The Best Books of 2024

Also Recommended

• 
  Paper of Wreckage

  by Susan MulcahyFrank DiGiacomo (Atria)

  Nonfiction

  This narrative history, by two former Posties, is a fun pile of quotations from Post employees and other voices on the past half century of the paper—which was founded, in 1801, by Alexander Hamilton and bought, in 1976, by the ambitious Australian Rupert Murdoch. With Murdoch came a lax attitude toward accurate attribution, a habit of placing a scantily clad woman on page 3, and a cadre of Aussie and English troublemakers. Outrageous anecdotes about unscrupulous escapades and dishonest tactics of Post reporters are interspersed with stories that reveal the tabloid’s consistent racism. And yet there has been no shortage of highfalutin New Yorkers—heralded editors, the Upper East Side’s moneyed crowd—who’ve fetishized the Post.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Why I Can’t Quit the New York Post,” by Vinson Cunningham
• 
  Mixed Signals

  by Rebecca Charbonneau (Polity)

  Nonfiction

  A year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union sent the first human to outer space. The U.S.-Soviet space race, the less antagonistic cousin of the arms race between the two countries, generated a series of unprecedented efforts to make contact with extraterrestrials, led by scientists who dreamed of harmony on Earth and beyond. As Charbonneau, a science historian, engagingly details, the Cold War quest for extraterrestrial intelligence was as much about communicating with other humans as it was about looking for aliens. This was an era obsessed with signals and surveillance, but terrible at direct communication. Enmity and mistrust made open dialogue between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. nearly impossible, and scientists seeking to collaborate across the Iron Curtain often found their attempts stymied. Charbonneau observes that the hunt for extraterrestrial life has often been hindered by what she calls the “giggle factor.” But as “Mixed Signals” reminds us, the history of this esoteric quest is bound up with some of the most profound questions faced by the inhabitants of planet Earth.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life,” by Sophie Pinkham
• 
  The Lives of Spiders

  by Ximena Nelson (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This enthusiastic volume—part textbook, part encyclopedia, part coffee-table book—advises readers to quash their repugnance and consider the astonishing things that spiders can do. Nelson, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, presents excurses on spider ecology, biology, and behavior, in addition to miniature biographies of forty distinct species. The flic-flac huntsman spider can double its running speed by turning cartwheels over sand dunes. The hairs on the legs of the tiger bromeliad spider, Nelson notes, may be the most refined sensory organ known to science, able to respond “to one hundredth of the energy contained in a single photon of green light!” In addition to making the case for individual species such as these, Nelson argues for a new understanding of the order as a whole—long maligned not only as creepy but as dim-witted and instinct-driven. Instead, Nelson shows spiders to be capable of learning, decision-making, and even sophisticated navigation.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “An Arachnophobe Pays Homage to the Spider,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Distinguishing Piss from Rain

  by Glenn Ligon (Hauser & Wirth)

  Nonfiction

  This richly textured compendium, spanning three decades of Ligon’s writings and interviews, amounts to more than a simple retrospective. Ligon’s visual art has always been both immediately of this moment and firmly anchored in history (see, for instance, his 2011 “Warm Broad Glow II,” a neon sculpture of Gertrude Stein’s phrase “negro sunshine”). Issues of identity, while central to his work, are also secondary to this historical imperative, inviting—or compelling—audiences to confront an ever-present past. So, too, do the pieces in this collection, which range from deeply considered essays on the work of Julie Mehretu and Félix González-Torres to a whimsical abecedarium, challenge established narratives while raising pressing questions about the purposes of making art today. One purpose, as Ligon writes in his essay on Mehretu, is to “squarely face the ambiguities of history,” while refusing “to retreat into despair.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Gabriel’s Moon

  by William Boyd (Atlantic Monthly)

  Fiction

  The narrator of Boyd’s novel, a le Carré-esque spy thriller, is Gabriel Dax, an acclaimed travel writer and occasional political reporter. While on assignment in Léopoldville, a stroke of luck gets Dax an interview with Patrice Lumumba—the last interview the Prime Minister will ever give—after which Dax suddenly finds himself an unwitting player in the scheme to cover up Western involvement in the leader’s death. Well known for his thoughtful fictional treatments of British history, Boyd combines measured twists with a trenchant reconsideration of the legacy of Cold War-era interventionism.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Mothers and Sons

  by Theodor Kallifatides, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy (Other Press)

  Nonfiction

  “When I was little I thought I would die before my mother, according to the principle that the tree outlives its fruit”: so begins this wise and gently funny memoir, in which Kallifatides, a Greek writer who has spent his adult life in Sweden, visits his ninety-two-year-old mother in Athens. His account enfolds many characters, including his brother (“the man who dreamed of affixing windshield wipers to his TV so that he could spit at the screen when he was watching football”), but its heart is conversations between Kallifatides and his mother. “Watching your world fade away while you are still living in it isn’t easy,” Kallifatides observes, yet he praises her “gift of being able to let the small elements of joy defeat the great sorrows.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Portal

  by Tracy Fuad (Chicago)

  Poetry

  In this début collection, Fuad wrestles with the sense of being deeply, possibly overly, connected to the world—a condition where, as she writes, “I thought I was living someone else’s life, but had no idea whose.” This confusion stems from the overlapping of online and physical life, where activities like browsing the Internet, gathering with friends in a Berlin park, or trying to speak a new language while in transit begin to blur together. As Fuad searches for new ways to describe prosaic experience, her collection evinces a deft mastery of poetic forms, from very short lines to prose to a sonnet sequence, as well as an intellectual richness that allows it to sidestep the clichés of Internet writing.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Catalina

  by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (One World)

  Fiction

  This breezily angsty début novel is narrated by Catalina Ituralde, a young woman who was born in Ecuador, raised in Queens, and is now a student at Harvard, on a full scholarship. As Catalina scrambles to navigate the expectations of senior year—including those placed on her by her grandparents, who raised her—it’s not lost on her that, being undocumented, once she graduates, she will be legally unemployable. (The novel begins in 2010, a year of Senate debate on the DREAM Act.) Villavicencio writes nimbly, especially when capturing Catalina’s tendency to lean on pop-culture references to clarify her thinking: “Something about being passed through so many hands as a child . . . made me feel like any value I was ever going to have I had to accrue myself, coin by coin, like Donkey Kong.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  We Have Never Been Woke

  by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Many anti-woke screeds read like Republican oppo research, but this work by al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, is less predictable. He argues that the Democrats have become the party of “symbolic capitalists,” or élites—academics, commentators, lawyers, consultants—who trade in forms of prestige. This transformation strikes al-Gharbi as a momentous miscalculation, one that has alienated an increasing number of “normies.” Though al-Gharbi himself suggests that Democrats could run further to the left on resonant economic issues like health care and shift toward the middle on issues like immigration, his book is more diagnostic than prescriptive. Above all, he argues, the problem is not that symbolic capitalists are “too woke,” but that they “often leverage social justice discourse in the pursuit of their own ends—often at the expense of the genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Have the Democrats Become the Party of the Élites?,” by Andrew Marantz
• 
  Only in America

  by Richard Bernstein (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  This capacious biography of the Lithuanian-born entertainer Al Jolson also traces the evolution of American Jewry on stage and screen, casting Jolson as an exemplar of immigrant success. Bernstein analyzes Jolson’s role in “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first feature-length talkie, and explores how the film reflects tensions between embracing assimilation and honoring Jewish traditions. Bernstein also reckons with Jolson’s use of blackface, engaging with contemporaneous Black newspapers and later critical scholarship and taking the issue as an opportunity to consider the potential spiritual and “tragic” links between Jewish and Black music-making.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Tasmania

  by Paolo Giordano, translated by Antony Shugaar (Other Press)

  Fiction

  Paolo, the protagonist of this searching novel, is, like its author, an Italian writer with a physics degree. When his wife ends their efforts to conceive a child, he takes up a wandering life, sleeping on couches and in hotels while teaching, writing newspaper columns, and researching a book on the atomic bomb. He finds distraction in the lives of others, including a friend embroiled in a custody battle, a charismatic climate scientist, and a priest carrying on an affair. As Paolo struggles to make sense of relationships characterized by both intimacy and distance, Giordano explores the challenge of finding safety in a world where disasters—from bombings to rising sea levels—proliferate.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Best of All Possible Worlds

  by Michael Kempe, translated from the German by Marshall Yarbrough (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Renowned for his work in science, philosophy, history, law, and, especially, mathematics, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) was one of the greatest thinkers of his age. He believed that his role was to spread news of useful discoveries, to make some discoveries himself, and to persuade rulers to exploit them for the benefit of mankind. Kempe’s new biography captures Leibniz’s dogged efforts through seven snapshots of the polymath’s chaotic life. At any given moment, Leibniz was juggling several projects at once—writing a treatise on metaphysics, compiling a history of the Welf dynasty, contesting Descartes’s theory of physics, building a mechanical calculator. His life was inevitably full of frustrations because he aimed so impossibly high, but as Kempe shows us Leibniz never stopped trying to improve the world, albeit mostly from his desk.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “He Was a Genius for the Ages. Can We Give Him a Break?,” by Anthony Gottlieb
• 
  Taiwan Travelogue

  by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from the Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf)

  Fiction

  Presented as a translation of an out-of-print Japanese text, this National Book Award-winning metafictional novel takes place in colonial-era Taiwan, and follows a Japanese writer on a trip during which she falls in love with her local translator. Yáng details their sumptuous meals, teasing out the differences between Japanese and Taiwanese foodways—and between what is imposed and what is native. As tensions around the imbalance that characterizes colonial relations threaten their intimacy, the novel’s framing device, with its many footnotes, underscores the barriers to mutual understanding the two face. “I complained about the Empire’s treatment of its colonies,” the Japanese writer notes, “yet I was but another citizen of this world with all its earthly flaws.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Giant Love

  by Julie Gilbert (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  Fusing biography and Hollywood history, this book chronicles the creation of Edna Ferber’s novel “Giant” and its transformation into a film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. Ferber, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright (and the author’s great-aunt), spent nearly thirteen years “assembling the stones and bricks and mortar and metal” for her novel, which was set in Texas. As Gilbert recounts Ferber’s duodenal-ulcer-inducing work ethic and her impressions of the state as “bombastic; naïve, brash,” she also delves into the drama behind the 1956 film, directed by George Stevens, which heightened the novel’s focus on racial prejudice by, among other things, featuring a climactic diner fight not present in Ferber’s original text.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Havoc

  by Christopher Bollen (Harper)

  Fiction

  This abidingly wicked novel of suspense and one-upmanship is narrated by an eighty-one-year-old American widow permanently installed in a hotel on the Nile catering to moneyed vacationers. The widow is driven to “sow chaos” by what she calls her “compulsion.” “I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck,” she claims. But her routine is disrupted when an eight-year-old American boy arrives at the hotel and becomes wise to her machinations. Their epic battle of wills comes to verge on black comedy, but the widow’s simultaneous battle with her own mortality gives the novel an unexpected poignancy. “Children aren’t the world’s inheritors,” she offers at one point, “they are its thieves, skating by on the hard work of generations that came before them.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Anima

  by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf)

  Nonfiction

  This lyrical but unsentimental book is a eulogy for transhumance—the seasonal movement of livestock and the people who watch over them. For the final installment in a quartet of books about the Balkans, Kassabova travels to her native Bulgaria to live in the Pirin Mountains with some of Europe’s last modern pastoralists. What she finds is a world that appears at once out of time—bedeviled by wolf attacks and sheep theft—and entirely contemporary, with industrialization and the pull of consumerism threatening to finally consign the shepherds, and the rare animal breeds they cultivate, to extinction. As Kassabova deepens her relationships with her subjects, she is both confronted and enchanted by their lonely, often harshly beautiful existence.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Invention of Good and Evil

  by Hanno Sauer (Oxford University Press)

  Nonfiction

  When Sauer, a German philosopher, titled his ambitious new book, he made it clear that he sees morality as different from science: its edicts are something human beings created, not something they discovered. The story of its origins, for Sauer, is just the story of evolution. He begins five million years ago in eastern Africa, where our early ancestors had to coöperate in order to survive in the exposed grasslands, and carries on through the past five years, as we’ve become increasingly fixated on microaggressions and cultural appropriation. But Sauer’s genealogical project isn’t meant to undermine the authority of morality. Though understanding morality as the product of human biological and social history may induce anxiety, the global convergence of values, he believes, “can be the basis for a new understanding.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Does Morality Do Us Any Good?,” by Nikhil Krishnan
• 
  The Black Utopians

  by Aaron Robertson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, liberation theology—which holds that “holiness starts from below, in the experiences and aspirations of the disinherited”—inspired Black Christian nationalists to find “new frameworks” for living. This history focusses on one such experiment: Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna church, led by Albert Cleage, Jr., a visionary preacher. Cleage believed that Black churches had to be “actively engaged in social struggle”; to that end, the Shrine attempted to empower Black communities with innovations including a communal-child-rearing movement and a national food-distribution network. As the congregation sought to “re-create” God “in their own image,” its members strove to create a world that was meant for them.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Blue

  by Rachel Louise Moran (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

  Moran’s concise history of postpartum illness charts the decades-long effort by activists, doctors, and psychiatrists to define and legitimatize the struggles many women face after giving birth. Long dismissed as the “baby blues,” postpartum illness (an informal umbrella term encompassing mild sadness, depression, and psychosis with a postpartum onset) began coming into public awareness in the United States in the nineteen-fifties. Yet it remained, as Moran shows, severely underpublicized and underdiagnosed well into the twenty-first century, its existence contested and its meaning politicized.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  More Than Pretty Boxes

  by Carrie M. Lane (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

  Professional organizing, with the advent of how-to books and Netflix series on the topic, has become central to American culture. Lane traces the motivation to declutter back to the Progressive Era, a period when Americans preached simplicity and the control of passions, and the outsourcing of this work to the nineteen-seventies, after more and more women had found jobs outside the home. For those who were reluctant to pursue office work, with its rigid schedules and constant threat of layoffs, organizing presented an opportunity for self-employment. But “More Than Pretty Boxes” isn’t just a historical account; it draws on interviews Lane conducted with more than fifty professional organizers as well as her experiences volunteering with some of them, participating in a decluttering boot camp, and even organizing her own belongings. Though initially skeptical of the trade, Lane comes to see organizers as containers for our attitudes about work, and her book ponders what we fill ourselves with when we are unfulfilled, and what keeps us buying things that we don’t even have time to take out of their pretty boxes.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  The Prisoner of Ankara

  by Suat Derviş, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely (Other Press)

  Fiction

  This slim, stark novel, first published in 1957 and only now translated into English, follows Vasfi, a Turkish man newly released from prison after serving a twelve-year murder sentence. Vasfi wanders the streets, unable to find either work or peace, as Derviş unfolds the circumstances behind his arrest. As a young man, he falls in love with Zeynep, a local beauty, who goes on to marry his rich great-uncle. As Vasfi’s love grows into an obsession, Derviş lightly hints at the character’s more juvenile qualities—he claims to love Zeynep but knows little of her, and is surprised to learn that she has been divorced. Derviş delivers a bleak story with an inkling of hope at its end—though her protagonist does not entirely earn his redemption.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Rental House

  by Weike Wang (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  Filled with both the comedy and the bitterness of miscommunication, this pointed, deadpan novel examines an intercultural couple’s marriage. Keru is a first-generation Chinese American; Nate is the product of working-class Appalachia. After meeting at Yale, the two moved to Manhattan and pursued jobs in management consulting and academia, respectively. Though the couple are now ostensibly upwardly mobile urbanites, the differences between them come into high relief during two vacations, when their in-laws make separate visits. Wang wryly examines the nuances of class and culture, while also showing that, in the messy terrain of a family with wildly varied values and assumptions, surprising—and profound—moments of unity can still be found.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Every Valley

  by Charles King (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  This history casts Handel’s “Messiah,” which King calls the “greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as both quintessentially of its time and an oddity; when it premièred, in 1742, its blend of secular and sacred was unprecedented. Delving into the era’s political and social turmoil, King argues that the primary theme of Enlightenment art wasn’t the triumph of reason but, rather, “how to manage catastrophe.” That theme is evident in King’s astute reading of the libretto (a collection of Bible verses that move from despair to hope), but he also locates it in the lives of key figures who had a hand in shaping and popularizing “Messiah.” The result amounts to more than an account of a piece of music. It is also, as King writes of Handel’s composition, “a record of a way of thinking.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Migrant’s Jail

  by Brianna Nofil (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Ellis Island may be the emblematic image of twentieth-century immigration to the U.S., but this academic history argues that a more accurate symbol is that of the county jail. Nofil’s book, dense with archival evidence, documents how the federal government has long warehoused immigrants in local jails, and, in so doing, evaded oversight and responsibility for horrific, even deadly, conditions. Small towns and county sheriffs have reaped benefits from agreements with immigration services, often building or expanding facilities to get contracts. In the early nineteen-hundreds, officials in northern New York constructed “Chinese jails” to “attract federal business”; in the late eighties, a sheriff in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, personally profited from an influx of Cuban refugees.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Empire of Purity

  by Eva Payne (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  In her début book, Payne argues that ideas of American exceptionalism extended to the commercial sex trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both social reformers and government officials took Americans to be especially capable of sexual continence. Their putative self-mastery, in turn, justified mastery over others. Ironically, Americans looked abroad for ideas on how to manage prostitution, and Payne explores the various schemes the U.S. invoked—from the creation of an isolation hospital for female sex workers in St. Louis to the circulation of chastity placards on American military bases in France. Many of these efforts assumed that all women who engaged in sex work were trafficking victims, but Payne grants them agency without romanticizing the profession. Her sober scholarship instead reveals the extent to which anti-prostitution campaigners remained blind to the causes of the activities they sought to curb.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “When the United States Tried to Get on Top of the Sex Trade,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  The Rest Is Memory

  by Lily Tuck (Liveright)

  Fiction

  “A work of fiction based on fact,” this slender, potent novel imagines the life of Czesława Kwoka, a Catholic teen-ager from the Zamość region of Poland, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Tuck deftly animates Czesława and her family, situating their lives within the larger context of Hitler’s effort to eradicate Poland and its culture. The novel sets up a powerful contrast between its intimately rendered characters and its steady accretion of facts delineating the objective horror of life in Auschwitz. In one passage, Tuck conveys the scale of that horror by quoting the writer Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote to his fiancée, “Our only strength is our great number—the gas chambers cannot accommodate all of us.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The World with Its Mouth Open

  by Zahid Rafiq (Tin House)

  Fiction

  This absorbing début story collection is composed of quiet snapshots of life in Kashmir. A shopkeeper grows unsettled by the anguished face of his new mannequin; a young boy who has trouble focussing endures corporal punishment at the hands of his teacher. (“Do you know what is waiting out there?” the teacher shouts. “The world . . . With its mouth open.”) A standout story centers on a community of stray dogs, scrounging for food and for peace in a world that wasn’t built for them. Throughout, characters are haunted by failures both personal and of their country, resulting in everyday heartbreak that is no less acute for being prosaic.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Valley So Low

  by Jared Sullivan (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In 2008, a landslide at a coal-powered electricity plant in Kingston, Tennessee, released more than a billion gallons of toxic coal-ash slurry into nearby neighborhoods. This tense investigative chronicle of what Sullivan, a journalist, calls the “single largest industrial disaster in U.S. history in terms of volume” focusses on the workers who cleaned up afterward. Many were told by their supervisors that their exposure to the slurry was safe, and were denied access to protective gear. Hundreds have developed cancer and other ailments; more than fifty have died. As Sullivan follows the court case filed by some of the affected men, the book becomes a legal thriller—a story of “simple, hardworking” Davids fighting the Big Energy Goliath who poisoned them.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Ingrained

  by Callum Robinson (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir honors not just the art of carpentry but the passion of labor itself. Robinson runs a workshop that specializes in sybaritic display cabinets, cases, and other luxury objects, some of which take hundreds of hours to make and sell for tens of thousands of pounds. He apprenticed under his father, one of the few Master Carvers in the United Kingdom, and writes with the precision and beauty that one finds in his craft. Oak has fibres that “catch and prickle like an old man’s stubble”; elm is “the tenacious swaggering dandy of the forest.” But Robinson is no purist: he praises manual labor in all its forms, whether it comes via cooking, gardening, or his own chosen trade. His book is a call for all of us, whatever we do, to do it with passion and care.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Deep Elation of Working with Wood,” by Casey Cep
• 
  The Impossible Man

  by Patchen Barss (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  The mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020, is known in part for his ability to visualize complex mathematical and physical concepts, from the twisting of light rays to the four dimensions of space-time. In this elegant biography, Barss vividly evokes Penrose’s geometric sensibility and his quest to prove that a geometrically perfect world lies hidden behind everyday reality. Throughout the book, Barss describes how Penrose escaped into “this Platonic mathematical realm” to sidestep worldly problems, particularly his strained personal and romantic relationships.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Family Romance

  by Jean Strouse (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Strouse, whose previous subjects include the diarist Alice James and the financier J. P. Morgan, takes on another Gilded Age story, to striking effect. Her focus is Asher Wertheimer, a Jewish art dealer who prospered in an old-money, aristocratic milieu that could seem resentful of a changing world. Wertheimer asked the most famous portraitist of the age, John Singer Sargent, to paint him and his family. The results are slippery—was Sargent dignifying the family, indulging in antisemitic caricature, or some strange mix of both? Strouse’s book is a biography of neither man; instead, she gently excavates the ironies that made one a brilliant painter and the other a poignant figure, chasing immortality.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Art Dealer Who Wanted to Be Art,” by Jackson Arn
• 
  Blood Test

  by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  This delightful deadpan novel, set in the post-industrial Midwest, follows a middle-aged insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher named Brock Hobson, who, at a medical appointment, takes a blood test offered by a shady biotech startup that uses genetic data to forecast participants’ future actions. When his results predict “criminal behavior . . . drug taking, and possible anti-social tendencies,” Hobson feels liberated from his straitlaced life. He shoplifts, and gets into an argument that leaves a man in a coma. After further tests suggest more extreme violence ahead, Hobson begins to question his identity and his sanity. The result is a comic parable about the possibilities, and the perils, of self-transformation.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Selected Amazon Reviews

  by Kevin Killian (Semiotexte)

  Nonfiction

  This expansive collection of the avant-garde San Francisco writer’s more than twenty-four hundred Amazon product reviews, scraped from the company’s servers, lightly edited, and arranged chronologically, includes evaluations of classic twentieth-century cinema, literary biographies, and experimental poetry collections—but also toiletries, Halloween costumes, and a chestnut tree. Killian’s reviews, usually five stars, are often exaggeratedly gushing, even melodramatic, but they are not mere parodies. He brings serious attention to bear on everything he reviews, and many of his recommendations are genuinely illuminating. It’s tempting to interpret Killian’s reviews as an ironic burlesque of the online shopper. But “Selected Amazon Reviews” is not just a conceptual art work, or a literary hoax. The entries are brimming with genuine pleasure, and also a wonderment and ardor for the great variety of stuff on the Web site. Like so many of us on social media, Killian seemed to love his platform of choice—the Amazon review section—despite its complicity in a techno-capitalist system that he abhorred.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer,” by Oscar Schwartz
• 
  Golden Years

  by James Chappel (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  As life expectancy in the U.S. increased, society’s interpretation of old age changed. Chappel chronicles how seniors themselves revised the narrative about aging and emerged as a dominant force in the country, pointing to the crucial roles played by organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons and shows like “The Golden Girls.” The A.A.R.P., founded in 1958, trumpeted a new reality where older people could stay in the game longer. “The Golden Girls,” which débuted in 1985, captured this image of the “wellderly,” depicting its four leads as enjoying active social and sex lives. But though the U.S. boasts robust systems of support for such healthy seniors, its support for those requiring long-term assistance is, Chappel writes, “catastrophically underdeveloped.” This highly perceptive account not only analyzes the reframing of old age as continued youth—albeit with the help of artificial joints, Viagra, and Botox—but is alert to its possible costs.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Old Age Was Reborn,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan

  by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa)

  Fiction

  The narrator of this wonderfully off-kilter novel, an elderly man, recalls his doting grandmother and his boyhood infatuation with a girl who danced on the balcony opposite his family’s apartment, in Naples. Starnone’s prose captures the feverishness and weird juxtapositions of a child’s inner life. “Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up,” he writes, and indeed, as a boy, the narrator spent a season searching for a “pit of the dead” evoked by his nonna. Now he tries to cement his experiences in words: “The problem, if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile, it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.”

