This month’s featured titles include poetry, a Creative Writing Program professor's neo noir novel, and a memoir about working for two celebrity chefs.
Buzz Kill
J. Robert Lennon
Lennon’s second thriller is a sequel to 2024’s Hard Girls.
That book’s protagonists, the formerly estranged twins Jane and Lila Pool, have healed their rift and co-founded a private investigation agency.In Buzz Kill, they dig into a case that’s close to home: the possibility that the long-ago suicide of an aunt—a lawyer with a powerful and unsatisfied client—was actually murder, tied to the sale of a new and deadly synthetic opioid drug.
Other plotlines include the efforts of Jane’s daughter to find out who has produced a deepfake video intended to derail her campaign for class president.
Lennon is the Bowers Professor of English on the Hill, where he also serves as editor of the EPOCH literary magazine. His many previous books include the novels Mailman, Happyland, Familiar, and Broken River, and several short story collections.
Aristotle’s Wife
Claudia Barnett ’88
Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, Barnett’s volume is subtitled Six Short Plays About Women in Science.
Its characters include a Cornellian: Nobelist Barbara McClintock 1923, PhD 1927. McClintock is featured in the book’s final play, I Knew I Was Right, in which she attempts to convince a skeptical male colleague about the validity of her findings in genetics.
“You must look at the entire organism,” McClintock says in Barnett’s imagined scenario.
“You need to register the process. Then you’ll see that what one cell loses, the other gains. The genes jump, and there’s a reason. It isn’t random; there’s an on-off switch.”
In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder
Mary Gilliland ’73, MAT ’80
Gilliland is an award-winning poet who has taught on the Hill and elsewhere (including at Weill Cornell Medicine’s branch in Qatar). Her collections include Ember Days, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, and The Devil’s Fools.
Her latest work is a long-form poem whose disparate inspirations include a statue from Japan and the author’s own late brother, an ardent activist for human rights.
“In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder is a multi-vocal poem with parts spoken by Marie Curie, the Radium Girls, and a mysterious fisherman,” states the publisher, Dancing Girl Press.
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