Recommended reading, Jan. 22

Johnson, who was born and raised in Marin County and has taught writing to teens, follows a group of kids as they struggle their way toward adulthood, but these are no ordinary kids.

[...] under the constant tourniquet pressure from parents and teachers to succeed, and the even more relentless demands from peers to fall in line or risk social banishment, life becomes a tsunami waiting to unfurl.

The novel begins with a tragedy in eighth grade, starring Calista, 13 years old, a bright girl who has a crush on Ryan, who believes his handsomeness has destined him for greatness.

Any adult receiving a letter like that would know to grab hold of such depth, but at 13, Calista can’t risk following her feelings, she can’t become more outlier than she already is, and so, in the novel’s most tragic moment, she becomes complicit in a plot with the others to ruin the one boy who not only had real substance, but who really might have made her life richer.

In her need to be liked, to be the kind of hip mentor she wished that she herself had had, she friends kids on Facebook, even as she is dealing with parents who tell her that her “homework is really out of line.”

Johnson sprinkles in text messages, Facebook posts Hmm well u don’t want to be too cling.

Under those headings boil hidden meanings, exhuming the teenage truth about social media, sex, alcohol and drugs.

Impossibly funny and achingly sad, Johnson’s novel makes you remember every humiliation you ever suffered while in school, and every terrifyingly bad decision you ever made.

There’s a reason why teenage years may be our most intense, and in this wise, dangerous, and yes, occasionally cruel debut, Johnson cracks open adolescent angst with adult sensibility and sensitivity.

Adolescence here is a prison term, and if you’re lucky you can find your keys and get yourself out, as unscarred as possible, clutching your scrap of hope, realizing, as Calista says, that despite all that has happened, she “is going on and trying, like everyone, to live in this beautiful world.”

The first of the South Korean author’s works to be translated into English, the book’s lurid and haunting story describes the shocking physical and psychological deterioration of an otherwise dutiful housewife who, to the shame of her social mores-abiding family, stops eating meat in an effort to transform herself into a tree.

Critics called it “ferocious,” a “mesmerizing mix of sex and violence.”

[...] the simultaneously grotesque and bizarrely beautiful images Han evokes throughout are unlike anything you’ll find in modern literature.

In response, the southern city of Gwangju became the nexus of mass demonstrations and political unrest as students and unionized workers joined together to oppose the oppressive regime.

In the words of one of the book’s characters, the army “had been given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city twice over.”

Some sources estimate that anywhere between 200 (according to the military) and 2,000 (according to foreign press reports) civilians were killed during the massacre.

[...] Han builds upon copious research and a return trip to her childhood home — she lived in Gwangju in the house of Dong-ho, one of her characters, until she was 9 — to reimagine the events that transpired over those hellacious days and in the years following the uprising.

In hopes of finding a friend whom he was with during the demonstrations, Dong-ho joins a group of bleary-eyed middle school-through-college-age volunteers in a makeshift gymnasium morgue to separate out, tag and clean heaping piles of bloated corpses before they can be identified by relatives.

In a 1990 interview with a professor writing a dissertation on the topic, a survivor speaks of the unimaginable beatings he endured at the hands of the police.

[...] the voice of Dong-ho’s murdered friend, looking on as his body is thrown into a truck with all the others, “that festering flesh now fused into a single mass, like the rotting carcass of some many-legged monster.”

Just as she did in “The Vegetarian,” she favors a deliberate, almost clinical tone, which renders each word, each sentence, each carefully painted image all the more chilling.

[...] what Han has re-created is not just an extraordinary record of human suffering during one particularly contentious period in Korean history, but also a written testament to our willingness to risk discomfort, capture, even death in order to fight for a cause or help others in times of need.

What binds Roxane Gay’s 21 short stories in “Difficult Women” is that they are told with direct, plainspoken intimacy — the same voice that makes her personal essays so compulsively readable.

Gay treats the power dynamics of gender, economics and race with a clear-eyed sobriety regardless of whether everything else in the world of the story is tinged with magic.

Gay references the tropes of onscreen romantic comedies and dramas and wields their narrative strategies to say something more interesting about the connections between people than the source material does.

With his initially funny rap-fueled fetish of black women, he would read broadly — like a villain in a made-for-television movie — if sexual violence of every kind were not so appallingly common and underreported in our actual world.

The resulting political fiction indicts white supremacy and patriarchy.

Gay’s stories sometimes rely on shorthand in lieu of actual conversations, defying a rule of contemporary literary fiction that dictates finding the universal through the particular.

[...] in “Bone Density,” about a marriage in which both spouses are having affairs, a narrator says, “I’ve cooked us dinner and we’ve made the small talk married people who know each other too well make.”

An inclination to combine fairy tales with social critique is one that the author has followed since her small-press debut story collection “Ayiti.”

The addictive, moving and risk-taking stories of “Difficult Women” provide a release valve for our collective dark anxieties and fantasies.

“Drugs and drink and strokes and heart surgery,” he says to his wife.

There’s a sadistic stepfather, and a mother who leaves her son at home with pizza money and boxed wine.

[...] the hole is big enough to let blood clots travel through to his brain, causing potentially fatal strokes.

Forsmann, in real life, invented the cardiac procedure that would eventually plug the hole in Mohr’s heart.

“Sirens” gives a picture of Mohr’s life as a balancing act with real danger and consequences.

There’s nothing at all calcified or fossilized here, and Mohr makes himself likable and compelling and charming, with a real ear for fast-moving unsentimental language.