  Buy on BookshopAmazon
• 
  Naples 1925

  by Martin Mittelmeier, translated by Shelley Frisch

  Nonfiction

  In the mid-nineteen-twenties, a group of German thinkers took a series of extended holidays in southern Italy. Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and other figures who would come to constitute the body of Continental thought known as the Frankfurt School, all felt stymied in the inflationary pressure cooker of the Weimar Republic. Mittelmeier’s study—a kind of intellectual history by way of Vitamin D synthesis—examines how these intellectuals were changed by the Italian environment. Coming from Germany, one of the most advanced industrial economies of the world at the time, they could not imagine how they would be impacted by Italy’s stubborn resistance to modernization as they knew it, and the way Naples seemed to traduce modern capitalism’s strict distinctions between work and leisure, personal and communal, and public and private. Arguing that “the experience of the city of Naples became an essential checkpoint for the analysis of modernity,” Mittelmeier claims that the landscapes and the peoples of Naples and Capri are the forgotten “source code” for some of the most influential diagnoses of modern life.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Surprisingly Sunny Origins of the Frankfurt School,” by Thomas Meaney
• 
  Burdened

  by Ryann Liebenthal (Dey Street)

  Nonfiction

  This granular history of education policy traces a century of decisions that caused American college education to become as expensive as it is today. The book’s sometimes surprising list of villains includes the G.I. Bill and Joe Biden, who, as a senator, argued for bankruptcy legislation that would “reward corporate creditors” instead of debtors. Its heroes—to the extent that Liebenthal has patience for incremental progress—include Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren. The book lingers on how student debt came to be thought of as a matter of consumer protection rather than of basic rights, and dismissed as a problem for unserious young people rather than seen as a barrier to a flourishing society.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Indian Card

  by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

  Nonfiction

  Schuettpelz, a former Obama Administration official, was six years old when she became, as she puts it, “a card-carrying Indian”—an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, from whom she is descended on her mother’s side. In adulthood, she learned that her enrollment had lapsed and she would have to reapply. The experience sparked her curiosity about the larger story of tribal membership, its personal and political meaning, a story she unspools in this book, an ambivalent and genre-bending work of reportage, memoir, and history. In researching tribal membership policies, Schuettpelz finds much that makes her uneasy but ultimately she sees tribal citizenship as an important bulwark against the forces of assimilation, extermination, subjugation, and disenfranchisement. Her own enrollment, she writes, has come to be “not just a source of protection but of pride,” one that feels increasingly like “an act of political dissent.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Complex Politics of Tribal Enrollment,” by Rachel Monroe
• 
  Linguaphile

  by Julie Sedivy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  The author of this engaging memoir is a linguist who focusses on the relationship between language and psychology. In explorations of language acquisition, ambiguity, and linguistic creativity, Sedivy transforms academic observations about language—a “daily miracle”—into broadly relevant insights. For instance, verbal fillers such as “um,” she explains, do not impede fluent communication but, rather, sharpen a listener’s alertness by signalling the complexity of the upcoming thought. She applies the conclusion to her encounters with sexism in the scientific community—where she might have benefitted, she suggests, from being clearer about the difficulties she faced.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Giant Robot

  by Eric Nakamura (Drawn & Quarterly)

  Nonfiction

  This lavishly designed hardcover collects some of the most important articles published by the Asian American magazine Giant Robot, as well as memories from contributors and readers. “We were just writing about stuff we liked,” Martin Wong, the magazine’s co-editor, said. “We weren’t trying to define anything or change anything.” By the fourth issue, Giant Robot had graduated from a D.I.Y. stapled-and-Xeroxed zine to a standard-size, nationally distributed magazine with a full-color cover. What attracted people from the mid-nineties through 2011, when Giant Robot published its final issue, was its mixture of arrogance—the sense that it was made by people with a strident sense of taste—but also curiosity. Reading it, you got the sense that anything was worth reviewing—snacks, books, movies, seven-inch singles, Asian canned coffee drinks—and everyone was worth interviewing, if only so that you could learn a little more about the world around you.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Giant Robot Captured Asian America,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  By the Fire We Carry

  by Rebecca Nagle (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  This richly reported book centers on McGirt v. Oklahoma, a Supreme Court case that, when it was decided, in 2020, reaffirmed Native American sovereignty over large parts of the state. Nagle, a Cherokee journalist, illuminates the case’s relevance through the related legal battle surrounding a Muscogee convict’s death sentence, the validity of which is contested by a public defender who believes that, since the crime took place on tribal land, Oklahoma state law enforcement did not have jurisdiction over it. Throughout the book, Nagle places these events in the context of centuries of injustice. By focussing on figures such as her ancestor John Ridge, a prominent nineteenth-century Cherokee politician, she also shows how “Indigenous resistance formed the first large-scale political protest movement in the United States.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages

  by Shane Bobrycki (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Crowds—whether the one that stormed the Bastille, in 1789, or the one that swarmed the U.S. Capitol, in 2021—have long fascinated social theorists and historians. Now crowds have become a field of study all their own, and Bobrycki’s contribution represents a blessedly old-fashioned kind of scholarship, as he digs through ever-finer shades of meaning, sifting through the Latin terms that refer to gatherings, and distinguishing among their changing definitions and implications. What happened when many people came together—and how critics imagined what happened—was, Bobrycki shows, mutable and multivalenced. Even in uncrowded early medieval Europe, the idea of the crowd mattered, as a concept, a dream, and a way of thinking about popular sovereignty, during a time when no such thing quite existed.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Alexander von Humboldt

  by Andreas W. Daum, translated by Robert Savage (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  The discoveries of the Prussian nobleman, cave botanist, and humanitarian Alexander von Humboldt, who was born in 1769, are the central attraction of this concise biography. Based on his research conducted in South America, Humboldt located the magnetic equator and defined the concept of climate zones for plants. He ventured high into the Ural Mountains and the Andes, and made a daring ascent on the volcano Chimborazo, in Ecuador. He also consorted with Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Darwin. Daum interweaves these exploits with noteworthy episodes that took place during the nine decades of Humboldt’s life, among them the decline of feudal Europe, the birth of photography, and the combustion of revolutionary fervor across the world.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Icon and the Idealist

  by Stephanie Gorton (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett were two twentieth-century crusaders who helped bring contraception to the United States. But the women took very different approaches. Sanger, the more famous of the two, was committed to direct action, such as opening clinics that might be shut down by the police. Dennett, in contrast, remained focussed on changing the law, devoting many years to the conventional politics of Washington lobbying. Gorton’s well-researched and timely dual biography not only recounts the lives of these activists but offers a closeup portrait of the rivalry that developed between them, one that was temperamental, political, and sometimes even personal. Yet Gorton complicates the usual dichotomy of movement leadership—the radical versus the institutionalist—and gestures toward the way arguments made by reproductive-rights champions decades ago are still bracingly relevant today.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Frenemies Who Fought to Bring Birth Control to the U.S.,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  Women’s Hotel

  by Daniel M. Lavery (HarperVia)

  Fiction

  This novel, about residents of a fictional New York City hotel exclusively for women, takes stock of women’s (sometimes circumscribed) lives with cynicism, humor, and curiosity. Set largely in the early nineteen-sixties, the story treats its characters’ alcoholism, anarchy, and kleptomania with tender irreverence. What most interests Lavery, however, is the life that such a hotel offers to women who wish to live without men. The residents consider marriage—“any man that you liked had to be seen through the light of a potential future employer”—but tend to reject it in favor of the charms and headaches of their floor mates.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Spirit of Hope

  by Byung-Chul Han, translated from the German by Daniel Steuer

  Nonfiction

  In this slim book, Han, a philosopher who was born in South Korea and lives in Germany, distinguishes between hope and optimism. “Hopeful thinking is not optimistic thinking,” he writes. Optimism “knows neither doubt nor despair. Its essence is sheer positivity.” But absolute hope is stranger, and in a way more extreme. It “arises in the face of the negativity of absolute despair,” Han writes, and becomes relevant at times “in which action seems no longer possible.” Hope emerges, paradoxically, when there’s seemingly nothing to hope for. In this sense, it relies on uncertainty, not conviction. Han has a spiritual bent, but his premise doesn’t have to be religious; it suggests only that the world contains untold potential, that what we see in front of us isn’t all that there will ever be.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Do You Have Hope?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Under the Eye of the Big Bird

  by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Soft Skull)

  Fiction

  Told in a series of loosely linked vignettes, this novel takes place in a future where humanity has nearly gone extinct and then been reborn—though, thanks to scientific advances, in slightly altered form. As Kawakami bounds through centuries, she explores mutant creatures, genetically identical children with numbers for names, and a group of bioengineered A.I. caretakers. Her terse, candid prose emphasizes the alienation of a world where death, sex, and clones all feel equally mechanical. At the same time, the processes by which these not-quite-humans begin to re-create religion and society feel innately familiar.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Stranger Than Fiction

  by Edwin Frank (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Is the twentieth-century novel a distinct genre? Frank thinks so, and he has made an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to prove it. The result is a book about books—thirty-one in total. They include novels that can seem demanding or off-putting, novels that are particularly long (like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”) or particularly weird (like Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives” and Machado de Assis’s “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”) or both (like Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” and Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual”). Frank is interested in the feel of novels and their writers, and he doesn’t shy away from plot summary. His capsule characterizations are deft; they contain enough biographical information about the authors to give us a sense of who they were and the worlds they inhabited without ever losing sight of what’s on the page.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre?,” by Louis Menand
• 
  Kent State

  by Brian VanDeMark (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  On May 4, 1970, the National Guard fired into a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University, in Ohio. When the dust settled, nine students were injured and four dead. This vivid, comprehensive account explores the circumstances around the shootings. Beginning with a tortured recollection from Matt McManus, the sergeant who issued a command to fire what he intended as warning shots, VanDeMark gives voice to both students and Guardsmen, and goes on to consider the political, military, and legal causes and ramifications of the event—including a new pessimism about the efficacy of protest.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Quarterlife

  by Devika Rege (Liveright)

  Fiction

  Rege’s début novel, largely set in Mumbai, takes its readers back to 2014, when Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party, the B.J.P., ousted the long-dominant Indian National Congress party. She rotates among the viewpoints of three principal characters—a well-born and free-floating capitalist; his initially aimless younger brother; and a blue-blooded American woman who’s on a fellowship to photograph a Mumbai slum—while presenting a gallery of smaller roles in order to explore the ideological ferment of that moment. Rege belittles none of these voices as she sets them at play, and, finally, at war. The effect is an urgent, vital orchestration, capturing both the complexities of the subcontinent and the capacities of the novel.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “A Début Novel Captures the Start of India’s Modi Era,” by James Wood
• 
  How the New World Became Old

  by Caroline Winterer (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  In 1826, explorers in upstate New York discovered trilobites that were some of the deepest ever unearthed, giving the fledgling United States a claim to ancientness predating that of Europe. In this elegant history, Winterer delves into the “deep time” revolution of the nineteenth century, a revolution that, as she shows, occurred not only among scientists but also among artists, poets, and theologians. Americans, Winterer writes, saw “a shimmering metaphysical significance” in the teeming strata beneath their feet, viewing coal deposits and fertile soil as divine gifts. Regarding themselves as stewards of the oldest lands on earth, they established the national parks in this era.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The City and Its Uncertain Walls

  by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Murakami’s newest novel is also a return to earlier works: a novella he published in Japan in 1980 and the novel “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” published five years later, which was, in part, an attempt to rethink the novella. In 2020, feeling that he finally had the skill and the time to return to this idea—of a high-walled town where clocks have no hands, people have banished their shadows, and a man works in a library “reading” old dreams—Murakami has written a larger portrait both of this surreal, almost mythical world and of the so-called real world. The result is a narrative full of twists and shifts, with an ending that purposely leaves us with questions to consider.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Haruki Murakami on Rethinking Early Work,” by Deborah Treisman
• 
  The Last Dream

  by Pedro Almodóvar, translated by Frank Wynne (HarperVia)

  Nonfiction

  This collection of twelve stories by the celebrated Spanish film director gleefully subverts the sacred as a matter of course. Populated by religious figures, sex workers, pop-culture icons, a gentle vampire, and a man who ages in reverse, these tales, written over five decades, are largely of a piece with Almodóvar’s exuberant, genre-defying cinema. A few, though, are stripped of outrageous plots and characters—intimate enough to resemble private jottings. The diaristic title story finds the author reflecting on the first sunny day after his mother’s death; another reckons earnestly with “having the desire but not the ability” to write a novel. Almodóvar introduces his book as a “fragmentary autobiography.” To read it, he observes, is to peer into the “relationship between what I write, what I film, what I live.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Repeat Room

  by Jesse Ball (Catapult)

  Fiction

  In this bleak work of speculative fiction, a futuristic state’s justice system is defined by a unique form of jury duty. After candidates are put through a series of harrowing tests, a single judge is chosen to enter the Repeat Room—an apparatus that allows the person to relive an alleged crime from the perspective of the accused—and decide whether to order an execution. As the book follows its protagonist, a garbageman who is selected for the Room, it examines a criminal-justice system that puts everyone on trial, rewards those found fit to be part of society with the power to determine the fitness of others, and disguises the death penalty as a product of individual empathy. “Being human,” a tutorial film claims, “is deciding who gets to be human.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Disrupted City

  by Manan Ahmed Asif (New Press)

  Nonfiction

  In this engaging book, a professor of South Asian history invites readers to take a walk with him through Lahore, the city of his birth. As he winds past monuments and bazaars—evoking a rich cast of characters who have called Lahore home for more than a millennium—he contemplates how this ancient city has changed since Partition, in 1947. Muslim families like his settled into the homes of displaced Sikhs and Hindus as part of a calamity that remade the population by forcing people “to move without much, to put down shallow roots, to remember even less.” But, as Asif demonstrates, walking through a city can be an act of remembering its past.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Flint Kill Creek

  by Joyce Carol Oates (The Mysterious Press)

  Fiction

  In this collection of twelve stories, in which relationships swerve disastrously off course, people aren’t as one thought they were, and seemingly bucolic landscapes turn sinister, Oates carefully threads strands of mystery and evil through the quotidian. As she said in a Q. & A. for the magazine, she considers “mystery to be the genre that most closely approximates our experiences as individuals.” One of the stories, “Late Love,” first appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Q&A

  by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)

  Nonfiction

  Structured as a series of answers to questions from readers, this book, by a noted graphic novelist, is part advice manual for aspiring cartoonists, part memoir. Tomine, who taught himself to draw as a “defense against chaos and loneliness,” started self-publishing at sixteen, and he has worked steadily for nearly thirty years now. He reflects candidly and wittily on topics including the solitary nature of cartooning, writing to artist idols, parenthood’s influence on his art, and adapting a graphic novel into a screenplay (“Shortcomings”). His writing, by turns encouraging and nostalgic, is interspersed with life-drawing sketches and with panels from his graphic novels.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Brothers Grimm

  by Ann Schmiesing (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  This is the first major English-language biography of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in decades, and it’s hearty German fare. Schmiesing traces the “riches to rags to riches” trajectory of their lives, situating it, along with their creative output, in an ever-evolving historical context. Born in 1785 and 1786, respectively, Jacob and Wilhelm came of age during a time when the outlines of their homeland shifted repeatedly, with the Napoleonic invasion of their native state of Hessen, in 1806, the Congress of Vienna and post-Napoleonic redivisions of Europe, and, eventually, the rise of Otto von Bismarck. For the Grimms, there could be no greater treasure than that of a German nation-state, and, believing that shared cultural traditions could actualize this dream, they set about collecting fairy tales. Aware, much like the brothers, that every story is one of enchantment and disenchantment, Schmiesing grapples with the commitment to authenticity that undergirded their work, and also its later appropriation by ethno-nationalist ideologies. In so doing, she demonstrates how the nation is at once humanity’s most cherished fairy tale, and its grimmest.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Brothers Grimm Were Dark for a Reason,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Model Home

  by Rivers Solomon (MCD x FSG)

  Fiction

  “Being well versed in the specific tropes of a genre should save me from worry, but knowledge has never saved anyone”—so observes Ezri, the Oxford-educated, nonbinary narrator of Solomon’s novel, which adapts the conventions of haunted-house fiction. After their parents—onetime paragons of “Black Excellence”—meet a grisly death in the affluent, white gated community in Texas where their family once lived, Ezri is summoned back to their childhood home, a place they have long regarded as haunted. As Ezri and their sisters parse supernatural horrors from earthbound ones, Solomon succeeds in evoking an atmosphere in which there is more than one way to feel haunted.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Letters

  by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  A new collection, edited by Kate Edgar, gathers the prolific, ebullient letters of the late British neurologist and longtime New Yorker contributor. An excerpt, focussing on his musings about the remarkable effects of a new drug to treat patients with encephalitis lethargica in the late sixties and on the writing of his 1973 book, “Awakenings,” appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Canoes

  by Maylis De Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore (Archipelago)

  Fiction

  This stylish collection opens with a narrator getting her jaw molded while a dentist shows her a photo of “a human jawbone from the mesolithic,” an image that establishes the oral and historical fixations that give de Kerangal’s mostly plotless stories their energy. A deep sensitivity to language elevates the mundanity of these narrators’ lives: one listens to radio static and feels that she is “crossing another dimension of reality in a breaststroke, immersed in the crackling of electromagnetic waves.” In another story, a narrator is asked to recite and record a poem by mysterious sisters who have undertaken “a monumental work that aimed to restore to literature its oral aspect, to embody it, to give each text a voice all its own, the right one”—a project not dissimilar to de Kerangal’s.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Barn

  by Wright Thompson (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Thompson, who was born into an old Mississippi planter family, grew up only miles from the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and killed. This book is not only a retelling of the crime—a story that Till’s family, among others, has already published—but also a rich and wandering history of the township in which Till died: the few square miles of plantations that helped birth both the blues and the Ku Klux Klan. Thompson writes movingly of more than one “enormous web of interconnected people” in the Delta, and of the ongoing fight to commemorate its lynchings. He brings a local’s intensity to the project: the book is as much about his neighbors, and even his kin, as it is about his country.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  When the Ice Is Gone

  by Paul Bierman (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This scientific history recounts the drilling, in the nineteen-sixties, of the world’s first deep ice core—a cylinder of ice that extended more than four thousand feet below the surface. Efforts like this one contributed to the creation of a new scientific discipline. By analyzing the dust, ash, oxygen isotopes, and air bubbles preserved in ice cores, scientists could now reconstruct the history of Earth’s climate. In 2019, Bierman, a geologist, and his team discovered plant fragments in the frozen soil collected from the base of the core—evidence that Greenland’s ice sheet had melted before, under climatic conditions similar to today’s. Unless we curb climate change, he writes, “the island will be green again.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Playing Possum

  by Susana Monsó (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  What do animals understand about death? That is the animating question of Monsó’s début book, in which readers encounter stories like that of a Tonkean macaque who refuses to put down the body of her dead baby and a dog that consumes the face of its deceased owner. It’s hard to engage with such anecdotes without anthropomorphizing their subjects. But Monsó shows that such accounts may be less straightforward than they seem. In order to lend some precision to an otherwise story-driven and sentimental subject, Monsó proposes a stripped down definition of death, one predicated on irreversibility and non-functionality, and rigorously applies it to an entire menagerie of creatures. The result not only expands our understanding of other animals but sheds light on our own intellectual and emotional relationship to mortality. How much, she implicitly asks, can any living being truly grasp about what it means to die?

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Do Animals Understand About Death?,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Bright I Burn

  by Molly Aitken (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Inspired by a real woman, Alice Kyteler, who was born in the thirteenth century and accused of witchcraft, this gripping novel follows its protagonist from her youth in Kilkenny, as the captivating daughter of an innkeeper and lender, to her old age, hiding out as a priest in England. In between, Alice takes over her father’s business; is struck by lightning; marries four times, each with violent ends; births two children; and amasses significant wealth. “I am a rare case,” she says, of her story. “Once brightly I burned, I drew them all to me and consumed them all, unwittingly and wittingly, in my fire.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Gifted

  by Suzumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell (Transit)

  Fiction

  In this unsentimental novella, a young woman working as a bar hostess and sex worker in Tokyo reckons with several unresolved personal traumas in the course of a few weeks. Her mother, an unsuccessful poet, is dying—first at her daughter’s house, in the entertainment district, then in the hospital. The unfortunate circumstances force the unnamed protagonist to reflect on the abuse she endured at her mother’s hands, as well as on the recent deaths of two of her friends. Based on Suzuki’s own experiences in the adult industry, the book chronicles the young woman’s wanderings from bar to bar, hospital to home, with brutal honesty. “This district is rife with women walking around with two million yen,” the character remarks. “Nearly the same number who say they want to die.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Irish Republican Brotherhood 1914–1924

  by John O’Beirne Ranelagh (Irish Academic Press)

  Nonfiction

  The Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in the late nineteenth century, was a secret society devoted to the establishment—through violent rebellion—of an independent Ireland. Its members included prominent figures such as Michael Collins, who was also the director of intelligence for the I.R.A. This comprehensive history focusses on a tumultuous decade that comprised the Irish War of Independence, the wrangling over the treaty that partitioned Ireland, and the civil war fought between Irish republicans and the British-backed government of the newly created Irish Free State. Ranelagh offers an illuminating study of how the I.R.B. weighed revolutionary idealism against political realism—a negotiation whose compromises are still playing out in Ireland today.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Third Realm

  by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

  This novel, part of an ongoing series, follows a loosely connected group of people as they navigate premonitions of doom that result from the sudden appearance of a bright new star. Despite suggestions of the supernatural (one subplot centers on a heavy-metal band implicated in human sacrifice), expectations of horror are not borne out. Instead, the book is full of the prosaic events for which its author is known. Protracted descriptions of drinking coffee or shopping at a grocery store are interspersed with philosophical musings about the search for meaning, which, when mixed with the uncanny, become genuinely unsettling.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Propagandist

  by Cécile Desprairies, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer (New Vessel)

  Fiction

  Who among us can truly claim immunity when the past comes calling? Desprairies’s “The Propagandist,” which was published in France in 2023 and long-listed for that year’s Prix Goncourt, is a case in point. Deftly translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, this début novel offers a thoroughgoing inventory of French complicity with the crimes of Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. Desprairies, a historian of Vichy France, focusses on a single French clan, modelled after her own family. The narrator is a historian of the author’s generation who recalls the characters who peopled her upper-middle-class, nineteen-sixties Parisian childhood. Some were mere “second-and-third-degree collaborators” during the war, content to look the other way and pursue their own advantage as Jews were systematically “relieved” of their property and positions in French society. Others, such as the narrator’s mother, Lucie—the novel’s central figure—were true believers in the Nazi cause. “The Propagandist” follows the narrator’s efforts to understand and come to grips with this malignant legacy. The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Mordant Intimacy of Cécile Desprairies’s “The Propagandist”,” by Leslie Camhi
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Use of Photography

  by Annie ErnauxMarc Marie, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories)

  Nonfiction

  In early 2003, while Ernaux was undergoing invasive treatment for breast cancer, she embarked on a passionate affair with a new man, Marc Marie. The mornings after their nights together, they’d wake to “the devastated landscape that remains after lovemaking”: clothes and shoes scattered haphazardly, papers knocked to the floor, dishes in disarray. There was a beauty and a mystery to the disorder, and Ernaux and Marie began to photograph these scenes, creating a silent record of their relationship. Later, they chose a selection of images to write about, and together produced this diary of a complicated year. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Good Reasonable People

  by Keith Payne (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  In America, it is now a common experience to find that an ordinary, likable person holds views that you deem disagreeable, or even disturbing. Often, we attribute this to the forces of polarization. But Payne, a professor of psychology, believes that the problem is deeper. Studies have shown that our political beliefs tend to be fairly shallow; few of us hold positions that are consistent or coherent over time. What we do share is a “psychological bottom line”: the conviction that we are “good and reasonable people.” In order to maintain a stable, positive sense of ourselves, Payne writes, we constantly rationalize, bending new facts toward a familiar conclusion—that we are good, and those who disagree with us are bad. Payne isn’t saying that politics is an illusion, or that Democratic and Republican policies are indistinguishable. But he does think that psychological drama, not political disagreement, is at the root of our national turmoil.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Do They Really Believe That Stuff?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

  by Rhodri Lewis (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This engaging study seeks to understand the “engine” driving Shakespeare’s tragedies, noting that no formal template binds “Hamlet” to, say, “Julius Caesar” or “Coriolanus.” Lewis finds common threads in the plays’ inner workings, most notably a delicate, calculated interplay between plot and personality. The tragic events that befall Shakespeare’s characters arise not from fate but from the characters’ feelings and thoughts—their delusions and the choices that those delusions lead them to make. Ultimately, Lewis writes, the aim of Shakespeare’s tragedies is not to moralize or to pronounce but to make audiences reflect on “human thought as an ineradicably emotional phenomenon.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Book of George

  by Kate Greathead (Henry Holt)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this comic novel is George, a millennial with vague writerly aspirations, who sustains his aimless life style by drawing on family connections and his girlfriend’s trust fund. His kind impulses are hampered by a lack of self-awareness: the day a moving truck is scheduled to arrive at his mother’s house, he unpacks her kitchenware to cook her an elaborate breakfast. As his girlfriend cleans his childhood bedroom while he plays with his old Game Boy, he says, “It’s not right.” The women in George’s life, who bear the brunt of his self-absorption, confront him with his egotism in occasional moments of clarity—but whether they can cure him, this wry story suggests, is less clear.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Dear Dickhead

  by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Despentes’s titular dickhead is a middle-aged novelist named Oscar Jayack, who finds himself on the wrong end of the #MeToo movement—in France, #BalanceTonPorc, or “squeal on your pig”—when his former publicist, Zoé Katana, outs him as a harasser on her blog. Zoé’s righteous fury is electric, and Despentes compellingly presents her as a casualty of male privilege. As for Oscar, there’s no doubt that his conduct was a textbook case of workplace harassment. And yet, he’s more pathetic than vicious, and far from “the big macho author” Zoé makes him out to be. Despentes, one of France’s most prominent feminist authors, has spoken up in support of #MeToo and been open about her own experience with sexual violence. Here, though, she’s less interested in revenge on the patriarchy than in recovery from its harms. “Dear Dickhead” is about the quiet, behind-the-scenes work of personal growth, which doesn’t always happen in a straight line. It is, in many ways, a sentimental book, forbearing toward its characters and essentially optimistic about the human capacity to change for the better.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Rage, Revenge, and Recovery Battle It Out in Virginie Despentes’s #MeToo Novel,” by Anahid Nersessian
• 
  Undivided

  by Hahrie Han (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Han, a political scientist, has previously written academic books and big-idea books, but her latest is a short, sensitive account of four congregants in a single church in Cincinnati. Crossroads is one of the largest in the country, with more than thirty-five thousand weekly in person attendees. In 2015, it created a racial-justice course in which small, diverse groups committed themselves to weeks of discussion; Han spent years talking to participants, using their experience to narrate the story of evangelical Christianity more broadly. Four, of course, is a mustard seed compared with the more than two hundred million Americans who identify as Christian, and Han makes no claim for statistical significance. She does, however, make a bolder claim about how the statistical insignificance of her subjects—as joiners in an age of social isolation, as Christians with a passion for racial justice, as interracial collaborators striving for mutual understanding—just might be relevant to the rest of us.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Megachurch That Tried to Confront Racism,” by Casey Cep
• 
  From Our Pages

  Highway Thirteen

  by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  The stories in this collection all revolve around the crimes of a serial killer, though the killer himself is never a main character, and the murders are not described in detail. Instead, each story features characters whose lives he touched or took: neighbors, acquaintances of his victims, podcasters chasing a sensational story. As McFarlane says, “The book isn’t about why serial killers do what they do; it’s about the ripple effects in the lives of people who are one or two or five or fifty steps removed from those horrors.” Two of the twelve stories, including “Hostel,” first appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Hidden Globe

  by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  Abrahamian takes readers on a vivid, revelatory, and politically unpredictable tour of the present-day network state, which she defines as an “invisible firmament that binds a most unlikely collection of places.” Since roughly the Second World War, she writes, sovereignty has figured out ways to sell its perks on the international market. Enterprising governments are wont to leverage their commercial faculties, hawking “something as sweeping as laws and as petty as stamps; as primeval as land and as functional as a phone number.” The book ranges beyond obscured transactions and nested shell companies to much weirder patterns of jurisdictional flexibility, and its scrutiny takes in the businesses that exploit these workarounds, as well as the states that purvey them. But “The Hidden Globe” is more than a political jeremiad. Abrahamian demonstrates interest in the actual people who designed the architecture of these liminal bailiwicks, and she is careful to point out that there are plenty of instances in which legal exemptions served righteous purposes.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Sovereignty for Sale,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
• 
  Lovely One

  by Ketanji Brown Jackson (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  Learning how to be, or become, Ketanji Brown Jackson was no mean feat. In her new memoir, Jackson, who joined the Supreme Court in 2022, writes that she was “fiercely” competitive in high school, skipping her commencement to take part in the National Catholic Forensic League championships. Her father, Johnny, a lawyer for the Miami-Dade school system, and her mother, Ellery, a teacher who became a high-school principal, pushed her to excel academically. “Lovely One” is, in some ways, most of all a parenting book. Jackson writes movingly about how her parents “instilled pride in our heritage, and faith in the future, in me,” and about raising her own daughters, the eldest of whom, Talia, was diagnosed with autism. Although Jackson doesn’t go into detail about her time on the Court, she does talk about the behind-the-scenes scrambling during her confirmation process. The transformation of prospective Justices’ Senate hearings into public ordeals means that almost any contemporary Justice’s memoir has room for a trauma plot. Jackson is gracious and refrains from score-settling, but makes it clear that her hearing—during which Republican senators intimated that she had supported terrorists when, as an assistant federal public defender, she represented Guantánamo detainees—was a wrenching slog.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Can Memoirs by Supreme Court Justices Teach Us?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
• 
  The Right to Oblivion

  by Lowry Pressly (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  Pressly, a philosopher by training, offers a radiantly original contribution to a subject in need of new thinking. Privacy is often framed as our right to withhold sensitive information—a way to defend ourselves from digital intrusion or surveillance. Pressly is not opposed to reforms that would give us more power over our data, but it is a mistake, he writes, “to think that this is what privacy is for.” In his view, true privacy “protects against the creation of such information in the first place.” The goal should be to preserve “oblivion”—the fluid, ambiguous state in which human experience can’t be defined, much less converted into information, and that allows us to restore and remake ourselves.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Is Privacy For?,” by Ben Tarnoff
• 
  The Notebook

  by Roland Allen (Biblioasis)

