The Best Books We’ve Read in 2024 So Far
The New Yorker Helen Phillips Willing Davidson Condé Nast
Reviews of notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico
The New Yorker
Skip to main content

The Best Books We Read This Week

Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.

By The New YorkerAugust 28, 2024

The Best Books We Read This Week

All Books

Nonfiction

Fiction & Poetry

Fierce Desires

by Rebecca L. Davis (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “The Forgotten History of Sex in America,” by Rebecca Mead

When you make a purchase using a link on this page, we may receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The New Yorker.

A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

by Noliwe Rooks (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Turning to Stone

by Marcia Bjornerud (Flatiron)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “Studying Stones Can Rock Your World,” by Kathryn Schulz

Books & Fiction

Book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature, twice a week.

Sign up »

Why Animals Talk

by Arik Kershenbaum (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Rich People Have Gone Away

by Regina Porter (Hogarth)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Grown Women

by Sarai Johnson (Harper)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Importance of Being Educable

by Leslie Valiant (Princeton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “What Does It Really Mean to Learn?,” by Joshua Rothman

Last Week’s Picks

Hitler’s People

by Richard J. Evans (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Sea Level

by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (Chicago)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

The Bookshop

by Evan Friss (Viking)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space?,” by Louis Menand

The Salt of the Universe

by Amy Leach (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Someone Like Us

by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Hum

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

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden (Avid Reader)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

All That Glitters

by Orlando Whitfield (Profile Books)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Previous Picks

Charlie Hustle

by Keith O’Brien (Pantheon)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

The Long Run

by Stacey D’Erasmo (Graywolf)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “Are You an Artist?,” by Alexandra Schwartz

Fifteen Cents on the Dollar

by Louise StoryEbony Reed (Harper)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

Circle of Hope

by Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Devil’s Contract

by Ed Simon (Melville)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Swift River

by Essie Chambers (Simon & Schuster)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Godwin

by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Keeping the Faith

by Brenda Wineapple (Random House)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Fire Exit

by Morgan Talty (Tin House)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Thom Gunn

by Michael Nott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Private Revolutions

by Yuan Yang (Viking)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Double Exposure

by Robert Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Loving Sylvia Plath

by Emily Van Duyne (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Garden Against Time

by Olivia Laing (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

The Winner

by Teddy Wayne (Harper)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Triumph of the Yuppies

by Tom McGrath (Grand Central)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “When Yuppies Ruled,” by Louis Menand

From Our Pages

Glory Days

by Simon Rich (Little, Brown)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The God of the Woods

by Liz Moore (Riverhead)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Bluestockings

by Susannah Gibson (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “The Original Bluestockings Were Fiercer Than You Imagined,” by Margaret Talbot

Gretel and the Great War

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

They Called It Peace

by Lauren Benton (Princeton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Friday Afternoon Club

by Griffin Dunne (Penguin)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

The Silence of the Choir

by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Europa)

Fiction

In this ambitious, Goncourt Prize-winning novel, seventy-two African asylum seekers arrive in a fictional town in rural Sicily after a harrowing journey, only to find themselves at the center of an ideological battle that splinters the community. Sarr moves adroitly between the viewpoints of a wide cast of characters—refugees, politicians, advocacy workers, xenophobic vigilantes, a priest, an eminent poet—while probing the complexities of Europe’s debate over asylum. Ultimately, the novel suggests that it is not only members of the far right, “obsessed with their phobia,” who deserve excoriation but also those more sympathetic to migrants’ plights who nonetheless “reduce a refugee to a walking tragedy.”

Buy on AmazonBookshop

In Tongues

by Thomas Grattan (MCD x FSG)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Change

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

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Woman of Interest

by Tracy O’Neill (HarperOne)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

Other Rivers

by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Consent

by Jill Ciment (Pantheon)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Night Flyer

by Tiya Miles (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman,” by Casey Cep

From Our Pages

Cue the Sun!

by Emily Nussbaum (Random House)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Work of Art

by Adam Moss (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Struggle for Taiwan

by Sulmaan Wasif Khan (Basic)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

The Coast Road

by Alan Murrin (HarperVia)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Combee

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

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman,” by Casey Cep

From Our Pages

Frostbite

by Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

On Call

by Anthony Fauci M.D. (Viking)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Long Island

by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Ask Me Again

by Clare Sestanovich (Knopf)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

Parade

by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Cosmic Connections

by Charles Taylor (Belknap)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity,” by Adam Gopnik

Orwell’s Ghosts

by Laura Beers (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones

by Priyanka Mattoo (Knopf)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Attachments

by Lucas Mann (University of Iowa)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Caledonian Road

by Andrew O’Hagan (Norton)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “Andrew O’Hagan’s Bonfire of the Vanities,” by Anna Russell

The C.I.A.

by Hugh Wilford (Basic)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Hey, Zoey

by Sarah Crossan (Little, Brown)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Achilles Trap

by Steve Coll (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

It has been tempting to view the C.I.A. as omniscient. Yet Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows just how often the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives. Saddam saw spies around every corner. This was reasonable, given the C.I.A.’s history, but Coll indicates that it was exactly the wrong fear. U.S. intelligence had missed Saddam’s Kuwait-invasion preparations, his nuclear program, and his subsequent disarmament. His real problem was not what the C.I.A. knew but what it didn’t.

