The editors of the New York Times Book Review recently shared the most notable titles of 2021 (so far!) so fire up the O'Neal Library app (available for Android and iOS) and get your favorite local book seller on speed dial, because gift-giving season is here!
FICTION & POETRY
Afterparties:
Stories by Anthony Veasna So
The nine stories in this deeply personal, frankly funny and
illuminating debut — published eight mont
hs after the author’s death at age 28
— are all set in California’s Central Valley and follow the legacies of the
Cambodian genocide among the diaspora who resettled there.
Appleseed
by Matt Bell
For some years Bell, the author of “Scrapper”
and “Cataclysm
Baby,” has had climate and apocalypse on his mind. This excellent novel
continues and deepens his investment. Timely, prescient and true, the book
tracks the planet’s progression from lush Eden to barren hellscape.
Beautiful
World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
In Rooney’s much-anticipated third novel, readers follow the
lives of Alice, a writer of global acclaim, and her best friend, Eileen, who
works at a literary magazine in Dublin. The two grapple with life’s biggest
(and most inconsequential) issues in a lively correspondence.
Bewilderment
by Richard Powers
Powers’s ability to translate arcane science into lush
storytelling is on ingenious display in his latest novel, about a newly widowed
astrobiologist and his troubled 9-year-old son, who embarks on an experimental
neurofeedback therapy with profound implications for the human race.
The
Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman Translated by Leslie Camhi
Part homage, part psychological investigation, this
novelized portrait of Huisman’s mother seeks to capture on paper the life of a
beautiful, charismatic, unstable, and exasperating woman — as well as the
experience of growing up in her ambit.
Build
Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
This novel, about a half-Vietnamese American in Vietnam, is
preoccupied with the body and its violations — both the sexual trauma
experienced by the female characters and the ravages of colonial occupation and
war upon the body of Vietnam.
Burnt
Sugar by Avni Doshi
This remarkable debut novel, about a young Indian woman
saddled with the care of her ailing and abusive mother, inflicts a visceral
punch. In spare and exacting prose, Doshi documents the petty cruelties and
helpless dependency of a primal relationship in disarray.
A
Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris
Ferris tells the complex and often very funny story of
hapless Charlie and his various attempts at success. Charlie’s novelist son
eventually reveals himself to be the narrator and sets up an impressive
reversal.
Chronicles
From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka
The
Nobel Prize winner’s first novel in 48 years, involving a sinister online
business that sells human body parts for private use in rituals and
superstitions, is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder
mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of Nigeria.
Cloud
Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Weaving narratives from three eras across most of a
millennium, from Constantinople in the 15th century to a space pilgrimage in
the 22nd, Doerr’s first novel since “All the Light We Cannot See” offers a
paean to the consolations of storytelling, and to the people who pass down
ancient texts.
Crossroads
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen’s
sixth novel follows the Hildebrandt family in suburban Chicago, with a
shaky marriage, a crisis of faith and teenage anguish driving the compulsively
readable plot. Set in the 1970s, the book examines an age-old moral dilemma:
how to do good in a selfish world.
Detransition,
Baby by Torrey Peters
Following three central characters — a trans woman who wants
a baby; her ex, a man who’s recently detransitioned; and the cisgender woman
he’s impregnated — this debut novel suggests there are many different ways to
be a parent, or a person.
Ghosts
of New York by Jim Lewis
Lewis’s haunting novel is built of vignettes whose links
become gradually clear, involving a dealer in Indigenous artifacts, the
Ivy-educated scion of a West African family, an East Village street kid with a
pure singing voice and a photographer just back from a decade abroad.
Harlem
Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
After winning the Pulitzer Prize for each of his last two
novels, Whitehead
here delivers a rollicking crime caper set in the Harlem of the 1950s and ’60s,
when social upheaval was just starting to roil the neighborhood. The highlight
of the novel is a brilliantly executed robbery of the famed Hotel Theresa.
How
Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
Mbue’s quietly devastating second novel — about a fictional
African village with high mortality due to an American oil company’s pollution
— charts the ways oppression, be it at the hands of a government or a
corporation or a society, can turn the most basic needs into radical acts.