  Nonfiction

  The profound cultural and intellectual impact of the notebook is the subject of this wide-ranging history, which traces the unassuming object’s development from ancient wax tablets to modern-day Moleskines. Through the centuries, notebooks and allied forms such as sketchbooks have been indispensable tools for merchants, writers, artists, scientists, and everyday people. Allen’s narrative moves fluidly as he recounts the evolution of the notebook’s use—touching on medieval trading routes and contemporary artist studios—and explores its role in both mundane tasks and world-changing innovations.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Sunday

  by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)

  Fiction

  Schrauwen, a Belgian author and cartoonist, spent more than six years working on the graphic novel, which he serialized with the Berlin-based publisher Colorama. The story follows one character, Thibault, over the course of a single, uneventful Sunday in 2017. Readers encounter the intimate thoughts and neuroses that creep into Thibault’s mind as he contends with his own boredom. With the narrative’s shifts and repetitions, the passing day gives way to a sprawling, dreamlike meditation on time, memory, and consciousness. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Enlightenment

  by Sarah Perry (Mariner)

  Fiction

  This tale of faith and obsession, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, follows a pair of friends from an insular Baptist community in Essex, England. As one of them searches for a ghost that has haunted him since childhood, he becomes a rapturous student of physics and astronomy. “Occasionally it struck him that his love for the stars was no less a matter of faith than his remaining love for God,” Perry writes. Though the friends’ love stories form the novel’s heart, the book also navigates their attempts to find enlightenment beyond the boundaries of their community, as they question the binaries of goodness and sin, faith and doubt.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Waiting for the Fear

  by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell (New York Review Books)

  Fiction

  The eight stories in this collection confirm Atay, who died in 1977, at the age of forty-three, as one of Turkey’s funniest, most enigmatic writers, a bard of the absurd. The typical Atay narrator is intelligent, brash, self-conscious, and male. He does not know what or who he is, and his self-estrangement is the source of the work’s drama. Often, he’s estranged from language, too: “words refused to describe me,” one character laments. Hubbell’s marvellous, restrained translation makes clear that the force of Atay’s fiction emerges from the tension between the purposive activity of his language and his narrators’ “state of vague revolt” against it. To read these stories is to be forcefully ushered into the home of a friend, to listen to him rant, yet to find his bizarre performance endearing, even lovable.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Bard of Turkish Alienation,” by Merve Emre
• 
  The Sequel

  by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon)

  Fiction

  In “The Plot,” the best-selling forerunner to this propulsive thriller, the novelist Jacob Finch Bonner dies by his wife’s hand, after becoming a literary star for having written a novel that—unbeknownst to him—is based on her grisly life story. That wife, Anna Williams-Bonner, is the quicksilver protagonist of this book, which follows her after she writes a novel of her own: ostensibly a roman à clef retelling of the events surrounding her husband’s suicide, it is in fact a cover for murder. The novel makes Anna a star, but her success is soon punctured by anonymous messages indicating that somebody knows the truth about Jacob’s source material. Korelitz spins Anna’s pursuit of her accuser into a satisfying hunt, threading it with her antihero’s hilariously jaundiced opinions of literary life.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  John Lewis

  by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  Some biographers must wrestle with their subjects’ inconsistencies, but Greenberg, for the most part, has the opposite challenge in writing about the life of the late congressman. Lewis, who died in 2020, after serving thirty-three years in office, seems to have been a stubbornly straightforward character. Indeed, one of the most astonishing things about his life is how quickly he found his path, and how closely he hewed to it. During his first career, as an activist fighting Jim Crow, Lewis learned the importance of courage in the face of injustice. During his second, as a politician in Washington, he had to contend with the seeming mismatch between the soaring rhetoric of the civil-rights movement and the more earthbound reality of everyday politics. Attuned to this tension, Greenberg’s biography is appropriately weighty and admiring, but not hagiographic.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How John Lewis Put a Legacy of Heroism to Use,” by Kelefa Sanneh
• 
  Clean

  by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  This tense and devilishly well-paced thriller is narrated by Estela, the housemaid of a wealthy couple in Santiago, Chile. Estela’s duties include cleaning, cooking, and—most important—taking care of the couple’s daughter; the novel consists of her recollection, delivered in an interrogation room, of the events leading up to the daughter’s untimely death. With increasing agitation, Estela relates the family’s dark dramas and her own mounting feelings of detachment, creating an outsider’s portrait of bourgeois unravelling, deftly entwined with reflections on class and oppression.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Paradise Bronx

  by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Fifteen years ago, Frazier set out to walk a thousand miles in the Bronx. His amiable ramble retraces the footsteps of five centuries, from George Washington exercising his horse on the site of the future Cross Bronx Expressway to President Jimmy Carter’s tour of the borough’s most burned-out blocks and the after-school wanderings of Sonya Sotomayor and Jennifer Lopez. With stops to note the birthplaces of hip-hop and Häagen-Dazs, he demonstrates the place’s essential and enduring in-betweenness. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Scaffolding

  by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Two linked story lines drive this loosely plotted but finely etched début novel, which centers on two women who lived in the same apartment at different times. In contemporary Paris, Anna, a married psychoanalyst on leave after a miscarriage, befriends Clémentine, a young woman who unwittingly opens a door onto Anna’s past. In 1972, Florence, a feminist studying psychoanalysis and living in what will eventually become Anna’s apartment, wants a child; her husband doesn’t. As Anna and Florence separately puzzle over fidelity, desire, and Jacques Lacan, the novel hints that greater rewards come from intellectual quandaries than from the kind of certitude that defines the thinking of Clémentine, who, at one point, reduces fidelity to “a container for sex, to keep it from being too threatening.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  I Will Do Better

  by Charles Bock (Abrams)

  Nonfiction

  Three days before the third birthday of Bock’s daughter Lily, his wife died of leukemia, leaving Bock a widower and Lily motherless. This memoir is Bock’s account of—and reckoning with—the period that followed, when, as a self-described “overgrown, adult child,” he had to figure out how he was going to be the kind of parent that Lily needed over the next day or week or month, or sometimes just the next hour. Told with ten years’ hindsight, the book, which was excerpted on newyorker.com, is irresistibly candid about both grinding challenges and unexpected moments of joy.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Do Something

  by Guy Trebay (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  This coming-of-age memoir is a love letter to nineteen-seventies New York, celebrating the creative tumult of the city “at a time when it was not at all unusual for people to shop around for the reality best suited to whatever story they happened to be telling.” Trebay, a longtime style reporter for the Times, peppers his story with reminiscences of his vibrant but troubled family, especially his huckster father and outlaw sister. The fondest passages concern his first steps as an eager but untrained journalist at Interview and the Village Voice, and his friendships with countercultural and literary figures, from Candy Darling to Jamaica Kincaid. Throughout, he testifies to an unbridled romance with “a city where the inexplicable is an everyday occurrence.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Abortion in the Age of Unreason

  by Warren M. Hern (Routledge)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir is partly a firehose of pure screed, demonstrating the radical commitment necessary to sustain a career under unique duress. Hern, who is eighty-six, is one of very few physicians in America who openly perform abortion in the second and third trimester. He received his first death threat two weeks after his clinic opened, in 1973, and has spent fifty years under constant harassment from people who view him as a mass murderer. His op-eds from the past several decades, republished exhaustively in the memoir, show Hern hitting the same notes over and over, warning of a future of draconian abortion regulation and pregnancy criminalization that has now come to pass. The book also provides an answer to the question that has tended to hover over his profession: What kind of person would choose this line of work? In Hern’s case: a hippie with a wife and child, who still takes great solace in hiking and skiing and wildlife photography, whose focus on reproductive medicine comes in part from decades of fieldwork in epidemiology and global health. One of the only regrets Hern mentions in the book is that he never made the time to study jazz piano under Ahmad Jamal, who once agreed to tutor him.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Warren Hern, America’s Abortion Doctor,” by Jia Tolentino
• 
  Homeland

  by Richard Beck (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  The focus of this history of the war on terror is the war’s lingering cultural and political influence, which, its author argues, includes the deluge of Hollywood superhero films, a boom in S.U.V. sales, and the election of Donald Trump. Beck, a journalist, contends that the campaign was undertaken partly in an attempt to rescue “America’s declining power”—which it failed to do—and that “anti-Muslim bigotry had been baked into the war from the beginning.” Among the war’s legacies, he writes, are two failed states, increased surveillance within the U.S., a rise in police brutality, and the war in Gaza.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Sonny Boy

  by Al Pacino (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  The actor looks back at his hardscrabble childhood in the South Bronx in the nineteen-forties and fifties, his early days as an actor in downtown Manhattan, and his roles in such Hollywood classics as “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Godfather,” and “Scarface.” The book was excerpted in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Vox Ex Machina

  by Sarah A. Bell (M.I.T.)

  Nonfiction

  Bell’s début is a terrific account of how researchers gave machines voices, from signal compression through linear predictive coding and natural-language processing. Along the way, readers meet a young Alexander Graham Bell (no relation), who eagerly accepts his father’s challenge to build a talking machine, and Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, as he got his start as a cryptologist at Bell Labs. Bell also delves into the science behind everything from the electronic vocal tract (1950) and Speak & Spell (1978) to S.A.M., the Software Automatic Mouth (1982) and Siri (2011), examining all the mostly military-funded research that made each of these landmarks possible, down to talking bots.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Is a Chat with a Bot a Conversation?,” by Jill Lepore
• 
  Elevator in Sài Gòn

  by Thuân, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen An Lý (New Directions)

  Fiction

  The narrator of this ruminative novel, set in the early two-thousands, is a Vietnamese-language teacher living in Paris who returns to Vietnam for her mother’s funeral, where she discovers a photograph of a Frenchman in a hidden notebook. Searching for the man, she learns that her mother may have first met him in 1954, when she, a Communist, was captured by the French and he was among her interrogators. Threaded with observations about the nature of Vietnam’s colonial history and its aftermath, the novel is also an appraisal of memory and elision. As one character says, “cracks in our memory,” left untended, can “yawn open into abysses that devour all we once swore would be forever cherished in our mind.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Q

  by Craig Brown (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Queen Elizabeth II’s singular importance—constitutional, historical, psychological—is the subject of Brown’s book, which depicts the monumental figure at its center with magnanimous levity rather than with scrupulous reverence. In accordance with his métier as a columnist, Brown offers a series of approaches to the monarch from differing angles. His ear is exquisitely attuned to the hypocritical and the tone-deaf, as when he lists a variety of actions taken “as a mark of respect” during the week of national mourning that followed the Queen’s death. He is particularly interested in the ways in which the monarch, a familiar presence in the daily lives of so many for so long, also appeared unbidden in her subjects’ imaginative lives. “Q” is plausible evidence for the case that any book about the Queen is also a book about the realm and its populace—as well as that much larger sphere of non-subjects over whom she somehow still managed to reign.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Unrivalled Omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth II,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  Stolen Pride

  by Arlie Russell Hochschild (New Press)

  Nonfiction

  A deeply researched account of the rightward turn in Appalachia, this study focusses on Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city once flush with coal-mining jobs that sits in what is now America’s “whitest and second-poorest congressional district.” Hochschild, a sociologist, posits that Pikeville’s politics are shaped by grief about “stolen pride” and feelings of shame prompted by the region’s decline. She interviews a range of residents—including a mayor, prisoners, and recovering drug addicts—to understand each person’s relationship to these feelings. Some of her subjects experience “bootstrap pride”; others, like Matthew Heimbach, a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party, fashion themselves as moral outlaws.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Charm

  by Julia Sonnevend (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Sonnevend, a sociologist at the New School, offers some useful clues about what makes a politician successful. In the past, she writes, we wanted such figures to be larger than life—to have charisma, an almost godlike quality that was evoked through authority and distance. Today, though, political life unfolds on smaller stages; we encounter politicians in a fragmented fashion, by scrolling through clips on TikTok and YouTube. The modern-day equivalent of charisma, therefore, is charm—an “everyday magic spell,” based on momentary glimpses of personality, that renders politicians “accessible, authentic and relatable in their quest for power.” The problem is that charm is fickle; as Sonnevend notes, it’s less an inherent quality than a reflection of our own search for authenticity.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Powerful Is Political Charm?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Concerning the Future of Souls

  by Joy Williams (Tin House)

  Fiction

  In this collection of vignettes centered on the angel Azrael, Williams flits through the moments before and after death. The young Azrael meets souls at the moment of their passing and shepherds them to what lies beyond. As he grapples with the nature of his trade and endures gentle ribbing from the older, more worldly-wise Devil, his earnest metaphysical musings create a current that charges Williams’s glittering, piecemeal requiem. The book is filled with humor, canny allusion, beauty, and a profundity born of glimpsing fleeting human lives from the outside—through eyes that have seen epochs yet nonetheless remain befuddled.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Taming Silicon Valley

  by Gary F. Marcus (M.I.T.)

  Nonfiction

  This polemic, by a cognitive scientist and startup founder, calls for stricter regulation of A.I. It begins with problems posed by generative A.I. (the kind that spits out text, images, and other data, and which currently fuels the largest A.I. companies’ businesses). These include misinformation, pornographic deepfakes, impersonation scams, and the use of publicly available material as training data, which Marcus equates to a “land grab.” His warnings are framed by critiques of A.I. development’s current direction, which has privileged deep learning over potentially more fruitful methods, and of what he argues is the tech industry’s moral decline.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Be Ready When the Luck Happens

  by Ina Garten (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  It took canny business sense as well as abundant good fortune to become America’s reigning queen of tastefully deployed butterfat. As the title of her memoir suggests, Garten has an evolving understanding of her own success: she used to think that she was just lucky, she explains, but lately she’s begun to recognize the roles talent and hard work played. The book brings intimate new detail to the much-told story of Garten’s journey—from an office job in Washington to a prepared food store in the Hamptons, and from there to writing best-selling cookbooks and navigating TV stardom—including insight into her painful childhood and an account of the challenges in her seemingly idyllic marriage.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Ina Garten and the Age of Abundance,” by Molly Fischer
• 
  Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

  by Katherine Bucknell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  A masterly biography of the author of “Goodbye to Berlin” and “A Single Man,” this book captures the intricacies of a fascinating, often contradictory character. Isherwood was an upper-class Englishman (he gained American citizenship in his forties) who genuinely loved people from all walks of life; a libertine turned Vedanta monk; a gay literary icon who didn’t come out publicly until his sixties. But, above all, as Bucknell shows, he was a tireless observer and recorder of people, places, and historical moments. When Isherwood died, in 1986, he left behind a vast personal archive—material that Bucknell uses to gently tease out themes that connect the author’s life to his art. Isherwood, she writes, “imagined a world in which he might be able to live differently”; through his work, he helped usher that world into being.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Life and Death of the American Worker

  by Alice Driver (One Signal)

  Nonfiction

  This intimately reported chronicle focusses on the migrant workers who staff Tyson Foods chicken plants in Arkansas. Their jobs, Driver reports, come with significant physical risks: they suffer from carpal-tunnel syndrome, chemical poisoning, and U.T.I.s (thanks to limited bathroom breaks). Because many workers process more than a hundred birds per minute, accidents are common: an average of twenty-seven workers a day are hospitalized, and some undergo amputations. According to Driver, Tyson intimidates workers who speak up, and the conditions at their plants devolved further during the pandemic. (Tyson representatives denied many of the claims in the book.)

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Our Evenings

  by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House)

  Fiction

  Hollinghurst’s fifth novel follows Dave Win, the son of a white British woman and a Burmese man. Although Dave never meets his father or learns much about his heritage, his foreign looks make him a bemusing presence in the Berkshire town where he grows up and in the élite institutions where he eventually studies. Hollinghurst writes movingly about Dave’s experience of British racism, evoking the humanity and inner life of someone often presumed to have neither. Meanwhile, we learn, in some detail, about Dave’s career in avant-garde theatre, his deepening emotional ties to his mother, and his relationships with various men. The book, despite narrative longueurs, contains moments of extraordinary beauty and powerful set pieces that demonstrate how much descriptions of sex—and Hollinghurst remains the great depixelator of carnality—can convey: distraction, estrangement, a fond attentiveness.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Color, Class, and Carnality Collide in Alan Hollinghurst’s New Novel,” by Giles Harvey
• 
  The Sons of El Rey

  by Alex Espinoza (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  Encompassing three generations and two countries, this novel traces the lives of the men of the Vega family. As the patriarch, a former professional-wrestling star from Mexico, lies in hospice, the ghosts of his wife and his lucha libre persona force him to untangle his life’s defining relationships and failures. His son struggles to keep the Vegas’ gym, in Los Angeles, afloat amid the pandemic; his grandson, who is gay, totters between academic ambition and self-exploitation. The result is an affecting exploration of masculinity, familial and cultural inheritance, and the ways that love can be hidden and revealed.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  An Honest Woman

  by Charlotte Shane (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  Shane was twenty-one and a graduate student when she started selling private sex shows on a Web site called Flirt4Free, in the early two-thousands. Soon she began offering her clients erotic massage, and then “full service” work (meaning all-out penetrative and oral sex). In this memoir, which chronicles the nearly two decades Shane spent as a sex worker, she has little interest in sharpening the facts of her life to advance a political argument about the profession. Instead, she uses her experience as the basis for a sustained meditation on the misunderstandings that shadow male-female relations, whether paid for or not.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Charlotte Shane Learned from Sex Work,” by Lili Owen Rowlands
• 
  Mina’s Matchbox

  by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen B. Snyder (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  This beguiling coming-of-age novel, set in 1972, follows a twelve-year-old girl who goes to live for a year with her eccentric half-German uncle. The head of a beverage company, he resides with his family in coastal Japan, in a large house with grounds that once contained a zoo. The youngster bonds with her cousin, Mina, a beautiful but frail asthmatic girl who collects matchboxes and rides to school on her pet pygmy hippopotamus. The book is suffused with the transplant’s growing awareness of the ephemerality of her own innocence: “Even if you were born in a wonderful house like this,” she thinks, “you couldn’t just stay there, warm and cozy, for the rest of your life.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Final Cut

  by Charles Burns (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Burns has a penchant for crafting images and stories that are both stylish and repulsive. The graphic novel follows Brian, a young artist and would-be filmmaker, and his attachment to Laurie, whom he recruits to play his film’s leading lady. It deploys themes of estrangement, fear of body processes, and the sudden apparition of extraterrestrials to express feelings of deep alienation and isolation. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Elise and the New Partisans

  by Dominique GrangeJacques Tardi, translated from the French by Jenna Allen (Fantagraphics)

  Fiction

  Tardi’s cartoonlike characters—depicted in realistic, harshly lit, black-and-white Parisian street settings—come to life as he draws on memories of the early activism of his longtime partner, the French singer Dominique Grange. The graphic novel follows a character named Elise, a stand-in for Grange, and recounts her political awakening and subsequent involvement in the protests that took place across France in May of 1968. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  How to Build a Fashion Icon

  by Law Roach

  Nonfiction

  Roach, a celebrity stylist, has worked with such clients as Céline Dion and Zendaya. In his new book, a memoir accessorized with tips for the Everywoman (and man) looking to dress like that girl, he writes about his childhood on the South Side of Chicago, his fashion influences, and what led to his decision to retire from full-time styling in 2023. Roach, who studied psychology in college, compares his initial meeting with a client to an “intake.” (Indeed, his first job out of school was doing intake at a mental-health facility.) “I can tell when to push someone out of their comfort zone, when to be more forceful with my vision, and when to pull back. That’s the psychologist’s training,” he writes.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Architect of Zendaya’s Red-Carpet Style,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Twenty Years

  by Sune Engel Rasmussen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This foreign correspondent’s account of the two decades following the American invasion of Afghanistan uses a kaleidoscope of individual stories to portray how the country was “hollowed out” by “waste, fraud, price gouging, and profiteering.” Two subjects in particular come to the fore: Zahra, an Afghan refugee who returns from Iran after the Taliban is ousted; and Omari, a Talib, who is as motivated by religion as he is by the brutality of the U.S. military. As Rasmussen interweaves the war and his subjects’ stories, he shows how historical events intrude on the quotidian, and examines a foreign intervention in which, he writes, “lessons were rarely learned, mistakes often repeated.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Kingmaker

  by Sonia Purnell (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Purnell’s new biography of Pamela Harriman is something of a feminist reclamation project, bent on producing a respectful portrait of its subject, a Democratic power broker who, in her lifetime, was often derided for her sexual adventures. Born into the English aristocracy, in 1920, she married Randolph Churchill when she was nineteen. But it was his father, Winston, and his mother, Clementine, who saw in Harriman an uncanny ability to wield “power over older men.” They deployed her in a campaign of charm and seduction to help secure the Anglo-American alliance. When she married the magnate and statesman W. Averell Harriman, in 1971, she swiftly became an American citizen, a Washington fixture, and a prominent political fund-raiser. The Gorbachevs made a point of visiting her during their first trip to Washington, Nelson Mandela sought her counsel about getting votes, and Bill Clinton described her as “the First Lady of the Democratic Party.” Though there’s not a lot to support Purnell’s contention that Harriman was a woman of ideas, it’s clear that she liked to bet on winners, and that she was good at it.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How a Mid-Century Paramour Became a Democratic Power Broker,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  The Wisdom of Sheep

  by Rosamund Young (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This meditative book reflects on more than four decades of living and working at Kite’s Nest, an organic farm in the Cotswolds, in England. Though Young acknowledges the “unremitting hard work” involved in farming, her anecdotes emphasize its pleasures: the welcome from her herd of sheep after she’s been away; the sight of a field full of frogs, signifying a healthy ecosystem. The farm’s cows, chickens, cats, and sheep “are all individuals with incredibly varied personalities.” Indeed, her stories show them to be subtly emotive—recalcitrant, helpful, blithe, astute. One hen, locked out of the house by mistake, leaps onto the windowsill “and pulls faces at me as I wash the dishes, forcing me to run to the door with profuse apologies.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Monet

  by Jackie Wullschläger (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Wullschläger, an art critic for the Financial Times, has written an Impressionist biography of the central Impressionist painter: a few key events appear in smudged glimpses, but the over-all shape of the life is clear, and every few chapters a nub of detail robs you of your breath. Monet often told interviewers half-truths, and he destroyed almost every letter he received. What Wullschläger shows, though, is that the artist was a relentless—and surprisingly business savvy—workhorse. He spent gruelling hunks of his twenties painting from five in the morning to eight in the evening; he conferred with his primary dealer about how to nudge up sales; he snubbed this dealer when he learned that a rival one could net him more money; and he completed something like two thousand paintings, not counting the hundreds he knifed apart.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Anguish of Looking at a Monet,” by Jackson Arn
• 
  How to Leave the House

  by Nathan Newman (Viking)

  Fiction

  This zippy novel takes place in the course of twenty-four hours on the day before the protagonist—a smart, self-centered, bisexual twenty-three-year-old—is meant to leave for university. The book alternates between chapters about the boy as he attempts to recover an important lost package and about the people he runs into along the way—an insecure ex-boyfriend, a cancer survivor, an elderly neighbor who has recently discovered a dark secret about her dead husband. Sprinkled throughout are wide-ranging cultural references—from Charlie Chaplin to broken phone screens—that nod at humanity’s interconnectedness, and, ultimately, help the boy learn that his is only one among many rich lives.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Entitlement

  by Rumaan Alam (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  The protagonist in Alam’s fourth novel is Brooke Orr, a thirtysomething Black woman living in New York. Brooke has just started working at a foundation that is dedicated to giving away the fortune accumulated by an office-supply magnate named Asher Jaffee. Brooke’s career path dismays her adoptive mother, an unmarried white woman, but Asher sees Brooke as just “the sort of woman he wanted working in his name” and decides to make her his protégée. Under Asher’s wing, Brooke tags along when he meets with the Ford Foundation, rides around in the cocoon of a chauffeured Bentley, and advises her boss to spend nearly a million dollars on a Helen Frankenthaler painting. One of Brooke’s friends finds her becoming transfigured, strangely beautiful and animated. Once, she was one of those people who thought that “money, like grace, would be accrued.” But her association with Asher has convinced her that she is now someone to whom money, like grace, will just happen. She develops the certainty of the manic, or the converted, and Alam deftly chronicles how proximity to great wealth ultimately unhinges her.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Other People’s Money Can Drive You Mad,” by Laura Miller
• 
  Headshot

  by Rita Bullwinkel (Viking)

  Fiction

  A boxing tournament for teen-age girls in Reno serves as the backdrop of this novel, which proceeds round by round, entering the psyche of each competitor as she squares up against her opponent. The boxers include a well-groomed heir to an athletic legacy and a gangly outsider who leans into the chaos of the fight; if the girls are sure of their bodies, they are often uncertain of where they belong. Each bout is written in rapid-fire bursts, moving between past traumas and into the characters’ futures, long after they’ve left boxing behind. With prose that channels the sport’s intensity, Bullwinkel creates a group portrait that insists on centering her subjects’ idiosyncratic lives.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Woodworm

  by Layla Martínez, translated from the Spanish by Sophie HughesAnnie McDermott (Two Lines)