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Cull of the Wild

by Hugh Warwick (Bloomsbury Wildlife)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Committed

by Suzanne Scanlon (Vintage)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Sidetracks

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

Poetry

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Light Eaters

by Zoë Schlanger (Harper)

Nonfiction

The contemporary world of botany is divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But research in recent decades has prompted the question that animates Schlanger’s book: Are plants intelligent? Schlanger writes about scientists who are studying how plants change their shape and respond to sound, how they use electricity to convey information, how they send one another chemical signals. Along the way, she becomes a sort of anthropologist of botanists. The book’s focus on the researchers themselves overcomes a challenge inherent to science writing: where to find drama. “The Light Eaters” is a special piece of science writing for the way it solves the genre’s bind; it doesn’t force people or their findings into narrative engines. Instead, the field of botany itself functions like a character, one undergoing a potentially radical change, with all the excitement, discomfort, and uncertainty that transformation brings. The book’s power comes from showing a field in flux and reminding us that ideas have their own life cycles: from crackpot theory to utter embarrassment to real possibility to the stuff of textbooks.

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “A New Book About Plant Intelligence Highlights the Messiness of Scientific Change,” by Rachel Riederer

From Our Pages

Beautiful Days

by Zach Williams (Doubleday)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Playbook

by James Shapiro (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Catland

by Kathryn Hughes (Hopkins)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “The Man Who Reinvented the Cat,” by Rebecca Mead

I Cannot Control Everything Forever

by Emily C. Bloom (St. Martin’s)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Matrescence

by Lucy Jones (Pantheon)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “ ‘Matrescence,’ and the Transformations of Motherhood,” by Anna Russell

The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

Edited by Frank AbeFloyd Cheung (Penguin Classics)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Vagabonds

by Oskar Jensen (The Experiment)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

The Other Olympians

by Michael Waters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Invention of the Darling

by Li-Young Lee (Norton)

Poetry

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

A Body Made of Glass

by Caroline Crampton (Ecco)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Growth

by Daniel Susskind (Belknap)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Little Seed

by Wei Tchou (Deep Vellum /A Strange Object)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two

by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics Books)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

They Came for the Schools

by Mike Hixenbaugh (Mariner)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

The Ministry of Time

by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Faraway the Southern Sky

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

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Liberalism as a Way of Life

by Alexandre Lefebvre (Princeton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Natural Magic

by Renée Bergland (Princeton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Traces of Enayat

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

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Tits Up

by Sarah Thornton (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “We Must Defend the Bust,” by Lauren Michele Jackson

From Our Pages

The Art of Dying

by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Whale Fall

by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Free and Equal

by Daniel Chandler (Knopf)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

All Fours

by Miranda July (Riverhead)

Fiction

July’s second novel is a study of crisis—the crisis being how middle age changes sex, marriage, and ambition. The unnamed narrator is a forty-five-year-old in L.A. with a mellow music-producer husband and a precocious seven-year-old. Less than an hour into a solo road trip to New York, she stops at a gas station, where a young man cleans her windshield. Soon the pair has succumbed to a magnetic, earth-shattering attraction, and the narrator has checked into a nearby motel, where she renovates her room in the style of an opulent Parisian hotel. The room becomes a love nest, of a kind, but a terrible deadline looms. The narrator’s putative road trip must end. What will happen when she goes home to face her life? July’s moving, very funny book is at once buoyant about the possibilities of starting over and clear-eyed about its costs.

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “Miranda July Turns the Lights On,” by Alexandra Schwartz

Women and the Piano

by Susan Tomes (Yale)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Dogland

by Tommy Tomlinson (Avid Reader)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Revolusi

by David Van Reybrouck (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Piglet

by Lottie Hazell (Henry Holt)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Lucky

by Jane Smiley (Knopf)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

The Invention of Prehistory

by Stefanos Geroulanos (Liveright)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Shakespeare’s Sisters

by Ramie Targoff (Knopf)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

This Strange Eventful History

by Claire Messud (Norton)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

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

Limitarianism

by Ingrid Robeyns (Astra)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

How to Baby

by Liana Finck (The Dial Press)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Rough Trade

by Katrina Carrasco (MCD x FSG)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

Life Wants You Dead

by Evan Waite (Chronicle Books)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Leaving

by Roxana Robinson (Norton)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Neighbors and Other Stories

by Diane Oliver (Grove)

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

From Our Pages

H Is for Hope

by Elizabeth Kolbert (Ten Speed)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Butter

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

Fiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

All the Campus Lawyers

by Louis H. GuardJoyce P. Jacobsen (Harvard)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “Academic Freedom Under Fire,” by Louis Menand

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

by Anthony Bale (Norton)

Nonfiction

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

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Knife

by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

Nonfiction

In August, 2022, more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assassin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on doing so for nearly half a minute. Rushdie’s first thought was “So it’s you.” His second thought was “Why now?” Rushdie’s short masterpiece is a memoir about almost dying, the miracle of surviving, and being reconciled to a threat that could not be forgotten or outrun: “Living was my victory. But the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat.” Ultimately, his account is an inspiration. “After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

Buy on AmazonBookshop

James

by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

Fiction

Since releasing his début work of fiction, in 1983, Everett has published roughly a novel every other year in addition to dozens of short stories, essays, and articles, plus a children’s book and a half-dozen poetry collections. His fictional protagonists have included ornery cowpokes and professors of esoterica. Much of his work is narrated in the first person, yet his “I” is often a fragmentary and destabilizing affair. In “James,” he retells the story of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion Jim. Conferring interiority upon perhaps the most famous fictional emblem of American slavery after Uncle Tom, the book seems to participate in the marketable trope of “writing back” from the margins. But there is no easy way to categorize what Everett is up to with this searching account of a man’s manifold liberation. The novel’s title is the name Jim chooses for himself.

Buy on AmazonBookshop

Read more: “Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean,” by Maya Binyam

From Our Pages

All Things Are Too Small

by Becca Rothfeld (Metropolitan)

Nonfiction

Rothfeld’s new collection of piquant essays eschews the contemporary predilection for minimali