New Book of the Week (August 8, 2024)
A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue
by Dean Jobb
During the 1920s, Arthur Barry—a jewel thief known for his debonair mien, audacious escapades, and deep-pocketed victims—stole an estimated half-million dollars in precious stones annually. Not bad for a former juvenile delinquent whose own mother thought him destined for either the gutter or the hoosegow. After serving in World War I, Barry returned to New York City, where he found his targets via newspaper society pages. He also found there the love of his life: widow Anna Blake. When the law finally caught up to Barry in 1927, he confessed to dozens of burglaries to protect her. And when Anna was diagnosed with cancer, he daringly escaped prison just so they could spend a few years longer together as fugitives. Told with brio, historical details galore, and attributes familiar from top-shelf crime fiction, Jobb delivers—dare I say it?—a gem of tale. —Jeff
New Book of the Week (August 8, 2024)
My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me
by Caleb Carr
I read this straight through and was entranced by the story and the relationship between the author and his cat. I am not necessarily a fan of pet memoirs, but this was different. It is, at its core, about two unapologetically difficult and eccentric personalities who redeem each other over the course of almost two decades together. It is strangely charming, weirdly compelling, but not particularly heartwarming in the Marley & Me sense. Carr is known for his clear, incisive nonfiction writing, as well as for his historical fiction, but this book doesn't fit into those categories any more easily than it does among regular pet memoirs. A unique read. —Sarah
New Book of the Week (August 8, 2024)
by Joseph O'Neill
Godwin is, as advertised, about the search for a teenage soccer prodigy who may or may not exist in West Africa and who may or may not be the next Messi. But it's also about a minor power struggle at a small Pittsburgh firm of tech-writer freelancers. That O'Neill can credibly braid these two stories together—and make the latter drama as compelling as its more glamorous counterpart—is a sign of his particular talent for nailing with graceful irony (as he did in his marvelous novel, Netherland) the wonder, the pettiness, the greed, and the kindness that are all part of our interconnected modern world. He's one of the few writers I always read, and Godwin made me once again glad I do. —Tom
Old Book of the Week (August 8, 2024)
by R.F. Kuang
R.F. Huang lulls you into a false sense of predictable dark academia before plunging you into an unputdownable journey. She plays out the consequences of seeing another's population as sub-human in exquisite, heartbreaking detail and magnifies the destruction left in its wake, all with a side of magic. Kuang's impeccable world-building ability deserves an award, too, as does her character development. It's a stunning, thought-provoking introduction to a trilogy for readers of all genres and some of the best fantasy I've ever read. No exaggeration. —Meghan
New Book of the Week (May 16, 2024)
América del Norte
by Nicolas Medina Mora
Medina Mora has produced a complex novel—intentionally so. I read other reviews that critiqued this book for being "too unconventional" and "too bookish." MM certainly makes few concessions for readers—from one chapter to the next, the point of view, the time period, and even the style of writing change. 20% of the book is in Spanish with no translations. The narrative arc is interwoven with exchanges between Mexico and the U.S. that did take place in the recent and historical past—except when the author decides to meander down a fictional side alley. The main character is sometimes sympathetic and sometimes an idiot. The author's idea of a joke is to call Nietzsche a "stateless writer of Zoroastrian fan fiction." I guess what I'm trying to say is that I loved this book and thought it communicated important sociopolitical ideas and often forgotten moments in history... but be prepared to work very hard while reading it. —Sarah
New Book of the Week (May 16, 2024)
Behind You Is the Sea
by Susan Muaddi Darraj
Author Muaddi Darraj paints a poignant picture of life among Baltimore’s Palestinian immigrant community. Each of her chapters introduces a new character that, in some way, shape, or form, intersects with another’s story. You'll meet a police detective trying to make amends between his father and sister, a teenager who stands up against Arab stereotypes, and a single woman who carries the weight of her family on her shoulders. It’s a masterful novel that reveals the often complex relationship between generations and reveals with utmost honesty what divides and connects us all. —Meghan
Old Book of the Week
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
by George V. Higgins
