The Best Books of 2023
The New Yorker Caitlin Reid Andy Kravis Jonathan Blitzer Clare Malone Condé Nast
The New Yorker’s editors and critics choose this year’s essential reads in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
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The New Yorker
Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2023 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry.

By The New YorkerDecember 20, 2023

The Best Books of 2023

All Books

The Essentials

Nonfiction

Fiction & Poetry

Essential Read

The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction

Paul Murray’s fourth novel is about the eeriness of transformative change. Its more than six hundred pages employ a rotating structure: the four members of the Barnes family—twelve-year-old PJ, his sister Cass, and his parents Imelda and Dickie—take turns as narrator. Irony, both caustic and elegiac, flourishes in the knowledge gaps between characters. Again and again, details come back reframed or reanimated by another perspective. It’s hard to resist Murray in his schoolyard mode, wittily choreographing nerds and bullies. The chapters featuring Imelda and Dickie are thornier, more treacherous, and formally more ambitious, using stream of consciousness to invoke the shattering power of grief and lust. Murray is interested in denial and how it ultimately fails to contain our unruly attachments and weird desperation. The catastrophic price of such denial is evident in the book’s frequent allusions to the climate crisis. As the book continues, the Earth’s climate and the apocalyptic climate of the Barnes family appear almost to merge, and what began as a coming-of-age saga pulls in stranger and darker forces.

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Read more: “ ‘The Bee Sting,’ a Family Saga of Desperation and Denial,” by Katy Waldman

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Essential Read

Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction

In this intricate, metafictional novel, a recently widowed writer embarks on a biography of her late wife, an enigmatic artist, author, and musician known only as X. As the writer delves deeper into X’s life and work—distinguished by X’s penchant for adopting Cindy Shermanesque personae—Lacey unfolds a startling counter-history, in which the United States has just reunified, having dissolved, after the Second World War, into three states: one liberal, one libertarian, and one theocratic. Throughout, Lacey artfully blends historical anecdotes—X is seen penning songs for David Bowie and attending openings with Richard Serra—into her fictional universe, making uncomfortable connections between X’s fragile world and our own.

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Essential Read

Birnam Wood

by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction

Mira Bunting is the twenty-nine-year-old founder of Birnam Wood, an activist collective, in New Zealand, that illegally plants gardens on unused land. One day, while trespassing on a large farm, she stumbles upon Robert Lemoine, a billionaire drone manufacturer who offers to finance the group. In fact, Lemoine has his own agenda—he’s purchasing the farm in secret, in order to extract rare-earth minerals that will make him the richest man in history—but this is just the first of the novel’s many sleights of hand. The story, which initially appears to be a study of young, white leftists grappling with the ethics of taking Lemoine’s money, evolves into a shocking tale of deceit, misunderstanding, and violence. Catton, who became the youngest winner of the Booker for her previous novel, “The Luminaries,” wants to revive plot as a literary mode, and her book’s biggest twist is that every choice matters, albeit in ways we might not have anticipated.

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Read more: “Eleanor Catton Wants Plot to Matter Again,” by B. D. McClay

Essential Read | From Our Pages

The Country of the Blind

by Andrew Leland (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

In this moving memoir, Andrew Leland recounts his journey from sight to blindness, tracing his ever-shifting relationship to his diminishing vision. Suspended between the worlds of blindness and sight—he will soon lose his vision entirely—Leland explores the history and culture of blindness: its intersections with medicine, technology, ableism. He travels to a residential school for the blind, where he dons shades that block his vision, and learns to cook meals and cross streets. One former student tells him, “Until you get profoundly lost, and know it’s within you to get unlost, you’re not trained—until you know it’s not an emergency but a magnificent puzzle.” The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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Essential Read

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan)

Nonfiction

In 2012, a catastrophic traffic collision in Jerusalem left a school bus filled with Palestinian children on fire for more than thirty minutes before emergency workers arrived. In this chronicle of the disaster, Thrall, a Jerusalem-based journalist, follows the father of one of the victims, and examines the response to the crash within the context of modern Palestinian dispossession. He depicts Israel’s “architecture of segregation”—encompassing checkpoints and byzantine transit rules—which needlessly complicated the rescue, leading to a delay that left “small, scorched backpacks” on the asphalt. Thrall’s account is a powerful evocation of a two-tiered society that treats children as potential combatants.

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Essential Read

Fear Is Just a Word

by Azam Ahmed (Random House)

Nonfiction

In 2010, the Zeta drug cartel seized control of San Fernando, Mexico, ushering in a wave of kidnappings and murders. Its tactics were brutal: it forced its hostages to fight one another, and sometimes dissolved its victims’ bodies in acid. Ahmed, a correspondent for the Times, retraces the story of Miriam Rodríguez, whose daughter was abducted, in 2014, and later killed. After government officials proved ineffectual, Rodríguez embarked on a search for justice, eventually uncovering the identities of several people complicit in the murder. Tragically, Rodríguez herself failed to escape the violence: she was shot to death for challenging “the primacy of organized crime.”

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Essential Read

Fire Weather

by John Vaillant (Knopf)

Nonfiction

In 2016, a wildfire ripped through the oil town of Fort McMurray, in Alberta, hot enough to vaporize toilets and bend a street light in half. It was the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This alarming account tracks the destruction, the role of fire in industry in the past hundred and fifty years, and the disregarded alarms about the environment raised by scientists, dating as far back as the eighteen-fifties. “Climate science came of age in tandem with the oil and automotive industries,” Vaillant writes, and their futures are as linked as their pasts. The number of places facing fates similar to Fort McMurray’s is rapidly increasing, even as “our reckoning with industrial CO2” moves painfully slowly.

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Essential Read

The Fraud

by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

Fiction

This kaleidoscopic novel revolves around the real-life trial of a man who, in late-nineteenth-century London, claimed to be the heir to a fortune. Smith relates the impressions of a housekeeper as she observes others’ opinions of the case, which transfixed—and split—the public, and was complicated by the testimony of a formerly enslaved man from Jamaica. The sprawling story is filled with jabs at the hypocrisy of the upper class, characters who doubt institutions, and corollaries of the pugilistic rhetoric of contemporary populism; with characteristic brilliance, Smith makes the many parts of the tale cohere. “Human error and venality are everywhere, churches are imperfect, cruelty is common, power corrupt, the weak go to the wall,” the housekeeper reflects.

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Essential Read | From Our Pages

Grand Tour

by Elisa Gonzalez (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry

This vivid, searching début collection traverses and troubles borders between nations, languages, lovers, the past and the present, the living and the dead; combining reflections on art and history with astute observations of everyday life, Gonzalez contends with the world’s capacity for profound suffering and for near-unbearable beauty in equal measure. Several poems, including “Failed Essay on Privilege,” were first published in The New Yorker.

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Essential Read

The Guest

by Emma Cline (Random House)

Fiction

Near the start of “The Guest,” Alex, a sex worker, is booted out of a mansion by Simon, her affluent boyfriend. They appear to be on the ritzy east end of Long Island, though the location is never named. Alex must make a choice: she can return to the city, where she has no friends, no apartment, and a vaguely menacing man on her heels, or she can wait out Simon’s anger, hoping he’ll take her back at his annual Labor Day party, in six days’ time. She chooses the latter. Her only tools are a bag of designer clothes, a mind fogged by painkillers, and a dying phone. But what follows is riveting, a class satire shimmed into the guise of a thriller. Because Alex is young, pretty, well-dressed, and white, the privileged people she meets believe that she’s one of them. They let her into their parties, their country club, their cars, their homes. Alex, like Cline, is a consummate collector of details, and part of the book’s pleasure is its depiction of the one percent—their meaningless banter, their blandly interchangeable clothes. But Alex is too passive a character for revenge. The book isn’t a caustic takedown of the rich so much as a queasy reminder of their invulnerability.

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Read more: “Emma Cline’s Vacay-Bummer Novel,” by Sarah Chihaya

Essential Read

I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home

by Lorrie Moore (Knopf)

Fiction

In the nineteenth century, Libby, the proprietress of a rooming house, writes to her dead sister about her new gentleman lodger, who, we come to learn, is a notorious assassin. The frame shifts; it is 2016, and Finn, a teacher, learns that his ex-girlfriend Lily has killed herself. Or has she? He finds her wandering a graveyard, dirt ringing her mouth, not deeply dead but, she says, “death-adjacent.” She asks to be taken to a body farm in Tennessee and used for forensic research; Finn agrees. Thus begins the first of two road trips featuring a corpse. We recognize shades of the Orpheus myth, catch the passing references to Faulkner, but “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home” feels most pointed in its response to an old question in Moore’s own work: what does it mean to come home? A work of determined strangeness and pain, Moore’s new novel is an almost violent kind of achievement, slicing open the conventional notions of narrative itself.

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Read more: “Lorrie Moore’s Death-Defying New Novel,” by Parul Sehgal

Essential Read

I Love Russia

by Elena Kostyuchenko, translated from the Russian by Bela ShayevichIlona Yazhbin Chavasse (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

In 2005, when Kostyuchenko started as an intern at the storied Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Vladimir Putin was relatively new to the Presidency and high oil prices were fuelling a consumer boom. But Kostyuchenko was less interested in the Russia hurtling forward than the one left behind, a place—or, rather, a people—defined by trauma and disorientation, hardiness and resolve. A decade and a half later, she spent two weeks living inside a state-run residential facility for people with psychiatric and neurological disorders. The article that emerged from that experience—a wrenching and visceral text whose details almost seem to waft off the page—is the masterwork at the heart of “I Love Russia,” a memoir and collection of reportage translated by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. In February of 2022, Kostyuchenko crossed into Ukraine, becoming one of an exceedingly small number of Russian journalists who managed to report from the war zone. She filed dispatches on Russia’s occupation and bombardment of Ukraine’s southern cities, bracing accounts laced with a sense of guilt and the utter futility of that guilt. But it was only upon leaving Ukraine that she fell victim to what may have been an act of Russian aggression: a suspected poisoning attempt inside Germany. Kostyuchenko’s writings are also a personal reckoning, an attempt to work through how she missed—or, rather, failed to adequately react to—Russia’s descent into fascism.