Intimacies
by Katie Kitamura
In the latest novel by the author of “A
Separation,” a court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately
vanishing into the voices and stories of the “plethora of war criminals in our
midst.”
Kink:
Stories edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell
Not quite erotica, this fiction anthology is more about the
transformative nature of kink as a practice. Featuring works from a diverse
selection of writers, the collection explores issues of power, agency and
identity.
Klara
and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara, the solar-powered humanoid who narrates the Nobelist
Ishiguro’s powerful eighth novel, is an “Artificial Friend,” purchased as a
companion to a sickly teenage girl. Through the robot’s eyes, and haunting mechanical
voice, we encounter a near future in which technology, ominously, has begun to
render humans themselves obsolete.
Libertie
by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Based on the lives of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the
first Black female doctor in New York State, and her daughter, Greenidge’s
second novel centers its post-Civil War New York story on an enduring quest for
freedom. A feat of monumental thematic imagination.
A
Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
In Davies’s wise, bracingly honest novel, a father chronicles
his son’s birth through his teenage years. He juggles guilt, worry and marital
strife alongside the joys, triumphs and laughter of family life — never
sugarcoating, always leaning into the hard parts in a way that’s refreshing,
timely and necessary.
Light
Perpetual by Francis Spufford
Do we live and die by accident, or according to some
preordained plan? Spufford explores the question in this vividly imagined and
richly drawn novel, which is based on an actual World War II bombing in London.
The
Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Set in the 1950s, Towles’s exhilarating novel follows four
boys on a trip across America, from rural Nebraska to the skyscrapers of New
York. All of them seek a better future but have very different ideas about how
to get there; over the course of 10 days this multi-perspective story offers an
abundance of surprising detours and run-ins.
The
Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
This triumphant debut novel follows a young Black woman
figuring out how to live with joy in the modern American South. The novel
switches between the past and the present, alternating the heroine’s story with
those of her ancestors.
The
Magician by Colm Toibin
In this novel of huge imaginative sympathy, Toibin delves
into the rich interiority of the German novelist Thomas
Mann. From childhood to early success to exile abroad, we follow Mann
through personal challenges and political turmoil as he turns the complexities
of life into art.
The
Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard Translated by Martin Aitken
In his haunting new novel, Knausgaard alternates between the
first-person accounts of nine characters, all of whom spot a huge, bright star
that has inexplicably appeared in the sky. Realist drama gradually gives way to
touches of horror and an enigmatic spiritual treatise.
My
Monticello: Fiction by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Comprising a title novella and stories, this debut depicts
finely drawn Black characters awash in microaggressions across Virginia, past
and present.
My
Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee
Part study of suburbia, part globe-trotting adventure, Lee’s
latest novel follows a young man from a transformative trip in Asia to a
low-key life in a New Jersey town. Reflective, precise writing and a steady
churn of pleasures and perils make for a winning combination.
The
Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the
History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen
Cohen imagines a college job interview in the 1950s for
Benzion Netanyahu, academic and father of the recently ousted Israeli prime
minister. The novel explores themes of Jewishness and diaspora as Netanyahu’s
fatalistic view of Jewish history bumps up against that of the narrator, an
assimilated American Jewish professor.
No
One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
This singular novel by Lockwood, a lauded memoirist and poet
who first gained a following on Twitter, distills the experience of life online
while transfiguring it into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose
poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually,
deeply moving.
Oh
William! by Elizabeth Strout
In her quietly radiant new novel, Strout returns to a
subject she writes about brilliantly (marriage) and a character readers have met
before (Lucy
Barton). A long-divorced couple team up for a (platonic) trip to Maine,
where they learn about family history and also about themselves.
One
Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
Part romance, part fantasy, this gorgeous novel is about
meeting someone on your daily commute — a girl, it turns out, who has been
riding the train since the 1970s, thanks to a magical timeslip. But it’s also
about loneliness, and being unmoored from normal time, and missing people
you’ve lost, and dealing with generational trauma and fearing an unknowable
future.
Our
Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
Shteyngart’s fifth novel begins at the onset of the
pandemic, with seven friends and one nemesis gathered at an estate in the
Hudson Valley to wait out what they’re sure will be a quick blip in their
convenient and prosperous lives.
