Carol Fulton
I never go wrong when I choose a King’s English employee’s pick. This time it was Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, not only the best fiction I’ve read this summer, but probably the best in years. In New York City in the early 70’s an event takes place that mesmerizes all who witness it, and has a lasting ripple effect, not only on the viewers but also others who didn’t see it but were in oblique ways affected. Each chapter is an exquisite story in itself with richly developed characters experiencing the aftereffects of the event in very different ways. None of them know each other, but through this author’s craft their stories overlap very cleverly in a wonderfully humane tale.

Shawn Rossiter
Of the books I was able to read this summer two stand out, not necessarily because they were the best (though I can recommend both) but because of a curious coincidence that ties the two together: Quim Monzó’s Gasoline and Tommaso Pincio’s Zero Star Hotel both open inside Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Monzó’s novel is really a diptych of two related stories, the first of which opens with a dream sequence wherein the story’s protagonist, Hildegarda, finds himself “in an exact reproduction” of the painting, that soon takes on a life of its own. In Pincio’s intriguing blend of narration, analysis and memoir, Hopper’s painting is the artistic specter that haunts the author’s aborted career as a painter: it is the work he wished he had painted. After leaving painting, Pincio became a writer, and his book is an intricately woven mediation, full of wit and insight, on his own life and the writers and artists who have influenced him. Monzó’s work, more straightforwardly a narrative (though its narration slips through various registers, including the surreal and the absurd) is a sardonic portrayal of the contemporary art world. It begins with a famous, mid-career artist who on the eve of an important exhibition finds himself incapable of or uninterested in painting; and in the second half follows the hyperactive career of the postmodern wunderkind who takes the former’s conjugal and professional place. Though written thirty years ago (but only recently translated into English from the Catalan), Monzó’s satire still feels du jour, making the work seem almost prophetic. Zero Star Hotel (Hotel a zero stelle) is as yet unavailable in English, but Pincio’s passion for American writers, including Melville, Burroughs, Dick, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Foster Wallace, will soon, one hopes, attract an American publisher.

Ann Poore
In Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley: Making the Modern Old West Tribune reporter Tom Harvey shows how that hedonist Western novelist Zane Grey (his story fascinates), filmmaker John Ford, Navajo inhabitants, trading post owners, 20th-century environmentalists and even scientists have taken the Rainbow Bridge and Monument Valley areas in Utah and Arizona and used them for their own purposes – from the earliest creationist myths to the damned dam projects of the 1970s, to Jeep Grand Cherokee advertisements and contemporary tourism. It’s a book that will interest armchair and actual travelers; folks interested in American Indian studies; Western and American history; and even Western film buffs. From the University of Oklahoma Press, out now in both hardcover and paperback, it’s a deserving finalist for the Utah Book Award.

Sweet Land of Bigamy by Miah Arnold (daughter of the late Tribune arts writer and dance critic Helen Forsberg), who grew up in a house attached to the Three Legged Dog Saloon in Myton and sets her first novel in rural Utah. The book opens with Helen Motes, shivering and tired from a climb up a cliff to Nuchu’s Landing in the Black Elk Mountains, wearing a scarlet sari held together by 17 safety pins, waiting for her wedding to a young (younger than her) Indian poet, Chakor Desai, accompanied by the Hindu pundit who will be performing the ceremony. Problem is, she hasn’t told Chakor she is already married to an older man in Texas, currently on a war contract mission in Iraq — who learned Arabic on a different mission in Egypt, while the LDS Church was still welcome in that country. Quirky characters, arresting imagery, beautifully written.

Geoff Wichert
Based on a handful of Victorian journals and such surviving records as early Baedeker’s and similar primitive travel guidebooks, Enid Shomer’s The Twelve Rooms of the Nile imagines what might have happened during simultaneous forays among the antiquities lining the Nile River that were actually undertaken in 1850 by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. Where books that hijack fictional characters can change their stories any way they want, these events, early in two of the better-known 19th century lives, face far tighter strictures. The dates and itineraries of both are known, as are some events and details, but while nothing documents their encounter, neither does the record prohibit their having shared an adventure. The challenge for Shomer was to craft a story that fits the known facts and, instead of reconfiguring what these two remarkable figures subsequently achieved, sheds light on how they became who we know them to have been.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.