Friends are one thing Eddie Coyle doesn't have. He talks to a lot of guys—this book is made of talking—but every conversation is a wary exchange, negotiated sometimes in half-spoken ways and sometimes with brutal directness. Why is this book, which Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane agree is the greatest crime novel, not even better known? Maybe because its brilliant but sometimes unforgiving reliance on the ambiguities of conversation makes it closer to Dubliners than The Firm. Maybe because Eddie's life of driving up and down the outer freeways of New England and getting drunk at Bruins games carries none of the dark glamour of the best-known crime story of its era, The Godfather. But oh, this book, and all its talk, is still a marvel, fifty years on. —Tom
New Book of the Week (April 12, 2024)
Ordinary Bear
by C.B. Bernard
Rarely have I been so deeply moved and delightfully entertained by a work of crime fiction as I was by Bernard’s second novel. The focus here is on Farley, a guileless man-mountain and oil company investigator in backwater Alaska, who, after barely surviving a polar bear attack that killed his 10-year-old daughter, heads to Portland, Oregon, hoping for his ex’s grudging absolution. There he befriends Lissa and Olive, a single mother and her sweet child, who help give purpose to his healing. But after Olive is kidnapped by a homeless man who feels wronged by Lissa, Farley musters all of his grief, might, and savvy to rescue her. While Bernard’s depiction of Portland is alternately appreciative and deprecatory (stressing its issues with the “under-homed”), his portrayal of a lonely protagonist struggling to do one last good thing is straight-ahead loving. —Jeff
New Book of the Week (April 12, 2024)
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
by Jonathan Blitzer
I didn't think it was possible to unseat Evicted as my favorite nonfiction read. But this one came close. Blitzer weaves intricate stories with vivid descriptions of civil wars in Central America and the ensuing (and ongoing) migrant crisis from the mid-1900s to the present day. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here read more like a fast-paced novel and filled gaps in my knowledge of recent Central American history and U.S. immigration policy, which was somewhat slim to begin with. It's not an easy read, but I'd argue one of the most necessary to understand the consequences of the U.S. meddling in Central American affairs and the often horrific impact on people's lives. —Meghan
New Book of the Week (April 12, 2024)
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
The berry pickers of this story are an indigenous family who migrate seasonally between Maine and Nova Scotia. I knew nothing about this cyclical migration or about the MI'kmaq when I picked up this book, This is an interesting window into a particular experience of life in the northeastern corner of our country, as well as an exploration of what it meant to be indigenous and navigating the northern border in the second half of the twentieth century. This book also follows the very individual story of what happens to a family when they lose (literally, not a gloss for "dying" in this case) a child. This is not a mystery story, as the reader learns very quickly what happened to the child, but it is a story of loss, redemption, and enduring family connection. —Sarah
Old Book of the Week (April 12, 2024)
A Woman in the Polar Night
by Christiane Ritter
In 1933, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian artist, told her husband, who had spent the last few years living off the land on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, that she wanted to join him. And so she did, spending the full, dark winter in a tiny hut with her husband and a young Norwegian friend, who admitted later he was looking forward to watching her lose her mind. She kept her sanity, grounded by her good humor and the constant tasks required to survive, but it's as if she found a whole new mind in that year, broadened by the isolation and the fierce elements. It's a spare and beautiful book, bright in its vision against the months of darkness it records. —Tom
New Book of the Week (March 29, 2024)
James
by Percival Everett
Mark Twain famously began Huckleberry Finn by declaring, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." You get the feeling Twain and Percival Everett would have gotten along fine: Everett has made a career out of upending narratives and skewering literary expectations. By his standards, Everett plays this one, a retelling of Twain's classic from Jim's perspective, pretty straight. Plenty is upended (Jim reads Voltaire on the sly, and joins a real-life minstrel troupe), but there might actually be a moral or two in it, and some dead-serious philosophy-in-action. It'll make you want to read Huck Finn again; it's so good it'll also make you want to read James again. —Tom
New Book of the Week (March 29, 2024)
The Rumor Game
by Thomas Mullen
