The Best Books of the Year So Far

• 
  Everything Evolves

  by Mark Vellend (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  In this ambitious book, Vellend, a biologist, attempts to establish a “generalized evolutionary theory” to stand alongside physics as a crucial paradigm for understanding “how everything came to be.” Here, biological evolution is merely one instance of a more fundamental process that can be seen in any system in which “new variants are produced, inherited, and moved around” and only some variants proliferate. Stepping away from living things, Vellend finds this dynamic at work in the development of violins and typewriters, in the technologies undergirding ChatGPT, and in the spread of cultural values like individualism.

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• 
  A New New Me

  by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  Kinga, the forty-year-old protagonist of the novel “A New New Me,” suffers from a peculiar affliction: there are seven of her. Each takes charge of a day of the week, leaving voice memos and diary entries for the others; their texts and transcripts form the book. Kinga-A is a striver at a corporate bank who mainlines Snoop Dogg with her morning coffee. Kinga-B works at the same company, but with less zeal; Kinga-C impersonates antique dealers and window washers. On “maintenance” Thursday, Kinga-D glides through appointments set by her predecessors, and Fridays and Saturdays are given over to pleasure and partying. Sabbath Kinga is an enigma—each Sunday she claims to stay in bed and catch up on TV, though the fitness tracker on the Kingas’ shared phone suggests clandestine trips to who knows where. There’s always been a flighty, avoidant streak in Oyeyemi’s fiction, as if she wants to be telling a different story than the one she’s begun. This novel is, in a way, about that very impulse: the lure of complexity as a means of escape.

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  Read more: “Helen Oyeyemi’s Novel of Cognitive Dissonance,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  Pariah

  by Dan Fesperman (Knopf)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this audaciously spoofy spy novel is Hal Knight, a comedian who has resigned in disgrace from his other job, as a Democratic congressman, after a video depicting him insulting an actress went viral. Hal is hiding out on a Caribbean island when the C.I.A. asks him to accept an invitation for an official visit to Bolrovia, a fictional Eastern European country whose autocratic President is a fan of his. In exchange for gathering intel, Hal is promised a Stateside image rehabilitation—presuming that he makes it out alive. Baked into the novel’s high comedy is an awareness of the thin line between politics and show business; Hal sees his assignment as “24/7 improv, and with a less forgiving audience.”

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Books & Fiction



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• 
  Positive Obsession

  by Susana M. Morris (Amistad)

  Nonfiction

  This nimble biography examines the life of the legendary science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose works, such as “Parable of the Sower,” often articulated unsettling visions of social collapse. Born in California in 1947 to a domestic worker and a veteran, Butler found escape in sci-fi books as a child. As Morris shows, Butler’s stories, which reckoned with chattel slavery, climate catastrophe, and fascism, were as deeply attuned to West African culture and myth as they were to the American civil-rights movement. Yet Morris contends that Butler’s stories “were not nihilistic predictions but a sort of love offering for readers to receive and be changed by.”

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Last Week’s Picks

• 
  Baldwin

  by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  The life of James Baldwin—a complex, quotable, and slightly otherworldly human being—has long inspired biographies. In the latest one, Boggs sets about to fill in some of the blanks in Baldwin’s love life, which, the biographer felt, had been downplayed in earlier works. Boggs’s book, at more than six hundred pages, makes a hugely important contribution by taking us to the heart of one of Baldwin’s central messages: We’re afraid of love, because we’re afraid of exposing our true selves, and we invent meaningless categories, like Black and white, homosexual and heterosexual, in order to avoid a reckoning with ourselves. This was an urgent problem for Baldwin, and Boggs shows us that, alongside Baldwin’s crusade for civil rights, there was always a private search for a stable, loving relationship.