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Read more: “A Russian Journalist’s Pained Love for Her Country,” by Joshua Yaffa

Essential Read

Judgment at Tokyo

by Gary J. Bass (Knopf)

Nonfiction

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, as the Tokyo trial was officially called, lasted longer than the trial in Nuremberg and was on a far grander scale. As Gary J. Bass points out in his exhaustive and fascinating book, the trial had serious consequences that continue to play out in modern Asia. Several Japanese Prime Ministers have believed that Allied propagandists, and the Japanese leftists who parroted them, imposed a “masochistic” view of the past on Japan, and unfairly accused the country of waging an aggressive war and committing worse atrocities than other nations. Placing the trial firmly in the context of colonialism, racial attitudes, the Cold War, and post-colonial Asian politics, Bass argues that Japan’s unresolved issues with the “Tokyo-trial version of history” get to the heart of the country’s greatest dilemma today.

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Read more: “What the Tokyo Trial Reveals About Empire, Memory, and Judgment,” by Ian Buruma

Essential Read

King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

This new addition to the biographical record of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s life presents readers with an alternative to the “de-fanged” version of King that endures in inspirational quotes. Eig’s new sources include the latest batch of files released by the F.B.I., which was surveilling King even more closely than he suspected, and remembrances from King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who recorded her thoughts in the time after his killing. “The portrait that emerges here may trouble some people,” Eig writes—the book recounts a number of King’s affairs, in addition to the allegation, from an F.B.I. report, that King was complicit in a sexual assault. What Eig mostly provides, though, is a sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life, capturing the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: police dogs, bombs, Klansmen, and, above all, segregationists wielding legal and political authority. He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and those who wanted to stop it.

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Read more: “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability,” by Kelefa Sanneh

Essential Read

The Lights

by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry

Lerner, a poet who found a second life as a novelist, has spent nearly twenty years attempting to bridge verse and prose, fiction and experience, dreams and reality. His latest collection, “The Lights,” gently advances this project, flickering between modes and finding insight in a range of symbols: the loss of a family member, the portal of a cell phone, the prospect of extraterrestrial life. Much of this is about reënchanting poetry itself, which can sometimes seem an outdated, indulgent form, severed from the modern world. But life and art can’t be held apart. Lyric poetry, Lerner writes, might be best understood as “our own / illumination returned to us as alien.”

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Read more: “Ben Lerner’s Long Search for Contact,” by Kamran Javadizadeh

Essential Read

Liliana’s Invincible Summer

by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth)

Nonfiction

In the summer of 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, a twenty-year-old architecture student in Mexico City, was murdered by her former boyfriend, who suffocated her with a pillow in her apartment. In this book, Liliana’s sister, a celebrated fiction writer and historian, memorializes her younger sister while indicting the “underground and constant” violence of entrenched male hatred for women. The narrative begins with Rivera Garza’s attempt to recover a lost police file, in 2019, and widens to encompass newspaper clippings, photographs, interviews, and Liliana’s letters and notebooks—what Rivera Garza calls “layers of experience that have settled over time,” and which she has the duty to “desediment.” The result is a text that roves between different styles of narration, sometimes verging on the experimental, as she tries to reconstruct the circumstances that led to her sister’s death, to devise a language adequate to her family’s grief, and to rescue memories of a young woman who was, as Liliana’s notes attest, thirsty for life: “I am a seeker. I want to try new things; maybe more pain and loneliness, but I think it would be worth it. I know there is more than these four walls and this sky, annoyingly blue.”

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Essential Read

Master Slave Husband Wife

by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)

Nonfiction

In 1848, Ellen and William Craft escaped slavery in Georgia by disguising themselves—the light-skinned Ellen as a sickly white gentleman, William as his slave—and making their way north by train and steamer. Woo’s history draws from a variety of sources, including the Crafts’ own account, to reconstruct a “journey of mutual self-emancipation,” while artfully sketching the background of a nation careering toward civil war. The Crafts’ improbable escape, and their willingness to tell the story afterward on the abolitionist lecture circuit, turned them into a sensation, and Woo argues that they deserve a permanent place in the national consciousness.

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Essential Read

Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

Sharpe, a finalist in the nonfiction category for the National Book Awards, has written two hundred and forty-eight notes in which, by layering memoir, criticism, inventory, and scholarship, she traces bright lines around Black lives lived amid the violence of white supremacy. In a glossary that invites close reading, she reminds us that “note” is both a noun (observations, memories, tones) and a verb (attending, marking, remembering). Sharpe’s own noting attends to the everyday. She outlines the precise elegance of her mother’s hands, the piercing vision of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” the transcendence of Savion Glover’s tap dance at Amiri Baraka’s funeral. With rawness and rigor, Sharpe repeatedly strikes blows against the presumed neutrality of whiteness that pervades art, literature, and even historical reckoning. Grief and triumph mingle throughout. “This is a love letter to my mother,” she writes in Note 248, and her incisive work is a paean to the legacies of Black love, care, and tenderness.

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Essential Read

The Rediscovery of America

by Ned Blackhawk (Yale)

Nonfiction

This monumental reappraisal of the United States’ history, which won the 2023 National Book Award in nonfiction, spans five centuries—from the Spanish colonial period to the Cold War—and situates Indigenous people at the center of America’s evolution as a modern state. Blackhawk, a professor of history and of American studies, foregrounds the endurance of Native Americans’ autonomy and traditions in the face of their near-eradication. He highlights the complex diplomatic maneuvering and the adaptive capacity that disparate tribes employed as they navigated the encroachment of European settlers, and, later, faced the obscene betrayals—from treaty violations to the seizure of “Indian lands and, most painfully, children”—that defined the federal government’s approach to Native affairs in the wake of the Civil War. As he approaches the present, Blackhawk homes in on movements for Native self-determination, lauding the emergence of a “grammar of Indian politics rooted in cultural pride and sovereignty.” Still, he observes, “Language loss, continued ecological destruction, and innumerable legacies of colonialism endure, making the challenges of Native America among the most enduring.”

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Essential Read | From Our Pages

Roman Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from the Italian by Todd PortnowitzJhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)

Fiction

Jhumpa Lahiri’s remarkable third collection of short fiction delineates the lives of newcomers to Rome and of those born there, as all find their histories and that of the eternal city entwined. The stories, two of which first appeared in the magazine, describe a relationship to place that can be by turns intoxicating and forbidding.

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Essential Read

A Shining

by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls (Transit)

Fiction

In this spare tale of disorientation and longing, by the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, a man gets stranded on a back road in a forest and wanders deep into the trees. There, he encounters stars, darkness, a shining figure, a barefoot man in a suit, and his parents, who seem to be caught in a dynamic of chastisement and withdrawal. Fosse uses fleeting allusions to a world beyond the reach of the narrator to explore some of humanity’s most elusive pursuits, certainty and inviolability among them. His bracingly clear prose imbues the story’s ambiguities with a profundity both revelatory and familiar. “Everything you experience is real, yes, in a way, yes,” the narrator says, “and you probably understand it too, in a way.”

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Essential Read

Some People Need Killing

by Patricia Evangelista (Random House)

Nonfiction

In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines after campaigning on the promise of slaughtering three million drug addicts. In this unflinching account of the ensuing violence, a Filipina trauma journalist narrates six years of the country’s drug war, during which she spent her evenings “in the mechanical absorption of organized killing.” The book, conceived as a record of extrajudicial deaths, interweaves snippets of memoir that chart Evangelista’s personal evolution alongside that of her country under Duterte. In this period, she became “a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own.”

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Essential Read

Vengeance Is Mine

by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (Knopf)

Fiction

In this elegantly layered tale of social stratification, NDiaye takes us through a maze of Bordeaux’s alleyways, backstreets, and elegant foyers, until we are dizzy from trying to chart the course of upward mobility. The novel, a story of class conflict embedded within a psychological thriller, begins with a tense office visit. A man walks into the struggling law practice of Maître Susane. His name is Gilles Principaux; he is known throughout Bordeaux as the husband of Marlyne Principaux, a woman in jail for drowning her three small children in a bathtub in the couple’s home in the affluent suburb of Le Bouscat. But Maître Susane knows him—or thinks she does—as the son of a wealthy family who once employed her mother to iron their laundry. Suspense supplies the forward motion of “Vengeance Is Mine.” We are on edge when Maître Susane turns the corners of streets and the corners of her own mind, scared of what she might remember about Gilles, or the boy who might have been Gilles. After she agrees to take Marlyne Principaux’s case, the gaps in her own story start to fill in.

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Read more: “Marie NDiaye’s Drama of Exclusion and Revenge,” by Jennifer Wilson

Essential Read

Y/N

by Esther Yi (Astra)

Fiction

“Y/N,” a strange, funny, and at times gorgeous new novel by Esther Yi, explores the consequences of subsuming your entire life in a desire for what may or may not exist. Before the narrator, an American living in Berlin, encounters Moon, the youngest member of a K-pop band with a global following, her idea of transcendence is purely theoretical. When her flatmate drags her to one of the band’s concerts, Moon’s dancing—“fluid, tragic, ancient”—changes everything. After the concert, she discovers a new vocation: writing Moon-themed fan fiction. Following the online convention that allows readers to insert themselves into the story, she calls her protagonist Y/N: “Your Name.” The allure of “Y/N” fanfic is the illusion that your story is written just for you. The catch is that “you” must remain undefined so that anyone can inhabit it. By making it the subject of her novel, Yi transforms an embarrassing gimmick into a philosophical claim, about the way people go through life alone together, each experiencing reality as that which happens strictly to them.