Over the course of three novels set in pre-civil rights era Atlanta, Mullen proved adept at stretching dynamic crime fiction over the static bones of history. Here his plot backdrop shifts to Boston, 1943, where reporter Anne Lemire—born Jewish but raised Catholic—regularly debunks rumors that may undermine wartime morale. She hungers for juicier leads, though. So when Lemire hears of anti-Semitic attacks by Irish gangs, and sees fascist leaflets casting the drive for enhanced US involvement in World War II as a Jewish conspiracy, she can't begin investigating fast enough. Meanwhile, FBI agent Devon Mulvey, a philanderer distrusted by his colleagues, probes the death of an immigrant munitions factory worker that could have national security implications. As their efforts intersect, Lemire and Mulvey discover ration-stamp counterfeiters, expose an espionage scheme, and find their nascent romance plagued by suspicions no less ruinous than those spread by the propagandists they hope to foil. A sadly timely yarn about bigotry and divisiveness. —Jeff
New Book of the Week (March 29, 2024)
Thunder Song
by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe
I enjoyed Red Paint, this author's debut novel. I feel that in the essays that make up Thunder Song, however, she has found her voice as an author. The essay on the Skagit Tulip festival will be one I refer back to for years—it so beautifully picks apart the historical and current context of this annual event in the Skagit. The back-and-forth LaPointe has with herself in another essay about what it means to love and eat salmon also resonated, as she asks what kind of relationship we each can have with different foods/food animals. Perhaps the most powerful essays in this collection delve into the complex relationship the author has with her mother—something she returns to repeatedly, across time. —Sarah
New Paperback of the Week (March 29, 2024)
Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller
by Oliver Darkshire
I did not expect a book written by someone who works in a rare books store to be so entertaining. From his first days as an apprentice rare bookseller, when he was assigned a desk more suited for a munchkin than his lumbering 6’ frame, Oliver Darkshire humorously describes his experiences and the unique individuals he works alongside, the latter with affection. As for those who walk through the doors of Henry Sotheran Ltd to buy or sell rare books, his descriptions suggest “eccentric" is more appropriate for many of them. The store’s location is said to be on a street time forgot and one cab drivers frequently cannot find. There are locked bookcases for which there are no keys. There are numerous unusual objects collected over the 263 years the store has been in existence which have nothing to do with rare books. Strange unexplained occurrences are attributed to the ghost of a former owner who was run over by a tram as he left the store. In another’s hands it is unlikely this book would have been so enjoyable. It is one I will occasionally pull off the shelf to read again in the years ahead. —Ken
New Book of the Week (March 15, 2024)
The Wharton Plot
by Mariah Fredericks
"The man was a writer, Henry. Maybe not a writer to my taste. But even in New York, the killing of writers seems a new outrage." The year is 1911, and Edith Wharton—celebrated for her novel The House of Mirth but feeling out of step with the new century and joyless in her marriage—is discussing with her friend and fellow litterateur, Henry James, the recent slaying of David Graham Phillips, an "arrogant, entitled" (and real-life) muckracking journalist whose not-yet-released new novel condemns their era's beau monde. Implored by Phillips's sister to champion his final book, Wharton also undertakes an inquiry into his murder, one that will carry her through the upper echelons of New York politics and publishing. Fredericks's narrative is more languid than some historical whodunits, but it offers a fascinating glance inside Wharton's head (where lurk insecurities about aging and increasing loneliness) and welcome cameos not only by James, but by that era's foremost mystery writer, Mary Roberts Rinehart. I'm only sorry this looks like a one-off, rather than the start of a new series. —Jeff
New Book of the Week (March 15, 2024)
Good Material
by Dolly Alderton
This book is a rom-com flipped completely on its head by British bestselling author Dolly Alderton. Detailing the aftermath of a surprising break-up with his long-term girlfriend from the primary perspective of main character, Andy, a 35-year-old comedian, this book captures the chaotic and confusing experience of the recently dumped. Andy is relatable, real, self-deprecating, and often wickedly funny. And then Alderton gives the ex-girlfriend, Jen, a chance to give her perspective at the book's end, offering the reader a broader window through which to revisit the early chapters. While Good Material is primarily about the relationship between Andy and Jen, my favorite part of the book was actually the many other close family and friend relationships that populate its pages. —Christina
New Book of the Week (March 15, 2024)
A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration
by Christopher Hitchens