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  Read more: “The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin,” by Louis Menand
• 
  Empty Vessel

  by Ian Kumekawa (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  This clever micro-history tracks the voyage of two barges through the roiling economic changes of the past half century. Built near Stockholm in 1979, the vessels swapped names, owners, and flags as they took in British troops in the Falkland Islands, held prisoners in New York City, and housed oil workers in Nigeria. In Kumekawa’s telling, theirs is an itinerary that drifts along deep historical currents, from British imperial decline and mass incarceration to globalization, financialization, and the development of the offshore economy. Along the way, Kumekawa brings readers on excursions into the collapse of Sweden’s shipbuilding industry, the rise of automation at Volkswagen, and the emergence of the Bahamas as a tax haven.

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• 
  Culpability

  by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau)

  Fiction

  In this tightly paced novel, domestic intrigue is transposed into the fraught world of A.I. The inciting incident is a car crash that takes place while a teen-age boy is at the wheel, driving with the help of an automated assistant. As the boy’s family, who was in the car with him, regroups at a vacation rental after the accident, questions about responsibility arise. Who, they wonder, was really driving? Who is liable, financially or morally? This Zeitgeisty discussion is balanced with plenty of drama: as it turns out, the family’s vacation house is next to a compound owned by a shady tech billionaire—a discovery that unleashes a torrent of deception.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  To Lose a War

  by Jon Lee Anderson (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Anderson’s book, built on two decades of reporting for this magazine, traces the long-running disaster of America’s intervention in Afghanistan. Clear-eyed and close to the ground, Anderson often saw what the occupying forces could not, and his book delivers hard-won lessons about projecting power abroad.

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• 
  Lili Is Crying

  by Hélène Bessette, translated from the French by Kate Briggs (New Directions)

  Fiction

  This propulsive mother-daughter psychodrama was published to great acclaim in France in 1953 before falling into obscurity. It begins with a young woman named Lili living in a Provençal village, where she works at a boarding house run by her mother, who is alternately coddling and domineering. Eventually, Lili manages to escape and marry, though in the process she loses her illusions about love. When the couple moves back to town, a fierce rivalry forms between mother and husband, setting off a widening conflict that involves sexual jealousy, the Holocaust, and wartime profiteering. The novel’s signature is its unusual form, which strings together short, hypnotic phrases, blurring the boundary between novel and poem.

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• 
  Shade

  by Sam Bloch (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  Shade is a straightforward solution to the problem of a warming world. But as this thought-provoking series of dispatches about the history of shade shows, its deployment is uneven and often politically charged. Providing protection from the sun was long considered a civic responsibility: in Mesopotamia, it was achieved by building cities on grids. But in the twentieth century the development of air-conditioning and automobiles stymied community-minded urban planning. Bloch, an environmental journalist, examines how shade is now a privilege, often denied to farmworkers, the homeless, and residents of poor neighborhoods.

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Previous Picks

• 
  King of Kings

  by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  This timely new book about the Iranian Revolution, by the reporter Scott Anderson, is a lively tale of palace intrigue and political miscalculation. Drawing almost exclusively on English-language sources in addition to interviews (including with Empress Farah, the Shah’s third wife, who is still living), Anderson reconstructs the bungling and drift that upended Iran in the late nineteen-seventies. By the time Iran’s revolution was over, it had drawn in two million people, a greater proportion of the population than any twentieth-century revolution before it. And yet, as Anderson writes, “the closer one examines it, the more mysterious and implausible it all seems.” A large, prosperous country became a hard-line semi-theocracy, but the factors that might explain its abrupt upheaval were hardly unique. Could one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century have been, at bottom, simply a fluke?

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  Read more: “The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Make It Ours

  by Robin Givhan (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  In this biography of the late Virgil Abloh—the founder of the luxury streetwear brand Off-White, and the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear line from 2018 until his untimely death, in 2021—there are few moments that highlight his prowess as a designer. Instead, the narrative centers Abloh’s collaborative instincts and his genius for slamming contexts together, often in ways that ironized fashion itself. One episode related by Givhan, a Pulitzer-winning fashion critic, involves Abloh screen-printing flannels produced for a now defunct Ralph Lauren sub-label to create “new” pieces that sold for more than five hundred dollars. As one of Abloh’s enduring bon mots has it, “Design is the freshest scam. Quote me on that one.”