  Fiction

  Vengeance and ghostly visitations undergird this début novel about a young woman and her grandmother who live in a house where they are plagued by what they call “the woodworm”: a “bastard itch that won’t leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either.” The women’s story is anchored in a long-simmering feud with their wealthier neighbors, which reaches back generations; when a child goes missing, the town’s collective suspicions fall on the granddaughter, and the conflict boils over into the present. Shadowed by the Spanish Civil War and the remarkable cruelty of men, the violent tale unspools into a potent consideration of inherited trauma and the elusiveness of justice.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Small Rain

  by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Greenwell’s latest novel unfolds within the consciousness of a patient hospitalized with a rare vascular condition. Tangled in tubes, with machines that beep and bring constant news of his body, the narrator participates in a parallel activity of self-monitoring, retrieval, and discovery. Pain, he observes, “had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence; I wasn’t impatient or bored, there was something fascinating and dreadful about the experience of my body. I began negotiating with it, with the pain or with my body.” What sustains the novel is what sustains the narrator: his partner L, at home worrying. From a tale of great pain—a rare kind of story—the book becomes one so difficult to render that it is thought to be impossible: a story of ordinary love and ordinary happiness.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “An Anatomist of Pleasure Gives Voice to the Body in Pain,” by Parul Sehgal
• 
  The Missing Thread

  by Daisy Dunn (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  This engaging book, by a classical historian, surveys three thousand years and argues that women were more integral to the development of the ancient world than prevailing narratives suggest. Dunn’s subjects include Pandora, whom Greek mythology identifies as the “first woman”; Locusta, the toxicologist who helped Agrippina to poison Claudius; Fulvia, a late Roman politician who raised an army after her daughter was scorned by a lover; and the scores of anonymous Etruscan women who maintained a thriving quasi-matriarchy until the Roman ascendancy. “Women are everywhere that antiquity raises its head,” Dunn writes. “They are the authors of our history.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Colored Television

  by Danzy Senna (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  Senna has spent her career finding humor in the ways that biracial people are questioned, fetishized, or ignored in America. Her latest follows a writer, Jane Gibson, whose main issue with her mixed identity is figuring out how to exploit it properly. Jane has spent nine years on a sprawling family saga that her husband, a Black visual artist, calls the “mulatto War and Peace.” When it’s rejected for publication, she fibs her way into television, pitching an influential showrunner on a biracial sitcom that she hopes might lift her family out of housing limbo. What follows is a tart, incisive portrait—both of the country and of the narcissistic task of self-commodification.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Danzy Senna Is Amused by Your Mixed Feelings,” by Julian Lucas
• 
  Life as No One Knows It

  by Sara Imari Walker (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  In this treatise, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist posits a new account of life: Assembly Theory, which identifies the threshold between nonliving and living complex objects—anything from a rock to a coffee cup to a human being—by counting the “steps” it takes for the universe to assemble them from their smaller parts. (In the lab, Walker and her team found that, on Earth, objects with an assembly index below fifteen steps are nonliving.) Assembly Theory has already attracted much attention, but more compelling is its underpinning idea of a “new physics” that places information front and center. “The fundamental unit of life,” Walker argues, “is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Impossible Creatures

  by Katherine Rundell (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Rundell’s tenth book for children, and her first foray into outright fantasy, revolves around a cluster of North Atlantic islands, magically hidden for thousands of years. There, supposedly mythical creatures, long since hunted to extinction in the rest of the world, still flourish—centaurs and sphinxes, dragons and krakens, mermaids and manticores. Now, though, those creatures are struggling. Their existence depends on the magic that suffuses the Archipelago, but that magic, known as the glimourie, is on the wane. It’s up to Rundell’s two intrepid child protagonists, a boy from North London and a girl from the Archipelago, to figure out what’s gone wrong. As this setup suggests, “Impossible Creatures” has something to do with environmental decline here in our own world. Yet it is not a parable. Its real subject is twofold: the dazzling beauty of the natural world, to which the very young, who are not yet accustomed to it, so often have special access; and the potential bravery of children, to which, in our helicopter-parent world, they so often do not.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Where Dragons Are Real and the Unicorns Are in Serious Trouble,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Napalm in the Heart

  by Pol Guasch, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Written in lyrical, if brutal, fragments, this dystopian novel takes place in an unnamed country riven by military strife and environmental disaster. Its narrator, a young man who lives in the forest with his mother, sustains himself by writing letters to his city-dwelling boyfriend. But, following a violent confrontation with a soldier, the young man embarks on a harrowing drive across a post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering mercenaries and desperate refugees along the way. If Guasch’s formally inventive approach can sometimes risk murkiness, the beauty of his prose shores up his story, in which language, love, family, and home are in constant peril.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Playground

  by Richard Powers (W. W. Norton & Company)

  Fiction

  The fourteenth novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Overstory” essentially comprises three story lines. The first is about an all-­conquering tech giant whose diagnosis of dementia has compelled him to revisit his happiest memories. A second story line concerns a close-knit, dwindling community on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, that must decide how to respond to an offer from American investors who want to launch a libertarian seasteading enclave nearby. The third follows Evelyne Beaulieu, a famous oceanographer, as she reflects on her life’s work and all the destruction she has witnessed. A Silicon Valley-inspired twist brings these threads together. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that an A.I. entity appears—and that it does not end up destroying life as we know it. In fact, the representation of A.I. is almost sympathetic, suggesting the possibility that machines could learn grace and benevolence. In a scene involving two characters playing the Chinese strategy game Go, one of the book’s central themes emerges: The players are competitive, but it’s the game’s complexity, the numerous possibilities in every decision, that appeals to them most. What if the point of life isn’t to win but to keep surviving, together?

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Bright Objects

  by Ruby Todd (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this layered début novel, set in 1997, is a young funeral attendant named Sylvia, who lives in a small town in Australia and is planning her suicide. Sylvia sets the date for it on the second anniversary of her husband’s death in a hit-and-run, but, before the time comes, she falls in love with an American astronomer working at a nearby observatory, where he discovered a comet that some townspeople have since endowed with conspiratorial significance. As Sylvia attempts to track down the driver who killed her husband, the book develops the momentum of a thriller; meanwhile, the astronomer’s skepticism about drawing meaning from the stars enriches the text with the provocations of a philosophical novel.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  My First Book

  by Honor Levy (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

  Levy is a twenty-six-year-old literary personality in the micro-scene known as Dimes Square. “My First Book,” which combines short, chaotic character studies with dispatches from her lower-Manhattan milieu and meditations on being an Internet native, wants to reproduce the ecstatic, youthful feeling of being swept up by one’s time and place, selected for a particular era in history. Levy’s strength is her style: energetic, funny, with a forlorn sweetness and innocence. It feels like the Web, not only because of its generous helping of contemporary slang (Levy includes a whole Zoomer glossary, with entries like “UwU,” “Nerf,” and “Ketamine”) but also because it pulls in material with no regard to context: the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe sit alongside Bella and Edward, from “Twilight.” There’s an element of social signalling to the references—Levy is obsessed with cataloguing trends and in-jokes—but she appears to be clowning on the world and herself in equal measure. In these stories, brands, campaign strategists, and pop stars are divorced from any sort of stable meaning and collapsed together in a whirl of gleeful stimulation.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  Playing with Reality

  by Kelly Clancy (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  Games may be a diversion, but, as Clancy, a neuroscientist, writes, they also can provide useful models of the real world. In this comprehensive study, which fuses science, world history, and politics, she documents the role that games have played in medicine, economic thought, moral philosophy, A.I., and more. Although knowledge acquired from gaming has had worthwhile practical applications, from text translation to advances in cancer treatment, games don’t necessarily reflect reality, and players don’t always act rationally. In detailed chapters on topics like modern war-game simulations and the misapplication of game theory in justifying mass privatization, Clancy warns of the societal risks of allowing mathematical models to govern political decisions.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  On the Edge

  by Nate Silver (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This book—like Silver’s previous one, “The Signal and the Noise”—is a hefty set of meditations on probabilistic thinking. But this time the author, America’s most famous elections prognosticator, is taking in broader horizons, extending the lessons of poker and modern gambling to arenas like artificial intelligence and ethics. He has spent time interviewing such notables as William MacAskill, the philosopher-evangelist of effective altruism; Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced cryptocurrency billionaire; and Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI. The people changing the world are doing it by thinking like poker players, Silver contends. If we want to keep up, we’ll have to learn the mind-set of the successful gambler.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player,” by Idrees Kahloon
• 
  The Secret Life of the Universe

  by Nathalie A. Cabrol (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  This compact and often astonishing overview of the current state of astrobiology, by a director at the SETI Institute, explores the scientific advances of the past few decades, many of which have radically altered our understanding of the universe and, Cabrol argues, brought us close to finding extraterrestrial life. Space telescopes—most notably the Kepler, launched in 2009—have revealed a cosmos “populated by more planets than stars,” and infrared surveys of those planets’ atmospheres will yield vast amounts of data in the coming years. Cabrol, an assured and accessible guide, notes that interpreting that data poses a great challenge: because we still lack a consensus on the definition of life, we may not know it when we see it.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Letters of Seamus Heaney

  Edited by Christoper Reid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This eight-hundred-page collection is an intimate portrait of Heaney’s everyday commitments. Many a letter begins with an apology for its belatedness; many others detail the innumerable obligations—the classes taught, the lectures delivered, the reviews drafted, the prizes judged, and, too rarely, the poems composed—that made prior correspondence impossible. Perhaps Heaney’s most complicated duty was to his country. He believed poetry to be a project of the self, but as Northern Ireland was ripped apart by the Troubles—and as Heaney became Ireland’s most prominent writer—he increasingly felt compelled to address the war around him.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Seamus Heaney Wrote His Way Through a War,” by Maggie Doherty
• 
  The Coin

  by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult)

  Fiction

  In this début novel, a wealthy, fashionable Palestinian middle-school teacher living in Brooklyn wrestles with feelings of alienation. Seeing dirt everywhere, she begins to wash herself compulsively. Her lessons become strange and her relationships with her students blurry. After a dalliance with a man, she gets swept up in a scheme involving reselling luxury handbags. In a moment of winking symbolism, she comes to believe that a coin she swallowed as a child is living in her body, altering her personality. Somewhat surreal, and willing to risk a little provocation, Zaher’s book plays with overlapping ideas of privilege, asking complex questions about what past suffering means in the face of a desire for today’s luxuries.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Living on Earth

  by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Usually, histories of life introduce us to creatures in sequence, showing how Earth’s menagerie has changed with time. But Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science, has a different goal: he wants to show how different forms of life have altered the Earth, creating the conditions for the creatures that follow, beginning with cyanobacteria adding oxygen to the atmosphere and ending with climate change. Each kind of creature sees the world in its own way, Godfrey-Smith writes, and so “our shared world can easily seem to fade.” But “our actions are poured, together, into a common arena.” The idea is to give us a better sense of the space we occupy together, and of our ongoing responsibility for it.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Natural Are We?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Fierce Desires

  by Rebecca L. Davis (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Davis, a professor of history and of women’s and gender studies at the University of Delaware, centers her chronicle on marginal identities, whether of nonconforming individuals or of whole peoples whose sexualities were vilified and constrained by conquest and exploitation. Her book is structured around a series of short biographical accounts—running from colonial-era sex police to the contemporary moral panic over Drag Queen Story Hour—and she fleshes out her case studies with a sympathetic imagination. For her, these are potent parables, revealing how questions of sex, gender, orientation, and identity have had the ability to disrupt communities from the nation’s beginning. They’re the overlooked antecedents to today’s battles over issues like gender nonconformity and reproductive rights.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Forgotten History of Sex in America,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

  by Noliwe Rooks (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This slim, engaging work of history looks back on the life of Mary McLeod Bethune, a Black educator and activist who was born to former slaves in the Jim Crow South and rose to prominence as an adviser to several U.S. Presidents. Though not a household name today, Bethune was well known and admired during her lifetime. She was a mentor to the poet Langston Hughes and persuaded business owners in Florida to invest in a “beach for Black people.” Rooks, whose grandmother graduated from Bethune-Cookman University, one of the many institutions Bethune founded, excavates Bethune’s biography to reveal valuable lessons for the present.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Turning to Stone

  by Marcia Bjornerud (Flatiron)

  Nonfiction

  This compelling and lucid work is not just about the life of the planet but also about the life of the author. Bjornerud, a geologist, structures each of the book’s ten chapters around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. Bjornerud has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. She is fond of calling us “earthlings,” to remind us that our most urgent identity is as creatures who evolved on and depend on this planet, and she argues that our lives are shaped in profound and ongoing ways by the ground under our feet.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Studying Stones Can Rock Your World,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Why Animals Talk

  by Arik Kershenbaum (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  A wealth of information is contained in this account of animal cognition, which focusses on such vocal creatures as hyraxes, parrots, gibbons, and chimpanzees. Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, relates tales from his field work—including a frigid expedition to northern Italy, where the wolves he listened for all day approach in darkest night—which demystify the howls, clicks, and whistles that could otherwise pass for noise. There are myriad examples of animals communicating: dolphins, for instance, seem to name themselves. Though animal utterances are different from our own, comparing animal expression to that of humans can illuminate the complex reasons behind the evolution of communication in each species.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Rich People Have Gone Away

  by Regina Porter (Hogarth)

  Fiction

  The precipitating event in this novel of COVID and comeuppance takes place on a hike, when a married couple—who have fled Brooklyn for a cottage upstate—have an argument. The wife, who is pregnant, throws hot tea at her husband; then, as he remembers it, he “let his wife dangle, if only momentarily,” over a cliff. After the wife runs away, the husband files a missing-persons report, and he becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance. Porter’s story has the signposts of a mystery and the economically stratified ensemble cast of a social novel. In chapters centered on characters whose lives are disrupted by the couple’s drama and by lockdown, people sift through pasts whose cruelties match those of their pandemic present.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Grown Women

  by Sarai Johnson (Harper)

  Fiction

  Four generations of Black women are at the heart of this tender and expansive novel, which begins in the nineteen-seventies. When Charlotte, eighteen years old and pregnant, flees her wealthy family’s home, she is determined to do better by her unborn child than her mother, Evelyn, did by her. But Charlotte’s choice leads to a life of poverty; eighteen years later, her daughter, Corinna, also gives birth to a girl. For Evelyn, Charlotte, and Corinna, the baby represents an opportunity “to move, if not on, then forward,” to break from patterns of physical and emotional violence carried out by the men in their lives, and by their own mothers. The three women endeavor to raise the girl together—a journey that leads them to discover the limits of forgiveness, and to reassess what it looks like to raise a “grown woman.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Importance of Being Educable

  by Leslie Valiant (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  When we think about what makes our minds special, we tend to focus on intelligence. But if we want to grasp reality in all its complexity, Valiant writes, then “cleverness is not enough.” Valiant, an eminent computer scientist at Harvard, thinks the more important quality is “educability”—the ability to gather diverse kinds of knowledge, often in a slow, serendipitous way, and knit them together. This explains why the books we read in college might not be understood until decades later, or why a good doctor doesn’t rely solely on what she learned in medical school. Human beings—unlike A.I., for example—constantly improve their minds through an unfolding, open-ended process that connects newly acquired facts and ideas to ones collected long ago.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Does It Really Mean to Learn?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Hitler’s People

  by Richard J. Evans (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Through a series of biographical essays on prominent Nazis—including Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, and Leni Riefenstahl—this book explores how members of the initially small but violently fanatical National Socialist movement came to dominate German politics and carry out unprecedented atrocities. Evans, a noted historian of modern Germany, complicates earlier portrayals of these figures as either bloodthirsty psychopaths or the inevitable product of historical forces. Instead, he foregrounds the ways that their individual psychologies and sociocultural backgrounds primed them to make self-interested and ideologically motivated decisions that ultimately resulted in the horrors of the Second World War.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Sea Level

  by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

  We talk about “sea level” as if it’s an unmoving benchmark against which we can measure elevation. But the oceans, of course, are never at rest; they have risen and fallen by hundreds of feet alongside changes in the Earth’s glaciation, and they are currently pushing, at a fairly rapid clip, over seawalls and into cities. How did we come to treat the sea as a synonym for stability? The environmental historian Wilko Graf von Hardenberg writes that sea level is best thought of as a social and historical construct, the result of decisions by generations of people doing their best to make sense of a strange and chaotic world. Elevation was once expressed as the amount of time it would take a person to climb to a destination, or as the distance from whatever baseline was locally known and useful. But, by the turn of the twentieth century, European scholars were gathering regularly to define sea level for the Continent, even as their ongoing studies of the Earth slowly undermined the theory of a stable sea. Von Hardenberg’s history is a story not of the way sea level has changed over time but, rather, of the ways in which humans have made use of sea level as a marker of where we stand in the world.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Our Very Strange Search for ‘Sea Level,’ ” by Brooke Jarvis
• 
  The Bookshop

  by Evan Friss (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  “The Bookshop” is a series of thirteen mini-profiles of notable bookstores and their owners, from Benjamin Franklin and his printing shop in the early eighteenth century to places like Three Lives, in New York’s West Village, today. Friss sees the small bookstore in contemporary America as a haven from commercialism—a place where books are treated as more than mere merchandise—and as a community-building space. Such retailers welcome everyone—toddlers, oddballs, and professors. Competing with the e-commerce leviathans, they schedule author appearances and other events; regulars drop in to chat about books. The rewards are not just material. In Friss’s account, the bookstore survives by redefining itself.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space?,” by Louis Menand
• 
  The Salt of the Universe

  by Amy Leach (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This volume of comic essays recounts Leach’s upbringing in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and her eventual withdrawal from “the regulated march of fundamentalism.” With an off-kilter tone and a dexterous, irreverent attitude toward religious fervor, Leach explores a range of topics, including vegetarianism, contemporary Christian music, and teaching English classes in Paraguay. Many of the chapters are attuned to the beauty of the natural world. “In the forest one is exempt from instruction and dogma,” Leach writes, “though not from sermons, for the birds preach: Sing. The grapevines preach: Climb a tree. The lichens preach: Patience.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Someone Like Us

  by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf)

  Fiction

  A pensive anomie pervades this potent novel about Ethiopian immigrants in the United States. The narrator, a journalist who lives in Paris, arrives at his mother’s house, in Virginia, to learn that his biological father, a taxi-driver, has died by apparent suicide. The journalist proceeds to investigate the mystery surrounding the man, who was “full of secrets” and less a father to him than “something like an uncle.” In doing so, the narrator, a drug user in flight from a failing marriage, also investigates his own troubled childhood. The result is an exemplification of storytelling as a consolation for the yearning and dislocation of immigrant life. As the father says, “We are always in more than one place at a time.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Hum

  by Helen Phillips (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)

  Fiction

  “Hum,” a meditative fable about marriage and motherhood, draws on sci-fi and suspense tropes to impart a gentle shimmer of uncanniness to its domestic realism. The book takes place in a dystopian world that is at once recognizable and subtly different from our own. Surveillance cameras and screens are as omnipresent as the pollution in the air; privacy, access to nature, and freedom from advertising have become luxury goods. Hums—graceful, tireless, superintelligent robots programmed for gentleness and empathy—occupy a growing number of positions in the workforce, especially in the service sector. Glowing, human-size eggs, called wooms, whose walls stream content, are designed to make users feel “safe and loved.” The book’s chief interest is not the Armageddon of climate change hovering in the wings but the dehumanizing, anhedonic grind of daily life, a constant battle against the temptations of consumption and technologically mediated distraction. People rely on technology to compensate for ecological ruin; they bathe in the beauty of screens because they’ve made the physical world ugly. As Phillips’s characters outsource their humanity to their devices, the machines that they’ve built seem to absorb their best selves.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Is A.I. Making Mothers Obsolete?,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  The Safekeep

  by Yael van der Wouden (Avid Reader)

  Fiction

  This impressive début novel, which is long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, is set in 1961 in the Dutch countryside, where the traumas of the Second World War have festered and conservative social attitudes prevail. Isabel, the story’s misanthropic protagonist, still lives in her childhood home, long after her siblings have moved to the city. When her elder brother’s vivacious, mysterious girlfriend turns up at the house for a monthlong stay, Isabel is suspicious and treats her with contempt. Yet her disdain soon transforms into desire, leading the two women into a clandestine relationship. Ultimately, the pair’s sensual love story is tested by revelations that force Isabel to reckon with the Netherlands’ role in abetting the Holocaust, and her family’s in silencing its survivors.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  All That Glitters

  by Orlando Whitfield (Profile Books)

  Nonfiction

  Whitfield’s memoir of his fifteen-year friendship with the disgraced art dealer Inigo Philbrick gives a momentous relationship its due, with unusual directness. It is an art-world story and a scammer story—in November, 2021, Philbrick pleaded guilty to defrauding clients of more than eighty-six million dollars—but it is also a close and careful examination of a life-altering relationship. Throughout the book, as Whitfield strives to convey the absurdity and frivolity of the international art market, and the boundless opportunities for criminality its atmosphere creates, he works just as hard to try and explain why Philbrick’s friendship was so consequential, why it “shaped the way I experience and confront the world.” One of the most endearing aspects of Whitfield’s narrative is the precision and enthusiasm with which he pinpoints all the traits that drew him to Philbrick and kept drawing him in, even as flickers of his friend’s predatory unscrupulousness began to emerge. “This book isn’t journalism,” Whitfield writes, “for there can be no objectivity where love has lived.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “A Frank Account of an Unequal Art-World Friendship,” by Rosa Lyster
• 
  Charlie Hustle

  by Keith O’Brien (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  Pete Rose, a product of Cincinnati’s hardscrabble west side, was a man of average physical gifts who propelled himself to unparalleled athletic heights and a mythic status hard to imagine for a baseball player today. His on-field excellence was ultimately undercut by his many faults of character and bouts of criminality and rule-flouting, which included betting on baseball while serving as the manager of the Reds, for which, in 1989, he was suspended from Major League Baseball, for life. Rose’s singularly rich and checkered life has been the subject of dozens of profiles and exposés, but O’Brien’s narrative gains impressive authority from the depth of its research: O’Brien spoke to Rose for twenty-seven hours across many months. He also spoke with scores of Rose’s former teammates, former players, an ex-wife, and an ex-mistress, along with two former M.L.B. commissioners, the men who placed Rose’s bets, and the men whose investigation brought him down. The resulting book is the more thorough account of one of the most fascinating rags-to-riches-to-infamy sagas of twentieth-century celebrityhood at a time when baseball was central to America’s story writ large.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Pete Rose and the Complicated Legacy of Cincinnati Baseball,” by Brandon Harris
• 
  The Long Run

  by Stacey D’Erasmo (Graywolf)

  Nonfiction

  What’s the secret to being an artist? And how, once you’ve made art, do you sustain your practice? These are the questions that D’Erasmo found herself asking a few years ago, after publishing three novels and confronting a series of personal and professional crises. The result is this anthology of interviews, in which she talks to eight artists, including the dancer Velda Satterfield, the writer Samuel R. Delany, the actress Blair Brown, the musician Steve Earle, and the abstract painter Amy Sillman. The creative life is often shrouded in mystery, but D’Erasmo uncovers the workaday traits that it relies on, whether it’s the ability to adapt to changing circumstances or the inner steel that keeps artists true to their craft.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Are You an Artist?,” by Alexandra Schwartz
• 
  Fifteen Cents on the Dollar

  by Louise StoryEbony Reed (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  The title of this deeply researched book points to the authors’ sobering calculation that, for every dollar of wealth that a typical white family has, a typical Black family has about fifteen cents. The writers attribute this stark gap to, among other culprits, the 2008 financial crisis, predatory lending practices, discrimination, and risk-based pricing models used by the insurance industry. Focussing on Atlanta, Story and Reed relate the lives of several residents, including a former president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P. and the son of a man shot by a police officer, to elucidate both the Black-white wealth gap and the “Black-Black wealth gap”—the divide between wealthy Black Atlantans and their poorer counterparts.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Circle of Hope

  by Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Griswold traces the tumult of the pandemic and the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement in one Philadelphia church, as four young pastors battle over what it means to devote one’s life to others. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Devil’s Contract

  by Ed Simon (Melville)

  Nonfiction

  Simon’s lively account explores the distinct historical phases of the tale of Faust and his deal with the Devil. In the early modern period, a cowed culture flirted with the danger of freedom and blasphemous knowledge, while the Faustian myth mainly enforced the proper religious and social punishment. In time, an anxious theological orthodoxy was supplanted by a broader fascination with the frontiers of knowledge itself. These days, Simon argues, in an excoriating and eloquent final chapter, we write our contracts not in blood but in silicon, signing away our identities and privacies for the short-term benefits of material ease. Simon, who is especially alive to the transgressive, enjoys the energetic heresies of the Faust myth, its madcap adventures, and, since he has read extremely widely, he relishes sharing all of that narrative wealth with his lucky readers.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Deals with the Devil Aren’t What They Used to Be,” by James Wood
• 
  Swift River

  by Essie Chambers (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  Diamond, the teen-age narrator of this powerful début novel set in the nineteen-eighties, is the only Black person in her New England mill town, where she lives with her mother. Diamond wrestles with the memory of her father, with ordinary teen angst, and—after she receives a letter from a long-lost aunt—with a rupture in the town’s past: the expulsion, seven decades earlier, of the community’s Black residents. Throughout, Chambers’s sharply observed characters butt up against one another in funny and poignant ways. Diamond’s unexpected friendship with another girl propels the story in surprising directions, but it is Diamond’s fraught relationship with her mother that forms the heart of this ultimately hopeful coming-of-age story.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Godwin

  by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Mark Wolfe, the protagonist of this intricately structured novel, is a technical writer in Pittsburgh going through an emotionally turbulent spell. Amid upheaval in his workplace, Wolfe is lured by his English half brother—an aspiring soccer agent who is “a tornado of unreliability”—into a quest to locate a prodigiously talented young African player named Godwin before a rival does. Their effort leads them from England to France to Benin, and, ultimately, back to the U.S. Ruminative, digressive, and epigrammatic, O’Neill’s novel is both a hilarious picaresque and a series of meditations on family, ambition, colonialism, and the history of soccer. “Football is not predictable,” one character observes. “Life is not predictable.” Neither is this novel.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Keeping the Faith

  by Brenda Wineapple (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  In 1925, religion was loosening its hold on American life. New technology was transforming society, Darwin’s theory of evolution was gaining credence, and Protestant Christianity was in retreat, with a select group of preachers and citizens—the self-styled fundamentalists—trying to return the nation to God. Wineapple studies the spectacle that followed: the Scopes trial, wherein a Tennessee teacher was charged with the crime of teaching evolution. Clarence Darrow led the defense, and the prosecution included William Jennings Bryan, the thrice-failed Presidential candidate who believed that Christianity guided people toward the common good. Wineapple deftly shows how each side met the other with prejudice and disdain—a dynamic familiar today, when the chasm between a militant religious right and the progressive left can seem unbridgeable.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again,” by Michael Luo
• 
  Fire Exit

  by Morgan Talty (Tin House)