This collection of Christopher Hitchens's writing about culture, politics, and literature is, as always, thought provoking. That these set pieces, and a small number of letters, were written 20+ years ago doesn't make them less so. I cannot help but admire his intellect and his mastery of the English language. Hitchens's unflinshing expression of his opinions invites debate, which he relished. He once said that give a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine he would debate anyone on any topic. With both at hand he frequently did, sometimes taking a position opposite his own for the intellectual challenge it offered. A Hitch in Time is well worth reading for anyone who appreciates superbly written commentary on a variety of subject matter. —Ken
New Paperback of the Week (March 15, 2024)
I Have Some Questions for You
by Rebecca Makkai
In Makkai's latest, you become an integral character in her story (but you aren't really you). I won't say more lest I give it away, but the way she does it is quite masterful. You meet her protagonist as she revisits her New England boarding school to teach film and podcasting to students intent on digging up the tragic past—for good reason. Makkai's a gifted storyteller who will keep you guessing and questioning right up until the end—and then some. And I have to say, if you enjoyed listening to Serial, you'll absolutely (can I emphasize, absolutely) want to pick this one up. —Meghan
New Book of the Week
by Alan Garner
A brief novel from last year's Booker Prize shortlist (written by the oldest-ever nominee, who turned 88 on the day of the award ceremony) comes to America at last. Alan Garner invokes both Steven Millhauser's meticulous nostalgia for childhood and Greer Gilman's native fluency in the language of myth, fairy tales, and folklore. —James
New Book of the Week
by Sofia Samatar & Kate Zambreno
A scintillant study of literature's most ineffable quality, tone, written by two novelist-professors who've collaborated in a 'textual rendezvous." Speaking in the first person plural as the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere, they push criticism beyond academics and into the realm of art. I've never before read anything that made me pause and look away from the page so often to ponder and savor a sentence. —James
New Book of the Week
by Juhani Karila
(trans. by Lola Rogers)
After years of city life, a woman returns to her childhood home in remote Lapland to lay to rest some unresolved business, but extremely unexpected complications arise, with startling and often comic results. Picture a mashup of the movie Fargo and the TV show Stranger Things, but set in Finland (and brought into English by a Seattle-based translator). —James
New Book of the Week
The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild
by Mathias Énard
(trans. by Frank Wynne)
Énard's multifaceted oeuvre takes a turn toward the comic with this story of an anthropology student trying (and mostly failing) to understand his own rural countrymen. It's a profoundly insightful novel about the France that can't be seen from the top of the Eiffel Tower. —James
Old Book of the Week
by A.S. Byatt
RIP to Dame Antonia Byatt, whose greatest novel, Possession, was probably the first contemporary literature that I read and responded to as I would a classic. —James
New Book of the Week
by Ed Park
Worth the wait. By that I mean both the time since I first read a preview copy of this novel (nine months or so ago) and the time since Ed Park last published one (fifteen years). A prolific magazine profile artist, he hasn't exactly been silent since his dark comedy of office life, Personal Days, appeared, but it's been longer than I'd like since he's allowed himself such an outpouring of fictional creativity. And what an outpouring it is. Over the course of over 500 pages, Park introduces a beleaguered everyman laboring for a corporate tech juggernaut called GLOAT (nobody is sure what that stands for, but it can't be good), and then introduces him to a secret manuscript that reveals either a bizarre conspiracy theory or an illuminating truth involving almost every politician and pop culture character of the last century. Abounding with Pynchonesque paranoia and possibility. Same Bed, Different Dreams is a rollicking three-ring circus that brings past, present, and future together under one massive, multicolored tent. —James
New Book of the Week
Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate: Poems
by James Tate
I'm not sure what approach to take here. It's tempting to let James Tate speak for himself, maybe by quoting "Memory" or "Goodtime Jesus" or "Poem to Some of My Recent Poems" or another of the hundreds of poems he published between 1967, when he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and his death in 2015. Or I could cite him telling an interviewer, "I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best." Doing those things would be a good way to get across why I love his work and how much it's meant to me over the years. Even better, I could just point you toward this little retrospective tribute collection and walk away without saying anything at all. —James
New Book of the Week
by Nina MacLaughlin
A brief candle in the deepest dark, a warm companion at the coldest hour, a gift from writer to reader. This lyrical essay (a complement to the author's earlier Summer Solstice) is the perfect pocket companion for the coming season. —James
Kids' Book of the Week