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Read more: “What Is the Appeal of Fan Fiction?,” by Katy Waldman

Also Recommended

The Dictionary People

by Sarah Ogilvie (Knopf)

Nonfiction

Unlike previous English dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary aimed to document not how words should be used but how they were actually used. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of people copied snippets from their reading onto slips of paper and mailed them to Oxford, where they were sorted and analyzed. This eclectic group, whom Ogilvie portrays with humor and affection, included vicars, murderers, Karl Marx’s daughter, and members of Virginia Woolf’s father’s walking club. When the O.E.D. was published, in 1928, it comprised more than four hundred thousand entries and almost two million quotations—an achievement that was possible only through the work of these “faithful” volunteers.

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How to Build a Boat

by Elaine Feeney (Biblioasis)

Fiction

In this novel, by a noted poet, a neurodivergent thirteen-year-old named Jamie fixates on building a perpetual-motion machine, imagining that, if he creates one that moves “at the same speed in a continual motion,” as his late mother did in a video of herself swimming, it will connect him to her. He finds an ally in a teacher at his school, who is struggling with infertility and a loveless marriage. A new teacher for the woodshop class becomes a refuge for them both, despite arriving with his own mysterious problems. There is perhaps more than enough tragedy to go around, but Feeney’s prose is beautifully crisp. Jamie imagines that, in one’s final seconds, one’s thoughts may be “made up of the energy of your previous moments. Which is all you can ever have.”

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Orbital

by Samantha Harvey (Atlantic Monthly)

Fiction

Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with a novel that imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The author winningly captures the almost unimaginable unworldliness of the situation: six imprisoned professionals are speeding around the world at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. When Nell, one of the astronauts, spacewalks outside the station to install a spectrometer, she observes that the Earth below her “doesn’t have the appearance of a solid thing, its surface is fluid and lustrous.” Her feet are dangling above a continent, “her left foot obscuring France, her right foot Germany. Her gloved hand blotting out western China.” Harvey demonstrates how a novelist might capture spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle and in ways that surpass the more orderly permissions of journalism and nonfictional prose. “Orbital” is the most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare.

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Read more: “Circling the Planet, Looking for God,” by James Wood

Time’s Echo

by Jeremy Eichler (Knopf)

Nonfiction

In this work of vast historical scholarship, Eichler, the chief classical-music critic of the Boston Globe, considers music’s ability to function as a vehicle for collective memory. “Sound is too visceral a medium, too penetrating of the senses to be naturalized like stone,” Eichler writes. His argument rests on detailed considerations of four key works—by Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten—composed in the shadow of the Second World War. Two of his subjects address the Holocaust specifically: Schoenberg’s blunt and graphic “A Survivor from Warsaw,” and Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, which features a setting of a poem memorializing the Nazis’ massacre of Jews in Kyiv, in 1941. Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” which unfolds as a seamless half-hour lament, is the most inward-looking of the group; Britten’s “War Requiem,” the longest, is a huge cantata of public grieving. Listening with “the ears of a critic and the tools of a historian,” Eichler details the geneses of these works and their receptions, their composers’ wartime experiences, and the wider history of the war to illustrate their capacities as “intensely charged memorials in sound.”

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Read more: “What Can Musical Monuments Achieve That Physical Ones Can’t?,” by John Adams

Wrong Way

by Joanne Mcneil (FSG)

Fiction

“Wrong Way” is a novel about the self-driving-car business that feels less like a vision of the future than a dispatch from the present. The story is told from the perspective of Teresa, a forty-eight-year-old Massachusetts woman who responds to a vague “Drivers Wanted” Craigslist ad posted by a recruiter on behalf of a Google-ish tech conglomerate called AllOver. At her orientation, she’s shown a video advertising an AllOver driverless electric taxi called the CR. But each CR, it turns out, has a human backup operator stashed inside, hidden from passengers, watching the road on a video screen. With its corporate machinations, creepy secrets, and low-ranking Everywoman protagonist, the novel seems, at first, like a standard-issue techno-thriller. But, just as the CR’s futuristic façade conceals something distinctly less high-tech, “Wrong Way” reveals itself to be something with a much lower heart rate: a leisurely novel of day-in, day-out gig work in the greater Boston area. The most memorable passages are not about self-driving cars but about other humans, and what it means to share a world with them.

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Read more: ““Wrong Way” Takes the Shine Off the Self-Driving Car,” by Peter C. Baker

State of Silence

by Sam Lebovic (Basic)

Nonfiction

This timely new book, by the historian Sam Lebovic, considers the influence of the Espionage Act, a hundred-year-old law that still guides the prosecution not only of spies but of whistle-blowers, leakers, negligent bureaucrats, and cyber activists. Because the Espionage Act is so old and the spate of cases against leakers is so recent, one might think that its use in confrontations with the press is new—that an archaic anti-spy law has been repurposed for the information age. In fact, Lebovic shows, speech was a target from the law’s earliest days. He finds it maddening that the act—which he believes cannot possibly mean what it says and still be constitutional—has time and again dodged its day of reckoning with the Supreme Court. Lebovic doesn’t disregard the existence of real espionage or the need to deal with it, but he makes a persuasive case that the Espionage Act is itself unsalvageable.

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Read more: “The Troubled History of the Espionage Act,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

The Money Kings

by Daniel Schulman (Knopf)

Nonfiction

This sweeping history focusses on German Jewish banking families in nineteenth-century New York, whose firms—among them Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers—helped define the modern financial system. Schulman offers a rich account of that system, and of his subjects’ role in shaping it (writing in part, as he says, in order to counter antisemitic falsehoods that have flourished online in recent years). But he anchors his narrative in intimate personal details, creating a compelling portrait of a close-knit Gilded Age aristocracy, which, though its members possessed nearly infinite wealth, was locked out of many of the country’s élite institutions. Schulman doesn’t shy away from the unsavory (such as the fact that, before the Civil War, the Lehmans owned slaves), rendering his subjects with satisfying complexity.

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About Ed

by Robert Gluck (New York Review Books)

Nonfiction

The Ed of the title of this memoir, by a pioneer of the New Narrative movement, is Ed Aulerich-Sugai, the author’s ex-lover and longtime friend, who died of aids in 1994. Glück documents how he and Ed, a couple for ten years, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, struggled to reconcile their differing views on monogamy. Now Glück wonders if, in writing about Ed and excerpting portions of his dream journals, he is “stealing his memories”—and wrestles with why he, who relied so much on Ed, should outlive him for so long.

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The Fund

by Rob Copeland (St. Martin’s)

Nonfiction

In the spring of 2010, a Wall Street gossip Web site called Dealbreaker obtained a notable PDF: a copy of the “Principles,” a novella-length manifesto written by Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. The chaotically designed document included dozens of rules, ranging from short axioms to long-winded anecdotes about Darwinian competition, which Bridgewater employees were reportedly encouraged to read, deploy in their daily lives, and quote from regularly at work. Thirteen years after the Principles became public, the New York Times reporter Rob Copeland has published “The Fund,” an investigation that looks at how Dalio’s precepts worked in practice. The book details Dalio’s rise in the world of high finance, and his increasingly elaborate attempts to codify every aspect of human behavior: employees accused of misdeeds are subjected to public trials, and millions of dollars are thrown at a hubristic software project, at one point called “The Book of the Future.” Drawing from Copeland’s deep sourcing at Bridgewater, “The Fund” offers a vivid snapshot of Dalio’s psyche: the same obsession with systems and rules that helped him conquer the hedge-fund world ultimately distracted him from it.

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Read more: “A Hedge-Fund Founder’s Obsessive Storytelling,” by Tarpley Hitt

Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch (Grove)

Fiction

This unsettling dystopian novel, which won the 2023 Booker Prize, imagines an Ireland that has fallen into totalitarianism. Its story centers on one family; the father, a union official, is disappeared after being accused of sedition, leading his wife to attempt to get their children out of the country by legal means, and then—once she fails—to resort to underground methods. As Lynch describes the state’s security forces firing on peaceful protesters and banning foreign media, he eschews paragraph breaks, denying the reader respite. The mother mourns the death of normalcy: “She sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing,” Lynch writes, “as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past.”

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Collision of Power

by Martin Baron (Flatiron)

Nonfiction

In 2012, Martin Baron, the then fifty-eight-year-old leader of the Boston Globe, was hired as the executive editor of the Washington Post; Jeff Bezos assumed ownership soon after. “Collision of Power” (Flatiron) is Baron’s sober and yet highly indiscreet new memoir about his eight-year tenure at the paper. Although his memoir reveals nearly nothing of his life outside the newsroom, his account brims with small, impolitic detonations, apparently included for the fullness of the record. Baron chronicles how the Post became a target for the Trump Administration, and drew a readership of unprecedented size, and the ways in which old reporting standards strained under the new habits of an always-online age. One of the delights of the book is observing a storied investigative editor plying his craft. In hindsight, Baron’s Post—enterprising, restrained, and deadly accurate—set the standard for news coverage of Trump’s Washington.

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Read more: “All the Newspapers’ Men,” by Nathan Heller

Treacle Walker

by Alan Garner (Scribner)

Fiction

The protagonist of this spare novel, drawn from British folklore and Northern English vernacular, is a boy who lives alone in an old house, reading comic books and collecting birds’ eggs, and whose life is disrupted by the arrival of a rag-and-bone man. The boy forges a friendship with the man, Treacle Walker, who speaks in rhymes and riddles and travels with a magic chest. When the boy visits a doctor for his lazy eye, he discovers that his other eye sees things that don’t exist in the ordinary realm, and he begins to navigate an increasingly blurry boundary between reality and a dreamlike parallel world. The book examines knowledge and blindness, but its central concern is time, and what it means to step beyond its constraints.