  Fiction

  This striking début novel of cultural inheritance and painful family bonds follows a man living across the river from Maine’s Penobscot reservation, where he was raised by his white mother and Native stepfather, and where he lived until he was effectively evicted by a law that tied residency to official tribal status. The man spends his days observing his estranged daughter, who was the result of an unexpected pregnancy, and whose mother, a Penobscot woman, brought her to the reservation. Taking care of his own aging mother, he unearths details he hadn’t known about his past, which he aches to share with his daughter, believing that they belong to her, too.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Thom Gunn

  by Michael Nott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Diaries, letters, and interviews are assembled in this profoundly intimate biography, which traces the life of a revelatory gay poet. Nott follows Gunn from his childhood in London to places such as Cambridge, San Antonio, and San Francisco, as he struggles with addiction and loses loved ones to AIDS. In himself, Gunn sees “a desire for a consistent and unbrutal strength” and “various complicated different kinds of cowardice,” but also “a readiness to enjoy my experience.” Most poignant is Nott’s treatment of Gunn’s loves, both shallow and deep, and the men who inspired much of his verse: “Nothing is, or will ever be, / Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart, / But what we hold in trust / We do hold, even apart.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Private Revolutions

  by Yuan Yang (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Four Chinese millennials are the protagonists of this journalistic chronicle, which attempts to portray the ways in which China’s economic and social transformations of the past thirty years manifest on a personal scale. Yuan’s subjects, all women, include the founder of a successful education business in Beijing, an urban transplant whose mother was killed in an accident while working in a coal mine far from home, and two labor organizers: one who pursued that path after working in factories, another after obtaining a sociology degree. Yuan, a former Beijing correspondent for the Financial Times who is now a British Labour M.P., captures each woman’s life as she contends with obstacles—from stolen wages to discouraging parents—and embraces new freedoms.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Double Exposure

  by Robert Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Beginning in 1867, the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan explored the American West as part of government-sponsored geological surveys. He was already known for his images of Civil War battlefields, which defined the conflict for many Americans, and the photographs he took during his later travels attest to the nation’s transformations following the war. Retracing O’Sullivan’s itinerary more than a century later for this study, Sullivan deftly takes up such themes as the political power of both photography and geology, the United States’ tortured racial hierarchies, the exploitation of natural resources—including land, gold, and silver—and the dispossession of Indigenous communities.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Loving Sylvia Plath

  by Emily Van Duyne (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This impassioned reassessment of Sylvia Plath’s life and work blends feminist theory and biography to challenge various narratives that have dominated criticism of the poet since her suicide, in 1963. One focus is Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, whom Plath accused of violence; for decades following her death, Van Duyne argues, Hughes shaped Plath’s legacy in an effort to obscure this history. Many of Hughes’s misdeeds (burning Plath’s journals, altering the manuscript of “Ariel”) are well-trod territory, but Van Duyne’s approach, in which she shows how certain publishers, critics, and biographers helped maintain some version of Hughes’s account, feels fresh and vital.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Garden Against Time

  by Olivia Laing (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Not long before COVID hit Britain, Laing and her husband toured what would become their home together, in Suffolk, a few hours’ drive northeast of London. The house, as she explains in the opening of “The Garden Against Time,” was previously owned by the late garden designer to the stars Mark Rumary, and her infatuation with its long-overgrown garden is immediate. When Laing moves in, the pandemic in full bloom, in August, she begins to bring the neglected garden back to life, and reads about examples from the past. Many of the book’s chapters center on historical figures for whom gardens symbolized both loss (of innocence, of aristocratic land holdings) and regrowth (of nature, of utopian projects). Laing intertwines their biographies with accounts of unfolding events in her pandemic life, phases of her garden-restoration project, and her past experiments in radical plant-based living as an environmental activist and an herbalist. She retreats to her garden not to escape the forward march of time but “to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Paradoxical Paradise of the Garden,” by Katie Kadue
• 
  The Winner

  by Teddy Wayne (Harper)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this page-turning novel of ruthless ambition is Conor O’Toole, a debt-laden striver newly graduated from law school, who lands a summer job giving tennis lessons in a wealthy gated community in Massachusetts. Fit and handsome, with “a certain Kennedy-esque air,” Conor soon attracts the attention of a rich divorcée twice his age, who lives in the largest house in the compound and offers to pay him double his hourly rate for services on and off the court. Conor’s situation becomes more complicated still when he falls in love with a young aspiring novelist with a trust fund. The longer Conor lives among the privileged élite, the more he yearns for “the money and the real estate and the bone-deep confidence” of his new neighbors. Risky and violent decisions ensue.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Triumph of the Yuppies

  by Tom McGrath (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  McGrath’s book is an entertaining recap of the time when a certain type of young urban professional ruled the country. Yuppies strode forth from the economic wreckage of the nineteen-seventies ready to consume conspicuously, to buy things they didn’t need—and pay extra for the brand. It wasn’t just O.K. to be rich; it was good to be rich. It justified the American way of life. McGrath frames his account with the story of Jerry Rubin as the model of a nineteen-sixties person who became a nineteen-eighties person. Rubin was famous as a co-founder of the Youth International Party, the Yippies, in 1967, and as a leading participant in several iconic Vietnam War-era protests. Then, in 1980, he published an Op-Ed in the Times announcing that he had taken a job on Wall Street as a securities analyst. He had realized, he said, that “money is power.” But this era wasn’t all just a matter of branded water, trendy restaurants, Rolexes, and Rolodexes, as McGrath shows. Behind the queasy fascination with yuppies lay a fracturing middle class and a growing gap between the affluent and everyone else.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “When Yuppies Ruled,” by Louis Menand
• 
  From Our Pages

  Glory Days

  by Simon Rich (Little, Brown)

  Fiction

  In a collection of stories featuring such characters as Super Mario, tooth fairies, Death Skull, and a participation trophy, Rich takes a comic look at, as he puts it, “millennials struggling to make the leap from childhood to old age”—and all that is lost and learned in the process. Several of the stories, including “We’re Not So Different, You and I,” first appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The God of the Woods

  by Liz Moore (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  Told from rapidly shifting points of view across several decades, this expertly paced thriller tracks the disappearance of a young woman named Barbara Van Laar from a summer camp in the Adirondacks, which is owned by her fabulously wealthy family. The Van Laars and their associates are a shady bunch, and the novel plays dexterously with the tension between the opulent family and the working-class environs in which they live. Barbara’s vanishing is further darkened by rumors that a recently escaped serial killer, who “does not believe in any god except himself,” is stalking the forest. Driven by a sprawling plot, Moore’s novel explores adolescence and social class and has the kineticism of a well-crafted miniseries.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Bluestockings

  by Susannah Gibson (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  The well-bred English women of the mid-eighteenth century who made up the group known as the Bluestockings held salons and promoted high-toned intellectual conversation. They also wrote, prolifically, and in genres that were largely considered the province of men: criticism, classical scholarship, and history. At a time when women were seldom taken to be rational creatures, they braved scorn and resentment, wielding their social respectability as a weapon. And yet, as Gibson, an Irish historian, shows in her intelligent and engrossing book, that weapon was sometimes used against their own. The Bluestockings could be quite punitive toward any among them who strayed from the straight and narrow.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Original Bluestockings Were Fiercer Than You Imagined,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  Gretel and the Great War

  by Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  At the start of this inventive novel, which is set shortly after the First World War, an unknown woman, unable to speak, appears on the streets of Vienna. After she is institutionalized, a letter arrives from a man claiming to be her father. A mysterious one-way correspondence begins, ultimately coalescing into twenty-six linked tales of aristocrats, artists, eccentrics, and revolutionaries. Though tending toward the whimsical, the stories also display the dark undercurrents of early psychiatry. Along the way, tantalizing clues about the woman’s identity, and that of her mother, are glimpsed. Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  They Called It Peace

  by Lauren Benton (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This history demonstrates how European imperial expansion in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia from 1400 to 1900 was fuelled by so-called small wars. Taking place during times of ostensible peace, these conflicts—involving raids, massacres, and enslavement—weakened indigenous resistance and produced truces that secured terms under which colonial powers enacted further, now lawful, violence. Benton, a historian at Yale, uses harrowing case studies from around the world, and contextualizes events with the work of contemporary intellectuals, such as Jeremy Bentham, who “upheld the necessity of colonial violence for the protection of property . . . standing in for the common good.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Friday Afternoon Club

  by Griffin Dunne (Penguin)

  Nonfiction

  This consuming family memoir recounts comically foul judgment, striking privilege, and unspeakable tragedy. Dunne grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of the movie producer (and, after failing at that, crime reporter) Dominick Dunne, whose brother and enduring rival, the writer John Gregory Dunne, would marry Joan Didion. Those figures loom over Dunne’s book, as does his sister, Dominique, who was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 1982, when she and Dunne were cultivating their acting careers. Throughout Dunne’s account, which concludes in 1990, with the birth of his daughter, he drops frequent bombshells, details raging family battles, and admits to frequent (if winsome) acts of self-sabotage.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Long Island Compromise

  by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House)

  Fiction

  When Carl Fletcher, the heir to a Styrofoam fortune, is abducted outside his Long Island estate, in 1980, his wife, Ruth, withdraws two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the bank as easily as if she’s getting a coffee to go. She delivers a briefcase with the money to a baggage carrousel at J.F.K. Airport, and, within minutes, Carl is dropped outside a Mobil bathroom, drenched in piss, vomit, and relief. The novel, Brodesser-Akner’s second, traces the aftereffects of the kidnapping on Carl and Ruth’s three children, who grow up to squander the fortune their self-made grandfather painstakingly accumulated. Brodesser-Akner names this state of affairs the Long Island Compromise: people born poor will struggle but be resourceful, whereas those born rich will turn into basket cases but never have to wonder how they’ll pay the therapist.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  In Tongues

  by Thomas Grattan (MCD x FSG)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this moody novel is a young man attempting to make a fresh start in New York City at the outset of the twenty-first century, seeking—through dead-end jobs, anonymous sexual encounters, and a gradual infiltration of the art-world élite—a new way to be seen. Amid his adventures, he wonders whether self-scrutiny is anything more than self-obsession, and if answering questions like that one is really a path to maturity. Grattan casts early adulthood as a period of inertia, in which a person is trapped between the urge to be present and the desire to move on—a time of life whose outward expressions are, above all, absurd.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Change

  by Édouard Louis, translated by John Lambert (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  In “Change,” Louis unravels a story he told a decade earlier, in his best-selling autobiographical novel “The End of Eddy” (2014). “Eddy,” which became an international sensation and a local scandal, dramatized the violence of Louis’s upbringing in the village of Hallencourt, in northern France, and the routine humiliations he endured growing up gay. “Change” enumerates the costs and consequences of the act of narration, with an avid, unsparing eye for distortion and error. “At just over twenty I’d changed my first and last names in court, transformed my face, redesigned my hairline, undergone several operations, reinvented the way I moved, walked and talked, and got rid of the northern accent of my childhood,” Louis writes. But his new life seems to give him little creatively; it dulls him. So he stalks his past—waiting, it seems, for the transformation, that intensity of sensation, to happen again.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Seditious Writers Who Unravel Their Own Stories,” by Parul Sehgal
• 
  Woman of Interest

  by Tracy O’Neill (HarperOne)

  Nonfiction

  At thirty-three, O’Neill, a writer and a professor who grew up in the Northeast, embarked on a quest to locate the South Korean woman who gave birth to her. In this dark, deeply funny memoir, O’Neill relates the story of that quest. Although her tale contains familiar elements (DNA searches, a trip to the motherland), she handles them uniquely. Framing her narrative as a detective story, she writes in a comedic voice that’s at once old-fashioned and contemporary—Dashiell Hammett meets “Fleabag.” Discursive detours give the book an intentionally shaggy feel: “Unruly story forms imply how a writer believes the shape of life goes,” she notes. It’s a keen observation, elegantly illustrated by the life of the woman at the center of her investigation.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Other Rivers

  by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Twenty-four years ago, Hessler, a staff writer and MacArthur grant recipient, published “River Town,” a celebrated memoir of the years he spent teaching English in a remote city in China. It was a time of rapid transformation, when millions of people were moving from poor, rural communities to seek education and economic opportunity in urban areas. Now, in “Other Rivers,” he recounts his experience of returning to the country, in 2019, to teach at Sichuan University. In intimate, finely drawn portraits of his students, he captures the ambitions and fears animating a new generation of young people as they navigate the political and cultural landscape of the education system in China and abroad. Parts of the book were drawn from articles originally published in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Consent

  by Jill Ciment (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  “Consent” is an account of Ciment’s marriage to the painter Arnold Mesches, told largely through a rereading of the author’s 1996 memoir, “Half a Life.” Ciment was sixteen years old when they met; Mesches was forty-seven. The two were married for almost half a century, until Mesches died in 2016. In “Half a Life,” Ciment portrayed herself as a “sexual aggressor” determined to seduce Mesches—was it a false narrative of empowerment? And what of their ensuing years together? “Was my marriage—the half century of intimacy, the shifting power, the artistic collaborations, the sex, the shared meals, the friends, the travels, the illnesses, the money worries, the houses, the dogs—fruit from the poisonous tree?” she asks in “Consent.” She does not think she was wounded; her marriage was long, happy—but what could she be concealing from herself?

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Seditious Writers Who Unravel Their Own Stories,” by Parul Sehgal
• 
  Night Flyer

  by Tiya Miles (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Harriet Tubman’s early years in Tidewater Maryland were filled with physical torture and emotional terror. Forced to work as a maid, a nanny, a trapper, and a field hand, she was whipped constantly and regularly deprived of food and clothing. What was never beaten out of her was a sense of liberty—the knowledge, self-evident to her, that God intended for her to be liberated from bondage. “God set the North Star in the heavens,” she said later. “He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.” In “Night Flyer,” Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, resurrects Tubman’s spiritual life, considering her alongside not only intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass but also Black evangelists of the era. The little we know about Tubman’s motivations comes robed in Scripture and prayer—blinding garments for modern eyes, but Miles helps us see.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman,” by Casey Cep
• 
  From Our Pages

  Cue the Sun!

  by Emily Nussbaum (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  Nussbaum, a staff writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner, turns her acute critical eye on the history of reality television, which became popular by offering “something authentic, buried inside something fake.” From “Candid Camera” to “The Gong Show” to “The Real Housewives,” Nussbaum writes, such programs have “functioned as a mirror of the people who watched them—and if that reflection was sometimes cruel, it was also funny, riveting, outrageous, and affecting, even if—maybe especially if—you found it disturbing.” This book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Work of Art

  by Adam Moss (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This collection of interviews, by a former editor of New York, aims to illuminate artists’ processes through conversation. The novelist Michael Cunningham describes writing first thing in the morning to avoid getting “lost in the realness of the real world”; the visual artist Kara Walker recounts beginning one project by drawing with her feet (“I can’t trust this hand not to make something very obvious”). Moss’s footnotes flag common themes, including tenacious work ethics, mentorship, and iterative revisions. His subjects’ accounts are enriched by color images of works in progress: the outline of a concerto (Nico Muhly), a line of poetry scribbled in a faculty meeting (Louise Glück).

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Struggle for Taiwan

  by Sulmaan Wasif Khan (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  As Khan observes in his rich and thoughtful book, the fraught status of Taiwan is bedecked with bad history, which muddles our understanding of what is at stake in East Asia. Start with China’s claim that Taiwan was always part of China, a cornerstone of Xi Jinping’s nationalism. In fact, for most of its history, Taiwan was no more a part of the Chinese nation than, say, Gibraltar was a part of Britain. Khan shows how politicians in Washington have often felt that they had both to defend democratic Taiwan and to reassure Beijing that Taiwanese independence would continue to be resisted. Avoiding violent conflict, he suggests, will take a great deal of diplomatic finesse guided by a profound knowledge of local history and politics.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How to Start a War Over Taiwan,” by Ian Buruma
• 
  The Coast Road

  by Alan Murrin (HarperVia)

  Fiction

  Set in a small town in northwestern Ireland in 1994, this finely wrought début novel depicts the limited options that were available to unhappily married women in that country prior to the referendum that legalized divorce there, the following year. It centers on the friendship between a poet who has returned to town as a pariah after a scandalous affair in Dublin and the discontented wife of a local politician. Murrin powerfully renders the ways that women’s freedom, individuality, and self-expression are stifled by religion, custom, and gossip, and, as one character reflects, how “bitterness could poison a life, could make you lousy with exhaustion.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Combee

  by Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press)

  Nonfiction

  Harriet Tubman’s greatest feat may also be among her least known—a raid of Confederate rice plantations on the Combahee River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, which liberated more than seven hundred enslaved Americans. She did not lead the raid, as some recent histories suggest, but she was integral to its success: for more than a year, Tubman gathered intelligence from formerly enslaved men and women fleeing the Confederacy, and she recruited troops, scouts, and pilots from around Port Royal, South Carolina, to help the Union Army fight its way through enemy territory. Fields-Black’s new history, “Combee,” powerfully situates Tubman among her contemporaries—not only the controversial military geniuses who advanced the war effort through espionage, river raids, and guerrilla tactics but fellow freedom seekers who, like Tubman, chose to go back down to pharaoh’s land and fight.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman,” by Casey Cep
• 
  From Our Pages

  Frostbite

  by Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Twilley, a frequent New Yorker contributor, studies an invention that transformed vast swaths of human life, from our nutrition to our cities to the layout of our homes. Her focus is the so-called cold chain—nearly three-quarters of everything Americans consume is shipped, packaged, and stored under refrigeration. And Twilley gives us a tour of the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, Missouri’s cheese caves, and the enormous vats that hold the nation’s orange-juice reserves. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  On Call

  by Anthony Fauci M.D. (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Although most readers will turn first to the chapters about the U.S. response to COVID and Fauci’s dealings with the Trump Administration, this autobiography by the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases covers his entire life, from boyhood and medical training to retirement, and thus presents an implicit demand for us to see his career whole. The two greatest public-health crises of his career—COVID and AIDS—also form something of a diptych, the resonances between them impossible to ignore. Both involve asymptomatic infection, a scramble for tests and treatments, public-information campaigns, and the search for a vaccine. And in each Fauci is vilified—first by militant AIDS activists, later by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, populist Republicans and libertarians, and a panoply of conspiracy theorists. But the differences are as revealing as the similarities, in ways that, by the end of the book, test even Fauci’s resistance to pessimism.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Anthony Fauci’s Side of the Story,” by Jerome Groopman
• 
  Long Island

  by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

  Fiction

  Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant in New York whom Tóibín introduced in his novel “Brooklyn,” returns in this deeply felt but resolutely unsentimental sequel. The book, which takes place in the nineteen-seventies, two decades after the events of the earlier installment, opens with Eilis—now a mother of two living on Long Island—learning that her Italian American husband has impregnated another woman. The news sparks Eilis’s return to her home town, Enniscorthy, where she has not been for some twenty years, and where she reconnects with a man with whom she had a dalliance early on in her marriage. Tóibín uses masterly restraint to dramatize how lives can be destabilized by desire.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Ask Me Again

  by Clare Sestanovich (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This début novel, by a noted writer of short stories, begins as Eva, the self-conscious teen-age daughter of middle-class parents, befriends a boy named Jamie, an intellectual with a contrarian streak who comes from a wealthy family. In the next few years, Eva graduates from a prestigious college and gets a job at a newspaper while contending with romances, ambitions, a nascent political consciousness, and a changing relationship with her parents. Meanwhile, Jamie drops out to join a thinly veiled Occupy Wall Street. Throughout, the novel considers how a life’s trajectory takes shape, and how much it is influenced by other people: “Eva herself thought about impressions all the time. She liked picturing it literally: the mark that you left on someone or that someone left on you.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Parade

  by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Cusk’s latest book is not so much a novel as a study of the isolation caused by the impulse to create art. The artists here—male, female, white, Black, all named “G”—follow their inspirations and their insecurities in ways that distance and alienate the people around them. Also a look at gender roles in art and in life, “Parade” considers the ways in which being female is a social performance, one often at odds with the untethered impropriety that making art requires. The opening chapter, “The Stuntman,” first appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Cosmic Connections

  by Charles Taylor (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

  We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, the Canadian philosopher writes, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the world that Enlightenment liberalism produced: one of fragmented belief and atomized selves. But Taylor thinks that the Romantics can tell us how this splintered realm can be mended. In his view, the arts can help us reënchant the world, restoring those resonant feelings of wholeness and of harmony—not just with “Nature” but with existence itself.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Orwell’s Ghosts

  by Laura Beers (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In the nearly seventy-five years since George Orwell’s death, his writing has been appropriated for various ideological ends. In this lucid, engaging study, Beers teases out its intricacies, considering, for instance, Orwell’s dual commitment to socialist revolution and “traditional” English society; his apparent dismissal of feminism; his belief in individual liberty; and why he ultimately valued truth above freedom of speech. The complexity (and sheer volume) of Orwell’s work means that he has frequently been misunderstood. Beers reaches a satisfying synthesis, writing that Orwell illuminates how “to resist the temptations of totalitarianism in favor of a more open and democratic socialism.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones

  by Priyanka Mattoo (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  The author describes a magical childhood in Kashmir, which her family was forced to leave, and the many countries, cultures, and kitchens through which she has travelled since in the quest for home. Sections about the musician Ali Sethi and her mother’s Rogan Josh recipe originally appeared on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Attachments

  by Lucas Mann (University of Iowa)

  Nonfiction

  The inner tumult of the contemporary dad, full of unprecedented new highs, lows, and targets for neurotic speculation, is the subject of this memoir. It is an intense, poetic, and almost uncomfortably honest book about what he describes as the “mundane enormous terror of watching a child grow.” Mann, who has previously published books about minor-league baseball, reality TV, and the effects of addiction on his own family, writes with a mix of bliss and dread, all of it suffused with a relentless sense of self-scrutiny. Like many in their mid-thirties or forties, cis-het men with progressive viewpoints and vaguely middle-class leanings, he aspires for an approach to fatherhood in rough agreement with his politics. And, throughout “Attachments,” he returns to the various forces that prepared him for this moment—the signals from society, the novels or art works that once gave him pause, the examples of friends and family—until he realizes that none of it properly readied him for the work at hand.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Should We Expect More from Dads?,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Caledonian Road

  by Andrew O’Hagan (Norton)

  Fiction

  O’Hagan is a journalist and editor-at-large at the London Review of Books, where he has written some of the publication’s best-known investigative, as well as comic, pieces. He is the toast of London society, a well-dressed and knowing presence at parties and polo matches. In his sprawling new novel, “Caledonian Road,” he skewers the scene’s hypocrisies. Campbell Flynn, the novel’s doomed protagonist, is an art historian who seems to have everything going for him. He’s married to a brilliant psychotherapist, and has two high-achieving grown children and impeccable liberal credentials. He’s written a successful book on Vermeer (“A work of mesmerising empathy”) and hosts a BBC podcast called “Civilisation and Its Malcontents.” He is also, we learn, beset by money problems and dangerously close to a breakdown. The novel follows the unravelling of his tidy life over the course of a year, as he writes an ill-conceived self-help book and becomes entangled with a promising student who upends his world view. O’Hagan calls him a “tinderbox in a Savile Row suit.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Andrew O’Hagan’s Bonfire of the Vanities,” by Anna Russell
• 
  The C.I.A.

  by Hugh Wilford (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  This adroit new overview by Wilford, a historian, examines how, after the Second World War, the United States set out to direct politics on a global scale. Many of the C.I.A.’s actions, in Wilford’s telling, can be understood as desperate and often destructive attempts to control processes that lay well beyond the agency’s grasp. Much of this work took place in former colonies. The stereotype of the Cold War milieu—upturned collars, fog-bathed checkpoints—is misleading on this score. The real action was in warmer climes, Wilford shows. It was the end of colonial empires that made the Global South central. Each newly independent state, from Washington’s vantage, represented a chance to gain (or lose) influence. Of course, countries that had just thrown off empires bristled at outside attempts to guide them. Ironically, Wilford points out, this anti-imperialism empowered the C.I.A. The stronger the norm against meddling, the more U.S. leaders felt a need to hide their work. The C.I.A. thus became a new covert force of empire in an age of decolonization, Wilford argues.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “When the C.I.A. Messes Up,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Hey, Zoey

  by Sarah Crossan (Little, Brown)

  Fiction

  What, in our digital age, constitutes an affair? Texting? Swiping? How about buying an eight-thousand-dollar A.I. sex doll and hiding it from your wife in the garage? In this entertaining novel, the middle-aged narrator, Dolores, discovers that her husband has done just that. As Dolores’s marriage falls apart, she forms a strange bond with the doll, Zoey, who proves a better listener than her aloof husband (an aptly professioned anesthesiologist). Told in short scenes that crosscut the present with childhood memories, the story is as much about technology as it is about friendship and romance. Even if Zoey’s “aliveness” is “a ruse,” like that of an E. T. A. Hoffmann character, she offers Dolores both life-affirming companionship and a way to access her repressed soul.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Cull of the Wild

  by Hugh Warwick (Bloomsbury Wildlife)

  Nonfiction

  If people, either intentionally or accidentally, have altered the natural world to favor one species over another, do people then have an obligation to undo the damage? Warwick, a British ecologist and writer, considers a dozen recent campaigns to assist one species by “removing” its competitor. These include efforts to cull mice in favor of albatrosses, rats in favor of puffins, and pythons in favor of bobcats. Invasive species, Warwick points out, are among the main drivers of extinction today, up there with habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change. The author’s own attachment to animals runs deep; he stopped eating meat thirty-five years ago and generally avoids animal products. His particular passion is hedgehogs. One might imagine Warwick to be opposed to “killing in the name of conservation.” In fact, though, he’s conflicted. Conservation “is really complicated,” he writes. “There is an old saying that anyone who gives you a simple answer to a complicated problem is either a liar or a fool.” As Warwick observes, it’s way too late to debate whether humans have a right to intervene in the natural world, because “we have, as a species, already intervened.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Should We Kill Some Wild Creatures to Protect Others?,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
• 
  Committed

  by Suzanne Scanlon (Vintage)

  Nonfiction

  “My writing was fuelled by desperation, and madness, too,” Scanlon, a novelist, writes in this affecting memoir, which recounts her stay at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in her early twenties, following a suicide attempt. Dogged by a “preternatural sense of doom” after her mother’s death from cancer, she is solaced by the work of women writers, including Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath, who wrote their way through despair, and Audre Lorde, whose “Cancer Journals” feel like a “revelation.” If the hospital ward where Scanlon stayed felt at times like a “foreign country,” books served as a ballast for her fragile psyche.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Sidetracks

  by Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang (New Directions)