by J.P. Takahashi
European folklore has the Wild Hunt, when fairies or other supernatural beings ride forth into the human world in thrilling fashion. Japan has a similar and equally ancient tradition, Hyakki Yagyō, or Night Parade of 100 Demons, when the spirits known as yōkai erupt into our reality. That legend is the basis for this stunning new picture book, created by a Japanese-American writer-illustrator duo. Protagonist Eka is a mixed-race girl who's about to move to New York, but not before she experiences one last Night Parade with her yōkai friends. Like a Miyazaki movie crossed with Where the Wild Things Are, it's a tiny bit scary but mostly very exciting, bursting with all the beautiful, chaotic energy of childhood. (Ages 4 to 8) —James
New Book of the Week
by Adam Thirlwell
A fascinating story by a writer twice chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists. Set in Paris around the time of the American revolution, it centers on Celine, an unhappily married woman attempting to clear her name of scurrilous, anonymous accusations that are spreading like viruses through high society. Without access to the traditional levers of power pulled by the wealthy men around her, she relies on a network of friends and striving artists to help her seize control of her own narrative. It’s all expressed in a sparkling, slangy, contemporary idiom that highlights similarities with our own fragmented, superficial, publicity-driven age: “No one knows anyone, or at least they try not to. Instead of conversation we have rumour, boato, opinion, journalism, prejudice, gossip: all the forms of language that have no weight at all.” —James
New Book of the Week
by Jon Strongbow
Artist, musician, and admirable eccentric Jon Strongbow died last year, and I'm sorry to say I knew nothing about him or his work until the posthumous appearance of this book. Born in Olympia, he was a fixture of the Pike Place Market community for decades, releasing jazz albums and exhibiting his remarkably fastidious and detailed pen-and-ink drawings. All One Life collects a sampling of this visual work, a series of downtown Seattle scenes depicting what the city might be like today if the spirit of indigenous life had been allowed to flourish here. Northwest shamans, Hopi kachinas, and African drummers populate our streets, bridges, and tunnels; whales swim through Pioneer Square; and a plumed Quetzalcoatl rides a Metro bus. Ultra-modern though reminiscent of antique etchings, every page is further enlivened by being rendered in stereoscopic 3-D (glasses required and included). If you want to count yourself a true Seattleite, this is a must-add to your personal library. —James
Old Book of the Week
by Marguerite Young
Conceived in the mid-1940s and intended to be about 200 pages long, Miss Macintosh, My Darling wasn't completed until twenty years later, and wound up as one of the longest novels ever published. It's a gorgeous American dream in print, entirely unique but usefully compared to fiction of the grandest kind—think of a landbound, Melvillean epic of the interior or Whitman reborn in prose. I can't possibly describe it adequately here, but please read the recent, glowing New Yorker review to get a better sense of it, and believe me when I say how much I love it. —James
New Book of the Week
by Ken Sparling
I'm completely smitten by this book and the relationship at its heart. The concrete ground of the novel: A boy and a girl (their sole identifiers, though they're no longer young) live together intimately, tallying moments of spiky annoyance and stacking them against the abiding affection they have for each other. The surreal backdrop: people periodically vanish for minutes, months, or years, often but not always returning without explanation. When the boy goes missing, the girl finds that his absence is even more significant than his presence was. Like the work of Donald Barthelme, Not Anywhere, Just Not is funny, full of feeling, makes you think without requiring full understanding, and is utterly charming. —James
New Paperback of the Week
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell
Katherine Rundell burst onto bookstore shelves with marvelous middle-grade novels (such as Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms), books written with all the exuberance you'd expect from someone whose hobbies include tightrope walking and nocturnal rooftop exploration. All this activity is something of a sideline for Rundell, who works a day job as Oxford academic. The polymathic, linguistically inventive author has met a suitable intellectual match in her first book for adults, on the topic of poet and parson John Donne. It's not a weighty tome for specialists, but an accessible and entertaining biography told very much in its subject's spirit: playful, inquisitive, forward-looking, and open to all the possibilities offered by life (and death). —James
New Paperback of the Week
by George Saunders