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The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters (Catapult)

Fiction

The ghosts of lost children haunt generations in this lucid and assured début. The novel begins at the deathbed of a man from the Mi’kmaq Nation, who recalls a life transformed by the abduction of his younger sister, from a berry field in Maine, when he was six. His narration twines with that of a woman who grew up in a stable middle-class home but remembers understanding as a child that “my house was not my house.” The story has an inevitability to it, but Peters’s writing can surprise. At one point, the woman thinks of her elders, “We just start to separate from them, like oil from water, a line separating the living and the dying, the living carelessly gathering at the top.”

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The Manuscripts Club

by Christopher de Hamel (Penguin)

Nonfiction

This inviting history brings together an eclectic group of medieval-manuscript lovers. In twelve gossipy chapters, de Hamel imagines discussing all things illuminated with, among others, St. Anselm, the eleventh-century monk and theologian; Belle da Costa Greene, the longtime director of the Morgan Library; and Theodor Mommsen, the German polymath whose transcriptions of classical texts earned him the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature. Highlighting the sheer unlikeliness of any book lasting for centuries, de Hamel shows how each of his subjects helped to preserve manuscripts for future generations, and finds in their stories hope for the survival of these unique works in the digital age and beyond.

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Correction

by Ben Austen (Flatiron)

Nonfiction

In the nineteen-seventies, the so-called war on crime initiated a trend in extreme sentencing that, for the federal government and sixteen states, included the near-elimination of parole. While showing how parole decisions can be erratic, biased, and insufficiently focussed on the offenders’ rehabilitation, Austen argues that the institution is nevertheless “an essential release valve.” He anchors his reportage with two inmates in their sixties, who have been imprisoned for four decades and are among the last in Illinois to remain eligible for parole. The self-knowledge and resilience of these men gleam against the harsh conditions of prison, and Austen transforms a debate often conducted on the plane of stereotype and fearmongering into a close study of real people in a broken system.

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The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (New Directions)

Fiction

This novel’s relatively conventional premise—an anthropology student moves to a provincial village to conduct research—belies the bizarre fantasia that unfolds in its pages, in which moments across history occur simultaneously. The student mingles with his new neighbors, has cybersex with his girlfriend back in the city, and dallies on his thesis; meanwhile, around him, the turning of the wheel keeps life and death in a constant churn. Énard charts the arcs of his characters in their current, past, and future incarnations—as farmers, murderers, monks, bedbugs, boars, and ash trees. The concept, if esoteric, provides a feast of pathos and pleasure, and a shimmering argument for the interconnectedness of everything.

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Holler, Child

by LaToya Watkins (Tiny Reparations)

Fiction

In this début short-story collection, a varied group of voices—male and female, young and old, parent and child—grapple with profound disruptions, from infidelity to illness. Among Watkins’s characters are a woman entertaining a string of reporters curious about her son, who was a cult leader, and a recent widow, who confronts her mother for raising her to be “too hard to live soft.” Though all the protagonists appear to chafe against what those they’re closest to expect of them, the stories’ prevailing sentiment is clear: “People need people. That’s heaven.”

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Yesterday

by Tobias Becker (Harvard)

Nonfiction

Nostalgia has broad artistic and political dimensions; it is a matter of cultural consequence. It also never ceases to be a private preoccupation—sometimes a harmless solace and occasionally a dangerous indulgence. Becker delves into volume after academic volume on the subject and finds a remarkable consistency within “the existing literature”: for centuries now, the verdict on nostalgia has been “overwhelmingly pejorative.” He is generally convincing in showing the whole political spectrum’s reluctance to be caught trafficking in any direct invocation of the concept; his prudent book considers the word a reflexive smear and proposes boldly that nostalgia “be struck from the political vocabulary altogether.” But, despite the scorn that electoral politics may profess toward nostalgia, we practice it culturally all the time. “Yesterday” also takes us through endless artistic revivals throughout the past half century, a period during which, as technology frog-marched us into the future, we kept a constant backward glance. The long era we’re in now, Becker suggests, seems not so much postmodern as re-everything.

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Night Watch

by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)

Fiction

Opening nearly a decade after the Civil War, this intricately plotted novel takes place at a progressive psychiatric hospital in West Virginia. At the story’s outset, a mute woman and her teen-age daughter are brought to the hospital by an abusive drifter who took over the farm on which they lived; gradually, the book begins to reveal events that took place ten years earlier, imbuing the more recent story line with tragic and surprising meaning. As Phillips shifts between the two periods and among her various characters’ perspectives—most crucially, that of the daughter forced by circumstance to forgo her adolescence and become a kind of matriarch—she examines ideas about identity, rebirth, and lingering trauma.

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In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl

by Merilee Grindle (Harvard)

Nonfiction

This vibrant biography follows the complex, captivating figure of Zelia Nuttall, a self-taught scholar of ancient Mesoamerica and a pioneer of modern anthropology. Nuttall rose to national fame in 1893, when her decoding of the Aztec calendar stone was featured at the Chicago World’s Fair. She went on to publish prolifically and to become one of the chief collectors of indigenous artifacts for numerous American museums. Her reputation declined in the nineteen-twenties, as anthropology was being codified into an academic discipline. Grindle paints an indelible portrait of a woman both charming and challenging, whose boldness could slip easily into imperiousness, and whose zeal could lead her astray (she was “not above smuggling treasures out of Mexico”).

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The Book at War

by Andrew Pettegree (Basic)

Nonfiction

A famous photograph of wartime London shows a group of men examining books on the miraculously intact shelves of a mansion’s bombed-out library. The photograph was almost certainly posed, but, as Andrew Pettegree, a prolific British expert on the history of books, points out, it was a true image of the way that books are used in catastrophic times: as solace and inspiration, as symbols of resistance against barbarism and of a centuries-old culture that remained an honored trust. These uses are the heart of Pettegree’s book, which documents conflicts from the American Civil War to the war in Ukraine but lavishes most attention on the Second World War. Pettegree considers a wide range of printed materials, including maps, pamphlets, and scientific periodicals, tracing not only how books contributed to military efforts—as when a British scientist was able to deduce from lecture listings in a German physics journal, that, as of 1941, the Nazis had not committed the resources needed to make an atom bomb—but also how they offered intellectual sustenance in a time of uncertainty.

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Read more: “From Homer to Gaza, the History of Books in Wartime,” by Claudia Roth Pierpont

Foreign Bodies

by Simon Schama (Ecco)

Nonfiction

This absorbing cultural history of vaccines surveys three centuries of controversy, beginning in England in the seventeen-twenties, with the first smallpox inoculation. For every enlightened champion of them—such as Voltaire, who praised the “strong and solid good sense” of their use—there were countless skeptics, reactionaries, and unscrupulous politicians who resisted them. Religious doctrine, the fear of outsiders, and personal attacks were among the tools these actors used: a central character in the book is Waldemar Haffkine, the creator of the cholera and plague vaccines, whose work administering them to the rural poor in India was cut short in 1902 after colonial officials campaigned to discredit him.

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Brooklyn Crime Novel

by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco)

Fiction

A half century of Brooklyn history and a bevy of crimes—currency defacement, petty theft, breaking and entering, drug use—feature in this series of loosely linked vignettes, which follow children living in and around the neighborhood of Boerum Hill, from the nineteen-seventies to the present. Though the book is tinted with nostalgia, it’s filled with characters suspicious of idealizing an earlier time. Boerum, the narrator observes, “is a slaveholder name,” and a Black boy called C. thinks that the area’s gentrifiers “want to live neither in the present, nor the future, but in a cleaned-up dream of the past.”

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Earlier

by Sasha Frere-Jones (Semiotexte)

Nonfiction

“If you love music, you have to fight for it,” a former New Yorker pop-music critic writes in this slim, engaging volume, which recounts his childhood among “celebrity children” at a private school in Brooklyn, and his early obsession with music, which led to his career as a writer and as a band member. Both a memoir and a history, the book touches on race relations in the seventies and the aids epidemic. Haunted by the deaths of his father and his first wife, along with his struggles with mental illness and alcoholism, Frere-Jones excavates his life’s triumphs and failures. As he writes of playing with a band for the first time, “I fail my way into an epiphany.”

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Klan War

by Fergus M. Bordewich (Knopf)

Nonfiction

This essential history details Ulysses S. Grant’s fight to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan during the course of his Presidency. The Klan sprang up largely in response to Black suffrage. After the Civil War, Southern Black men voted in the hundreds of thousands, sending scores of Black candidates to office. The Klan, which Bordewich calls the nation’s “first organized terrorist movement,” targeted Black community leaders, with local and state officials either unwilling or unable to stop it. Grant made the issue federal, dispatching troops to the South and holding trials for suspected Klan members. Though his efforts were later gutted by a series of disastrous Supreme Court decisions, Grant’s victory, Bordewich argues, serves as a potent reminder that “forceful political action can prevail over violent extremism.”

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Camille Pissarro

by Anka Muhlstein, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter (Other Press)

Nonfiction

Camille Pissarro, the father figure of the Impressionists, connected the group’s feuding factions, became an instructor and mentor to the impossible Cézanne, welcomed Georges Seurat and took up his pointillist cause, and even remained (until the Dreyfus Affair) on good terms with the irascible Degas. Pissarro’s observation that winter sun is actually warmer than the summer kind was an insight that moved Monet and Alfred Sisley, and illuminates their art. Only late in his life, though, did he find a subject and an approach toward art-making that brought him to the level of his more illustrious peers. Muhlstein’s biography invites us to head to the museums to look at the work again. She is a sympathetic chronicler of Pissarro’s life, and she understands that, although we may want to lift Monet or Degas up from their circle to see them individually, comparing them with masters past and masters yet to come, Pissarro belongs not only to his time but to his team. Whatever “Impressionism” means is what he means, too.

