Local Spotlight

Just as the trees are beginning to bud again, spring brings a flowering from Minnesota’s local authors and independent presses, including several notable debuts. From Coffee House Press comes The Grasshopper King, Slate columnist Jordan Ellenberg’s wryly funny Boyle-cum-Borges satire about a crabby, untalented, yet mysteriously important Kafka-like poet and the two academics who wreck their lives trying to explain him. We laughed more than a few times, and crown King the best thing we’ve read all month. P. J. Tracy, a pseudonymous mother/daughter writing team from Minneapolis and L.A., has a breakout first novel with Monkeewrench, a comic police procedural/ serial killer thriller that sites one of its murders at the Mall of America. Two from Graywolf Press: First, much-published poet Albert Goldbarth switches to the novel for Pieces of Payne, a wild and freewheeling thing that manages to combine the Legion of Superheroes, quantum physics, Dickens, Moby-Dick and Victorian-era mastectomy surgical practices. In a much more somber vein, Patricia Seraffian Ward draws on her girlhood in Beirut for The Bullet Collection, a passionate tale of the corrosive effects of the Lebanese civil war. And last but not least, New Rivers Press celebrates its rebirth out west in Moorhead with several new publications, including Daniel Bachhuber’s melancholy memoir Mozart’s Carriage and short-story author Cezarija Abartis’ Nice Girls. Bacchhuber and Abartis read at Open Book April 4; P.J. Tracy at Borders in Woodbury April 18, Barnes & Noble Eden Prairie April 19 and Once Upon a Crime April 21. Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S., (612) 215-2575, www.openbookmn.org; Borders, 8472 Tamarack Bay, Woodbury, 651-578-2931, www.bordersstores.com; B&N, Eden Prairie Center, (952) 944-5683, bn.com; Once Upon a Crime, 604 W. 26th St., (612) 870-3785