The Long-Legged Fly(1992) by James Sallis

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Long-Legged Fly (1992)

by James Sallis

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana 1/28

   I have adjusted my approach to completing the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to reflect the fact that I am now driving less than I have been over the past decade.  I have less time to listen to Audiobooks in the car, and that makes me more selective about the titles I choose.  No more YA fiction or struggle narratives in Audiobook format, it's quicker and easier to just glide through the print copy since that category of book rarely takes more than an hour to read, but multiple hours to listen.  SO, while I read at one end of this chapter, Georgia, I'm listening at the other end: Louisiana.  And by Louisiana I'm mostly talking about New Orleans, which boasts 13 of the 28 titles in this subchapter.  Also I'd be willing to wager that many of the other Louisiana books set somewhere else on the map have significant action inside New Orleans.

   New Orleans is not a first-tier American literary city but it is certainly in the group after the first tier- I'd put in the same group as Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.  It's an interesting place, and it has historically drawn writing talent attracted to the anarchy of New Orleans.  The Long-Legged Fly, by underrated author James Sallis, is a great way to kick off the festivities.  Sallis is best known today as the author of Drive-which was made into the Ryan Gosling movie.  The Long-Legged Fly was his first novel, about African-American detective Lew Griffin.  Fly is anything but a conventional detective novel, taking place across the decades to give a fuller portrait of the detective.  This is a great example of how good the 1,001 Novels project can get- because I'd never heard of Sallis before reading this book, and now I think I'll go on and check out his other books. 

The Cherokee Rose (2015) by Tiya Miles

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts(2015)

by Tiya Miles

Diamon Hill, Georgia

Georgia: 8/26

  The subtitle, A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, made it hard to take The Cherokee Rose seriously, and there is no mistake that is a work of fiction written by a historian, but I can see why editor Susan Straight would pick it because it talks about a little mentioned group: people with mixed African American and Native American lineage.  As recounted by this book (and something I knew independently before reading this book, but presumably something the "average" reader would be learning for the first time by reading this book), the Cherokee tribe had gone a long way to assimilation before they were forced off their developed lands in the southeast and forced west at gun point.

  The conventional whoa-is-me narrative surrounding the trail of tears does a particular disservice to the Cherokee nation by focusing on the least fortunate among them.  Wealthy landowners, often of mixed Cherokee/white heritage (but identifying as Cherokee) were able to relocate with their possessions, including slaves, intact.    After the removal, some African American slaves with mixed parentage were left behind for various reasons, and then the convention became to identify as wholly African American.  Finally, in the 20th century, there was a double reckoning, first among the remaining Cherokee people in Oklahoma, who had taken affirmative steps to disenfranchise those of mixed African America/Cherokee blood AND by African Americans in the Southeast who "rediscovered" their native roots in the 20th and 21st century.

  Miles awkwardly accommodates all these experiences in the context of a novel about a wealthy but frivilous African American woman from Atlanta with "mixed roots" who buys the plantation of a famous Cherokee landowner who left as part of the removal process.  There, she reconnects with a childhood friend with her own racial identity issues and a Cherokee journalist who mixed racial identity.  There is also, yes, a ghost, and an appropriately menacing white local.  Besides the very real and interesting historical perspectives, The Cherokee Rose is basically an LGBT friendly Hallmark movie plot.

Hunchback (2025) by Saou Ichikawa

 Audiobook Review

Hunchback (2025)

by Saou Ichikawa

Translation by Polly Barton

  It's been a slow year for literary fiction- compared to last year- by this point in 2024 I'd read 14 books published in the current year.  This year the comparable number of books is four, and none of them were particularly memorable.  Thus, Hunchback arrived as a minor revelation, a book which boldly does what fiction ought to do- generate empathy and understanding for a point of view which has been previously neglected or ignored.  Ichikawa, who suffers from congenital myopathy, has written a book which redefine the way most readers think about the severely disabled.  It's not a rah-rah look at me I'm amazing situation, nor is it inordinately bleak.  Ichikawa's protagonist and narrator is wry, self-aware and very horny- a situation which is exacerbated by her side hustle of writing porn for the internet. 

  The plot is slight, as one would imagine in a book written from the POV of a person who is basically stuck in her room all day. Basically, the narrator wants to have sex and then there are consequences. I think it's likely to be a memorable read for most readers.  The Audiobook was great.