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Read more: “How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence,” by Adam Gopnik

A History of Fake Things on the Internet

by Walter Scheirer (Stanford)

Nonfiction

Scheirer, a computer scientist, surveys the landscape of Internet fakery and manipulated media. He knows better than most how such technologies could set off a society-wide epistemic meltdown, yet he sees no signs that they are doing so. Doctored videos online delight, taunt, jolt, menace, arouse, and amuse, but they rarely deceive. Seeing the digital-disinformation threat looming, media-forensics experts rushed to develop countermeasures, Scheirer writes. But to hone them, they needed fake images, and, Scheirer shows, they struggled to find any. He sent students hunting for manipulated photos on the Internet. They returned triumphant, bags brimming with fakes. They didn’t find instances of sophisticated deception, though; instead, they found memes. Scheirer reframes our most urgent needs; the manipulations we’ve faced so far haven’t been deceptive so much as expressive. Fact-checking them does not help, because the problem with fakes isn’t the truth they hide. It’s the truth they reveal.

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Read more: “What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes,” by Daniel Immerwahr

Charlie Chaplin vs. America

by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster)

Nonfiction

“You know this fellow is many-sided,” as Chaplin explained the Tramp, his famous silent-film character, “a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player.” In short, the Tramp was an Everyman, and when he emerged on the scene, his creator became an object of fan hysteria on a par with Rudolph Valentino. Soon after 1940, however, the country turned against him. Eyman’s book is an attempt to explain what happened. The image of Chaplin the man became virtually the inverse of the Tramp’s: oversexed, ungenerous, anti-American. Chaplin’s fall from grace, Eyman says, “eerily foretells the homicidal cultural and political life of the twenty-first century.” His book is lively and entertaining, adding significant detail to the story of Chaplin’s spectacular peripeteia. Eyman is completely sympathetic to Chaplin, and he makes the case that we should be, too.

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Read more: “The War on Charlie Chaplin,” by Louis Menand

Let Us Descend

by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)

Fiction

The title of this powerful historical novel is taken from Dante; the descent to which it refers is into the hell of chattel slavery, “this death before death.” Annis, the protagonist, is the child of an enslaved woman who was raped by the owner of the plantation in Carolina where they labor. Her mother secretly passes down ancestral knowledge, teaching Annis to fight and forage as “a way to recall another world.” After an act of resistance, Annis is sold to a slave trader, and during a brutal forced march she discovers the company of spirits, one of whom takes the name of her grandmother, an African warrior. “How am I with none of the people I belong to?” Annis asks. Ultimately, the spirits help her achieve a measure of deliverance from her lonely inferno.

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The Love of Singular Men

by Victor Heringer, translated from the Portuguese by James Young (New Directions)

Fiction

In this novel of queer first love, set in Rio de Janeiro, a middle-aged man, Camilo, obsessively revisits his childhood affair with a teen-age orphan named Cosme, whom his bourgeois family adopted in the nineteen-seventies. The romance between the two boys—Camilo so white as to be “almost green,” Cosme the color of “coffee-with-watered-down-milk”—unfolds against the backdrop of Brazil’s military junta and its legacy of slavery. As Camilo’s family unravels—his father tormented by his work as a doctor for the regime’s torturers, his mother beset by madness—Camilo and Cosme experience the bliss of infatuation, before tragedy occurs, one made all the crueller by the author’s own death by suicide, at the age of twenty-nine.

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Beyond the Wall

by Katja Hoyer (Basic)

Nonfiction

When the victors of the Second World War agreed, in 1945, to build a “decentralized” and “denazified” Germany, they set the stage for the creation of the German Democratic Republic, which was founded in the region formerly administered by Soviet authorities. In this layered history, Hoyer combines analysis of the government’s inner workings and interviews with East Germans. She takes up the state’s surveillance apparatus and its appetite for ideological conformity, but also considers the country’s cultural idiosyncrasies and its generous social safety net, which included a robust child-care system. As she does so, she relates details that lend weight to her conclusion that reunification was “a waymarker in Germany’s quest for unity rather than its happy ending.”

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From Our Pages

Naked in the Rideshare

by Rebecca ShawBen Kronengold (William Morrow)

Nonfiction

These raucously funny pieces of satire by the youngest-ever writers for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” gleefully dissect so many aspects of Gen Z life—from sex and politics, to memes and Goop—with scalpel-like precision.

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Flee North

by Scott Shane (Celadon)

Nonfiction

In the eighteen-forties, Thomas Smallwood, an educated free Black man, and Charles Torrey, a white abolitionist, began working together to free slaves. From Washington, D.C., they organized escapes and established the network of allies that Smallwood named the Underground Railroad. Through newspaper records and Smallwood’s and Torrey’s writings, Shane paints a vivid picture of the nation’s capital, which was then dominated by pro-slavery institutions, and of the journeys of slaves who fled north. While recognizing Torrey’s legacy, he draws Smallwood into the spotlight, arguing that his contributions were far greater, despite the fact that, as a Black man, he inhabited a more circumscribed and dangerous world.

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Mapping the Darkness

by Kenneth Miller (Hachette)

Nonfiction

This absorbing history traces the science of sleep from its origins in a lab at the University of Chicago in the nineteen-twenties. Its ascent, Miller shows, was influenced by a range of factors, among them Freudianism, the study of blinking, the pressures of capitalism (knowledge about circadian rhythms prompted changes in factories’ production schedules), and the Challenger disaster (sleep-research funding increased after it was revealed that exhaustion helped cause the catastrophe). The book follows a handful of dogged scientists—a First World War refugee, a pioneering psychiatrist who was once her mentor’s test subject—but also examines the impact of the many researchers whose discoveries have helped to make the treatment of sleep disorders a pillar of public health.

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January

by Sara Gallardo, translated from the Spanish by Frances RiddleMaureen Shaughnessy (Archipelago)

Fiction

This début novel—by an acclaimed Argentinean writer, and first published in 1958—centers on a sixteen-year-old who becomes pregnant after an assault by an older man. Setting the story in the sweltering heat of Argentina’s Pampas, Gallardo re-creates the world of ranchers and missionaries from the perspective of the girl, with her adolescent confusion and private sense of guilt. Gallardo juxtaposes her solitary desperation—she visits a local medicine woman for an abortion, and gallops recklessly on horseback to induce a miscarriage—with the conservative Catholic society that closes ranks against her.

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A Council of Dolls

by Mona Susan Power (Mariner)

Fiction

In this novel, three Dakhóta girls come of age while wrestling with the destruction of Native traditions. Each girl possesses a doll, which Power imbues with memories and speech, and the dolls help pass stories down through the generations. Cora, in the nineteen-hundreds, and Lillian, in the nineteen-thirties, are both sent to Indian boarding schools, which aim to turn “so-called ‘wild Indians’ into darker versions of white people.” Sissy, their daughter and granddaughter, never endures those horrors, but in the book’s final, metafictional section she has become a novelist, and, through the dolls, resurrects her ancestors’ tales. “Words can undo us or restore us to wholeness,” she says. “I pray that mine will be medicine.”

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The Long Form

by Kate Briggs (Dorothy)

Fiction

The plot of Kate Briggs’s début novel is deceptively bare: Helen and her baby, Rose, live through a day together. Between cries, bounces, park walks, lots of looking, thinking, some panicking, dozing, and a number of cups of tea, Briggs delivers essayistic interludes on how caring for a baby, like reading a novel, upturns the standard experience of time. Briggs foregrounds the improvisational quality of mothering a newborn, the perpetual creativity inherent in Helen’s attempts to catch Rose’s interest and make her comfortable. At first, it might sound like Briggs is trying to question the basics of plot or suspense, but, in fact, “The Long Form” is gripping, with all the satisfactions of more traditional narratives, albeit in unprecedented places. When the fictional doorbell rings after pages and pages of Helen trying to put Rose down, trying to gently drift her into a very necessary morning nap, I almost yelped out “No!” like an action hero sprinting toward a preventable explosion, pathetic hand outstretched—we had worked so hard, and now it was over!

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Read more: “A Novel That Captures the Mind-Bending Early Weeks of Parenthood,” by Audrey Wollen

Lies and Sorcery

by Elsa Morante, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee (New York Review Books)

Fiction

The Italian author Elsa Morante’s longest novel, a scathing, operatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance, was first published in 1948, but a full translation has not been available in English until now. (An abridged English version, which Morante considered a “mutilation,” appeared in 1951 as “House of Liars.”) The book, which follows three generations of tragically deluded women, is animated by Morante’s hatred of the selfishness and superficiality engendered by Italy’s rigid class system. In their masochistic worship of hierarchy, tendency toward idolatry, and susceptibility to kitsch, its characters embody the traits that she believed had enabled Mussolini’s rise.

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Read more: “The Novelist Who Inspired Elena Ferrante,” by Jess Bergman

The Necessity of Exile

by Shaul Magid (Ayin)

Nonfiction

Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth and an ordained rabbi, was raised in a New York suburb by secular Socialist parents. But, in 1978, as a twenty-year-old hippie, he moved to Israel in an aimless search for spiritual communion. Over the years, he took up with like-minded counterculturalists in a Jerusalem yeshiva, fell in and out of various Haredi communities, and spent time among the early settlers. The early Religious Zionists who he encountered “truly believed they were the vanguard, riding the wave of messianic time.” He came away feeling that the ideology was “powerful yet dangerous,” a feeling that was reinforced by his time in the Israel Defense Forces. His new book, “The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance,” is a record of his painful surrendering of Zionism, a project that he compares to Manifest Destiny. He traces the now largely forgotten history of Jewish movements against statist Zionism: religious anti-Zionists, for example, who believed that a return to the homeland should come only with the arrival of the Messiah, and that anything else was a sacrilege. Magid advocates for what he gingerly calls “counter-Zionism,” and for a solution to the conflict that allows for the self-determination of both Israelis and Palestinians. The state’s character, he writes, “would not be structured on the notion that this land ‘belongs’ to anyone, it would be a true democracy.”

