a young woman’s emergence from a 27-year funk. Like Kate Atkinson (“When Will There Be Good News?”), Flynn has figured out how to fuse the believable characters, silken prose and complex moral vision of literary fiction to the structure of a crime story. Alternating with Libby’s grumpy present-day account of reinvestigating the “Kinnakee Kansas Farmhouse Massacre” are chapters set during the day of the murders, told from the viewpoints of her mother, Patty, and Ben himself. Ben’s in the throes of heavy-metal-fueled adolescent rebellion, while Patty struggles to save the family farm from a treacherous economy and her deadbeat ex. You can sense trouble coming like a storm moving over the prairie, but can’t quite detect its shape.

There’s something about the flatness of the Great Plains states and the difficulty of life in the lonely farmhouses there that makes the Days’ murders seem even more stark and unfathomable; this is “In Cold Blood” country. That the secret to the killings lies not in hatred, madness or rage, but in love is Flynn’s ingenious variation on the theme. In tough times, even the tenderest emotions can break us, but as Libby finds out, they can also put us back together again. (Available now)

“The Strain”

By Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

What’s summer without a big, fat vampire novel? “The Strain,” by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, doesn’t have the Old World moodiness of Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 bestseller, “The Historian,” but what it lacks in misty Carpathian landscapes and haunted libraries it makes up for in apocalyptic action and supersize portions of gore. “The Strain” isn’t really the reinvention of the vampire yarn that its publisher claims, but that’s OK; it’s hard to imagine how anything genuinely original could be done with the genre at this point. Instead, “The Strain” is shamelessly, gleefully cheesy, like one of those sneakily potent cocktails that includes a dash of everything in the bar (and heavy on the grenadine).

Co-authors del Toro (director of the Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” franchise) and Hogan (a mystery novelist) kick things off with a transatlantic flight landing at New York’s JFK and going suddenly, totally dark — a nod to Bram Stoker, whose “Dracula” featured an eerily depopulated sailing ship dropping anchor off England. Fearing terrorism, emergency response personnel approach the plane carefully, only to discover that everyone on board is dead. Well, almost everyone. Among the four survivors (none of whom remember anything about the landing) is an attorney who gets all four sprung from quarantine, over the protests of our prudent hero, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather of the Centers for Disease Control.

Of course, the survivors are infected, and soon the semi-supernatural vampire virus is spreading through New York City, abetted by a sinister billionaire financier whose name (Eldritch Palmer) is yet another nod — this time to Philip K. Dick. The vampires themselves behave more or less like zombies, although their wherewithal is somewhat inconsistent; one tries to attack a victim through a car windshield because it apparently doesn’t know about glass, while another manages to send a text message. Goodweather teams up with the obligatory elderly vamp expert (this time it’s an Armenian holocaust survivor turned pawnbroker) and a delightfully saturnine Russian-American rat catcher in a desperate bid to stamp out the epidemic before it spreads beyond the city.

“The Strain” is part “The Andromeda Strain,” part “Night of the Living Dead,” and all B-movie, but despite its air of pastiche, it succeeds on the force of sheer enthusiasm. Del Toro and Hogan aren’t afraid to use lines like, “Everett, this is bigger than you can know!” — and their affection for the genre’s clichés, along with their brisk delivery of suspense and thrills, makes even the hoariest chestnuts seem like old friends.

The only really discordant note is Goodweather himself, a blatant authorial avatar embroiled in a child custody battle with an ex-wife who was too small-minded to accept her proper role as Helpmeet to Genius. Since “The Strain” is the first book in a projected trilogy, I’d like to take this moment to have a word with Messrs. del Toro and Hogan: Gentlemen, I won’t speculate about whose divorce-settlement baggage found its way into “The Strain,” but in the future, leave the score settling with your ex and her toolish new boyfriend at home. We don’t want that in our vampire novel! When it comes to blood sports, please stick to the strictly fictional kind. (June)

“Ravens”

By George Dawes Green

Chance is a cruel god and luck cuts both ways in the Southern strip-mall milieu where George Dawes Green’s “Ravens” takes place. The Boatwright family of Brunswick, Ga. — churchgoing Mitch, his boozy wife, Patsy, their striving, community college student daughter, Tara, and her kid brother, Jase — are no sooner blessed by a $318 million lottery jackpot than they draw the attention of two losers passing through town. One, Shaw, is a charismatic sociopath and the other, Romeo, is Shaw’s devoted, if intermittently ambivalent, Igor. In no time, the Boatwrights’ phenomenal good fortune morphs into calamity.