  Poetry

  More than a decade in the making, this book-length poem traces its acclaimed author’s years in exile after his expulsion from mainland China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Dotted with dates and locations of personal and historical significance—as well as encounters with friends and peers, such as Allen Ginsberg and Mahmoud Darwish—the poem combines the documentary and the elusive, finding meaning in language both when it “talks with the tanks” and when it captures the “sunshine tablecloth” in a California kitchen. Elegantly rendered into English, the poem exemplifies Bei Dao’s surprising imagery and logic while also introducing an autobiographical immediacy to his work.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Beautiful Days

  by Zach Williams (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  In this eerie début story collection, Williams explores how easily the unknown can enter our everyday lives and change us. His work, which often teeters on the border between reality and the uncanny, asks more questions than it answers. Two stories from the collection, including “Wood Sorrel House,” first appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Playbook

  by James Shapiro (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  This perceptive history, by a Shakespeare scholar, centers on the Federal Theatre, a short-lived New Deal-era relief program that staged more than a thousand plays and employed more than twelve thousand artists before it was disbanded for allegedly disseminating “Communist propaganda.” Under the stewardship of Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar professor, the theatre produced plays that combined social commentary with documentary realism; its critically acclaimed shows included a voodoo-inflected “Macbeth” set in nineteenth-century Haiti. The theatre ultimately lost its funding after it was targeted by Martin Dies, the director of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose tactics, Shapiro wryly notes, are still employed by culture warriors seeking to defund or censor the arts.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Catland

  by Kathryn Hughes (Hopkins)

  Nonfiction

  Louis Wain, an artist born in England in 1860, is the figure at the center of “Catland,” an entertaining and often surprising cultural history. Hughes examines a seventy-year period, stretching from the latter half of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth, during which, she writes, “cats transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors, with names, personalities and even biographies of their own.” In alternating chapters, Hughes narrates the life of Wain—whose drawings at the height of his popularity were as familiar as those of Beatrix Potter, and who spent his later years in a mental asylum, afflicted with symptoms of what may have been schizophrenia—and provides a zesty account of the many ways in which the cat came in from the alley and took up its place at the hearth. Hughes makes the case that the new world of cats which Wain both chronicled and helped to create is a signal instance of modernism in all its confusion and uncertainty. She writes, “When it came to ‘making it new’—that battle cry of early twentieth-century intellectuals—nothing conveyed the principle better than the transformation of the domestic cat from smudgy outlier to cultural obsession.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Man Who Reinvented the Cat,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  I Cannot Control Everything Forever

  by Emily C. Bloom (St. Martin’s)

  Nonfiction

  This remarkable memoir, which takes its title from a work by Louise Bourgeois, describes the author’s fraught journey to parenthood and considers pregnancy through the lenses of science and art. Bloom, a literary scholar, interweaves the narrative of becoming the mother of a diabetic and congenitally deaf daughter with analyses of art works and brief medical histories. The sound of the voice-flattening vocoder in Laurie Anderson’s song “O Superman,” for instance, recalls cochlear-implant simulations. “I care for her and I care for her devices,” Bloom says of her child. “I am part mother, part machine.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Matrescence

  by Lucy Jones (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  In 2015, when the journalist and science writer Lucy Jones became pregnant with her first child, she found the experience joyful but discombobulating: after a difficult birth, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. She came to feel a sense that she “had been fundamentally misinformed about the female body and the maternal experience.” Her subsequent attempt to rebuild her conception of motherhood forms the basis of this wide-ranging and hugely ambitious book. Marshalling memoir, science, sociology, and history, Jones argues that, outside of adolescence, there is no transformation as dramatic in a human’s life, in both its emotional and biological impacts. Research has found, for instance, that motherhood causes big changes in the brain’s default-mode network, an area related to what Jones calls “the perception of the self.” She relates discoveries like these alongside moving reflections on her transformed state: “I had thought that my disrupted sense of self, my notion that I’d become a new hybrid creature, must be in some way fanciful,” she notes. In fact, “it was the idea that I was ultimately an independent individual that was fanciful.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “ ‘Matrescence,’ and the Transformations of Motherhood,” by Anna Russell
• 
  The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

  Edited by Frank AbeFloyd Cheung (Penguin Classics)

  Nonfiction

  This essential volume collects more than fifty accounts of Japanese life before, during, and after the war. The title alone is a bold assertion of identity: for decades, the wartime incarceration of the Japanese was described in euphemistic terms such as “relocation” or “internment.” Abe and Cheung’s definition of “literature” is admirably broad, encompassing letters, editorials, poetry, short stories, manga, and government documents. Although there have been many books written on the history of incarceration, few have captured the kind of emotional detail that comes through in the largely first-person accounts collected by Abe and Cheung. Their selections paint a complicated picture, convening hopeful, patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “A Portrait of Japanese America, in the Shadow of the Camps,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Vagabonds

  by Oskar Jensen (The Experiment)

  Nonfiction

  Impoverished nineteenth-century Londoners tend to come to us in the form of caricature or literature; this engaging history seeks to allow them to speak for themselves. Jensen delves into contemporary memoirs, trial proceedings, periodicals, and other sources to capture an “astonishingly eloquent collective.” He pays particular attention to differences not only of class but of race, country of origin, and gender (girls and young women in the streets, he notes, had to navigate “a London that is made of a thousand eyes”). As one fellow who has fallen on hard times puts it, “Hungry in a land of plenty, I began seriously for the first time in my life to enquire WHY, WHY—a dangerous question . . . isn’t it, for a poor man to ask?”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Other Olympians

  by Michael Waters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Late in 1935, a Czech track star, the winner of a bronze and a gold medal at the previous year’s Women’s World Games, revealed that he was planning to undergo surgery so that he could live openly as a man. The news made headlines around the world, and the track star, Zdeněk Koubek, was, for a while, internationally famous. He appeared on Broadway in a cabaret show; he shared top billing with Josephine Baker at the Folies-Bergère music hall, in Paris. Meanwhile, with the Berlin Olympics approaching, a Nazi sports doctor named Wilhelm Knoll used Koubek’s case as a rationale for instituting sex testing at the Games. Waters traces this history thoughtfully, and meticulously, revealing how much about this recent and relevant past we have forgotten, or never knew. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Invention of the Darling

  by Li-Young Lee (Norton)

  Poetry

  “True love looks out / through death’s unswerving gaze,” proclaims the poem that opens this collection, from a writer renowned for his renderings of erotic and spiritual ecstasy, and for work that braids together dream, myth, and memory in unabashed pursuit of the sublime. For Lee, devotion is both shadowed and illuminated by a consciousness of mortality. He employs an acute surrealist sensibility connected to the experience and anticipation of exile—from one’s mother country or tongue, from childhood, from a state of unity with the beloved, and, ultimately, from life. “I wasn’t born in this country, / but I’ll likely be buried here. / Nothing mysterious about that,” he writes. “Mysterious are the myriad gates / by which light comes and goes.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  A Body Made of Glass

  by Caroline Crampton (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  The author of this thought-provoking exploration of hypochondria—which counts Marcel Proust and Charles Darwin among its sufferers—describes it as a difficulty in identifying “that boundary between fictional and real illness.” Delving into the medical literature, Crampton discovers that the conception of hypochondria has shifted greatly during the millennia, from its earliest diagnoses as a liver-and-abdomen complaint to its current unofficial status as a psychological problem (“hypochondriasis” is no longer included in the DSM). What emerges is a portrait of a condition that, though nearly as old as recorded human history, continues to elude neat definition, even as it raises urgent questions about “who is believed when they speak of their pain, and who is not.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Growth

  by Daniel Susskind (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

  “Modern economic growth began just two hundred years ago,” Susskind, an economist at King’s College London, writes. “If the sum of human history were an hour long, then this reversal in fortune took place in the last couple of seconds.” The turning point came with the Industrial Revolution, which triggered an explosion in prosperity in Europe and North America, and led to the sustained worldwide growth that humans are still enjoying today. In the past fifty years, the global economy has become twenty-six times bigger—or twelve times higher per person. In 1970, half of humanity lived in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than two dollars a day. Today, only a tenth of the global population lives in extreme poverty. But we’re also guzzling resources and belching carbon at unprecedented rates. The paradox of growth—that we suffer from both too much of it and too little of it—drives Susskind’s book. His narration properly captures the astonishing triumph of these shifts, even as he considers their dangers.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The World Keeps Getting Richer. Some People Are Worried,” by Idrees Kahloon
• 
  Little Seed

  by Wei Tchou (Deep Vellum/A Strange Object)

  Nonfiction

  A family story and a natural history of the fern run in parallel through this memoir, in which chapters alternate between botanical esoterica and descriptions of Tchou’s personal life: she grew up in Appalachian Tennessee as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and she has a brother who, as an adult, is beset by psychotic episodes. The two narratives initially stay on their separate paths, but eventually Tchou finds graceful moments of glancing association, especially on the vexing topic of identity. “My family is rigid about identification with one another and with the whole,” she explains. “We lack the flexibility of taxonomists, to allow things to break apart and come back together.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two

  by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)

  Fiction

  Ferris’s début graphic novel, “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters,” was a breakout hit, garnering praise for its intricately cross-hatched drawings and its marriage of gothic-pulp aesthetics and sharp social commentary. The story is presented as the diary of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old girl growing up in the politically volatile Chicago of the nineteen-sixties. Ferris weaves together history, comic books, and horror to echo Karen’s sense of herself as a monster. In the second volume, Karen continues to dig deeper into her own evolving sensibilities about the inhuman and the obscene. The graphic novel was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  They Came for the Schools

  by Mike Hixenbaugh (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  Roughly five years ago, a racist incident prompted a Texas school district to investigate discrimination in its schools and, ultimately, to formulate a plan that included cultural-sensitivity training and the hiring of more teachers of color. The district presented its proposals not long after the murder of George Floyd sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, and it was met with fierce, well-funded resistance. A political-action committee was formed to oppose the plan; the following year, candidates endorsed by the committee swept elections for school board, city council, and mayor. As Hixenbaugh demonstrates, conservative activists across the country saw what happened in Texas as a blueprint—not only to get their preferred candidates elected but to launch an ongoing attack on public education itself.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Texas School District That Provided the Blueprint for an Attack on Public Education,” by Jessica Winter
• 
  The Ministry of Time

  by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader)

  Fiction

  In this compelling début novel, set in the near future, the British government has created a time machine and used it to retrieve a handful of people from other periods of history, referred to as “expats.” The book’s narrator is a minder for one of them: a nineteenth-century Royal Navy commander and polar explorer. Complications ensue when the narrator, who is Cambodian English, begins to fall in love with her charge, while also closing in on the truth of the mysterious extraction program. Throughout, Bradley meditates on mortality, grief, and imperialism. “Everything that has ever been could have been prevented and none of it was,” she writes. “The only thing you can mend is the future.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Faraway the Southern Sky

  by Joseph Andras, translated from the French by Simon Leser (Verso)

  Fiction

  This brief but layered novel follows a nameless figure wandering around Paris searching for traces of Ho Chi Minh, who lived there as a young revolutionary, near the end of the First World War. Ho is glimpsed through police files, plaques, and publications on his unlikely path to political power, working as a cook and a photo enlarger while managing his ceaseless political agitation. During the search, scenes of contemporary Parisian life are overlaid with memories of past struggle. In Andras’s depiction, the city’s history emerges as a deep record of past disruptions—and, perhaps, the stuff of present inspiration (the gilets jaunes make an appearance), if an observer is able to draw connections between the eras.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Liberalism as a Way of Life

  by Alexandre Lefebvre (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, writes about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of the professional pundits. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous. Lefebvre recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to our anxiety. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Natural Magic

  by Renée Bergland (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Although Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson are not known to have ever crossed paths, this study finds meaning in their shared enchantment with the natural world. In the eighteen-thirties, as “natural philosophy” began to be reframed as “natural science,” emotion and wonder were eclipsed by objectivity and mastery. Darwin and Dickinson resisted this binary: Darwin saw his theory of natural selection as an occasion for humility, relating humans to other species; Dickinson, whose poetry reflects her extensive scientific education and interest in Darwin’s ideas, depicted the natural world with both botanical specificity and attention to its splendors. Bergland links their thinking to an earlier tradition of “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) magic, which emphasized the interconnectedness of life and valued emotion as a form of understanding.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Traces of Enayat

  by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger (Transit)

  Nonfiction

  Literary obsession and detective work merge in this biography of Enayat al-Zayyat, an Egyptian writer who died by suicide in 1963, at the age of twenty-six, years before the publication of her only novel. Following the threads of al-Zayyat’s life, Mersal depicts the Egypt in which she grew up and the largely vanished Cairo where she lived, while chronicling her search for the forgotten author. “To trace someone,” Mersal writes, “is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.” Indeed, despite assiduous research and interviews with surviving friends and family, Mersal experiences “despair at the possibility of knowing” the true story of al-Zayyat, whose remnants she embroiders with photographs, speculation, and personal reflections, leaving behind a seductive mystery.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Tits Up

  by Sarah Thornton (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Thornton’s own breasts “made their debut on a summer’s day in the mid-1970s,” she writes. “Not yet a teenager, I imagined that my new assets might become a potent symbol of adult self-possession or a source of mesmerizing power.” That aspiration ended at fifteen, when the head chef at a local golf club groped her during her shift. Then, in her fifties, she underwent a double mastectomy after a series of biopsies revealed the presence of early-stage cancer. She soon found that she “had an overwhelming desire to understand the multifarious meanings and uses of breasts.” Here, Thornton is less interested in how breasts appear than in how they can be put to work—by sex workers, activists, milk donors, midwives and lactation specialists, surgeons, lingerie models, and swimwear designers. The broad truth that most American women “are dissatisfied with, indifferent to, or ambivalent about their breasts” is the premise of her book, one that wants to set these organs free with the goal of gaining a greater understanding of and appreciation for the people to whom they are attached.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “We Must Defend the Bust,” by Lauren Michele Jackson
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Art of Dying

  by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams)

  Nonfiction

  This posthumous collection gathers the final pieces written by The New Yorker’s longtime art critic, who died in October, 2022. The forty-six essays, all of which originally appeared in the magazine, include Schjeldahl’s unparalleled exploration of his life as a critic, which he wrote in the weeks after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. The volume demonstrates how Schjeldahl’s kinetic, wry, and inimitable style remained powerfully intact until his last days.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Whale Fall

  by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Manod, the observant narrator of this début novel set on the cusp of the Second World War, lives on a sparsely populated Welsh island where, one night, a whale washes up on the beach and dies shortly thereafter. Soon, two researchers turn up to document the customs of the islanders. Manod agrees to assist them, translating phrases (such as “sheep farmer”) and cultural realities (the people cannot swim). In time, however, misunderstandings arise between researchers and subject, imbuing their relationship with both alienation and tenderness. Stubborn transgressions committed by the interlopers testify to the hazards of anthropology and the delusions of so-called progress.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Free and Equal

  by Daniel Chandler (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics, is a passionate evangelist for the great American philosopher John Rawls, using Rawls as his fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Rawls’s magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice” (1971), was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme where everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (economic inequalities have to be justified by their effect on the least advantaged). The vision Chandler extracts from this is, on the whole, a sane one of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Women and the Piano

  by Susan Tomes (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  In this engaging survey of fifty female pianists, from the eighteenth century to the present, Tomes aims to correct a male-centric understanding of piano history. Women pianists have long been scrutinized—for playing in a “masculine” style, for their appearances, for not orienting themselves around family. Through short biographies, Tomes documents the cost of pursuing art. Fanny Mendelssohn allowed her compositions to be published under her brother Felix’s name; Zhu Xiao-Mei continued studying Bach even after being sent to do manual labor during China’s Cultural Revolution. Yet the resounding note is one of passion. As Marguerite Long told her students, “My joy in life is work, because it will never betray you.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Dogland

  by Tommy Tomlinson (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  The dog show is a forum optimized to display the weirdness of the current human-canine relationship: our lavish expenditure on dogs, our equally outsized emotional investment in them, and the degree to which we have quite literally shaped them as a species. Tomlinson, a journalist and former mutt owner, found himself captivated by the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show when he caught it on TV. The questions that came to mind, as Shih Tzus paraded around the ring, were not very scientific, but they were very American: Are these dogs happy? Are any dogs happy? Why do dogs make me so happy? Those musings form the kernel of his new book, which approaches its subject with a pleasing mixture of conviviality and comedic distance.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Wacky and Wonderful World of the Westminster Dog Show,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  Revolusi

  by David Van Reybrouck (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This powerful account of the colonization of Indonesia takes the form of a people’s history, using interviews with those who lived under—and sometimes defied—Dutch rule. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian best known for his work about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shows how the Dutch relied on genocide and slavery to piece together the Indonesian “jigsaw puzzle.” As one colonist put it, “Trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.” Van Reybrouck also captures the hope that independence brought, showing how, before a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship ushered in a “crazed explosion of violence,” Indonesians’ fight against oppression inspired other nations to break free.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Piglet

  by Lottie Hazell (Henry Holt)

  Fiction

  Newly installed in a house in Oxford, the protagonist of this novel savors visions of a future with her well-to-do fiancé. To her relief, they are a world away from her family in Derby, for whom she feels “a crawling embarrassment,” and from whom she received the nickname Piglet, for her prodigious appetite. Days before the wedding, however, her fiancé confesses a betrayal. Clinging to “the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared,” Piglet insists on moving forward with the marriage. But amid sensuous descriptions of her cooking and of the vast amounts of food she begins to order at restaurants, battles between self-denial and indulgence, external expectations and inner feeling, start to consume her. Each burger and croquembouche is freighted with meaning.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Lucky

  by Jane Smiley (Knopf)

  Fiction

  The main character of this warmhearted novel is Jodie Rattler, a girl who, at the age of six, accompanies her uncle to a racetrack and wins a roll of forty-three two-dollar bills. That talisman propels Rattler through life, from her upbringing in a gregarious family to a successful, if ultimately unfulfilling, career as a folk-rock singer-songwriter. As the novel wends its way from the nineteen-fifties to the near future, through multiple national crises—some historical, some speculative—Rattler contemplates the mixed blessings of her lifelong lucky streak and the contingencies inherent in “the great enigma . . . the sense you have, that comes and goes, of who you are, what a self is.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Invention of Prehistory

  by Stefanos Geroulanos (Liveright)

  Nonfiction

  Stories about the deep human past rest on assumptions about what it means to be human in the first place, giving them normative implications for modern society. Geroulanos, a historian, notes that European intellectuals have, in the past two and a half centuries, turned to prehistory to explain things like the structure of families, the basis of states, the prevalence of war, and the contours of our nature. “Pre-history is about the present day,” he writes. “It always has been.” With careful attention to our collective accounting of our prehistoric roots, Geroulanous considers what is revealed about our present when we write about our past.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What the Origins of Humanity Can and Can’t Tell Us,” by Maya Jasanoff
• 
  Shakespeare’s Sisters

  by Ramie Targoff (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In this thoughtful study, Targoff, a literary scholar, highlights four female contemporaries of Shakespeare, women who “weren’t encouraged” and rarely received “even a shred of acclaim,” but managed to write nonetheless. Mary Sidney (the sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney) produced a noteworthy translation of the Book of Psalms. Elizabeth Cary wrote “The Tragedy of Mariam,” the first original play published by a woman in England. Aemilia Lanyer was the first published English female poet of the seventeenth century, thanks to her “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” which mounted a “defense of women’s rights.” Anne Clifford, a voracious reader born to aristocrats, wrote a detailed journal; by “treating herself as a historical subject living an important life,” Targoff argues, she became the “most important female diarist” of her time.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  This Strange Eventful History

  by Claire Messud (Norton)

  Fiction

  Messud’s new book traces three generations of an itinerant French family with roots in North Africa. The Cassars are pieds noirs—people of European descent born in colonial Algeria—who flee their home during the Algerian revolution. Unwelcome in Paris, where they are seen as interlopers from the fringes, the Cassar children traverse the globe, seeking to assuage their lost sense of belonging through the myth of a perfect love. The novel brims with autobiographical details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled “Everything That We Believed In,” that Messud’s paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: “This Strange Eventful History” is a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it. The Cassars cling to an idealized memory of Algeria that’s untroubled by reality, the tree of knowledge unshaken, the apple still intact. Messud trusts her readers to bite down.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Claire Messud’s New Novel Maps the Search for a Home That Never Was,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Limitarianism

  by Ingrid Robeyns (Astra)

  Nonfiction

  This provocative consideration of extreme wealth accumulation asks how society might improve if the phenomenon were eliminated. Robeyns, a philosopher, uses the term “limitarianism” to describe an economic framework that would impose a cap on how much money any single individual can amass. Throughout the book, she outlines the concrete steps that her proposal would require, and reflects on its wider social implications, in the form of sweeping fiscal and ethical transformations. Ultimately, her account amounts to an argument for “why a world without extreme wealth concentration is better for us all.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  How to Baby

  by Liana Finck (The Dial Press)

  Nonfiction

  This hilarious, illustrated pregnancy and parenting how-to-ish book is for all the people who are tired of receiving useless advice on pregnancy and parenting but would like to vent about said advice. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Rough Trade

  by Katrina Carrasco (MCD x FSG)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this transgressive crime thriller, set in Tacoma, Washington, in the late nineteenth century, is Alma Rosales, an ex-detective who has constructed a new life as Jack Camp, a stevedore and an opium smuggler both beloved and feared by his crew. Alma commands this masculine world with “hard-worn knuckles and small-man’s swagger,” but when an old friend and love interest unexpectedly arrives, with a detective on her tail, their meeting sets off a series of dangers that almost cost Alma and her crew their livelihoods. At once richly atmospheric and finely paced, the novel is a potent and morally complex portrait of queer life and history.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Life Wants You Dead

  by Evan Waite (Chronicle Books)

  Fiction

  In a world that seems bleaker and more treacherous than ever, it’s important to remember all the ways in which you are imperilled, and to laugh at them, right up till the bitterly funny end. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Leaving

  by Roxana Robinson (Norton)

  Fiction

  This quietly compelling novel of forbidden love focusses on two characters in their sixties, Sarah (divorced) and Warren (married, not entirely happily), who dated as teen-agers and meet again by chance one evening at a performance of “Tosca.” Though its tone is muted, the book captures the aching pull of an all-consuming affair, which draws the characters away from their families and from the lives they have painstakingly built. Robinson examines the question of how difficult it is to abandon vows, even for people who came of age in the throes of the sexual revolution. Despite contemporary society’s general acceptance of divorce, the novel shows how desire can still have painful consequences.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

  by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  An eye-opening collaboration between two great American artists, this volume is not like any ABC book or gardening manual you’ve ever seen. A longtime New Yorker contributor, Kincaid unearths the secret history of the plant world, turning up the sometimes barbarous stories behind the garden blooms that we’ve been looking at all of our lives. Walker’s arresting watercolors bring it all to life. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Neighbors and Other Stories

  by Diane Oliver (Grove)

  Fiction

  In 1966, Oliver, an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa, was killed in a motorcycle accident. This book, the first collection of her work, exhibits a unique delicacy in chronicling Black life in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—especially in the South amid the civil-rights movement. In the title story, a girl observes her brother on a tense night before he is to become the first to integrate his school; in another story, a young woman joins a lunch-counter sit-in. Oliver delves into subtleties of class, focussing on characters such as a doctor’s second wife and a daydreaming maid. At their best, the stories let ideas take shape gradually, making close observation the cornerstone of their politics.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  H Is for Hope

  by Elizabeth Kolbert (Ten Speed)

  Nonfiction

  “Climate change resists narrative,” Kolbert writes, “and yet some account of what’s happening is needed.” Here, she employs the alphabet as a framing device to walk readers through an array of colorful characters, notable events, bad actors, and big ideas, to make tangible the diffuse and troubling history of a changing climate—and our relationship to it. The piece first appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Butter

  by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Ecco)

  Fiction

  In this thriller inspired by true events, a journalist, Rika, becomes obsessed by the case of Manako Kajii, a sometime sex worker convicted of killing several men. Kajii reportedly seduced the men with her cooking—much to the confusion and chagrin of Japanese society, which tends to view Kajii’s “huge” body as an abomination. Rika interviews the wily Kajii in charged jailhouse meetings, and, as the two engage in an increasingly fraught game of cat and mouse, Rika’s relationships—with her boyfriend, her colleagues, and even her own body—begin to change. The novel cleverly intertwines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of Japan’s standards for women: “Whichever aspect of it you considered, Rika thought, the Kajii case was tinged by misogyny and the excessive self-pity felt by lonely men.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  All the Campus Lawyers

  by Louis H. GuardJoyce P. Jacobsen (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  Commentators debate the extent to which a culture of “coddling” has taken hold of college campuses, and the degree to which offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion are responsible for it. Guard and Jacobsen outline how the systems at play are largely the creation of the federal government. Various federal statutes prohibiting discrimination protect programs and activities that receive federal funds, as most universities do. Prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin have been interpreted in recent decades to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2016, an expanded definition of “disability” was added to the Americans with Disabilities Act. For universities, these laws provide a potential cause of action at every turn. Students and employees who feel harassed, unsafe, or generally uncared for by virtue of their identities are entitled, under federal law, to make a complaint. The result is what Guard and Jacobsen call the “lawyerization of higher education,” a state of affairs where “the impact of the legal issues bearing down on institutions and their campuses has intensified to levels never before seen.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Academic Freedom Under Fire,” by Louis Menand
• 
  A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

  by Anthony Bale (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  The late-medieval traveller, it was said, always needed two bags: one full of money, one of patience. Such wisdom fills the pages of this immensely entertaining history, which is constructed around medieval guidebooks and travelogues, and highlights dazzling destinations like Constantinople and Rhodes under the Knights Hospitaller. Pilgrimage was a common reason people left home; by 1350, travellers could book a tour to Jerusalem that included transportation, meals, and currency exchange. Yet, as Bale shows, their experience of travel was not one we would entirely recognize. As one pilgrim put it, in 1384, “No one should travel who does not desire hardship, trouble, tribulation and the risk of death.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  All Things Are Too Small

  by Becca Rothfeld (Metropolitan)

  Nonfiction

  Rothfeld’s new collection of piquant essays eschews the contemporary predilection for minimalism in favor of indulgence, ambition, and surplus in all its forms. Rothfeld applies an incisive lens to everything from decluttering and fasting to mindfulness. One essay, on the œuvre of the film director David Cronenberg and body horror as a model for a new philosophy of consent, was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  What Kingdom

  by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Archipelago)