This author's reputation is so elevated—popular success; multiple literary awards, including the Booker Prize; and fellowships from both the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations—that he's virtually beyond praise, but I'll heap some on him anyway. He really is that good. That good, and that weird, frankly. Take the title story in this new collection as an example. It's narrated by a man who's voluntarily had himself converted into a piece of technology, indentured with others like him to an artist who has bound them all together into a "Speaking Wall" that presents imagined historical scenes for the delectation of his upper-class party guests. It's a purely science-fictional conceit, but in the hands of George Saunders, it seems perfectly realistic, as if there were no other way to recreate the strangeness of normal life than with such odd materials. Channeling the confluence of the mainstream and its fringiest tributaries, he's tapped into a power that no other writer of the present day can access. —James
New Book of the Week
by Catherine LeRoux
(trans. by Susan Ouriou)
A grief-stricken woman comes to a fantastical, decaying Detroit that is and is not the one we know, searching for her missing grandchildren, who vanished in the wake of their troubled mother’s death. The grandmother first takes aid and inspiration from the anarchistic, self-supporting urban community that has sprung up between the cracks of societal collapse, and then braves a journey into the wilderness of the massive park at the city’s center, where feral youngsters thrive in the shadows like Peter Pan's Lost Boys. The Future is a multi-hued vision of ruination, reconstruction, and redemption. —James
New Book of the Week
by Dan Sinykin
This one might seem at first to fill too small a niche—an academic history of structural forces within a relatively small industry—but you'll be surprised. Dan Sinykin is a professor of literature, here examining not the intellectual or cultural value of individual books, but the system of publishing that produces them. Over the past several decades, the industry has been marked by increasing corporatization and conglomeration, which has radically affected what kinds of books are printed and promoted. It's fascinating, at least for this lifelong bookseller, to learn about the ways commerce has altered art. It's also fun and almost gossipy, since Sinykin has such rich material to work with: the big personalities of major writers, editors, and tycoons of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. If you care at all about how you get to read what you do, or you recognize the visual reference being made by this book's cover, you'll be as hooked as I was. —James
New Book of the Week
by Miriam Landis
Lauren in the Limelight is a realistic middle-grade novel about three young ballet dancers on Mercer Island, near Seattle. Set in the present day, it features three main characters, all in sixth grade. It’s been Lauren’s dream for a long time to use pointe shoes, and this is the year her class finally will. She’s always been the best in her group, but then Serena moves into town. Everyone notices right away how much more Serena excels than the others her age, but she can’t help but feel hollow. After a monumental loss in her family, is success in dance really what she wants? The first to catch a glimpse of what’s behind her façade is Bryan, a Black male dancer in training who is constantly bullied at school. As the story progresses the characters learn a lot about themselves and the world around them. As they reveal more about themselves to each other, their relationships deepen and their enriched understanding helps them decide what their priorities really are. Together, they face the challenges of a major recital and what may be a career-making audition. Through the novel’s many conflicts, the author addresses themes of competition, jealousy, prejudice, and darker topics like divorce, racism, and sexism. Despite this, the tone is mostly light. Readers will relate to the characters’ problems without being weighed down by their hardships. Lauren in the Limelight is very well written in a straightforward, simple style that anyone, even a person who has never set foot in a dance studio, can understand and appreciate. If you are a young dancer, you’ll like it that much more. (Ages 8 to 12) —Arden
New/Old Book of the Week
by Helen Garner
First published in 1984 in Australia (and not to my knowledge published by an American press until now), this slim novel sets a sneaky trap. Helen Garner seems to take a desultory approach, sketching domestic urban settings occupied by a loose consortium of characters, leading her readers to wonder when the story's point will come into focus. But then we realize she hasn't been meandering—the circle is the point. A tense and delicate web of relations among parents and children, spouses and lovers, has surrounded us all the while, and every scene is a deftly pulled thread that sets this glimmering apparatus into resonant vibration. —James
New Paperback of the Week
by Elizabeth McCracken
I'll try to be as concise as this unique work and simply say this: it's a brief and beautiful blur of autobiography and fiction about the many deep and complicated emotions shared by a mother and daughter. —James
New Paperback of the Week