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• 
  A Day Like Any Other

  by Nathan Kernan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Kernan’s intrepid new biography of the American poet James Schuyler, over thirty years in the making, plucks its title from “February,” one of Schuyler’s early poems. (The phrase is at once blasé and foreboding; we say “it was a day like any other” when catastrophe awaits around the bend.) Schuyler, one of the generation of poets and painters who would come, in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to be known as the New York School, was lucid and serene in his poetry, which belied the turbulence of the life behind it. In this filigreed presentation of Schuyler’s life, Kernan explores the unique terroir of his early years, the antics of the New York scene, and the special torment the poet suffered in the seventies and eighties. Schuyler once told a friend that “life had been after him with a sledgehammer,” but his poems, bright and humane, are a marvel of twentieth-century literature.

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  Read more: “How the Poet James Schuyler Wrung Sense from Sensibility,” by Dan Chiasson
• 
  Exophony

  by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)

  Nonfiction

  In these deft essays, Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, wanders through cities and languages, treating every border crossing as an adventure. Meditating on the notion of “exophony”—writing outside one’s native tongue—each installment blends anecdote, literary criticism, and cultural history to examine the “poetic ravine” that exists between languages. Tawada was born in Japan and immigrated to Germany more than forty years ago; as she recounts making her way from Dakar to Seoul, Cape Town to Tübingen, she argues that “human beings in the modern world are repositories for countless languages that unmake and undo one another.”

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• 
  The Sisters

  by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  The titular sisters of this expansive, lightly metafictional novel, the Mikkolas, are haunted by an intergenerational curse. At the dawn of the millennium, the three girls meet a neighbor who develops a lifelong fascination with their stories. Over more than thirty years, as the characters move across Sweden, Tunisia, and the U.S., the neighbor, Jonas—who shares not only the author’s name but also his Swedish-Tunisian heritage and his occupation—witnesses each sister evolve. Jonas gradually becomes a literary detective, tasking himself with solving the mystery of the Mikkola curse: whom it came from, how it connects him with the sisters, and what must be done to break it.

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• 
  A Flower Traveled in My Blood

  by Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  During Argentina’s last military dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983, a group of women, now known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, suffered the loss of their children—kidnapped, tortured, and murdered—and of their infant grandchildren, who were stolen and given away. The Abuelas’ search for those grandchildren is the subject of this accomplished book, which brings the plight of these women into an English-language nonfiction narrative for the first time. As Cohen Gilliland, a former Economist correspondent in Argentina, unspools the story of these disappearances, she delivers a timely message about repression under authoritarian regimes: their worst actions don’t end when the regime does. The pain persists, shaping countless lives for years to come.

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  Read more: “Searching for the Children of the Disappeared,” by Graciela Mochkofsky
• 
  From Our Pages

  Putting Myself Together

  by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Over the fifty-plus years of her writing career, Kincaid, an essayist and novelist, has refined a uniquely lyrical critical voice, at once impressionistic and exact. This collection of fiction and nonfiction from 1974 on shows Kincaid applying her crystal prose to subjects including Diana Ross and the semiotics of Black women’s stardom to Robert Frost’s house, to which she makes a pilgrimage, through the woods, every summer. Several tend to ideas that emerge from her experience cultivating a garden in Vermont, where she now lives. Kincaid was a New Yorker Staff Writer from 1976 to 1996. Two of the pieces in the book, including “The Disturbances of the Garden,” originally appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Blessings and Disasters

  by Alexis Okeowo (Henry Holt)

  Nonfiction

  Okeowo grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. In this book, which blends memoir and reportage, she tells the troubled history of her home state. We meet a compelling cast of characters, including the chief of the state’s only federally recognized tribe, and the director of the state’s confederate memorial park. In one memorable section, excerpted in the magazine, we encounter Tina Johnson, who, at the height of the #MeToo movement, accused the conservative politician Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her, and has since faced enormous backlash. All of this is set against Okeowo’s own upbringing, in a family of Nigerian immigrants. She writes, “In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Broken King

  by Michael Thomas (Grove)

  Nonfiction

  Thomas’s memoir deftly chronicles his experiences growing up Black in Boston, his complicated relationship with his father, and his struggles with depression and alcoholism as he became a writer and a parent in his own right. An excerpt from the book appeared on newyorker.com, in the form of an essay about his father and going to Fenway.

