Reading a "Dictionary of the Khazars"

Before the captivity narrative about a Mexican woman abducted by the Apache in the mid-1800s; before the storyline about Geronimo's surrender; before the torrent of details about the life and peoples on the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the U.S.; there's this first sentence:

In the beginning, things appear. Writing is a defiant gesture we’ve long since gotten used to: where there was nothing, somebody put something, and now everybody sees it. For example, the prairie.

author and poet Ocean Vuong on his new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness." Set in a fading Connecticut town, the book follows a suicidal young man whose life takes an unexpected turn when he becomes the caretaker of an elderly woman with dementia. Loosely inspired by Vuong's own experiences growing up in a working-class immigrant family in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the novel explores themes of chosen family, survival and the quiet resilience of everyday life.

Straub's new novel is a time-travel fantasy about a 40-year-old woman who's tending to her ailing father — until, that is, the day she's transported to her childhood home on her 16th birthday.