A memoir of living in close quarters with Susan Sontag; a novel set in the world of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho; and a young-adult novel that covers the very adult themes of labor camps in 1941 Lithuania.
Sempre Susan
A Memoir of Susan Sontag
by Sigrid Nunez
Susan Sontag may have been a genius — a master of the essay, a woman whose prose has been rivaled by only a few — but she was not an easy woman to live with. Writer Sigrid Nunez got the experience close-up; she had just finished her M.F.A. at Columbia and was looking for work, when a friend at The New York Review of Books set her up with a job as Sontag's assistant. Soon, Nunez had fallen in love with David — Sontag's son, whom the writer treated almost as a sibling — and the three ended up living together in Sontag's Upper West Side apartment for years. During that time, Sontag had recovered from her first brush with cancer, and she was still smoking excessively and working on a new book. Nunez found Sontag fascinating, glamorous and brilliant — but also overbearing, opinionated, odd and judgmental. Sempre Susan looks at one of the 20th century's best thinkers at close range, exploring the difference between the public perception of an intellectual and the daily reality of a life.
Hardcover, 140 pages; Atlas & Co.; list price, $20; publication date, March 30
What You See In The Dark
By Manuel Munoz
Jealousy, longing and two murders drive the plot of What you See in the Dark. One of the murders takes place on-screen in Psycho, and the other is set in late 1950s Bakersfield, Calif. Manuel Munoz's first novel re-envisions Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock as unnamed characters known simply as "Actress" and "Director." They come to Bakersfield to shoot one scene and by happenstance come across Watson's Inn, which serves as physical inspiration for the Bates Motel. The second-person narrative jumps back and forth between the movie and life in the Central Valley where a lethal love affair grows between Dan Watson and Teresa Garza.
Hardcover, 272 pages; Algonquin; list price, $23.95; publication date, March 29
Between Shades Of Gray
By Ruta Sepetys
Young-adult author Ruta Sepetys has a story she doesn't want you to forget — and it's most likely one you've never heard. In Between Shades of Gray, she brings you Lina Vilkas, a bold 15-year-old girl, an artist whose passion and vigor are stifled by the Soviet secret police. It's 1941. The Soviet Union has occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. And Lina's family is on the list of presumed anti-Soviet people — those who must be deported. We travel with Lina as the police take her in her nightgown, through the packed train car carrying her mother and her brother and many others to Siberia, and finally, to the labor camp where they're forced to work for a daily bread ration. All the while, Lina draws the faces of her family and fellow deportees, hoping to one day make it out and tell their story — the story of those 300,000 Lithuanians — the one so few have heard, until now
Hardcover, 344 pages; Philomel; list price, $17.99; publication date, March 22
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