  Fiction

  In this striking début novel, Gråbøl documents daily life in a psychiatric ward for young people in Denmark. Waheed blasts 50 Cent and loves junk food; Marie lives a few floors above her mother; and the narrator, who remains nameless, recounts her struggle with bipolar disorder. Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines—“benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles”—and challenges the perception of mental illness as an invisible affliction, “inaccessible to any other.” Gråbøl’s portrait of the residents’ and caretakers’ interconnected lives constructs a communal existence out of individual pain.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  On Giving Up

  by Adam Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Like many of Phillips’s previous works, this roving collection of writings fuses the lexicon of psychotherapy with literary criticism to upend conventional ideas about common emotional experiences—among them repression, longing, and loss. Phillips enlivens these explorations with examples from literature and history: Kafka and Shakespeare appear, as does the Crow Nation, whose existence was radically altered by the decimation of the animals on which its people depended. Though occasionally meandering, Phillips’s agile treatment of familiar ideas often yields compelling analyses, as when he argues, in the titular essay, that our cultural prohibition on “giving up” compels us to “think of our lives in terms of losses and gains, or profit and loss.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Ian Fleming

  by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  The decolonization of the British Empire throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties brought particular attention to Ian Fleming’s famous debonair spy, James Bond. Shakespeare, a novelist and biographer, details Fleming’s own rise to stardom (his irritated wife called him the “oldest Beatle"), alert to the politics that infused his life and work. Fleming first tried journalism, then finance, faring poorly at both. In 1939 Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, John Henry Godfrey, tapped Fleming to be his assistant. The usual thing to say about Fleming’s intelligence work is that he was a deskbound underling who turned his daydreams into spy novels, but Shakespeare presents evidence of Fleming’s centrality. One officer felt that it was Fleming, not Godfrey, who effectively directed naval intelligence for most of the Second World War. Fleming emerged in his spy fiction as the voice of a beleaguered empire but could never quite deal with the way America was eclipsing Britain as a world power.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Rabbit Heart

  by Kristine S. Ervin (Counterpoint)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir stretches across a quarter century to chart the investigation into the author’s mother’s murder, which occurred in 1986, after she was abducted from a mall parking lot in Oklahoma City. Ervin, who was eight at the time of the tragedy, follows the case with devastating rigor, shingling its developments with her memories of growing up without a mother. The adult Ervin, knowing that her mother was sexually brutalized, attempts to undo how that knowledge seems to have settled in her body—in the form of muscular dysfunction—but she also accepts the lasting nature of her grief: “Maybe I’ll always be the daughter, retracing her final footsteps to the car, seeing just how close I can get.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Book of Love

  by Kelly Link (Random House)

  Fiction

  This novel, the first by an author celebrated for her short fiction, follows a group of teen-agers who are determined to live normal lives amid intrusions of magic. Three classmates wake up to find that they have died; confused and annoyed, they make a deal with two mysterious beings, who allow them to return home in exchange for their participation in a series of trials. A supernatural power struggle ensues, but the book devotes most of its attention to the ordinary world, slowing the action to examine the relationships between its characters, most of whom are queer. Here, a magical quest is less absorbing than the act of texting a crush.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Limits

  by Nell Freudenberger (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Set partly in New York City and partly in French Polynesia, this novel follows a family through the distress of 2020. Stephen, an overworked cardiologist, resides in New York with his new wife, who is pregnant. His ex-wife, Nathalie, a scientist, lives in Tahiti, where she studies deepwater-coral bleaching. Moving between these two worlds is their teen-age daughter, Pia, who has become attached to a Tahitian expert diver who works with her mother, and to his mission: to prevent mining companies from destroying the reefs, even if it might require violence. The novel’s evocation of contemporary troubles—Trump, COVID, ecological devastation—endows it with a sense of chaos that is at once limiting and liberating.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Cocktails with George and Martha

  by Philip Gefter (Bloomsbury)

  Nonfiction

  When Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway, in 1962, it marked a watershed in American theatre, simultaneously enthralling and appalling audiences with its excruciatingly intimate portrait of a dysfunctional marriage. Tracing the life of the play from its first draft through the film version, adapted by Mike Nichols in 1966, Gefter deftly blends social history, textual analysis, and Hollywood gossip to probe the story’s appeal. At the heart of his inquiry are three real-life relationships—between Albee and his longtime boyfriend, William Flanagan; between Nichols and Ernest Lehman, the film’s producer; and between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film’s stars—that illustrate the universality of Albee’s themes.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Cahokia Jazz

  by Francis Spufford (Scribner)

  Fiction

  In this stylishly drawn mystery novel, the tropes of noir—among them a hardboiled detective with an artist’s soul, a powerful woman with a terrible secret, and a journalist chasing the story of a lifetime—appear in an alternative Jazz Age. Here, Native Americans did not succumb to smallpox, and the powerful and ancient Cahokia nation has joined the United States. This imagined America is studded with names borrowed from the real one: St. Louis might be a mere backwater, but T. S. Eliot is still among its locals. So, unfortunately, is the Klan, which is intent on wresting control of the city from its people and putting it under white, capitalist authority.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Wide Wide Sea

  by Hampton Sides (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  This new biography undertakes the hazardous enterprise of revisiting the life of Captain James Cook, who, at the time of his death in 1779 was Britain’s most celebrated explorer. In the course of three epic voyages—the last one, admittedly, unfinished—he mapped the east coast of Australia, circumnavigated New Zealand, made the first documented crossing of the Antarctic Circle, “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, and paid the first known visit to South Georgia Island. His admirers believed that he deserved the “gratitude of posterity.” Posterity, however, has a mind of its own. “Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity,” are, Sides writes, just a few of the charged issues raised by Cook’s legacy. It’s precisely the risks, the author adds, that drew him to the subject.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Captain James Cook Got Away with Murder,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
• 
  The Tower

  by Flora Carr (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  Based on true events, this richly detailed novel takes place over the course of a year, in the late fifteen-sixties, on an island in Scotland. Mary, Queen of Scots, has been imprisoned by rebels and forced to leave her son, the future King James, with her enemies. She is pregnant with twins, having been raped by the man who became her third husband. After a miscarriage, she directs her remaining energy toward escape. Schemes ensue: could she jump from a tower window, seduce a visiting lord, or pose as a laundress? Her attending ladies, who are also imprisoned, are devoted to helping her reclaim the throne. Through her tale, Carr depicts the ways in which women can care for and exert power over one another.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  My Beloved Life

  by Amitava Kumar (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Jadu Kunwar, Kumar writes of his novel’s gentle hero, “had passed unnoticed through much of his life.” His experiences “would not fill a book: they had been so light and inconsequential, like a brief ripple on a lake’s surface.” Kunwar is born in 1935 in rural India. Eventually, he becomes a lecturer in history at a local college; gets married and has a daughter; and wins a scholarship to study at Berkeley, in the late nineteen-eighties, before returning to India. Kunwar’s life is told twice over in this book—the first large section recounts it in the third person, and then the second large section recounts it in the first-person voice of Kunwar’s daughter, Jugnu, bringing us to the present day. The realization that Kumar might be writing a fictionalized version of his own late father’s life breaks like a wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story. The novel’s astonishing details are pointedly revealed but not overpoweringly unpacked, having the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real. Above all, the tale is always deeply human, that of a son grappling with his father’s legacy by inhabiting his point of view.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Amitava Kumar and the Novel of the Translated Man,” by James Wood
• 
  Ours

  by Phillip B. Williams (Viking)

  Fiction

  In this ambitious début novel, a Harriet Tubman figure possessed of supernatural abilities founds a town in Missouri, whose first inhabitants she has rescued from slavery. Magically concealed from the outside world, the community is ostensibly a haven, yet the weight of its inhabitants’ pasts and the confines of safety prove to be difficult burdens. In lush, ornamental prose, Williams, who is also a poet, traces many characters’ entwined journeys as they seek to understand the forces that assemble and separate them. The novel is an inventive ode to self-determination and also a surrealistic vision of Black life as forged within the crucible of American history.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Worry

  by Alexandra Tanner (Scribner)

  Fiction

  This dryly witty novel centers on Jules, a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring novelist turned study-guide editor living in Brooklyn, and her younger sister, who has just moved in with her. Jules swings between irritation and compassion toward her sibling; she notes that “having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it.” Jules is just self-aware enough to admit that chief among her joys in life is feeling superior to others. She spins a fixation on her Instagram feed as research for “a book-length hybrid essay” on feminism, capitalism, antisemitism, and the Internet. As Tanner’s novel explores these topics, its depiction of Jules’s relationships also highlights absurdities of contemporary culture and the consequences of self-absorption.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Whiskey Tender

  by Deborah Taffa (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  This vibrant memoir recalls the author’s childhood on the traditional lands of the Quechan (Yuma) people on a reservation in California, and in a Navajo Nation border town in New Mexico. The move to New Mexico, in 1976, reflected Taffa’s parents’ desire for their children to “be mainstream Americans.” As a young woman, however, Taffa sought to link her identity to figures from her ancestral past, such as a great-grandmother who lectured and performed for white society. In her account, Taffa regards the broad tapestry of history and picks at its smallest threads: individual choices shaped by violent social forces, and by the sometimes erratic powers of love.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Out of the Darkness

  by Frank Trentmann (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Germany’s postwar transformation into Europe’s political conscience is often cast as a triumphant story of moral rehabilitation. This book points to the limitations of that narrative, arguing that, in the past eight decades, German society has been “preoccupied with rebuilding the country and coming to terms with the Nazi past” rather than with confronting its obligations to the broader world. Trentmann draws from a wide range of sources, including amateur plays and essays by schoolchildren. These lend intimacy to his portrait of a citizenry engaged in the continuous process of formulating its own views of right and wrong as it debates issues from rearmament to environmentalism.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  I Heard Her Call My Name

  by Lucy Sante (Penguin)

  Nonfiction

  In early 2021, the writer Lucy Sante sent an e-mail to her closest friends. Its subject was “A Bombshell,” which Sante later joked was an unintentional pun. In the text she attached, she explained that at the age of sixty-six she was accepting her long-suppressed identity as a transgender woman. This announcement, which runs several pages, opens Sante’s memoir of transition, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” in which she attempts to understand the process by which she ignored her own longings for decades. In her young adulthood, she writes, her longing to live as a woman was closer to the surface but got buried as she grew older, and suppressed fantasies she told herself were “perversions.” The danger of revelation was particularly acute for Sante in areas where a person longs to be most open: in intimate relationships, in sexuality, in drug use. After losing friends to AIDS and addiction, and the downtown New York she loved to corporate interests, she married multiple times, had a child, wrote, and taught—but, she says, “I spent middle age behind a wall.” Her difficulty accepting her gender was compounded by a sense that it was too late in life to indulge in what she still thought of as fantasies. “I’m lucky to have survived my own repression,” Sante concludes. Now, she says, “I am the person I feared most of my life. I have, as they say, gone there.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Lucy Sante Became the Person She Feared,” by Emily Witt
• 
  Bitter Water Opera

  by Nicolette Polek (Graywolf)

  Fiction

  Gia, the narrator of this début novella, is disenchanted with the modern world. She’s a film scholar whose long-term relationship is crumbling; in the rubble, she finds a new obsession, a dancer and recluse named Marta, who retreated to the desert in order to perform on her own terms, and who mysteriously appears after Gia writes to her. Of Marta, Gia thinks, “This was the kind of woman I thought I would be. Alone and powerful with creation.” With Marta’s help, Gia can find transcendence in everyday life again—in “miry water” and “wiry greenery, coiling”; in a beetle’s “thin, metallic sounds”; even in the taste of “strawberry-flavored melatonin.” Polek elegantly fashions an ode to small and privately felt moments of beauty, and to art’s capacity to reach through time.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution

  by Jane Kamensky (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Candice Vadala, better known as Candida Royalle, was an adult-movie actress turned feminist-porn pioneer. Few have tried with as much ardent, self-serious determination to remake the industry from the inside. With her production company, Femme, Royalle sought to make hardcore movies that would appeal to women and could be watched by couples. She was intent on “letting men see what many women actually want in bed.” In this assiduously researched, elegantly written new biography, the historian Jane Kamensky mines the depths of Royalle’s personal archive, at the core of which were the diaries she had kept almost continuously from the age of twelve. (There were also photos, videos, clippings, costumes, and correspondence.) Kamensky makes a strong case for her subject’s story as both unique and representative. Royalle, she writes, “was a product of the sexual revolution, her persona made possible, if not inevitable, by the era’s upheavals in demography, law, technology, and ideology.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “How Candida Royalle Set Out to Reinvent Porn,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  Takeover

  by Timothy W. Ryback (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In this thoughtful and thorough new book, Ryback, a historian, has assembled an intensely specific chronicle of a single year: 1932. He details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to Adolf Hitler, someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. The book is a mordant accounting of Hitler’s establishment enablers, from the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg to General Kurt von Schleicher, two of many characters who schemed to use him as a stalking horse for their own ambitions. Ryback’s gift for detail joins with a keen sense for the black comedy of the period as he makes clear that Hitler didn’t seize power; he was given it.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Ashoka

  by Patrick Olivelle (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  This incisive biography aims to separate the historical Ashoka, who ruled a vast swath of the Indian subcontinent in the third century B.C., from the one of legend. Ashoka is commonly described as “the Buddhist ruler of India,” but in Olivelle’s rendering he is a ruler “who happened to be a Buddhist,” and whose devoutness was only a single aspect of a “unique and unprecedented” system of governance. Ashoka sought to unite a religiously diverse, polyglot people; his most radical innovation, Olivelle shows, was the “dharma community,” a top-down effort to give his subjects “a sense of belonging to the same moral empire.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Pax Economica

  by Marc-William Palen (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  A comprehensive account of the modern free-trade movement and a timely act of historical reclamation, this book illuminates the forgotten legacy of left-wing advocacy for liberalized markets. Palen, a historian, reveals the movement’s origins to be internationalist and cosmopolitan, led by socialists, pacifists, and feminists, who viewed expanded trade as the only practical way to achieve lasting peace in a newly globalized world. This fresh perspective complicates contemporary political archetypes of neoliberal free marketeers and “Made in America” populists, adding valuable context to our often overly simplistic economic discourse.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Here in Avalon

  by Tara Isabella Burton (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  Dreams of escaping the mundane animate this fairy-tale-inflected thriller set in contemporary New York. The novel’s action centers on Cecilia, a flighty “seeker” whose mercurial bent leads her to abandon a new marriage, ditch her sister, Rose, and take up with a cultish, seafaring cabaret troupe that recruits lonely souls with the promise “Another life is possible.” Soon, Rose embarks on a mission to find Cecilia, blowing up her own relationship and career to follow her sister into a world of “time travelers” who tell “elegantly anachronistic riddles,” lionize unrequited love, and live to “preserve the magic.” Exploring the bond between the markedly different siblings, Burton examines their life styles—the bourgeois and the bohemian, the materialistic and the artistic—through a whimsical lens.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Age of Revolutions

  by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  Perl-Rosenthal, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, offers what he calls an “anti-exceptionalist history of the age of revolution.” In his view, there is an alternative way to understand why the great transatlantic revolutions that straddled the turn of the nineteenth century—in the United States, France, Haiti, and Latin America—are often said to have “failed.” The degree to which these revolutions met (or did not meet) their egalitarian aims should be understood in the light of processes that took a full generation to unfold. Perl-Rosenthal’s book, which follows several members of what he calls the first generation of “gentlemen revolutionaries,” is a persuasive and inspired contribution to perennial historical debates. Was the American Revolution a project of radical egalitarianism, or was it simply a transfer of élite power? Was the French Revolution stymied by external forces of reaction, or was it fundamentally illiberal to begin with? He writes that we should not limit our gaze to “supposedly sharp turning points and dramatic transformations” but instead narrate the past as a series of successive and intertwined campaigns to improve our estate.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “You Say You Want a Revolution. Do You Know What You Mean by That?,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
• 
  Help Wanted

  by Adelle Waldman (Norton)

  Fiction

  Adelle Waldman is an expert at marshalling small details to conjure a particular milieu. Her first novel, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” caught the mores and signifiers of literary Brooklyn circa 2013 with the unflinching precision of a tattoo artist. In “Help Wanted,” her second novel, she uses detailed descriptions to animate the daily lives of a group of employees at Town Square, a superstore in the Hudson Valley. As her characters move through their routines, Waldman maintains a kind of steady presence, attentive but not intrusive. That the prose doesn’t soar is the point: thick with explication, the sentences are sandbags, loaded onto the page to drive home the cumulative weight of work. Town Square emerges as a complex social milieu with its own rules, and its own consequential choices. At the beginning of the book, a team chart occupies the space where readers of nineteenth-century novels might expect to see a family tree. It is simultaneously a joke, a homage, and a provocation for our unequal age: To what extent has work really usurped ancestry as a shaping force in people’s lives?

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “A Novelist of Privileged Youth Finds a New Subject,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  Wild Houses

  by Colin Barrett (Grove)

  Fiction

  In the opening chapter of this short, deftly written novel, two roughnecks in the employ of an Irish drug dealer abduct a teen-age boy named Doll English, hoping to extract repayment of a debt owed by Doll’s older brother. Doll is held at a remote safe house owned by a man who is mourning his deceased mother, while Doll’s girlfriend frantically searches for him. The kidnapping serves as a binding device, bringing together a small, carefully drawn cast of characters under unusual, high-pressure circumstances. The release of that pressure is sometimes violent, but it is also revelatory: Barrett is less concerned with suspense than with the ways in which people negotiate “that razor-thin border separating the possible from the actual.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  No Judgment

  by Lauren Oyler (HarperOne)

  Nonfiction

  In “No Judgment,” Lauren Oyler, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, collects a series of spry, wide-ranging essays that take on gossip, Goodreads, autofiction, Berlin, and more. Her essay on anxiety was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Road from Belhaven

  by Margot Livesey (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This novel follows Lizzie Craig, a young clairvoyant who lives on a farm with her grandparents in nineteenth-century Scotland. At first, Lizzie prays to be free of her “pictures,” as she foretells traumatic incidents that she has no power to change, but later she tries to harness her talent to see her own future. When Lizzie becomes enraptured by a young man from Glasgow, her grandmother warns that Lizzie’s choice of partner could alter her “road in life,” and Lizzie’s navigation of the boundary between girlhood and adulthood becomes more urgent. Inspired by the author’s mother, the novel gracefully evokes the magic and mystery of the rural world and the vitality and harshness of city life.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Martyr!

  by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf)

  Fiction

  The person exclaiming “martyr” in Kaveh Akbar’s novel “Martyr!” is Cyrus Shams, a poet and former alcoholic, who was also formerly addicted to drugs. Cyrus is in his late twenties. He’s anguished and ardent about the world and his place in it, and recovery has left him newly and painfully obsessed with his deficiencies. Desperate for purpose, he fixates on the idea of a death that retroactively splashes meaning back onto a life. He starts to collect stories about historical martyrs, such as Bobby Sands and Joan of Arc, for a book project, a suite of “elegies for people I’ve never met.” Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom arises partly from the circumstances of his parents’ deaths. His mother, Roya, was a passenger on an Iranian plane that the United States Navy mistakenly shot out of the sky—an event based on the real-life destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes, in 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq War. In “Martyr!,” Cyrus contrasts his mother’s humanity with the statistic that she became in the U.S. Her fate was “actuarial,” he says, “a rounding error.” Although Akbar, an acclaimed Iranian American poet, has incisive political points to make, he uses martyrdom primarily to think through more metaphysical questions about whether our pain matters, and to whom, and how it might be made to matter more.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “ ‘Martyr!’ Plays Its Subject for Laughs but Is Also Deadly Serious,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  Errand into the Maze

  by Deborah Jowitt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This astute biography, by a veteran Village Voice critic, traces the long career of Martha Graham, a choreographer who became one of the major figures of twentieth-century modernism. Born in 1894 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Graham came of age in an era when Americans mainly thought of dance as entertainment, a conception that she helped change through such groundbreaking pieces as “Primitive Mysteries” and “Appalachian Spring.” While detailing many of Graham’s romantic and artistic collaborations, Jowitt focusses on how Graham approached her work—as a performer, a choreographer, and a teacher—with a philosophical rigor that expanded the expressive possibilities of movement and established a uniquely American idiom.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  A Map of Future Ruins

  by Lauren Markham (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  In 2020, a fire broke out at a refugee camp in the town of Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, displacing thousands. In this finely woven meditation on “belonging, exclusion, and whiteness,” Markham, a Greek American journalist, travels to Greece to investigate the fire and its aftermath, including the conviction of six young Afghan asylum seekers. Her thoughts on the case—she ultimately finds it to be specious—mingle with gleanings from visits to locales central to her family’s history. “Every map is the product of a cartographer with allegiances,” she writes, eventually concluding that confronting the contemporary migration system’s injustices requires critically evaluating migrations of the past and the historical narratives about them.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Goodbye Russia

  by Fiona Maddocks (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

  This biography of Sergei Rachmaninoff focusses on the quarter century that he spent in exile in the United States, after the Russian Revolution, when he established himself across the West as a highly sought-after concert pianist. In place of extensive compositional analyses (during this time, the composer wrote only six new pieces), Maddocks offers a character study punctuated by colorful source material, including acerbic diary entries by Prokofiev, which betray both envy of and affection for his competitor. Maddocks notes such idiosyncrasies as Rachmaninoff’s infatuation with fast cars, but she also captures his sense of otherness; he never became fluent in English, and his yearning for a lost Russia shadowed his monumental success.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Fetishist

  by Katherine Min (Putnam)

  Fiction

  The blooming and dissolution of a romance forms the core of this wistful, often funny, posthumously published novel. “Once Asian, never again Caucasian,” jokes Alma, a Korean American concert cellist, to Daniel, a white violinist, the first night they sleep together. Eventually, Alma will break off their engagement after discovering that Daniel, the book’s titular fetishist, has been having an affair with another Asian American woman. When that woman dies by suicide, her daughter seeks revenge. The resulting series of escalating high jinks, which includes the use of blowfish poison, verges on the farcical, but the novel’s major chord is one of rueful longing.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Survivors of the Clotilda

  by Hannah Durkin (Amistad)

  Nonfiction

  The last known slave ship to reach U.S. soil, the Clotilda, arrived in 1860, more than fifty years after the transatlantic slave trade was federally outlawed. This history details the lives of the people it carried, from their kidnappings in West Africa to their deaths in the twentieth century. Durkin, a scholar of slavery and the African diaspora, traces them to communities in Alabama established by the formerly enslaved, such as Africatown and Gee’s Bend, and finds in their stories antecedents for the Harlem Renaissance and the civil-rights movement. Amid descriptions of child trafficking, sexual abuse, and racial violence, Durkin also celebrates the resilience and resistance of the Clotilda’s survivors. “Their lives were so much richer than the countless crimes committed against them,” she writes.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Held

  by Anne Michaels (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This episodic, philosophical novel orbits a group of loosely connected characters living between 1917 and 2025. It begins in France, during the First World War, with a British soldier lying on the ground after an explosion. We follow him home to North Yorkshire, where he works as a portrait photographer in whose images spirits begin to appear. Later, we meet his granddaughter, who provides medical care in war zones. Throughout, characters ponder the boundaries between the physical and the ineffable, the mortal and the spiritual. Sometimes they reach epigrammatic epiphanies, as when one realizes that “everything she had thought of as loss was something found.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Byron: A Life in Ten Letters

  by Andrew Stauffer (Cambridge)

  Nonfiction

  Should one wish to tackle the great Romantic poet Lord Byron, there is no denying that his collected works loom like a fortress in your path. Even the recent Oxford edition of his work, which omits great swathes of it, runs to some eleven hundred pages; his letters and journals fill thirteen volumes in all. Luckily, there is an alternative: Stauffer’s compact biography, which is elegantly structured around a few choice pickings from Byron’s correspondence. Each letter affords Stauffer a chance to ruminate on whatever facet of the poet’s history and character happened to be glittering most brightly at the time, from his devotion to the cause of Greek independence in the fight against Ottoman rule to the libertinism for which he is famed. We are presented, for instance, with a jammed and breathless letter almost three thousand words long centered on a tempestuous baker’s wife with whom Byron had been involved in Venice. Stauffer comments, “One gets the sense that he could have kept going indefinitely with more juicy details, except he runs out of room.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Lord Byron Was More Than Just Byronic,” by Anthony Lane
• 
  Remembering Peasants

  by Patrick Joyce (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  In this elegiac history, Joyce presents a painstaking account of a way of life to which, until recently, the vast majority of humanity was bound. Delving into the rhythms and rituals of peasant existence, Joyce shows how different our land-working ancestors were from us in their understanding of time, nature, and the body. “We have bodies, which we carry about in our minds, whereas they were their bodies,” he writes. The relative absence of peasants from the historical record, and the blinding speed with which they seem to have disappeared, prompt a moving final essay on the urgency of preserving our collective past. “Almost all of us are in one way or another the children of peasants,” Joyce writes. “If we are cut off from the past, we are also cut off from ourselves.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Carson McCullers

  by Mary V. Dearborn (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Carson McCullers rose to fame when she was only twenty-three, after her début novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” wowed critics, who crowned her Faulkner’s successor. Precocity would both define and stifle her career. In her work, she probed the twilit zone between adolescence and adulthood, when impulse reigns. In her life, she often acted the child herself, relying on friends and family members to cook her meals, pour her drinks, listen to her self-flattery, and care for her through a series of illnesses. Dearborn’s biography is a marvel: admiring of the fiction and its startling imagination, but clear-eyed about how McCullers’s behavior hurt her work, herself, and those who loved her. In one sense, the same indulgent atmosphere that stunted her growth kept the link to late childhood alive.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Arrested Development of Carson McCullers,” by Maggie Doherty
• 
  In Ascension

  by Martin MacInnes (Black Cat)

  Fiction

  In this capacious, broody work of speculative fiction, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, a Dutch microbiologist who had a turbulent childhood joins expeditions to the center of the earth and to the far reaches of space: first to a hydrothermal vent deep in the Atlantic Ocean, then to the rim of the Oort cloud, a sphere of icy objects surrounding our solar system. As her narration toggles between chronicles of her voyages and reflections on her personal life, each of these “two zones” is revealed to be a wonder of inscrutability. “So many times I had identified errors,” she thinks, “stemming from the original mistake of . . . predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Smoke and Ashes

  by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  A hybrid of horticultural and economic history, this book proposes that the opium poppy should be taken as “a historical force in its own right.” Ghosh touches on opium’s origins as a recreational drug—it was favored in the courts of the Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, each of which enhanced its potency in different ways—but he dwells on its use by Western colonizers. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British began a campaign to get the Chinese population hooked on opium produced in India, in the hope of correcting a trade imbalance. Ghosh details the illegal business that arose as a result—opium imports were banned in China—ultimately arguing that the British “racket” was “utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Riddles of the Sphinx

  by Anna Shechtman (HarperOne)