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

A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand (Mulholland)

Fiction

Hand’s novel is, as the book jacket notes, “the first novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” In Hand’s story, four friends come together to rent Hill House in order to spend some time workshopping a play. The narrator, a fortysomething playwright named Holly Sherwin, is hoping to revive her flatlined career; all the participants in her workshop are prone to moments of sharp-elbowed competition and jealousy. Meanwhile, they watch as hares run out of the fireplace and supernatural doorways materialize beside their beds. Hand has a gift for the sensuous, evocative detail, and her descriptions are often simultaneously seductive and spooky. She makes clever thematic use of her own haunting of Jackson’s house, brilliantly capturing the discomfort of being too close to a vulnerable artistic project, the sense of violation that can arise when someone moves too boldly into your creative space.

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Read more: “When a Novelist Carries On What Another Novelist Started,” by Kristen Roupenian

The House of Doors

by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury)

Fiction

In 1921, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham was the most celebrated author in the world. He published, among many other works, a piece called “The Letter,” a short story based on an actual criminal trial in which the wife of a well-off British planter was accused of murdering her neighbor. Eng’s novel offers an imagined account of how Maugham came to write “The Letter,” and does so by combining novelistic hypothesis with the available biographical record. The novel juggles two central narratives, one from 1910, in which the murder trial and its aftermath are masterfully recounted, and one from 1921, in which Maugham vacations with a man who is his secretary and lover, enjoys the hospitality of his colonial hosts, and prospects for stories. With lyrical generosity, and exquisite reticence, Eng layers narratives of history, fact, fiction, and hearsay. He mimics the patter of Maugham’s own prose, introducing gentle subversion in his subplots of passion and erotic wandering. Eng’s book is full of distinct pleasures, conjuring a delicious set of secrets behind a classic story.

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Read more: “When the World’s Most Famous Writer Visits a Hotbed of Amorous Intrigue,” by James Wood

Cross-Stitch

by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines)

Fiction

The words “text” and “textile” contain a common Latin root, a teacher tells Mila, the narrator of this skillful début novel about female friendship. Mila and Citlali meet as schoolchildren in Mexico City, and bond over a love of embroidery. For Mila, embroidering is both an aesthetic pursuit and an act of political resistance. Years later, Citlali’s sudden death leads Mila to reflect on their past, and to remember Citlali asking, “Just what have you done for a world that’s falling apart around you? Write?” The novel serves as a response, conjuring Citlali, “like a spell,” into life again.

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The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)

Fiction

In this ruminative novel set during the covid pandemic, the narrator, an intellectual living in New York, lends her apartment to a visiting pulmonologist and moves into one belonging to acquaintances who have decamped to a suburb, leaving behind their pet macaw. Her living arrangement is soon disrupted by the unannounced arrival of the previous bird-sitter, a college student. At first, the two keep to themselves in a largely peaceable coexistence. The narrator’s most unsettling experience takes place outside, when a man taunts her and coughs in her face, an event that underscores her “vulnerable” status. Rather than dwelling in despair, Nunez’s book expands into a meditation on pain and the formation of unusual intimacies.

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Romney

by McKay Coppins (Scribner)

Nonfiction

During his first failed campaign for President, Mitt Romney acquired a reputation: the “flippin’ Mormon.” He began his career as a pragmatist, a wildly successful businessman who became a moderate governor in Massachusetts. When he took the national stage, though, he appeared stiff and disingenuous, awkwardly contorting his positions to match the Republican Party’s rightward lurch. In a new, intimate biography, Coppins draws on dozens of interviews, as well as hundreds of pages of personal journals and private correspondence, to show how Romney’s ambitions and principles increasingly came into conflict. The throughline is Romney’s faith, which he nurtured even when he was running for President, and which finally led him to a moment of redemption: his decision, in 2020, to be the first Republican senator who voted to impeach Donald Trump.

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Read more: “Did Mitt Romney Save His Soul?,” by Michael Luo

The Dimensions of a Cave

by Greg Jackson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction

This cerebral thriller follows an investigative journalist as he attempts to expose a secret government program developing a lifelike virtual reality. His reporting raises profound questions: Are artificial beings alive? How do ambition and idealism transform each other? And “how, when you’re inside one story, can you see around it?” The character of the journalist takes shape through his relationships—with his girlfriend, a gallerist, who feels that their settled coupledom has run its course, and with a young, high-minded reporter who lacks the journalist’s ironic distance—suggesting that we best affirm our own realness by recognizing the reality of others. Jackson depicts the world as “stranger, wilder, deeper, more open than you’ve been made to know.”

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Baumgartner

by Paul Auster (Grove)

Fiction

The center of this slender, ruminative novel is Sy Baumgartner, an author and a professor who, at seventy, has been mourning his wife’s sudden death for nearly ten years. As Baumgartner struggles to make sense of this chapter of his life, he starts dating, and he devotes himself to a new book, “a serio-comic, quasi-fictional discourse on the self in relation to other selves.” (Notably, Auster and his protagonist share several traits—both are from Newark and both married translators—and Baumgartner’s mother’s maiden name was Auster.) Auster writes movingly about seeming to recover after great loss: “If you are the one who lives on, you will discover that the amputated part of you, the phantom part of you, can still be a source of profound, unholy pain.”

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How to Be Multiple

by Helena de Bres (Bloomsbury)

Nonfiction

In her ambitious and vivacious book, de Bres aims to rescue twins from the gothic, from horror movies, and from singleton scrutiny, the better to testify to the experience of twindom from the inside out. She invokes twins from life and legend—the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker; Tweedledum and Tweedledee; her own identical twin and herself—to examine how multiples complicate our notions of personhood, attachment, and agency. Twins have been critical to our understanding of ourselves, she argues; they are present in the founding myths of great cities. Twins have been worshipped, killed at birth, paraded as curiosities. They have been treated as subhuman and superhuman, and seen to personify every possible duality: collaboration and bitter competition, the purest as well as the most morbidly enmeshed forms of love. And they continue to unsettle our notions about where bodies end and begin, and about whether personalities, even fates, are forged or found.

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

Going Infinite

by Michael Lewis (Norton)

Nonfiction

Almost immediately after the cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded last November, an agent e-mailed Hollywood buyers to reveal that the writer Michael Lewis just happened to have spent the previous six months hanging around Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis, famous for his portraits of unlikely, contrarian heroes, has not composed a hagiography—but neither does he portray Bankman-Fried as an antihero. In the first chapter, Bankman-Fried stands up Anna Wintour at the Met Ball. Later, Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s on-and-off girlfriend, sends him bullet-point memos about her hopes for a real relationship. Lewis’s tone is one of tender beguilement. He isn’t sympathetic, exactly, but he remains defiantly open to evidence of Bankman-Fried’s innocence, despite the fact that most of the world is convinced that he is guilty of one of the greatest financial frauds of all time. The final work—which is stupefyingly pleasurable to read—offers an inside account of FTX’s collapse, and fills in many gaps in a story that has been subjected to an unholy amount of reporting.

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Read more: “Michael Lewis’s Big Contrarian Bet,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

The Mysteries

by Bill Watterson (Andrews McMeel)

Fiction

Watterson’s return to print, nearly three decades after retiring from producing his wildly beloved comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes,” comes in the form of this “fable for grown-ups,” which he wrote and illustrated in collaboration with the renowned caricaturist John Kascht. The book’s characters, unnamed, are drawn from the misty forever-medieval: knights, wizards, peasants with faces like Leonardo grotesques. The magic of condensation that is characteristic of cartoons is also here, in a story with a quick, fairy-tale beginning: “Long ago, the forest was dark and deep.” It opens in a world in which unseen mysteries are keeping the populace in a state of terror. As people unearth the secrets behind these mysteries, and use their new knowledge to create technological marvels, they become less fearful. Or you might say insufficiently fearful: if “The Mysteries” is a fable, then its moral might be that, when we believe we’ve understood the mysteries, we are misunderstanding; when we think we’ve solved them and have moved on, that error can be our dissolution.

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Read more: “Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”,” by Rivka Galchen

From Our Pages

The Chapter

by Nicholas Dames (Princeton)

Nonfiction

In this history, Dames considers the nature of the chapter, a subjective division that nonetheless organizes our understanding of life and literature, giving us a shared metaphoric language, a threshold for signalling transition, a way of counting our thoughts. He walks through the chapter as metaphor, the chapter as historical construct, and finally, in its novelistic form, the chapter “as a way to articulate how the way to experience time is to experience its segmentations.” For Dames, form begets function—and neither is above scrutiny. The book was born of an essay published on newyorker.com.

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The Lumumba Plot

by Stuart A. Reid (Knopf)

Nonfiction

In 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first Prime Minister, was murdered, brought down by a combination of Congolese politicians and Belgian “advisers,” with the tacit support of the United States and the malign neglect of the United Nations. In this book, Reid, an editor at Foreign Affairs, is interested not only in how external forces arrayed themselves to bring about a calamity but also in how the first leader of the newly decolonized Congo, dealing with a breakaway province and a range of outside players, alienated Belgium and triggered America's Cold War anxieties about Soviet influence. Reid’s account, cool and vivid, leaves no doubt about Lumumba’s humanity and vision, though his portrait of the late Prime Minister avoids the nostalgia that has become a part of his legacy. Most of all, it shows how Congolese independence was never given a chance.

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Read more: “The Real Story Behind Patrice Lumumba’s Assassination,” by Isaac Chotiner

On Marriage

by Devorah Baum (Yale)

Nonfiction

Marriage is a vast subject, being an institution that informs our most important social structures—including the tax code and the disposition of intergenerational wealth—while also circumscribing the idiosyncratic goings on within a household. Yet Baum, a British critic and filmmaker, posits that marriage is a surprisingly unexamined subject, at least by professional philosophers, who have left the field to novelists, filmmakers, and other artists. Her nimble new work selects and analyzes artistic renderings of marriage across philosophy, television, and literature—including work by the novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the theorist Slavoj Žižek, and the screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Baum is a master at unpicking clichés. She pushes at the boundaries of marriage as a framework for conceiving of ourselves in relation to others, and she is especially interested in marriages that adapt the institution’s conventional trappings for subversive and playful ends. “The happily married,” Baum concludes, “are the ones who’ve simultaneously killed and reinforced the institution by making it suit themselves.”