With a combination of ghastly threats and mesmerizing persuasion, Shaw worms his way into the Boatwrights’ home and alternately cows and seduces them into presenting him as a co-owner of the winning ticket. Romeo plays enforcer, prowling the streets and poised to slaughter their friends and relatives if they rebel. Then, carried away at a press conference, Shaw suddenly proclaims his intention to give his share to charity. This attracts a come-to-Jesus following, some of whom believe that he has the power to heal. In no time, Shaw begins to subscribe to his own charade, convinced that he plans to “bring great beauty into the world” in “this great adventure” he’s sharing with the Boatwrights.

What makes “Ravens” remarkable is how monstrous Shaw can be without ever becoming an absolute monster; he’s a volatile mixture of megalomania, petulant rage and pathetic longing, dreaming of a respectable marriage to Tara, as if he’d never threatened to shoot her in front of her beloved grandmother. Romeo’s much the same, softhearted enough to want to give his roadkill a decent burial (“I was just trying to do right by this animal”) yet determined to fulfill his loyalty to Shaw even if it means cutting down innocents in cold blood.

The novel’s suspense hinges on this precarious dynamic; any little thing — a slight, a smile, a flash of memory — might tip Shaw or Romeo one way or the other, toward savagery or sympathy. This instability also makes the book surprisingly, if darkly, funny. Green’s juicy supporting characters contribute a lot of the humor, from the aging, hangdog deputy who’s shrewd enough to smell a rat, to the appalling Patsy, who takes a break from being terrorized by Shaw to check the going prices for Malibu beach houses and fantasize about sipping tea with Nancy Reagan.

Green writes like Ruth Rendell with a generous injection of Elmore Leonard, but he also waxes philosophical. “Every great idea is enforced by a great terror,” Shaw tells Romeo, as he acquires more and more of the mannerisms of a tent-revival preacher. “That’s how good comes into the world — with a dark escort.” He has a point: How much clout would God wield without the Devil behind him, playing the heavy? The fate of the Boatwrights hangs on the possibility that Romeo’s evil will turn out to be as fraudulent as Shaw’s holiness. A long shot, perhaps, but Green keeps the family’s unstable luck in play until the very end. (July)

“The Girl Who Played With Fire”

By Stieg Larsson

Lisabeth Salander, a ninja-hacker-urchin punkette with an implacable and somewhat inhuman sense of justice, was more of a supporting character in the international bestseller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” than the novel’s title might lead you to suppose. “Dragon Tattoo” was the first of three long, detailed crime novels written by the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, who died of a heart attack at age 50; all three books have been published posthumously in Sweden, with the English translation of the second, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” coming out this July. The second novel shifts the focus away from middle-aged investigative journalist Mikel Bloomkvist to dig deeper into Salander’s past, explaining how she became the extraordinary creature she is.

But Salander is only the most obvious attraction in Larsson’s addictive fiction. His secret weapon is his straightforward, methodical, even expository style, most likely an adaptation from his nonfiction feature writing. It’s the very absence of the usual flashy, fast-paced, movie-inspired tricks that hooks you in. When Salander, rocking a bogus identity, sets about furnishing a new apartment, Larsson meticulously lists everything she buys right down to the new mop, naming each item ordered from Ikea. Then he tells you how much she spent. By conventional rules, this level of detail ought to be tedious, but instead it makes the novel feel reported, as if it were the world’s greatest true-crime narrative.

The story this time around hinges on an exposé of sex trafficking about to run in Bloomkvist’s magazine. The freelancer working on the piece turns up murdered, as does Salander’s nasty legal guardian. (She’s been declared mentally incompetent, for reasons that only become clear later.) Forensic evidence points to Salander as the killer, which Bloomkvist, naturally, refuses to believe. She goes on the lam and he tries to clear her name, fighting a state bureaucracy whose doctors, lawyers and case managers have mislabeled the brilliant Salander as (in the words of one cop) a “psycho bitch.” It also doesn’t help that, to judge by Larsson’s fiction, Sweden is crawling with misogynistic bullies. Unfortunately for the villains, they have picked the wrong victim, and the unflappable Salander proceeds to infiltrate networks, office buildings and personal computers, wreaking her terrible vengeance according to her own peculiar code.