Playlist
for the Apocalypse: Poems by Rita Dove
Plenty of poems here address disability, history, and
quotidian human behavior, but racism and economic oppression are the former
poet laureate’s primary concerns in this book, her first in 12 years. With
Dove’s characteristically affable voice, the book tries to understand saving
graces and the things they save us from.
The
Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
A struggling writer steals a plot from his student and his
life changes overnight. Suddenly, he’s a household name and the toast of the
literary community. But somebody knows what he did — and wants revenge.
Korelitz’s latest novel is a literary thriller with two questions at its core:
Who knows the truth? And who really owns a story, anyway?
The
Promise by Damon Galgut
This novel follows a white South African family from the
final years of apartheid to the present. A long-deferred vow to their Black
housekeeper becomes a stand-in for the nation’s moral bankruptcy.
The
Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.
A lyrical and rebellious love story about two enslaved boys
in Mississippi, whose relationship is accepted and even cherished until a
Christian evangelist, also enslaved, turns the plantation against them. The
novel is about their choice to love in the face of the forces that would crush
them, and the repercussions of that love.
Razorblade
Tears by S.A. Cosby
This sprawling, go-for-baroque pulp thriller is about two
dads — one Black, one white, both ex-cons — who decide to avenge the murders of
their sons. Cosby writes in a spirit of generous abundance and gleeful abandon
and, unlike a lot of noir writers, he doesn’t shy from operatic emotion.
Send
for Me by Lauren Fox
Inspired by a trove of letters written by her
great-grandmother in 1930s Germany and incorporated into the text, Fox’s latest
novel spans four generations and two continents, offering a nuanced exploration
of the burden of inherited trauma on a single family riven by the Holocaust.
The
Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Erdrich's playful wit and casual style belie a seriousness
of purpose, which in the case of this winning novel, entails tackling the
pandemic, the death of George Floyd, the trials of doing time in prison and,
not least, the power of books to change lives.
Something
New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman
Kleeman’s novel is an unlikely amalgam of climate horror
story, movie-industry satire and made-for-TV mystery, following a flailing
writer who has come to Los Angeles for a film adaptation of his novel starring
a tabloid-tragic teen star.
Strange
Beasts of China by Yan Ge translated by Jeremy Tiang
Elusive creatures flit through a Chinese city in this
enchanting novel, alternately avoiding and consorting with its human
inhabitants, all the while pursued by a cryptozoologist with a fondness for
smokes and booze — a female, science-minded Sam Spade.
The
Sun Collective by Charles Baxter
In Baxter’s new novel, an aging couple‘s search for their
missing son leads them to a quasi-anarchist group. With generous, keen humor,
the author suggests that their real problem might be mortality: not our
tumultuous times, but time itself.
The
Trees by Percival Everett
In rural Money, Miss., two white men are found murdered next
to the corpse of a Black man whose mutilated face bears an eerie resemblance to
Emmett Till’s. As more bodies pile up, Everett’s acid satire expands to
encompass America’s racist past and present with equal parts horror and humor.
Velvet
Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Immensely satisfying, refreshingly new and gloriously
written, this vibrant noir, set in 1970s Mexico City, traces how a dowdy
secretary on the cusp of 30 sparks to life thanks to the disappearance of her
beautiful and glamorous neighbor.
The
War for Gloria by Atticus Lish
Lish’s substantial gifts are on abundant display throughout
this gorgeously written novel, which offers a rich tapestry of troubled lives in
and around working-class Boston. Corey, the young protagonist, grows up with a
terminally ill mother and a perplexing father whose presence gradually turns
sinister.
Wayward
by Dana Spiotta
A middle-aged woman spontaneously buys a new house and moves
into it alone, without her husband or teenage daughter. Spiotta’s precisely
observed, fiercely intelligent novel excavates the long and winding path that
led our protagonist to this place.
What
Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
El Akkad’s second novel examines opposing sides of a migrant
crisis from the point of view of two children: a boy who washes up on an island
after a doomed ship passage, and the girl who takes him in and tries to get him
to safety. In a compassionate but nuanced telling, the novel effectively
effaces assumptions of superiority and inferiority, good and bad.
