Spectacular Fiction

Beginning with a harrowing, high-speed ride through the Upper South (a TVA baby is a good ol' boy with a Yankee father and a 12-gauge) and ending in a desperate search through New Orleans graveyards for Darwin's doomsday machine ("Charlie's Angels"), Terry Bisson's newest collection of short stories covers all the territory between-from his droll faux-FAQ's done for Britain's Science magazine, to the most seductive of his Playboy fantasies ("Private Eye"), to an eerie dreamlike evocation of the 9/11 that might have been ("A Perfect Day"). On the way, we meet up with Somali Pirates, a perfect-crime appliance (via PayPal) and a visitor from Atlantis who just wants a burger with fries, please. Readers who like cigarettes, lost continents, cars, lingerie, or the Future will be delighted. For those who don't, there's always Reality TV.

Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, six hundred "damnificados" -vagabonds and misfits-take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical "owners." Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven's Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse. The ghosts and miracles woven into the narrative are part of a richly imagined world in which the laws of nature, are constantly stretched and the past is always present.

Nazaré tells the story of a peasants' revolt in the polyglot city of Balaal. The story begins with a miracle. A homeless boy sees a whale washed up on the beach. He alerts the local fishermen, and soon, the whole town is trying and failing to push it back into the ocean. With just the boy left to accompany the whale now in its dying throes, a freak wave pulls the creature back into the sea. This is an omen. Change is coming. The boy and the washerwoman who adopts him cobble together a ramshackle army of fishermen, shopkeepers, lapsed nuns, anarchist bats, and an itinerant camel. They attempt to end the reign of the dictator who rules over Balaal. Their attempt involves pitched battles, farcical trials, rooftop escapes, and sun-parched wanderings in the wilderness. Looming over the disparate cast of characters is the legend of the giant wave, Nazaré, that will one day annihilate everyone and everything in the city. Nazaré is an adventure and a parable that pits the oppressed against the oppressor. The work has been, likened to that of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa in its use of language, its inventiveness, its humor, and its examination of issues of justice.

Love. Politics. Parasitic manipulation. Julia Hernandez left her husband, shot a real-estate developer out to gentrify Brooklyn, and then vanished without a trace. Well, perhaps one or two traces were left...With different personal and consumption habits, Julia has slipped out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum-a place between the cracks of our existence from which human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasp and a collective of hyper-intelligent spiders. When Julia's ex-husband Raymond spots her in a grocery store he doesn't usually patronize, he's drawn into an underworld of radical political gestures and Internet organizing looking to overthrow a ruling class it knows nothing about-and Julia is the new media sensation of both this world and the Simulacrum. Told ultimately from the collective point of view of another species, Sensation plays with the elements of the Simulacrum we all already live in: media reports, businessspeak, blog entries, text messages, psychological evaluation forms, and the always fraught and kindly lies lovers tell one another.

A radical activist, Luba Gold, makes the difficult decision to go underground to support the Puerto Rican independence movement. When Luba's collective is targeted by an FBI sting, she escapes with her baby but leaves behind a sensitive envelope that is being safeguarded by a friend. When the FBI come looking for Luba, the friend must decide whether to cooperate in the search for the woman she loves. Ten years later, when Luba emerges from clandestinely, she discovers that the FBI sting was orchestrated by another activist friend, who had become an FBI informant. In the changed era of the 1990s, Luba must decide whether to forgive the woman who betrayed her. Told from the points of view of five different women who cross paths with Luba over four decades, Clandestine Occupations explores the difficult decisions that activists confront about the boundaries of legality and speculates about the scope of clandestine action in the future. It is a thought-provoking reflection on the risks and sacrifices of political activism as well as the damaging reverberations of disaffection and cynicism.

Perched on a dry desert mesa, San Judas is a home of last resort for landless peasants who build makeshift homes and a vibrant community on "worthless" land that no one else wants. Or so it seems. Until suddenly, and tragically, everyone wants it for their own. The Road Through San Judas chronicles from the inside the colorful characters struggling to save their village from NAFTA regulations, local Juárez developers, terrifying drug cartels, violent cholo gangs, and corrupt politicians on both sides of the border. All those interested in the culture and contradictions of modern Mexico-including activists involved in struggles for land, democracy, and justice under international capitalism-will delight in this novel's revolutionary humor and compassion.

Julia is an American medical doctor fleeing her own privileged background to find a new life delivering health care to African villages, where her skills can make a difference. Carl is also an American, whose very different experiences as a black man in the United States have driven him into exile in West Africa, where he is an international NGO expat. The two come together as colleagues (and then more) as Liberia, is gripped in a brutal civil war. Child soldiers kidnap Julia on a remote jungle road, and Carl is evacuated against his will, by U.S. Marines. Back in the United States he finds Julia's mentor, Levin, a Rhode Island MD whose Sixties idealism has been hijacked by history. Then they meet the thief. Then they meet the smuggler. And, the dangerous work of finding and rescuing Julia begins. An unforgettable thriller grounded in real events.

It is 1988. Judit Klemmer is a filmmaker who is assembling a fortieth-anniversary official documentary about the birth of Judenstaat, the Jewish homeland surrendered by defeated Germany in 1948. Her work is complicated by Cold War tensions between the competing U.S. and Soviet empires and by internal conflicts among the "black-hat" Orthodox Jews, the far more worldly Bundists, and reactionary Saxon nationalists, who are still bent on destroying the new Jewish state. But, Judit's work has far more personal complications. A widow, she has yet to deal with her own heart's terrible loss-the very public assassination of her husband, Hans Klemmer, shot dead while conducting a concert. Then a shadowy figure slips her a note with new and potentially dangerous information about her famous husband's murder.

It's 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And, a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman's guerrilla army. Fire on the Mountain is the story of what might have happened if John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry had succeeded, and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners, but the abolitionists.