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Read more: “Why We Need to Talk About Marriage,” by Rebecca Mead

The Revolutionary Temper

by Robert Darnton (Norton)

Nonfiction

In the final forty years of the ancien régime, Paris was gripped by drama, involving, among other things, royal affairs, riots over bread prices and ministerial despotism, and public demonstrations of innovations like the hot-air balloon. Darnton, a historian at Harvard, plumbs diaries, news reports, and popular songs to show how these events, combined with Enlightenment ideals, were digested by the city’s robust media culture to fuel a burgeoning sense of citizen sovereignty. By the start of the French Revolution, he writes, these stirrings had crystallized into a “revolutionary temper”: “a conviction that the human condition is malleable, not fixed, and that ordinary people can make history instead of suffering it.”

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What the Taliban Told Me

by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster)

Nonfiction

In this memoir, a former linguist for the U.S. military, who monitored suspected Taliban communications in Afghanistan, gathering information that determined the people American soldiers would kill, reflects on his deployment. The book’s arc traces his moral transformation: Fritz recounts how listening to the prosaic conversations of potential enemy combatants rendered him unable to depersonalize them, and therefore unable to perform his job. Essentially, his war chronicle cautions that the urge to make monsters of others creates the risk of slipping into the monstrous ourselves.

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Monica

by Daniel Clowes (Fantagraphics Books)

Fiction

The nine stories in Clowes’s graphic novel follow one another without any introduction, guide, or postscript. Centered on the lives of strong female characters, the book intertwines tales of soldiers in the hell of the Vietnam War, a demonic sect of inbred aristocrats, a radio that broadcasts the voice of the dead, and a rags-to-riches story of an influential candlemaker—among others. The comics form a fractal-like chronicle, with threads of conspiracies and end-of-the-world scenarios woven throughout. An overarching narrative seems to become clearer with each reading—but in the style of a David Lynch story, with each reader’s interpretation as varied and as valid as the next.

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The Two-Parent Privilege

by Melissa S. Kearney (Chicago)

Nonfiction

Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, considers how disparities in marriage can underpin social inequality. She begins by positing that the decline in marriage rates and the corresponding rise in the number of children being raised in single-parent homes “has contributed to the economic insecurity of American families, has widened the gap in opportunities and outcomes for children from different backgrounds, and today poses economic and social challenges that we cannot afford to ignore—but may not be able to reverse.” Having two parents who are married to each other, Kearney argues, provides offspring with economic and social advantages. And by joining their particular strengths, a married couple can give their progeny more than the sum of their parts. She argues for policy changes that would scale up community-based programs that strengthen and increase economic support for low-income families and for a broader cultural push to recognize that when it comes to raising children, no other arrangement works quite as well as matrimony.

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Read more: “Why We Need to Talk About Marriage,” by Rebecca Mead

A Volga Tale

by Guzel Yakhina, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon (Europa)

Fiction

The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was a state located along the Volga River, populated by ethnic Germans whose ancestors had been lured to the region by Catherine the Great. This rich epic depicts its rise and fall through the story of a principled and awkward schoolteacher, whose life intersects with twenty years of social tragedy. Early in the novel, the teacher falls in love, but a horrific incident renders him mute and his lover pregnant. Yakhina charts the brutal decades of Stalin’s collectivization and repression, and creates a moving portrait of the teacher’s profound love for his family, and of Russia’s multiethnic population.

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From Our Pages

Artificial

by Amy Kurzweil (Catapult)

Nonfiction

Many generations of the Kurzweil family have sought, through various mediums, to make sense of their collective traumatic past, and in this graphic memoir Amy Kurzweil considers her father’s use of A.I. to create a chatbot that speaks in his own father’s voice and ties it to her quest for self-knowledge. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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Omega Farm

by Martha McPhee (Scribner)

Nonfiction

In this expansive memoir, a novelist recounts her return to the place where she grew up—a compound in New Jersey, known to her family as “the Farm,” where she was raised by her mother and stepfather in a combined family of ten children. As she revisits the scene of her tumultuous childhood, McPhee writes, memories begin to emerge from “every patch-job and jerry-rigged ‘solution’ from the broken, yet widening, spell of the past.” When a tenant alerts her that overgrown bamboo is interfering with the electricity and plumbing, she embarks upon a series of projects—including tending to the understory of the land’s forest—that lead her to examine the stories that sit behind her own ideas of family and sense of self.

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Pandora’s Box

by Peter Biskind (William Morrow)

Nonfiction

Biskind’s saga about the rise and fall of prestige television explains, in punchy, propulsive prose, how we went from Tony Soprano to Ted Lasso. We meet the three HBO Davids: Chase, Simon, and Milch—the headstrong, high-strung men who reinvented the Mob drama (“The Sopranos”), the crime procedural (“The Wire”), and the Western (“Deadwood”), respectively. The story of these turbulent masterminds and their antihero doubles has been told before, but Biskind has the benefit of having waited to see the other side of Peak TV’s peak. Netflix, he writes, quickly established itself as a purveyor of original series to rival HBO’s. Then legacy studios and Big Tech got in on the game. Now many streamers are launching ad-supported tiers, meaning that they’ll be answerable to the same sponsors that propped up the networks. “Pandora’s Box” posits that golden ages don’t arise from the miraculous congregation of geniuses; the industry’s default setting is for garbage. Occasionally, the incentives change just enough to allow a cascade of innovation, but things inevitably shift back to the norm. The small-screen era of risk-taking and artistic ambition is over, Biskind suggests. But he cannily chronicles its heights.

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Read more: “The Twilight of Prestige Television,” by Michael Schulman

A City on Mars

by Kelly WeinersmithZach Weinersmith (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

This playful “homesteader’s guide” to space settlement presents a bleak view of the pursuit, arguing that “an Earth with climate change and nuclear war . . . is still a way better place than Mars.” The authors examine the increasingly popular dream of a multi-planetary human race with a skepticism informed by ethical, logistical, and legal anxieties. They warn that the Martian landscape is whipped by “poison storms”; that space exploration without clearer laws could escalate into a “zero-sum scramble” for resources; and that science has barely grazed the unknowns of long-term extraterrestrial habitation.

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From Our Pages

The Pensive Citadel

by Victor Brombert (Chicago)

Nonfiction

Brombert went to Yale University as a recipient of the G.I. Bill after serving in the Second World War; his essay collection reflects on decades spent in the academy, in halls fortified not for war but for scholarship. Brombert, who pairs a gravity of human experience with a tender love for regarding it, expounds upon the "paradox of laughter," the allure of existentialism, and the faculty of Baudelaire. One essay, on the slipperiness of time and the layered reappraisals that constitute life and learning, was published on newyorker.com.

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Crossings

by Ben Goldfarb (Norton)

Nonfiction

Roads, those most ubiquitous features of human civilization, are the subject of this perceptive book by an environmental journalist. Roads kill more creatures than any other “environmental ill”; they also bisect migration routes, pollute with noise, and help to facilitate deforestation. Road ecology—a specialty that Goldfarb lauds as “a field whose radical premise asserted that it was possible to perceive our built world through nonhuman eyes”—seeks to understand these dynamics and to propose solutions that actively consider animal lives. Through encounters with practitioners, including a veterinarian who helps track the movements of anteaters across Brazilian highways, Goldfarb charts a path toward a less destructive future.

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From Our Pages

The Body of the Soul

by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard PevearLarissa Volokhonsky (Yale)

Fiction

Many of the stories in the new collection by one of Russia’s most famous writers, who now lives in exile in Berlin, deal with life in the Soviet and post-Soviet years, chronicling ordinary people who encounter mystery and bureaucracy. Two of the stories appeared in the magazine.

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The Lies of the Land

by Steven Conn (Chicago)

Nonfiction

This piercing, unsentimental new book by the historian Steven Conn scrutinizes wistful talk of “real America.” Conn, who teaches at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, argues that the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial: its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. Agriculture has become a capital-intensive, high-tech pursuit, belying the “left behind” story of rural life, he argues. Fields resemble factories, where automation reigns and more than two-thirds of the hired workforce is foreign-born. And for the past century, rural spaces have been preferred destinations for military bases, discount retail chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants, and real-estate developments. Understanding the contemporary cultural “revolt against the city,” Conn writes, will require setting aside myths and grappling with what the rich and the powerful have done to rural spaces and people.

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Read more: “Beyond the Myth of Rural America,” by Daniel Immerwahr

American Poly

by Christopher M. Gleason (Oxford)

Nonfiction

Fifty-one per cent of adults younger than thirty told Pew Research, in 2023, that open marriage was “acceptable,” and twenty per cent of all Americans report experimenting with some form of non-monogamy. “American Poly,” a new book by the historian Christopher M. Gleason, offers some explanations for how this came to be the state of our affairs. (The term “polyamory” is thought to have been coined in 1990, but Gleason backdates to encompass various forms of consensual non-monogamy.) The book does not purport to be a sweeping study of free love in the U.S., a history that would include more on its adoption by socialists, beatniks, and queer liberationists. Instead, “American Poly” focusses more narrowly on the post-nineteen-sixties polyamory movement. Gleason argues, persuasively, that contemporary polyamory as a set of ideas and practices was articulated by the free-love advocates best positioned to survive conservative backlash in the nineteen-eighties: socially liberal fiscal conservatives.

