The Red Arrow by William Brewer |
L.A. Times

In his provocative 1991 book Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, Leonard Shlain notes that although his subjects make for “a strange coupling,” fundamentally they “are both investigations into the nature of reality.” William Brewer’s debut novel, The Red Arrow, adds another pairing to his matrix: depression and psychedelics.

The premise of The Red Arrow sounds like the high-concept picaresque narratives of Thomas Pynchon or Neal Stephenson: A debt-ridden painter-turned-writer accepts a job as a ghostwriter for a world-renowned physicist who vanishes before the writer can finish the book. Desperate to escape his debts and plagued by a suicidal depression he refers to as “the Mist,” the unnamed writer undergoes a treatment of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Most of this information is provided to the reader in the first few pages. We meet the narrator as he’s on his way to find the Physicist (name redacted per their contract) aboard Italy’s Frecciarossa (“Red Arrow”) train. Along the way, the writer describes his financial failures, his strained relationship with his wife, Annie, and his life-changing new treatment. Continue reading…

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Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr |
The Georgia Review

Anthony Doerr is one of the most scientifically minded fiction writers working today. He’s a literary conservationist. In his vision, science is a matter of preservation and protection. Nature and technology, under science’s umbrella, are to be engaged with responsibly and in the interest of betterment, for they can be easily exploited by opposing forces. Science, in Doerr’s fiction, is a human ideal, matched only by art—which too can be safeguarded or destroyed via scientific means. His latest novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, presents Doerr’s most directly articulated paean to science, art, and the human spirit, here represented by the greatest of humanity’s achievements—the book—and some of the best in human conservation—librarians. Cloud Cuckoo Land is also Doerr’s most ambitious work to date, which demonstrates just how much he cares about his subject. Continue reading…