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• 
  Clint

  by Shawn Levy (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  Clint Eastwood’s filmmaking draws little from his life, which makes the prospect of a biography adding much to the familiar view of the legend, who is now ninety-five, seem unlikely. But this fine-grained and deeply researched unfolding of Eastwood’s career reveals fascinating truths. Levy mines Eastwood’s formative experiences in the Hollywood of the nineteen-fifties to present the star as both a child of his time and an utterly distinctive personality—a product of a society and a system from which he nonetheless stood apart. As Levy tracks Eastwood’s career as an actor, a producer, and a director, he conveys a sense of restless activity and spontaneity, the fundamental form of which was Eastwood’s choice of stories. He rarely commissioned scripts, preferring to receive them readymade, and he distrusted rewrites: “When something hits you and excites your interest, there’s really no reason to kill it with improvements.”

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  Read more: ““Clint” Highlights the Artistic Modernity of an Old-School Man,” by Richard Brody
• 
  Moderation

  by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

  Fiction

  In this biting novel, a fiercely independent young woman named Girlie works as a content moderator for a virtual-reality platform, Playground, that is at once a game-like diversion and an immersive therapeutic tool. Its inventor imagined that people would one day be prescribed alternate realities to help them recover from P.T.S.D. and depression—but, before he could see this vision to fruition, he died, possibly by suicide. As Girlie learns more about the inventor through the platform’s co-founder, she finds herself falling in love at the same time as she becomes ensnared in a corporate conflict over Playground’s future. Castillo explores the wonders and limitations of technology while skewering its stewards’ appetite for power.

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• 
  Inventing the Renaissance

  by Ada Palmer (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

  Palmer, a historian at the University of Chicago, digs into the daily lives of Renaissance luminaries to reveal not idealists dreaming of a better world but the usual tangle of self-promotion, delusion, and fakery. The Renaissance city-states, often romanticized as centers of enlightened rule, emerge here as impoverished, violent, and chaotic. Palmer resituates the period in the divided natures of its leading figures. What we inherit, she suggests, is less a golden age than a glittering illusion—assembled, reassembled, and ultimately betrayed by the fantasies of posterity.

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  Read more: “Was the Renaissance Real?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  The Key to Everything

  by Margaret A. Brucia (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  The pioneering poet May Swenson arrived in New York in 1936, when she was twenty-three, anticipating a personal and creative flowering. She came from Utah, where she was born to Swedish immigrant parents, devout Mormons who raised their children in kind. Imaginative and ambitious, May left the church and her beloved family to pursue an artistically, politically, and sexually liberated life, eventually establishing herself as a unique figure in modern poetry. Brucia’s vibrant portrait, set against the mercurial backdrop of mid-century Manhattan, draws on Swenson’s diaries and her extensive correspondence with her fellow-poet Elizabeth Bishop to examine Swenson’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project; her romantic relationships, most of which involved women; and her cultivation of the playful, experimental literary style that would define her career.

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• 
  Total Defense

  by Andrew Preston (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

  For decades, American leaders have seen national security as a globe-spanning problem, rather than one that ends at the United States’ borders. In this finely argued, original history, Preston traces this expansive vision to the late nineteen-thirties and early forties. The Roosevelt Administration had just issued Americans a fresh social contract, grounded in the welfare programs of the New Deal, when Germany and Japan began to kindle crises in Europe and Asia. Roosevelt responded by broadening his model of social protection, promising to safeguard Americans not only from economic insecurity but also from far-flung dangers—a mission that would help guide the United States into the Second World War. Though the New Deal eventually withered, this all-encompassing approach to national security would continue to lead Washington into global conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and beyond.