When
We Cease to Understand the World by BenjamÃn Labatut Translated by
Adrian Nathan West
Labatut’s singular imagination dazzles in this hybrid of
fiction and biography, exploring the lives of major 20th-century scientists.
His true subject is the ecstasy of discovery and the agonizing price it can
exact.
Winter
Recipes From the Collective: Poems by Louise Glück
The 2020 Nobel laureate’s stark new collection consists of
just 15 poems, but each is as breathtaking as a cold night; the book affirms
her icy precision and extends her interest in silence and the void through
verses that seem, at times, to offer a poetics of resistance to poetry.
The
Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton
This romance novel has considered realism and punted it
outside the highest available window. Letter openers have a hidden rapier
blade; a respectable lady’s house in Mayfair is equipped with a flying spell
and can sail to Bath. Yet amid the often wacky melodrama, there are moments of
emotion that cut to the quick.
NONFICTION
All
the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the
Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner
Equal parts biography, history and thriller, this book tells
the story of the author’s idealistic but doomed great-great-aunt, Mildred
Harnack, who, between 1932 and 1942, helped build a network of objectors in
Berlin who hoped to stop the Nazis.
America
and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present by John Ghazvinian
This book presents the long, troubled relationship between
the United States and Iran in a breezy and supple narrative, replete with
poignant anecdotes, to posit convincingly that “antagonism between Iran and
America is wholly unnecessary.”
America
on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the
1960s by Elizabeth Hinton
Hinton documents hundreds of often violent urban protests by
Black Americans beginning in the mid-1960s, as policing grew increasingly
aggressive. Such protests must be understood, she posits, not as riots but as
“rebellions” against racial injustice.
American
Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle
Glaser
Focusing on a single intimate tale that contains the seeds
of today’s adoption practices and parenting norms, Glaser’s account is the most
comprehensive and damning yet of the scandals at the postwar adoption agency
Louise Wise Services.
The
American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian
A former civilian adviser in Afghanistan and aide to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Malkasian has written a broad-reaching, authoritative
history of America’s longest war from 9/11 to the near-present, including
knowledgeable details on the Afghan part of the story.
Beautiful
Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang
In 1994, Wang moved from China to Brooklyn with her family.
This is her memoir of their tumultuous early years building a life in an
unfamiliar and mostly inhospitable place.
Better
to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash
Kapur
This haunting memoir, by a man who grew up in an intentional
community in India and returned to live there with his wife and children, is a sensitive
excavation of fraught family history as well as a philosophical meditation on
the utopian impulse.
Between
Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad
This memoir from a young survivor of acute myeloid leukemia
provides an unlikely roadmap to the new not-normal of the pandemic era. Through
her treatment and subsequent cross-country roadtrip, Jaouad demonstrates the
courage it takes to live with unanswered questions.
Catching
the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour by Neal Gabler
Gabler relates how the youngest Kennedy brother overcame
ridicule and scandal to become one of the most effective senators in U.S.
history. In five decades, Ted Kennedy sponsored nearly 700 bills that became
law, and left his imprint on scores of others.
The
Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel by Kati Marton
As Marton demonstrates in this biography, Merkel’s was a
life full of drama, as she rose from the hinterlands of East Germany to the
center of power in Berlin and overcame all of the obstacles, from Communist
repression to German misogyny, on her rise to the top.
Churchill’s
Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Wheatcroft’s Churchill led Britain heroically during World
War II, but at other times in his life, as recounted in this revisionist
biography, he was an imperialist, a racist, a drunk, a neglectful father and,
perhaps most of all, a masterful mythmaker.
The
Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max
Chafkin
In this energetically reported book, Chafkin paints a deeply
disturbing portrait of the billionaire entrepreneur turned Donald Trump backer
Peter Thiel, tracing his ascent through the ranks of Silicon Valley moguls
along with his embrace of far-right causes and beliefs.
The
Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen translated
by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.
First published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s,
Ditlevsen’s unstinting memoirs detail in luminous prose her hardscrabble
upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the
struggle to reconcile art and life.
Crying
in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner
In the musician’s gutting account of coming to terms with
her mother’s death and coming into her own as a Korean American, food is her
lifeline.
