Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham

“A national campaign was a great unfathomable whale, with all kinds of subsidiary life flourishing on its skin and between its strands of baleen,” writes Cunningham in an impressive debut chronicling a young volunteer’s growth through the Obama Presidential campaign. The novel has a Gatsbyesque touch in its evocation of fundraising parties and the milieu of the hopeful times. The story shines when the narrator frames the story from his own experiences, a memoir of sorts. At times the story gets a little too ornate. Nevertheless, a different twist to the coming-of-age story told from a ringside seat of history.

Choice by Neel Mukherjee

Riddled with climate anxiety, battling obsessive-compulsive disorder, Ayush can’t get over capitalism’s oversized destructive effect on the lives of ordinary people. Economics is life, life is economics, is a mantra that surfaces over and over again in the first long short story of three. Equally compelling is the final story in which the well-intentioned gift of a cow to a rural impoverished mother systematically unravels the family unit until the unexpected ending. Startling and dark, the stories are a perfect snapshot of life lived under the yoke of capitalism today. Choice is but an illusion, we all bear our burdens.

The Archive of Feelings by Peter Stamm

 

An unnamed middle-aged  archivist in a small Swiss town reflects on the path not taken in this moving melancholic reflection. When we find him, the archivist has lost his job at the local newspaper, displaced by digital technology. Having inherited his parents’ home, he is comfortable nevertheless. With time weighing heavy on his hands, the archivist especially obsesses over Franziska, a school friend whom he had a crush on, and who goes on to become a famous singer. What would it mean to rekindle a relationship with her, he wonders, even as his increasingly small world boxes him in slowly.