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Read more: “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?,” by Jennifer Wilson

This Is Salvaged

by Vauhini Vara (Norton)

Fiction

The narrator of the title story in this collection is an unappreciated artist who beholds a warming planet and wishes to express that the precariousness of life is, among other things, darkly funny. This thesis propels the stories that follow. A teen-age girl avoids processing her brother’s death while working above her favorite eggroll shop at an operation that sells everything from phone sex to gardening magazines. A boy who doesn’t fret about technological advancements that pose a risk of alienation fantasizes about owning a car in a driverless future. The exuberant optimism of Vara’s characters allows the author to approach heavy topics—predatory bosses, globalization, class difference—with levity.

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Wound

by Oksana Vasyakina, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter (Catapult)

Fiction

In this affecting début novel, a narrator who resembles the author grapples with the death of her mother—her “integral wound”—and with her mother’s disapproval of her lesbianism. She makes a pilgrimage through Russia, carrying her mother’s ashes in an urn to be buried in their home town, in Siberia, but her grief is continually punctured by the bureaucracy of dealing with death. Drawing from Siberian legend and Greek mythology and from modern works by artists like Louise Bourgeois and Annie Leibovitz, Vasyakina meditates on time, womanhood, and sexuality, using the novel to make sense of the parent she has lost. “I feel that she is looking at the world through me,” Vasyakina writes. “I feel her inside me all the time.”

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The Boy from Kyiv

by Marina Harss (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

This deft, intimate biography traces the career of Alexei Ratmansky—arguably the preëminent ballet choreographer of our time, currently in residence at New York City Ballet—and examines the tensions between traditionalism and innovation within his field. Born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), raised in Kyiv, and trained at the Bolshoi, Ratmansky danced with the National Ballet of Ukraine during perestroika. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, he ventured abroad to join companies in the West before eventually returning to the Bolshoi as its director. His eclectic, erudite œuvre includes a variety of original pieces—narrative, abstract, satirical—and reconstructions of classics, like “The Sleeping Beauty,” that make radical use of century-old dance notation. Harss’s insightful portrait of a prolific creator highlights how Ratmansky’s art reflects the frictions and the liberations of a changing world.

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From Our Pages

This Country

by Navied Mahdavian (Princeton Architectural Press)

Nonfiction

This moving graphic memoir about buying a (tiny) house and making a home in rural Idaho as an Iranian American beautifully depicts a quest for belonging and the revelation that it rarely comes in the shape or form that one expects.

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From Our Pages

This Won’t Help

by Eli Grober (The Experiment)

Fiction

The collection of short humorous fiction addresses how to, if not thrive, at least hang in there while the world burns. (The key: laughing at these incisive pieces of satire.)

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The Genius of their Age

by S. Frederick Starr (Oxford)

Nonfiction

Ibn Sina and Biruni, two polymaths born in the late tenth century, were giants of the Islamic Golden Age, producing groundbreaking findings in mathematics, science, and philosophy. Both men were from what is now Uzbekistan, and both drew from Aristotle, but this engaging history uncovers their differences, in temperament and in scholarly approach. Ibn Sina was a bon vivant and an eager public intellectual who reasoned from abstract metaphysical principles, whereas Biruni, a recluse, “moved from the specific to the general.” After a vitriolic exchange early in their careers, the two men apparently never corresponded again. As Starr brings them back into conversation, he illuminates the richness of thought that characterized this “lost Enlightenment.”

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From Our Pages

Black Friend

by Ziwe (Abrams)

Nonfiction

In this incredibly funny collection of essays, the comedian Ziwe mines anecdotes from her life—such as finding out that her feet were only rated “okay” on the celebrity-feet photo-sharing site wikiFeet—to delve deeply into contemporary culture, and explore what it means to be a Black woman in America, and in the American media landscape.

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Our Hideous Progeny

by C.E. McGill (Harper)

Fiction

This novel might be called historical science fiction: it takes place in the aftermath of “Frankenstein” and treats that text as if it were a true family history rather than a novel. Its narrator, Mary, is an illegitimate daughter in the Frankenstein clan who grows up hearing stories of family tragedy and later accesses a trunk full of old papers in which her great-uncle, Victor Frankenstein, chronicles an experiment gone hideously awry. Mary inherits her ancestor’s scientific proclivities and boldness. Fascinated by fossils, she undertakes an experiment worthy of Dr. Frankenstein, had he been a paleontologist. Evocatively and compassionately, McGill seeks a way to tell the stories of those “whose tales cannot fit in one book, those poor creatures who remain lost or forgotten,” as one character notes. Monstrousness is framed as something empowering, especially for “women who love women, women who didn’t know they were women at first but know better now, those who thought they were women at first but know better now.”

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Read more: “How Queer Is “Frankenstein”?,” by Ruth Franklin

Blood in the Machine

by Brian Merchant (Little, Brown)

Nonfiction

In the early eighteen-hundreds, British textile workers waged a rebellion against the automation of their industry, breaking into factories and smashing the machines. In response, the government unleashed regiments of soldiers in what became a kind of slow-burning civil war of factory owners, supported by the state, against a group of workers who called themselves Luddites. Today, the term is used as an insult to describe anyone resistant to technological innovation; it suggests ignoramuses, sticks in the mud, obstacles to progress. But this new book by the journalist and author Brian Merchant argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers above the inequitable profitability of machines. The book is a historical reconsideration of the movement and a gripping narrative of political resistance.

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Read more: “Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.,” by Kyle Chayka

The Burning of the World

by Scott W. Berg (Pantheon)

Nonfiction

The big-city fires of the past were sudden, cataclysmic events—boiling rivers, melting buildings—and thus easily mythologized; their origins were occluded by fear and wonder. But the imagery of destruction, retribution, and rebirth could obscure circumstances that were often deeply political, as Scott W. Berg shows in his illuminating new book. In the century and a half since the Chicago fire of 1871, many of the lies surrounding it have proved impervious. If you know anything about the disaster, you probably have a vague recollection that there was a cow involved. Didn’t it kick over a lantern? And wasn’t it somehow Mrs. O’Leary’s fault, whoever she was? But none of that is true. Whatever the spark, there was fuel aplenty in the city at large, Berg writes; the weather was an accelerant, but so were social conditions and political decisions. The Chicago fire turns out to be a rich case study not only in urban history and the sociology of catastrophe but in how people choose to remember their collective past.

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Read more: “What Really Started the Great Chicago Fire?,” by Margaret Talbot

From Our Pages

Emperor of Rome

by Mary Beard (Liveright)

Nonfiction

The author of the international best-seller “SPQR” returns with a thematic history of Roman emperors, exploring subjects such as palace dining, funeral processions, and paperwork to illuminate their daily lives, political strategies, and godlike aspirations across two hundred years of rule. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

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Pet

by Catherine Chidgey (Europa)

Fiction

In this suspenseful bildungsroman, Justine, a Catholic schoolgirl living in New Zealand in the nineteen-eighties, searches for a classroom thief, as the school’s suspicions shift from her to her best friend to a glamorous new teacher. Justine’s adolescence is colored by concerns both workaday and personal: a close female friendship, petty teen-age infighting, seizures that disrupt her recall, grief for her recently deceased mother. The novel occasionally jumps forward to 2014, when Justine, now an adult with a daughter of her own, tends to her dementia-stricken father. In these moments, Justine’s girlhood collapses into her present, and she appraises “shimmers in my memory” and revisits the mysteries of her youth.

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From Our Pages

A Man of Two Faces

by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)

Nonfiction

Nguyen’s memoir dissects his relationship with the United States, the country to which he came as a refugee from Vietnam when he was four years old, and with his parents, who had to create a new life for their family. Both analytical and impassioned, this exploration of the nature of identity is a valuable addition to the literature of diaspora. The book was excerpted by The New Yorker.

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American Visions

by Edward L. Ayers (Norton)

Nonfiction

This nimble history surveys the “visions” that Americans fashioned for the nation taking shape before them in the “lurching” period of 1800 to 1860. These ideals were expressed through literature, visual art, popular songs, political slogans, religious doctrines, and folk heroes (such as Johnny Appleseed, who, Ayers argues, represented “the American frontier cleansed of dispossession and despoliation”). Ayers anchors his study with familiar figures, but he pays particular attention to lesser-known Black abolitionists and Native Americans. The result is a dynamic portrait of a country in transition.

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From Our Pages

I Must Be Dreaming

by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury)

Fiction

It perhaps comes as no surprise that the cartoonist Roz Chast—into whose unique and zany mind readers of The New Yorker have peeked, via her instantly recognizable, beloved cartoons—has some weird dreams. Now, fans can see these dreams illustrated, along with an exploration into the history and meaning of dreams as we know them.

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Revolutionary Spring

by Christopher Clark (Crown)

Nonfiction

This Cambridge historian’s scrupulous survey takes up the interconnected uprisings that engulfed almost all of Europe in 1848. Arguing that they represent “the only truly European revolution that there has ever been,” Clark follows these revolts’ trajectories, from heady beginnings, when parliaments were convened and new constitutions proliferated, to counter-revolutionary backlashes. Resisting the “stigma of failure” that has tended to lurk over this period, he insists that it was consequential, calling it “the particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century. People, groups and ideas flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities whose trails can be traced through the decades that followed.”

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The Upstairs Delicatessen

by Dwight Garner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

Garner, whose book reviews are a highlight of the Times culture pages, serves up a commonplace book composed of literary quotations, advice for living, recipes, and a heaping side order of memoir. The assortment makes it clear that, in his reading and at the table, Garner, like A. J. Liebling before him, is a man of immense appetites. He likes his dishes unpretentious––his yearning for chili dogs is at least as powerful as his love of oysters––and his tastes as a reader range from thrillers centered on hardboiled boozers to “Ulysses,” in which grilled mutton kidneys thrill Leopold Bloom, with their “tang of faintly scented urine.” Garner’s mind––his “upstairs delicatessen”––is generous, excellent company.

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Fire in the Canyon

by Daniel Gumbiner (Astra)

Fiction

Set in the foothills of California’s gold country, this dread-laden novel follows a family who make their living cultivating grapes for winemaking as they attempt to resume their lives in the wake of a wildfire. After an evacuation,