by Oriana Ramunno
(trans. by Katherine Gregor)
Is it too early to begin naming my favorite books of 2023? Italian author Ramunno’s discomfiting first novel definitely qualifies. Set during the 1943 Christmas season at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, this yarn centers on the baffling death of Sigismund Braun, a close associate of abominable Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Dispatched from Berlin to investigate is Hugo Fischer, a young police criminologist who long ago shucked off his veneration of Hitler’s regime and is now concealing a secret the Reich would deem grounds for his suicide: he suffers from multiple sclerosis. Fischer has scant evidence to go on: Braun’s office was scrubbed before he arrived; the doctor’s lofty wife is disinclined to cooperate in the inquiry; and his best source of information is only 8 years old, a Jewish inmate who—with his twin brother—is under Mengele’s “care.” Amid vivid historical atmospherics, Fischer pursues Braun’s slayer, discovers Auschwitz’s quotidian atrocities (including the source of its “sickly-sweet smell”), and learns that not every German officer is indifferent to the prisoners’ plight. Don’t be surprised if this story leaves you saddened but also strangely uplifted. —Jeff
New Paperback of the Week
by Andrea Wulf
In 2015, the New York Times named Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature one of the Ten Best Books of the year, and LitHub later called it one of the twenty best nonfiction titles of the decade. Wulf is back in print to cover an even more fascinating (at least to me) seminal subject: the origins of our modern conception of freedom, identity, and the human role in the cosmos. Her Magnificent Rebels appear in panorama, a glittering company of intellectuals, artists, and philosophers who inspired a mental revolution with more lasting effect than any political upheaval of the last three centuries. —James
New Book of the Week
by Benjamin Labatut
Labatut's first novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, was a favorite of the New York Times, Barack Obama, and most important, me. This one is even better than its predecessor. Like the earlier book, The MANIAC can be read as pure truth, but the factual narrative Labatut assembles is as artfully composed and strikes to the heart as powerfully as fiction does. His main protagonist is the polymathic scientific genius John Von Neumann, who fathered most of the important technologies of the 20th century, including the hydrogen bomb and the computer (the novel's title derives from the acronym for one such early device). The range of his accomplishments is vast, but their cumulative effect is terrifyingly amoral. The tantalizing promise of artificial intelligence that Von Neumann pioneers appears in the end more like an existential threat. Nevertheless, one man, filled with a hopeless heroism, defends humanity as bravely as an anonymous protestor facing down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Altogether unique, The MANIAC is both direct and deep, a novel of astonishing intellectual heft that moved me nearly to tears. It's a masterpiece. —James
New Book of the Week
by Shannon Sanders
How I loved spending time with these people! Members of a big, multigenerational Black family with branches bohemian and bourgeois, they live vibrantly on the pages of this debut collection of fiction. It's remarkable how effectively Shannon Sanders uses her characters to comment on societal changes of the 20th and 21st centuries without letting them lose a whit of their individuality. Linked together in a glittering chain of language, their stories combine to create a treasured heirloom. —James
New Book of the Week
Ladies' Lunch: And Other Stories
by Lore Segal
I remember watching my grandmother cut an intricate shape for me out of paper. She did it with unhesitating confidence, turning the paper rather than the scissors, and made the process look like magic. Her gnarled fingers didn't have the strength my young ones did, but she had a clear vision, an economy of movement, and a lifetime of wisdom to draw on. Lore Segal possesses the same qualities as a writer. At the age of ninety-five, she retains all her deftness, her shearing wit, and a sureness of purpose that produces astonishing emotional effects. These skills, used in a droll examination of a made-to-order topic, the straining of familial and friendly relationships under the pressures of old age, make this story collection a very special one. —James
New Book of the Week
by Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis has a voice unlike any other in fiction, and her gnomic stories, sometimes no longer than a paragraph, are always worth reading, turning over in your mind, and re-reading. I can't help suggesting that her latest collection is the one most deserving of attention, though, thanks to her defiant refusal to allow it to be sold anywhere other than in independent bookstores. —James
New Book of the Week
by Kate Briggs