Dirty
Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal
Press
In this powerful, discomfiting book, Press investigates a
series of morally fraught jobs — among them drone warfare operators and prison
psychologists — and shows how such work is tacitly condoned by society while
also rendered invisible so as not to disturb our collective conscience.
Doomed
Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century
America by Christine Leigh Heyrman
This account of a love triangle that roiled the country’s
burgeoning evangelical movement in the late 1820s is scholarship at its most
entertaining and insightful, as Heyrman, mining smoldering letters by aspiring
missionaries, chronicles the ambition, hypocrisy and sexism at the heart of a
crusade.
Empire
of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Tenacious reporting and deft storytelling by Keefe, the
prizewinning author of “Say Nothing,” about Ireland’s Troubles, give this
exposé of the family widely blamed for igniting the opioid crisis the moral
heft of Greek tragedy, yielding a mesmerizing portrait of appalling greed and
indifference.
The
Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage by
Sasha Issenberg
This lively, thorough and fascinating history reconstructs
the fight for gay marriage, tracing how an issue that barely registered among
queer activists became, in the wake of outspoken opposition from the religious
right, a priority.
Everything
I Have Is Yours: A Marriage by Eleanor Henderson
“It is a confusing time to be a woman who loves a troubled
man,” Henderson writes in this unflinching memoir of her husband’s long and
confounding illness. She tells their story with a novelist’s eye for detail and
the honesty of a trusted friend.
The
Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager
In this nuanced portrait, more than a decade in the making,
Norma McCorvey — best known as “Jane Roe,” the woman at the center of Roe v.
Wade — emerges as a contradictory figure, both heroine and villain of her story
and one whose views on abortion are as complex as those of her fellow citizens.
Festival
Days by Jo Ann Beard
Featuring characters mostly drawn from life confronting
illness, loss, violence and death, this exquisite collection of pieces defies
classification, blending intuition and observation into something unaccountably
yet undeniably real.
The
Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand
In a sweeping, original history, Menand employs finely tuned
capsule biographies of writers, filmmakers, artists and more to cover the
interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the
decades following World War II.
A
Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa
This powerful blend of memoir and literary investigation
begins with the author’s obsession with an 18th-century Irish poem. But it’s
far from dusty scholarship; Ni Ghriofa weaves past and present, dreams and
harsh reality, in an account of motherhood and transformation.
How
the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America By
Clint Smith Smith, a poet and journalist, spoke with scholars, guides,
heritage fanatics and tourists as he visited sites key to America’s slavery
past. The result is timely and profound, an eloquent view of a history we have
yet fully to confront.
How
to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon
A contentious publishing experience left Laymon unsatisfied
with his 2013 essay collection. Now, seven years later, after buying the book
back from his initial publisher and revising the collection, he returns with
Take 2.
I
Came as a Shadow: An Autobiography by John Thompson with Jesse
Washington
Standing 6-foot-10 with a booming voice and an urban
dictionary’s worth of curse words, the onetime Georgetown basketball coach
inspired a potent mixture of fear and respect. In this lively and entertaining
book, Thompson, who died in August, finally gets to cast his legend on his own
terms.
Invisible
Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City by Andrea
Elliott
Expanding on a 2013 series for The Times about a homeless
New York schoolgirl and her family, Elliott delivers a searing account of the
family’s struggles with poverty and addiction in a city and country that have
repeatedly failed to address these issues with efficacy or compassion.
JFK:
Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 by Fredrik Logevall
In this first of two projected volumes, Logevall
demonstrates how, even at an early age and despite his playboy reputation, John
Kennedy took a serious interest in politics, forming a cleareyed sense of the
world and his nation’s place in it.
Last
Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer
This slim but forceful treatise begins with patriotic
despair: With inequality persisting in the United States across generations,
Packer paints a picture of a deeply fractured America that he divides into four
irreconcilable categories. The result, he believes, is that we are losing the
art of self-government.
Let
Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
The 12 previously published essays collected here (mostly)
for the first time were written between the late 1960s and the year 2000.
Revisiting Didion’s work now provides a familiar joy, as well as a reminder of
her prescience.
Life’s
Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer
Zimmer’s book tackles some of biology’s hardest questions:
What is life? How did it begin? And what criteria should we even use to call
something “living”? From metabolism to sentience to evolution to our current
focus on DNA, Zimmer takes the reader on an elegant, deeply researched tour.