Although “The Girl Who Played With Fire” lacks the melancholy island setting of “Dragon Tattoo,” and Stockholm is a less atmospheric replacement, the Swedishness that made the first novel so beguiling remains. It’s in the characters’ uneasiness with their overmanaged lives, their awareness of the danger that lies in permitting your identity to be dictated by a state that doesn’t always live up to its vaunted ideals. That’s what makes Salander, for all her oddity and surliness, so engaging: An antisocial democrat, she refuses to comply. She’s the imp that lurks in every machine. (August)

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“The Lady Elizabeth” by Alison Weir

Elizabeth Tudor is a puzzle by any conventional standard of femininity, a woman who declared that if she had her druthers, she’d be “a beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.” If she had a great love, or even a great passion, she never got carried away by it, or at least not far enough to let it interfere with the more important (to her) affairs of state. Did her public success hide a private tragedy — was she, in short, the prototype for Miranda Priestly (from “The Devil Wears Prada”) and every other emotionally unfulfilled career woman in popular culture? Or did she, as she proclaimed to her troops at Tilbury, truly harbor “the heart and stomach of a king” within “the body of a weak and feeble woman”?

Alison Weir’s novel of Elizabeth’s youth, “The Lady Elizabeth,” takes the queen at her word. In what appears to be the first installment in a series of historical novels, she depicts the proto-monarch as a girl who learns from a disastrous infatuation at age 14 (with her trifling fool of a stepfather, Thomas Seymour) that love is a treacherous diversion. Furthermore, “her father had desired her mother, and her mother [Anne Boleyn] had met a bloody end.” Is it any wonder, then, that the princess greets every suggestion of marriage with “a kind of horror”? Since “The Lady Elizabeth” ends with the queen’s coronation, and Weir’s last sentence lingers over the “warm and twinkling” eyes of Robert Dudley — regarded by some as the first serious test of Elizabeth’s resolve in this department — perhaps more romance awaits in future volumes.

So, instead of the usual Tudor soap opera of adultery, beheadings and martyred females — the kind of yarn that has kept Philipa Gregory, author of “The Other Boleyn Girl,” in Jaguars for the past few years — “The Lady Elizabeth” is a relatively sober work detailing the coming of age of a prudent, if brilliant woman. Initially a willful child, Elizabeth goes in and out of favor with her father, half-brother (Edward VI) and half-sister (Mary I), dodging scandals, treasonous conspiracies, religious persecution and efforts to marry her off to assorted inbred Hapsburg hunchbacks and weaklings. By the age of 20, she is cannily explaining to her elders why an unmarried British queen should stay that way: “If she marries a foreign prince, he might interfere too much in the affairs of the realm. Yet if she marries an Englishman, his rule might raise jealousies and factions.”

This is, in short, historical fiction not as romance novel but as speculative biography. Still, there are plenty of velvet gowns, jewels and palaces to feed a reader’s appetite for vicarious pomp, and where Weir has chosen to embellish on the established facts of Elizabeth’s life, she does so for reasons carefully explained in her author’s note. She has a firm grasp of the history, though a less certain hand with her dialogue — I’m pretty sure no 16th century Englishman ever told anyone to “tone it down”; As a result, on the occasions when Weir has a character quote directly from source materials, the sudden shift in tone can be startling. Nevertheless, that she makes a point of using those sources indicates how conscientious she is with her subject. Weir is more historian than novelist (this is only her second work of fiction, the first being the best-selling “Innocent Traitor,” about the life of Lady Jane Grey), and “The Lady Elizabeth” is best enjoyed as that: a dramatic, dishy alternative to a traditional biography, as well as the latest attempt to plumb one of history’s best-known, yet most enigmatic figures.

— Laura Miller

“The Dark Lantern” by Gerri Brightwell

Chamber pots: That’s what’s missing from the usual Merchant-Ivory depictions of the late Victorian era. However, Jane Wilbred, the heroine of Gerri Brightwell’s “The Dark Lantern,” set in 1893, can’t afford to ignore the unpleasant realities of life before flush toilets. She’s a maid in an upper middle-class London house, and emptying the chamber pots is one of her regular tasks. So is carrying heavy trays of tea things up and down narrow stairways in cumbersome skirts (any broken crockery will be docked from her meager pay). Jane feels lucky to have the job; as an orphan and the illegitimate child of an executed murderess, she thought she’d never escape the stingy, sanctimonious country vicar’s wife who deigned to hire her despite the “stain” in her blood. Unfortunately, to get this new position, she’s had to change her name and forge a letter of reference.

