2 minute read
EARTH by Wole Soyinka
chronicles from the land of the happiest people on earth
community as they seek to save their library—which offers so much more than books.
A delightful exploration of personal growth, inner strength, and the importance of family, friends, and love.
LASERWRITER II
Shopsin, Tamara MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $26.00 | Oct. 12, 2021 978-0-374-60257-4
Dispatches from Mac world. In the 1990s, before the Genius Bar, even before Apple stores, there was Tekserve, a repair shop for Mac computers and printers, the brainchild of David Lerner and Dick Demenus, who had started their tech careers in the 1980s and found they loved fixing Macs. Illustrator, memoirist, and graphic designer Shopsin makes her fiction debut with a delightfully wry tale set at Tekserve and featuring David, Dick, their motley crew, and the newly hired Claire, a 19-yearold with no technological experience whatsoever. Nevertheless, Claire feels instantly at home at Tekserve, drawn as she is “to the type of anarchy that believed in small communities and held the promise of a just society. Everyone had said, ‘life is not fair,’ but maybe it could be.” That sentiment could have been Tekserve’s motto; instead, its employee handbook advised, “If you are ever in doubt, do the right thing.” Claire is first assigned to intake, where she processes the anxious, needy customers who find at Tekserve “a space that was as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine, complete with mutated elves.” The staff benefits from sumptuous Wednesday lunch buffets and Thursday breakfasts, health care coverage, and unexpected raises. With no qualifications, Claire is promoted to printer technician and, at the repair bench, encounters the formidable LaserWriter II, “one of the most solid printers Apple ever made.” Learning to repair its rare design flaw, Claire decides she “has found her calling. One that draws on her full mind and body. A noble calling that helps people make poetry and do their taxes.” Illustrated with Shopsin’s whimsical chapter icons and punctuated with animated—and admittedly silly—conversations between parts of computers and printers, the novel bounces through the history of digital technology, the fey atmosphere of geekdom, and Claire’s shrewd, serene observations.
Fresh and charmingly quirky.
Soyinka, Wole Pantheon (464 pp.) $28.00 | Sep. 28, 2021 978-0-59-332016-7
A richly satirical novel, his first since 1973, by the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner. “The timing could not have been more thoughtfully ordained. Indeed—and he leant over to whisper confidentially to the surgeon during one of their meals together….‘It was I who set fire to Hilltop Mansion, just to get you down in Badagry.’ ” There’s a lot going on in Soyinka’s shaggy dog yarn, its plot dense enough to rival anything by Günter Grass. The speaker here is an engineer who has fallen afoul of the nation’s prime minister, a propagandist wedded to the ironic slogan of Soyinka’s title. His lifelong friend, a surgeon
