![]() But it is also proof that love is in our nature regardless of our nurture. The Only Girl in the World (Little, Brown) is the haunting story of a girl whose survivalist parents locked her away and subjected her to “training” starting at the age of three. In the hierarchy of traumatic memoir, Maude Julien has something to write home about. It’s a rich, contemporary canonization of the Crescent City at the turn of the century. ![]() Set against the backdrop of the birth of jazz and the Spanish flu, King Zeno tells the story of an army veteran, a jazz cornetist, and a Mafia widow, whose trajectories are twisted by a musically motivated ax murderer. “Is an ax-man at large in New Orleans?” So asks a 1918 Times-Picayune article in Nathaniel Rich’s sprawling but speedy third novel, King Zeno (MCD). But she has paved a subversive path through the forest for others to follow. Diski’s is the kind of voice of which we need more, of which we now have one fewer. ![]() Here are narratives that play with perception, turning fairy tales on their sides, if not their heads stories about women attempting to construct ideal bathtubs, contentedly existing in towers, and dipping in and out of mental institutions. The beloved British author chronicled her terminal illness for the London Review of Books, and now The Vanishing Princess (Ecco), a collection of her caustically funny and ebullient stories, is being released. You probably miss Jenny Diski even if you’ve never heard of her. ![]()
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