It turns out that Jane isn’t the only resident of 32 Cursitor Road with a secret. The mistress of the house, Mina Bentley, keeps wheedling her husband to move back to Paris, where they met, and tries not to go outside any more than is absolutely necessary. She fired the previous maid because she spotted the girl talking to a suspicious-looking man on the street; what is she so afraid of? On Jane’s second day, a mysterious stranger manages to bluster his way into the house by pretending to be Mina’s husband, Robert, then rifles through the study, apparently taking nothing. The cook is skimming off the top of the household accounts, and the senior housemaid manipulates a complex and inescapable web of favors and obligations that has all the rest of the servants at her mercy.

Brightwell has delivered a delectably sinister picture of the snake pit seething behind the facade of respectable Victorian affluence. Only Robert Bentley himself can afford not to lie, and that’s because he’s at the top of the heap. Then his brother dies in a shipwreck while returning from India and a young woman who claims to be his widow is rescued from the disaster. She is the only surviving witness to their shipboard marriage; if she’s telling the truth, she inherits the house.

A proponent of anthropometry — a method of comparing very precise measurements of the various features of an individual’s body — Robert is locked in a professional rivalry with the champions of fingerprinting. Each side is trying to persuade law enforcement officials that they have the key to setting up a new system for “the complex process of identification.” Since half the people in Robert’s own house may or may not be who they say they are, the irony of his situation is rich indeed.

The multiple deceptions and misperceptions of the residents of Cursitor Road mesh like the gears of a Swiss clock, each ticking the next one a turn closer to disaster. Eventually, even the reader is drawn into the machinery, wondering which stories — and which hearts — are false. The surprises that wait at the end are more a matter of emotion than plot, and that makes them all the more satisfying.

— Laura Miller

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“Mistress of the Sun” by Sandra Gulland

Seventeenth century France may have revolved around that most kingly of monarchs, Louis XIV (aka the Sun King), but Sandra Gulland’s entertaining novel “Mistress of the Sun” finds its center in a less exalted figure — that of Petite, a pixieish horse-crazy girl of minor nobility who would grow up to become Louis’ first mistress. Gulland seems to specialize in conveying a woman’s-eye view of great men: Her previous trilogy of novels retraced the life of Josephine Bonaparte, whose tale is unraveled via imaginary diaries.

“Mistress of the Sun” opens when Petite (aka Louise de la Valliere) is 6 years old, living with her family in the famine-ravaged French countryside, a place where old pagan superstitions comingle with religious belief. Tomboyish and precocious, Petite has already taught herself to read well enough to peruse the mystic writings of Saint Teresa. When a band of local gypsies blows into town with a pack of wild stallions, Petite is transfixed by the most ferocious one — a white creature named Diablo — and begs her adoring father to buy him.

When the white horse turns out to be untamable, Petite fears her father will slaughter the beast and desperately turns to a chapter in her ancient horse-training manual on “Bone Magic.” The enchantment she performs works, but it also sets off a series of unfortunate events and darkens her soul forever — or so she is convinced.

Like most girls of the era, Petite has no control over her fate. With no dowry or title, she gets passed around and handed off like a pretty object, first sent to be “waiting maid” to Marguerite, a raucous and misshapen young royal who has high hopes of marrying the teenage Louis. The girls follow the king’s activities as if he were a boy-band heartthrob: “It was reported that he was comely, that he refused to wear a wig, that he loved hunting, music and theater and danced the lead parts in ballets.”

Eventually, Petite comes into close contact with the regal one himself when she is sent to live at court as a lady in waiting to Henriette, a lively English princess who is married to Louis’ brother. The palace is a hothouse of gossip and trysts, and Petite spends her days fulfilling the whims of bored royals, whether dancing or singing or accompanying her cohorts on hunts.

Our heroine is far more interested in riding horses than she is in flirting, or in anything else, really. She observes the pomp and ceremony around her (and boy is there a lot of pomp) with a distant curiosity. Gulland delights in the details of her surroundings, and squeezes great amusement out of minor characters, like Petite’s horrible bore of a stepfather, a self-important marquis. He marks their first meeting by oversharing — blathering on about “the state of his bowels (unforthcoming), the enema and purge he took once a week to balance his humors, his hippo-tusk false teeth,” the latter of which he brags work far better than plain old elephant ivory.