A fictional account of the quotidian interactions between a new mother and her new baby that is also a commentary on what a novel is and what it is to write one. Philosophical and highly experimental, yet rife with living human moments, it advances the work of literary geniuses such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. The Long Form is a book of real and lasting significance. —James
New Book of the Week
by Nicola Griffith
(due 10/3)
Ten years is a long time to wait, but well worth it in this case. Nicola Griffith's Hild is one of my favorite historical novels ever, as my review in this newsletter from a while back will show. That book brought its eponymous protagonist into early adulthood, and Griffith is at last carrying her story forward through maturity in seventh-century Britain. Like its predecessor, Menewood is a sumptuous book, equally rich in detailed imagery and sophisticated plotting. If you're looking for an immersive reading experience, you won't find a better opportunity than this. —James
New Book of the Week
by Regie Routman
Now and again a book will come along that will set a hook in me even though it seems to be written for an audience that I'm not part of. Take the estimable Shop Class as Soulcraft from a dozen or so years ago, written by a mechanic about the rewards of the manual arts. As a decidedly unhandy person, I didn't initially connect with the topic, bur hearing from such an involved, thoughtful writer brought the subject to life and made me realize that I am not detached from it, not remotely. Such a book is The Heart-Centered Teacher, written ostensibly for educators by someone with a lifetime of experience in the field. While she draws her material largely from classrooms and tutoring sessions, what she's teaching here applies to all of us, lessons about the importance of literacy, love, and basic human connection. It's a pleasure and a value from cover to cover. —James
New Paperback of the Week
by Jonathan Coe
Simply one of the most charming novels I've read this year. Coe's narrator is an English film composer winding down her career, reminiscing about her first foray into the industry. After chance introduces her to the legendary director Billy Wilder, she traverses the path from innocence to experience through Hollywood restaurants, European hotels, and movie sets in Greece, learning in the process from a remarkable artist. Her story makes for a good book, but the brilliant, sardonic, history-haunted Wilder is an unforgettable fictional character. —James
New Book of the Week
by Lauren Groff
Without a backwards glance, a foundling servant girl named Lamentations escapes from the failing English colony at Jamestown and hurtles into the American wilderness, driven by hunger, fear, and her indomitable will to survive. Readers will likewise be propelled through The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff's effortless feel for the rhythms of life and language in the early 1600s, and together they will enter a truly timeless New World. —James
New Book of the Week
by Jonathan Raban
An Anglo-American writer of vast accomplishment, who seems to have been everywhere and seen everything, takes a final journey to the undiscovered countries of his family's past and his own mortality. Jonathan Raban's parallel accounts of his father's battles during World War II and his own struggles with age-related indignity and incapacitation are frank and deeply moving. Father and Son is a remarkable coda to a legendary career. —James
New Book of the Week
Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars
by Tom Fucoloro
As someone who generally commutes to this very store on two wheels, I can vouch that Seattle’s environment isn’t always the best for cycling, as Biking Uphill in the Rain's title suggests. But this book is more than just a geographical complaint. It's a personal story of one man's urban activism (Fucoloro is a longtime cycling advocate who was named by Seattle Met as "One of 15 People Who Should Really Run Seattle"). It’s also a history of the city’s relationship with bicycle transport, explaining how the focus of our civic infrastructure has shifted over the course of a century from bikes to cars, and may now be slowly turning back again. I can tell you some of the highlights from this trove of absorbing information, including the fact that I-5 runs on nearly the exact course of an old community-sponsored bike trail, and the dubious reasons jaywalking is a crime rather than the normal way to cross a street. With a locally researched piece like this, though, it’s far more fun for you to read for yourself. —Jasper
New Paperback of the Week
by Pekka Hämäläinen
History is full of unexpected tidbits, perhaps the least important of which is the odd fact that one of the world's leading experts on the history of Native Americans is a Finnish academic at Oxford. Whatever his background, his most recent book is a provocative reframing of the question of who really dominated our continent from the 1500s to today. Old maps show various regions controlled by Spanish, French, and English colonists at various times, but those depictions were far more aspirational than accurate. Until the the final backlash after Custer's Last Stand, it was native power that held real sway. —James