  Nonfiction

  Fusing original historical research and memoir, this book is at once a feminist history of the crossword puzzle and an account of the author’s anorexia. Shechtman began to suffer from an eating disorder at the same time she became an avid constructor of crosswords; interrogating both through the lenses of feminist theory and psychoanalysis, she comes to see them as attempts at “reaching for sublimity—to become a boundless mind, to defeat matter.” Along the way, she unearths the legacies of the women—such as the New York Times’ first crossword editor—who shaped the crossword into the lively art form it is now. Two portions of the book were published on newyorker.com: one in the form of a memoir about the relationship between disordered eating and crossword construction, and another as an essay about how the field of crossword construction came to be dominated by men.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Turned Crossword Constructing Into a Boys’ Club?,” by Anna Shechtman
• 
  Reading Genesis

  by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Robinson, a novelist, is in many ways an ideal reader of Genesis and its rich human stories: Jacob, tricking his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright, or the long tale of Joseph and his envious brothers. Genesis was written by human beings, she begins; this needn’t be a concession, as the Bible itself names the authorship of many of its books. The episodes that follow God’s creation of the world dramatize how “a flawed and alienated creature at the center of it all” made a mess of things, Robinson writes. As she sorts through the Genesis stories, Robinson notes how often God chooses the younger son over the natural heir: Abel over Cain, Joseph over his brothers—or the prodigal over the righteous—and Jacob, with his ignoble behavior, over Esau. She isn’t especially interested in the historical actuality of events like the expulsion from Eden, the flood, or the Tower of Babel, considering them closer to a set of allegories about the nature of reality. In Robinson’s reading, the Bible is “a meditation on the problem of evil,” constantly trying to reconcile the darker sides of humanity with God’s goodness, and the original goodness of being.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis,” by James Wood
• 
  Fourteen Days

  by The Authors GuildMargaret AtwoodDouglas Preston (Harper)

  Fiction

  This round-robin novel was written by many illustrious hands—including Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Celeste Ng, Ishmael Reed, and Meg Wolitzer—all left cozily anonymous in the linked storytelling. With a wink at Boccaccio’s Florentine narrators, filling their time with stories as a plague rages, these modern storytellers gather amid the COVID pandemic, on the roof of a run-down building on the Lower East Side. Each storyteller is identified by a single signifier—Eurovision, the Lady with the Rings—and the stories that the speakers unwind leap wildly about. An apron sewn in a suburban home-economics class becomes the subject of one narrative. Another storyteller recalls an art appraiser’s trip to the country and a scarring revelation about the wealthy collectors he is visiting: they keep the lid of their dead son’s coffin visible as a memento of their pain. The evasion of the central subject, the turn to subtext over text, the backward blessing of being “off the news”—all this rings true to the time, when symbolic experience overlayed all the other kinds.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Our Moon

  by Rebecca Boyle (Penguin)

  Nonfiction

  This chronicle of our planet’s “silvery sister” begins with the explosive interaction, four and a half billion years ago, that split the moon from the Earth, and eventually encompasses the climatic chaos that is likely to ensue when it ultimately escapes our gravitational pull. Boyle inventories the ways in which the moon’s presence affects life on Earth—influencing menstrual cycles, dictating the timing of D Day—and how humans’ conception of it has evolved, changing from a deity to the basis for an astronomical calendar to a natural-resource bank. Throughout, the author orbits a central idea: that understanding the science and the history of the moon may help to unlock mysteries elsewhere in the universe.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  2020

  by Eric Klinenberg (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In Klinenberg’s excellent book, we are given both micro-incident—closely reported scenes from the lives of representative New Yorkers struggling through the plague year—and macro-comment: cross-cultural, overarching chapters assess broader social forces. We meet, among others, an elementary-school principal and a Staten Island bar owner who exemplify the local experience of the pandemic; we’re also told of the history, complicated medical evaluation, and cultural consequences of such things as social distancing and masking. We meet many people who make convincing case studies because of the very contradictions of their experience. Sophia Zayas, a community organizer in the Bronx who worked “like a soldier on the front lines,” was nonetheless resistant to getting vaccinated, a decision that caused her, and her family, considerable suffering. Klinenberg sorts through her surprising mix of motives with a delicate feeling for the way that community folk wisdom—can the vaccines be trusted?—clashed with her trained public-service sensibility. Throughout his narrative, his engrossing mixture of closeup witness and broad-view sociology calls to mind the late Howard S. Becker’s insistence that the best sociology is always, in the first instance, wide-angle reporting.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Bitter Crop

  by Paul Alexander (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  This ambitious biography of the jazz singer Billie Holiday uses 1959, the tumultuous final year of her life, as a prism through which to view her career. Drawing its title from “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that was Holiday’s best-selling recording, the book focusses on her experiences of racism and exploitation, and on her anxiety about government surveillance. In tracing Holiday’s longtime drug and alcohol use, which damaged her health and led to her spending nearly a year in prison for narcotics possession, Alexander also delves into the unwarranted sensationalism with which the press often covered these matters at the time. Holiday died at forty-four. Toward the end, she was frail—at one point weighing only ninety-nine pounds—but, as one concertgoer noted, “She still had her voice.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  To Be a Jew Today

  by Noah Feldman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Noah Feldman, a polymath and public intellectual at Harvard Law School, opens his new book, “To Be a Jew Today,” with two questions: “What’s the point of being a Jew? And, really, aside from Jews, who cares?” Feldman spends the first third of the book reviewing the major strains of contemporary Jewish belief: Traditionalists, for example, for whom the study of Torah is self-justifying; “Godless Jews,” who take pride in Jewish accomplishment and kvetching without much else. For Feldman, what’s characteristically Jewish about these camps is their ongoing struggle—with God, with Torah, with the rabbis, with each other—to determine for themselves the parameters of an authentically Jewish life. Jews are people who argue, ideally with quotes from sources, about what it means to be Jewish. For Feldman, the establishment of Israel has become the metanarrative that binds many contemporary Jews together. It has also turned Jews away from struggle and toward dogmatism. Feldman asks us to see criticism of the country as a deep expression of one’s relationship to tradition, and perhaps even an inevitable one. He aspires to return the notion of diaspora to the center of the tradition—to propose that Jewish life can be more vigorous, more sustainable, and more Jewish when it pitches its tents on the periphery.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Jewish Identity with and Without Zionism,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
• 
  Life on Earth

  by Dorianne Laux (Norton)

  Poetry

  “If we are fractured / we are fractured / like stars / bred to shine / in every direction,” begins this small marvel of a poetry collection. Laux’s deft, muscular verse illuminates the sharp facets of everyday existence, rendering humble things—Bisquick, a sewing machine, waitressing, watching a neighbor look at porn—into opportunities to project memory and imagination. Beautifully constructed exercises in tender yet fierce attention, these poems bear witness to deaths in the family, to climate destruction, and to the ravages of U.S. history, even as they insist on intimacy and wonder.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Adversary

  by Michael Crummey (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  An all-consuming, mutually destructive sibling rivalry propels this vibrant historical novel, set in a provincial port in nineteenth-century Newfoundland—“the backwoods of a backwards colony.” The antagonists are the inheritor of the largest business in the region and his older sister, who, through marriage, takes control of a competing enterprise. Amid their attempts to undermine and overtake each other, the community around them suffers “a spiralling accretion of chaos”: murder, pandemics, a cataclysmic storm, an attack by privateers, and a riot. By turns bawdy, violent, comic, and gruesome, Crummey’s novel presents a bleak portrait of colonial life and a potent rendering of the ways in which the “vicious, hateful helplessness” of a grudge can corrupt everything it touches.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Splinters

  by Leslie Jamison (Little, Brown)

  Nonfiction

  In this memoir, two life-altering events—the birth of a daughter and the end of a marriage—are intertwined. When Jamison meets her ex-husband, a fellow-writer whom she calls C, she is newly thirty; he is a widower more than ten years older. At the time, she writes, “I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.” As the book progresses, that ambition is realized—not just through the arrival of their child but also by transformations in her own being that are precipitated by her marriage and its eventual dissolution. Throughout, Jamison dwells on marital competitiveness, working motherhood, and the inheritances of love. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  John Lewis

  by Raymond Arsenault (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  This sweeping biography represents the first effort at a comprehensive account of the life of the civil-rights icon John Lewis. Lewis’s “almost surreal trajectory” begins with his childhood in a “static rural society seemingly impervious to change.” Arsenault frames what followed in terms of Lewis’s attempt to cultivate the spirit of “Beloved Community”—a term, coined by the theologian Josiah Royce, for a community “based on love.” As a boy, Lewis disapproved of the vengeful sermons at his home-town church; as a youthful protest leader, he adhered to nonviolence, even while being assaulted by bigots; in Congress, he rose above a culture of self-promotion and petty rivalries. Lewis, in Arsenault’s account, was unfailingly modest: watching a documentary about his life, he was “embarrassed by its hagiographical portrayal.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Alphabetical Diaries

  by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This unconventional text comprises diary-entry excerpts that are arranged according to the alphabetical order of their first letters. The sections derive their meaning not from chronology but from unexpected juxtapositions: “Dream of me yelling at my mother, nothing I did was ever good enough for you! Dresden. Drinking a lot.” The text is clotted with provocative rhetorical questions: “Why do I look for symbols? Why do women go mad? Why does one bra clasp in the front and the other in the back?” Rich with intimacies and disclosures, these fragments show an artist searching for the right way to arrange her life.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Twilight Territory

  by Andrew X. Pham (Norton)

  Fiction

  Set during the Japanese occupation of Indochina and its bloody aftermath, this novel of war is nimbly embroidered with a marriage story. In 1942, a Japanese major who is posted to the fishing town of Phan Thiet falls for a Viet shopkeeper when he witnesses her excoriating a corrupt official. The shopkeeper, despite her wariness of being viewed as a sympathizer, accedes to a courtship with the major, recognizing their shared “language of loss and loneliness,” and the two eventually marry. Soon, the major’s involvement with the resistance imperils his family, but his wife remains resolute, having long understood fate to be a force as pitiless as war: “Destiny was imprinted deeply. She saw it the way a river sensed the distant sea.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  To the Letter: Poems

  by Tomasz Rozycki, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal (Archipelago)

  Poetry

  In this philosophical collection that explores doubt—regarding language, God, and the prospect of repeating history—many poems address an unreachable “you” who could be a lover, a deity, or a ghost of someone long dead. Rosenthal’s translation draws out these poems’ shades of melancholy and whimsy, along with the slant and irregular rhymes that contribute to their uncanny humor. Różycki’s verse teems with sensuous, imaginatively rendered details: “that half-drunk cup of tea, the mirror / filled up with want, the strand of hair curling toward / the drain like the Silk Road through the Karakum / known as Tartary, the wall that defends the void.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

  by Joan Acocella (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  In these twenty-four essays, Acocella, a much loved staff writer from 1995 until her death, earlier this year, brings her inimitable verve to subjects as varied as Andy Warhol, swearing, the destruction of Pompeii, and Elena Ferrante. Throughout, she illuminates the ways in which her subjects’ personal lives, and the “moral experience” they came to encompass, fused with their artistic sensibilities. In an essay about Francis Bacon, the Irish-born English painter best known for his menacing paintings of human figures, she writes, “He wanted to make us bleed, and in order to do so, he had to show us the thing that bleeds, the body.” Twenty-two of the essays were originally written for the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Spinoza

  by Ian Buruma (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  For Buruma, a writer and historian, and a former editor of The New York Review of Books, the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s dedication to freedom of thought makes him a thinker for our moment. In this short biography, he highlights how Spinoza’s radical conjectures repeatedly put him at odds with religious and secular authorities. As a young man, he was expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for his heretical views on God and the Bible. When his book “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” was published, in 1670, its views on religion—specifically, the benefits of “allowing every man to think what he likes, and say what he thinks”—were so uncompromising that both author and publisher had to remain anonymous. Buruma observes that “intellectual freedom has once again become an important issue, even in countries, such as the United States, that pride themselves on being uniquely free.” In calling Spinoza a “messiah,” Buruma follows Heinrich Heine, the nineteenth-century German Jewish poet, who compared the philosopher to “his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like him, he suffered for his teachings. Like him, he wore the crown of thorns.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times,” by Adam Kirsch
• 
  If Love Could Kill

  by Anna Motz (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  From the Furies to “Kill Bill,” the figure of the avenging woman, evening the scales, has long entranced the public. But, as Anna Motz shows in this wrenching study, many women who turn to violence are not hurting their abusers, though often they have endured terrible abuse. They tend to hurt the people closest to them: their partners, their children, or themselves. Motz, a forensic psychotherapist, presents the stories of ten patients, managing the conflict between her feminist beliefs and the ghastly facts of the women’s crimes. Although she’s interested in the lore of female vengeance, she punctures its appeal. Such violence may look like an expression of agency, but it is the opposite, a reaction and a repetition.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “When Women Commit Violence,” by Alexandra Schwartz
• 
  From Our Pages

  Filterworld

  by Kyle Chayka (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  The New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka chronicles the homogenization of digital culture and the quest to cultivate one’s own taste in an increasingly automated online world. An excerpt from the book appeared on newyorker.com, in the form of an essay on coming of age at the dawn of the social Internet.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Melancholy Wedgwood

  by Iris Moon (M.I.T.)

  Nonfiction

  In this unorthodox history, Moon, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, casts aside the traditional, heroic portrait of the English ceramicist and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood and envisions the potter as a symbol of Britain’s post-colonial melancholia. Touching lightly on the well-trodden terrain of Wedgwood’s biography, Moon focusses on the story’s “leftovers,” among them the amputation of Wedgwood’s leg; his wayward son, Tom; the figure of the Black man in his famous antislavery medallion; and the overworked laborers in his factory. Moon’s overarching thesis—that destructiveness is inherent in colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism—is nothing groundbreaking, but her mode of attack, at once bold and surreptitious, succeeds in challenging the established, too-cozy narrative about her subject.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Taft Court

  by Robert C. Post (Cambridge)

  Nonfiction

  “Taft’s presidential perspective forever changed both the role of the chief justice and the institution of the Court,” Post argues in his landmark two-volume study. The book is an attempt to rescue the Taft years from oblivion, since, as Post points out, most of its jurisprudence had been “utterly effaced” within a decade of Taft’s death. But, if John Marshall’s Chief Justiceship established what the Court would be in the nineteenth century, Taft’s established what it would be in the twentieth, and even the twenty-first. Post, a professor of constitutional law who has a Ph.D. in American Civilization, searches for the origins of the Court’s current divisions. His book is rich with close readings of cases that rely on sources scarcely ever used before and benefits from deep and fruitful quantitative analysis absent in most studies of the Court. It restores the nineteen-twenties as a turning point in the Court’s history.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Architect of Our Divided Supreme Court,” by Jill Lepore
• 
  Slow Down

  by Kohei Saito, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom (Astra)

  Nonfiction

  The key insight, or provocation, of “Slow Down” is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. Saito highlights the Netherlands Fallacy, named for that country’s illusory attainment of both high living standards and low levels of pollution—a reality achieved by displacing externalities. It’s foolish to believe that “the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advancements and economic growth,” Saito writes. What the North actually did was off-load the “negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like” onto the Global South. If we’re serious about surviving our planetary crisis, Saito argues, then we must reject the ever-upward logic of gross domestic product, or G.D.P. (a combination of government spending, imports and exports, investments, and personal consumption). We will not be saved by a “green” economy of electric cars or geo-engineered skies. Slowing down—to a carbon footprint on the level of Europe and the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies—would mean less work and less clutter, he writes. Our kids may not make it, otherwise.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Can Slowing Down Save the Planet?,” by E. Tammy Kim
• 
  From Our Pages

  Wrong Norma

  by Anne Carson (New Directions)

  Poetry

  In a new collection of poems, short prose pieces, and even visual art, Carson explores various ideas and subjects, including Joseph Conrad, the act of swimming, foxes, Roget’s Thesaurus, the New Testament, and white bread. No matter the form, her language is what Alice Munro called “marvellously disturbing”—elliptical, evocative, electric with meaning. Several pieces, including “1 = 1,” appeared first in The New Yorker.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  You Dreamed of Empires

  by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  This incantatory novel takes place in 1519, on the day when Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors arrived at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. As they await an audience with the mercurial, mushroom-addled emperor, Moctezuma, the conquistadors navigate his labyrinthine palace, stumble upon sacrificial temples, and tend to their horses, all the while wondering if they are truly guests or, in fact, prisoners. Enrigue conjures both court intrigue and city life with grace. In metafictional flashes to present-day Mexico City, which sits atop Tenochtitlan’s ruins, and a startling counter-historical turn, the novel becomes a meditation on the early colonizers, their legacy, and the culture that they subsumed.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  You Glow in the Dark

  by Liliana Colanzi, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

  Fiction

  The short stories of Colanzi, a Bolivian writer, blend horror, fantasy, reporting, and history. One of the stories, “The Narrow Way,” first appeared in the magazine.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Why We Read

  by Shannon Reed (Hanover Square)

  Nonfiction

  In this charming collection of essays, Reed digs into the many pleasures of reading, interweaving poignant and amusing stories from her life as a bibliophile and teacher to advocate for the many joys of a life spent between the pages. This piece was excerpted on newyorker.com.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Come and Get It

  by Kiley Reid (Putnam)

  Fiction

  Agatha Paul, the narrator of this fizzy campus novel, is the acclaimed author of a book on “physical mourning.” During a visiting professorship at the University of Arkansas, she intends to conduct research on weddings. Yet the subject prickles—she is still reeling from a painful separation—and she soon pivots to a new topic: “How students navigate money.” Paul herself quickly becomes an object of fascination for many of the students, and the stakes are raised when one of them offers Paul the use of her room to eavesdrop on conversations between the undergraduates. Almost on a whim, Paul accepts, and small transgressions soon give way to larger ones.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Twinkind

  by William Viney (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This handsomely produced anthology of twin representations depicts vaudeville performers, subjects of torture, and the blue dresses with the puffed sleeves worn by the “Shining” twins. Viney collaborates with his identical twin, who contributes a foreword. Many of the book’s images of twins tend to show them shoulder to shoulder, facing the viewer, presenting themselves for our inspection. Only a handful show twins looking at each other. And how different those tender images of mutual regard feel—they lack the charge of the conventional twin pose, underscoring the tension Viney remarks between the actual “mundane” nature of being a twin and the titillated fascination it inspires. He invites readers to contemplate, and to learn from, the fractal nature of twin identity.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Twins Obsession,” by Parul Sehgal
• 
  Poor Deer

  by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco)

  Fiction

  This novel follows a sixteen-year-old-girl named Margaret and her attempts to reckon with the death of her best friend in childhood, for which she was partly responsible. In time, Margaret’s role in the tragedy was relegated to rumor; when she confessed, her mother told her, “Never repeat that awful lie again.” Now, in adolescence, Margaret attempts to document the incident honestly, accompanied by Poor Deer, the physical embodiment of her guilt, who intervenes whenever Margaret begins to gloss over the truth. The author renders the four-year-old Margaret’s inner life with sensitive complexity, depicting an alert child logic that defies adults’ view of her as slow and unfeeling. In the present day, the novel considers whether its narrator’s tendency to reimagine the past might be repurposed to envision her future.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Disillusioned

  by Benjamin Herold (Penguin)

  Nonfiction

  This intrepid inquiry into the unfulfilled promise of America’s suburbs posits that a “deep-seated history of white control, racial exclusion, and systematic forgetting” has poisoned the great postwar residential experiment. It anatomizes a geographically scattered handful of failing public schools, incorporating the author’s conversations with five affected families. Herold, a white journalist raised in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh suburb, peels back layers of structural racism, granting that “the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier were linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who lived there now.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Nonfiction

  by Julie Myerson (Tin House)

  Fiction

  The narrator of this raw-nerved and plangent novel, a fiction writer who goes unnamed, addresses much of the book to her drug-addicted and intermittently violent adolescent daughter. Woven throughout her ruminations on her daughter’s struggles are the writer’s cascading reminiscences of her own fragmented childhood and the romance she rekindled with a married ex-lover when her daughter was young. Set in and around a muted London, the novel is a sustained meditation on the trials of family, marriage, and creativity. Writing is an act “of insane self-belief,” the narrator says. “The moment you listen to the opinions of others . . . you risk breaking the spell and, if you’re not careful, sanity creeps in.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Tripping on Utopia

  by Benjamin Breen (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman’s televised trip seem less incongruous than it might have been, if no less fascinating. He has an eye for the telling detail, and a gift for introducing even walk-on characters with brio. In Breen’s telling, the buttoned-down nineteen-fifties, not the freewheeling nineteen-sixties, brought together the ingredients for the first large-scale cultural experiment with consciousness-expanding substances. He depicts a rich and partly forgotten chapter before the hippie movement and before the war on drugs, encompassing not only the now notorious C.I.A. research into mind-altering drugs but also a lighter, brighter, more public dimension of better living through chemistry. “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era,” Breen writes. “They ended it.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “When America First Dropped Acid,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  Witchcraft

  by Marion Gibson (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  Gibson, a professor of Renaissance and magical literature at the University of Exeter, has written eight books on the subject of witches. In her latest, she traverses seven centuries and several continents. There’s the trial of a Sámi woman, Kari, in seventeenth-century Finnmark; of a young religious zealot named Marie-Catherine Cadière, in eighteenth-century France; and of a twentieth-century politician, Bereng Lerotholi, in Basutoland, in present-day Lesotho. The experiences of the accused women (and a few accused men) are foregrounded, through novelistic descriptions of their lives before and after their persecution. The inevitable charisma of villainy makes the accusers vivid as well. But the most interesting character in the book is also its through line: the trial. Depicting a wide variety of legal codes and procedures, from poisonings and drownings to modern imprisonment, Gibson provides a robust examination of the judicial systems in which witch-hunting has thrived—and those in which, bit by bit, it has been stopped.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Forgottenness

  by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins (Liveright)

  Fiction

  This thoughtful novel connects two characters separated by a century: a present-day Ukrainian writer and the twentieth-century Polish Ukrainian nationalist Viacheslav Lypynskyi. In one thread, Maljartschuk plumbs Lypynskyi’s incendiary biography: born a Polish aristocrat, he served as a diplomat for the nascent Ukrainian state before living in exile when the Soviets took over. In another, the contemporary writer revisits her failed love affairs, and her grandparents’ experiences in the famine of 1932-33. As Maljartschuk makes the characters’ common history apparent, she compares it to a blue whale consuming plankton, “milling and chewing it into a homogenous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Behind You Is the Sea

  by Susan Muaddi Darraj (HarperVia)

  Fiction

  Composed of linked stories, this novel explores the lives of Palestinian Americans in Baltimore. At a young man’s wedding to a white woman, his father agonizes over the gradual loss of the family’s cultural identity. A student finds that her objections to her high school’s production of “Aladdin” fall on willfully deaf ears. Elsewhere, girls and women are shunned for getting pregnant, or for being unable to bear children. Darraj writes with great emotional resonance about hope and disappointment. “His mouth opens in an O, like America has shocked him at last,” a girl says of her Palestinian-born father’s dying breath. “It’s like he finally understood he was never meant to win here.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Termush

  by Sven Holm, translated from the Danish by Sylvia Clayton (FSG Originals)

  Fiction

  This hypnotic novella, written in the nineteen-sixties but appearing only now in the U.S., takes place after a nuclear cataclysm, and is narrated by a man living in a luxury resort that has been converted into a sanctuary for the rich. “We bought the commodity called survival,” he dryly notes, but, as the story unfolds and refugees stricken by radiation sickness pour in, the delusional nature of that notion becomes clear. Despite its brevity, the book is richly textured with insights about how money shapes one’s conception of safety, and how grasping the interconnectedness of the physical world is also to grasp one’s mortality. A resort guest imagines the radiation as light that “streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones . . . suddenly to reveal the innermost, vulnerable marrow.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Who Owns This Sentence?

  by David BellosAlexandre Montagu (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Virtually every song that Bruce Springsteen has ever written is now owned by Sony, which is reported to have paid five hundred and fifty million dollars for the catalogue. For Bellos, a comparative-literature professor at Princeton, and Montagu, an intellectual-property lawyer, the story of Sony’s big Springsteen buy epitomizes a troubling trend: the rights to a vast amount of created material—music, movies, books, art, games, computer software, scholarly articles, just about any cultural product people will pay to consume—are increasingly owned by a small number of large corporations and are not due to expire for a long time. The problem, they write, is that corporate control of cultural capital robs the commons. While warning against the overreach of contemporary copyright law, this lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely book also raises the alarm about the increasing dominance of artificial intelligence, a technology that threatens to bring the whole legal structure of copyright down.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?,” by Louis Menand
• 
  American Zion

  by Benjamin E. Park (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Park, a historian, traces Mormonism from its inception in New York, in 1830, to its struggle amid persecution in the mid-nineteenth century, to its present status as a global empire of more than seventeen million adherents. He posits that changes in the decade of Mormonism’s emergence—such as the vibrant growth of the American marketplace—eliminated élite education as a requirement for divine calling, creating an opportunity for a man like Joseph Smith, Jr., to found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Throughout, Park delves into Mormon history and lore to produce a picture of the institution as one that is both marginalized and marginalizing.

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  Unshrinking

  by Kate Manne (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  Fatphobia, as defined by the author of this polemic, a Cornell philosophy professor, is a “set of false beliefs and inflated theories” about fat people which inform both health care and culture at large. Manne’s argument draws on personal experiences—she relates having gone on drastic diets and engaging in “dangerous, exploitative” relationships as a teen-ager—and on trenchant analyses of the ways in which fatness has been regarded throughout history. She proposes, for instance, that hatred of fatness is a consequence of racist ideas embedded in American culture in the era of slavery. Manne identifies “beauty and diet culture” as an additional culprit, and argues, “We are wronged bodies, not wrong ones.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop
• 
  The Rebel’s Clinic

  by Adam Shatz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Frantz Fanon, the biographical subject of Shatz’s striking new book, saw the end of empire as a wrenching psychological event. Looking back on his Francophilic upbringing in Martinique, Fanon recognized an inferiority complex induced by empire. He saw worse when he took a post in a hospital in Algeria, in 1953. Unlike Martinique, Algeria had recently been scarred by violence, most notably in 1945, when, after a clash with nationalists, the French massacred thousands of Algerians. Individual traumas could be handled clinically, but what about societal ones? Fanon believed that the act of defying empire could cure Algerian neuroses. Shatz describes Fanon’s extremism as the “zeal of a convert”—just as Fanon spoke better French than the French, he became, as a revolutionary, “more Algerian than the Algerians.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Erotic Vagrancy

  by Roger Lewis (Mobius)

  Nonfiction

  The idea of the celebrity couple really began with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, a larger-than-life pairing whose every diamond and every dispute would become the subject of insatiable public interest. “Biography is historical fiction,” Lewis, the author of several biographies that read like novels of manners, writes. In the end, the saga of Taylor and Burton is about extra-human obsession. During the Cold War, the two managed to launch a whole industry of self-magnification, based on their personal ups and downs. “Taylor and Burton’s is a Pop Art story,” Lewis writes. “Their abundance and violent greed belong with comic books and bubble-gum machines—with Roy Lichtenstein’s enlarged comic strips of lovers kissing.”

  Buy on AmazonBookshop

  

  Read more: “The Dawn of the Celebrity Power Couple,” by Andrew O’Hagan