It is not Petite’s beauty or purity but her spectacular riding skills that eventually excite the admiration of the (by now married) king. At which point “Mistress of the Sun” morphs from an engaging, intricately described girl’s-eye view of history into a bodice-ripper. (His breath? “Fragrant with wine.” Hers? “Coming now in gasps.”) Or at least it does for a few chapters.

But the known facts of Louise de la Valliere’s and Louis XIV’s life — recently detailed nonfictionally in Antonia Fraser’s “Love and Louis XIV” — lend themselves all too well to torrid treatment. The rest of the story is laced with all kinds of political and sexual intrigue, as well as religious guilt and public suffering. Gulland’s gothic touches sometimes seem overripe but not inappropriate in this easily devoured historical romp about a girl, a king, her horse and their nation.

— Joy Press

“The World Before Her” by Deborah Weisgall

Not all of Deborah Weisgall’s historical novel takes place in Venice, but that ancient, sinking city, so full of beauty and ugliness and decay, is the appropriate launchpad for her tale of two women who visit the city, a century apart. Each journeys there in an airless, stagnant marriage — one 10 years old, one new. And Venice for each of them evokes memories of earlier and more vibrant loves.

In 1880, 60-year-old Marian Evans, by then a celebrated novelist under the pen name George Eliot, is trying to bring herself, and her writing, back to life after the death of her partner, philosopher and “Life of Goethe” author George Henry Lewes. Evans lived with Lewes (whose wife had left him but not divorced him) out of wedlock for 25 years. After his death, Evans finally married the financier John Cross, 20 years her junior. “The World Before Her” begins with the Crosses honeymoon arrival in Venice.

In 1980, a Rumpelstilskin-obsessed sculptor, aptly named Caroline Spingold, is visiting the city with her husband of 10 years, a financier 20 years her senior. Malcolm Spingold has brought his wife wealth and some happiness, but their decade together has sapped her of something essential — her spirit and perhaps her artistic self. Now he has brought Caroline to Venice, where she spent a childhood summer before her father left her mother, because he is scheming a way to bring Venice back from the economic death that seems inevitable.

Much of “The World Before Her” is about the dream of reviving things that are dead — cities and memories and relationships and ambitions — through art. “Art doesn’t fool,” says Caroline. “It transforms. It makes the mess bearable.” Both Marian and Caroline have woven art from their messes; they create sculpture and stories, making endings happy when life does not promise them the same good fortune. They make pieces of art that should be immune to the passage of time and to decay, and yet are utterly shaped — in both creation and reception — by the currents of life and love around them.

Marian fears she cannot write without her late lover; and when she looks at paintings in the Academia with her new husband — so cowed by her ardor that he literally cannot rise to meet her — she feels numb. “Fifteen years ago, when she saw them with George, these paintings had affected her like music. All her senses had been receptive; she had been in love, she had been open to the world. Love gave her clarity. It had been a kind of ecstasy.”

Weisgall, who has written about music, ballet and painting, jams her book with not only Eliot and Lewes, but James McNeill Whistler, Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann. Marian and Caroline both search for texture and meaning. They want to spin life into art, to laugh and breathe and soak in beauty, while the men they’re with seem wan and lifeless, emotionally and artistically impermeable.

In some regards, Weisgall is taking a page from A.S. Byatt’s century-spanning intellectual romance “Possession.” It jumps back and forth in time, forming intricate patterns with the life of the mind and the life of the body, worrying about morality both past and present, sending small clues from one woman’s story shuttling a hundred years back into the other’s. But for all the academic heft of a book that makes a meal of literature, painting and sculpture, and that takes as its setting a heavy, slightly rotted city, “The World Before Her” does not seem as heavy or plodding as might be feared. Weisgall’s style is diverting and compelling; the book zips by, even as its meditations on art and time, god and marriage, get full-bodied treatment, and even as she skillfully dips readers in and out of memory and flashback, introducing dozens of characters, some real and some imagined, in two centuries and on two continents.

The novel tells a brief and beautiful story of how we get over love, and how we have changed in our struggles to name and contain it by marriage. “The World Before Her” is not the lightest book you’ll pick up this summer, but it might be one of the smartest, and most vibrant.

— Rebecca Traister