A
Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif
Abdurraqib
Abdurraqib, a poet, cultural critic and essayist, uses the
tales of Black performers to make powerful observations about race in America,
gliding through music, television, film, minstrel shows and vaudeville. The
book is also a candid self-portrait, written with sincerity and emotion.
New
York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation
by Thomas Dyja
This capacious account of New York’s recent rise describes
the men and women in every facet of life who helped revitalize the city. Yet
for Dyja, who sees the need for another reinvention of New York, the city has
in many ways fallen prey to its own success.
Now
Beacon, Now Sea: A Son’s Memoir by Christopher Sorrentino
This stunning memoir is less an account of the writer’s own
life than a post-mortem of his parents’ marriage, and an honest and heartfelt
portrayal of his mother. Sorrentino aches to gain her acceptance, a lifelong
effort that often results in disappointment.
On
Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson
Nelson’s brainy, affecting, genre-crossing books have earned
her a deserved reputation as a sui generis amalgam of poet, memoirist, theorist
and critic. This provocative meditation on the ethics of freedom as a source of
constraint, as well as liberation, shows her at her most original and
brilliant.
On
Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
In a book that is part memoir, part history, Gordon-Reed
(who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Hemingses of Monticello”) recounts
her continuing affection for her home state of Texas, despite its reputation
for violence and racism, writing that “the things that happened there couldn’t
have happened in other places.”
People
Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present by Dara Horn
In a series of striking essays, Horn explores how the ways
we commemorate antisemitism and Jewish tragedy distract from the very concrete,
specific death of Jews. She wants a more direct reckoning with Jew hatred and
its consequences.
Punch
Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir by Brian Broome
Broome’s coming-of-age memoir explores Black manhood and
queerness in the Rust Belt, and the pressures that Black queer boys face to
change. Broome pairs his own story with a scene he witnessed, of a father
screaming at his young son.
Putting
It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park With George”
by James Lapine
A fascinating and rigorous, no-punches-pulled account of
Lapine’s first collaboration with Sondheim, on a Pulitzer Prize-winning
musical. Despite the hilarious anecdotes, this is not a collection of gossip.
It is actually a story of artistic steadfastness.
Red
Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather
Clark
The bar is high for a new Plath biography, but Clark’s
meticulously researched account manages to be both riveting and revelatory,
restoring complexity and nuance to a poet whose career has been overshadowed by
the circumstances of her tragic early death.
Say
It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture by Randall Kennedy
This collection of essays offers a full portrait of
Kennedy’s thinking as a law professor and public intellectual, demonstrating
his commitment to reflection over partisanship, thinking over feeling.
The
Secret to Superhuman Strength By Alison Bechdel
The acclaimed cartoonist uses her lifelong obsession with
exercise to ponder some big questions: What is going on with our ridiculous
bodies and our even more ridiculous relationship between our bodies and minds?
Seeing
Ghosts: A Memoir By Kat Chow
Nearly two decades after her mother’s death, when Chow was
just 13, her family is still in deep mourning, an experience she documents with
wit, poignancy and fresh insight and imagery.
Somebody’s
Daughter: A Memoir By Ashley C. Ford
This memoir begins with a phone call in which the author
learns that her father is coming home after almost 30 years in prison, and it
ends with his release. But at its heart, this is the story of Ford as her
mother’s daughter, for better and often for worse.
Three
Girls From Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and
Sisterhood By Dawn Turner
A former columnist for The Chicago Tribune offers a textured
portrait of her 1970s childhood on the South Side, where three Black girls with
similar aspirations ended up with wildly divergent fates.
A
Whole World: Letters From James Merrill Edited by Langdon Hammer and
Stephen Yenser
The poet’s letters cast light on a generous soul with an
active social life and a quicksilver wit. Artifice was Merrill’s way of being
natural. He lavished his correspondents with parody and aphorism, as well as
assessments of his poetic peers.
Woke
Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America By John McWhorter
McWhorter, a Black liberal who dissents from much of the
left's views on race, argues against the position that racism and white
supremacy are “baked into” the structure of American society.
Posts