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• 
  The World at First Light

  by Bernd Roeck, translated from the German by Patrick Baker (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Roeck, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Zurich, adopts a wide-angle view of the Renaissance, taking in the medieval world that birthed it and the Enlightenment that succeeded it. His Renaissance begins in the twelfth century—what we usually call the high Middle Ages—and extends through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Baroque. The book is enlivened by vivid cameos, including the first man since antiquity known to have celebrated his own birthday, a milestone of individualism on par with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. For Roeck, the Renaissance was neither a final flowering of the ancient world nor a prelude to modernity; it was modernity itself.

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  Read more: “Was the Renaissance Real?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Misbehaving at the Crossroads

  by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  In this genre-blurring collection, which shifts between memoir, history, and poetry, Jeffers charts her place in a line of women whose lives have been shaped by slavery, racism, and resistance. Organized by the concept of the “crossroads,” a place of “difficulty and possibility,” Jeffers’s essays recall a range of formative experiences, from her first encounters with Alice Walker’s writing to a searing meeting with James Baldwin. Her disappointments with political figures, including Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, are tempered by insight into the challenges they faced; Harris, for instance, was “expected not only to be perfect but to transcend perfection.”

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• 
  The Mission

  by Tim Weiner (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  Weiner, a longtime national-security correspondent, opens this book amid the steady, fruitless drumbeat of C.I.A. intelligence about Al Qaeda, capturing the mood of dread that gripped Washington in the aftermath of September 11th. As in his acclaimed earlier work, “Legacy of Ashes,” Weiner draws on deep sourcing to lay bare the errancies of American intelligence—this time, as the war on terror endlessly expands. He documents the agency’s torture programs and its growing reliance on drone strikes, tracking how the campaign against terrorism blurred legal and ethical boundaries. But “The Mission” also brings the story into the disorienting present, chronicling the astonishing reversal in the C.I.A.’s public standing during Trump’s first term, when the President openly feuded with the agency over Russian election interference. Weiner closes with a cautious faith in the agency’s rank and file, shadowed by a clear sense of foreboding. What happens to the C.I.A. when the threats come from above?

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  Read more: “What Will Become of the C.I.A.?,” by Keith Gessen
• 
  The Girls Who Grew Big

  by Leila Mottley (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This striking novel tracks the friendships among a group of teen moms as they struggle and strive in a small, gossipy beach town in Florida’s sticky-hot panhandle. Simone, their strong-willed leader, gave birth to twins in the back of her boyfriend’s truck. A young woman named Adela joins the pack after her parents send her away from Indiana, in shame, to live with her grandmother. Her arrival causes friction—one mom falls in love with her; Simone, on the other hand, is not so sure that Adela belongs—until a series of crises forces the women to see that, together, they can be “mother and child and freed, all at once.”

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• 
  The Place of Tides

  by James Rebanks (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  Fjærøy, an island in the Norwegian archipelago, is the setting of this rumination on preserving ancient traditions in the modern world. Rebanks, whose other books center on his life as a shepherd in England’s Lake District, follows a septuagenarian named Anna Måsøy as she embarks on her last season of caring for eider ducks, a species whose survival is threatened by mink farming. Måsøy’s family has been tending to the ducks for generations, and she spends her days gathering and drying seaweed, fortifying stone walls, and building roosts for the eiders to hatch their ducklings, before finally collecting their precious eiderdown after they return to the sea.

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• 
  Wild Thing

  by Sue Prideaux (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Prideaux’s biography of Gauguin—iconoclastic Post-Impressionist—is the first to appear in English in thirty years. Gauguin, who was born in Paris, spent more than a decade of his life in French Polynesia. For many years, he was celebrated, in the words of his previous English biographer, David Sweetman, as “a mythic figure who devoted himself to immortalizing an innocent native dreamworld.” More recently, he has been derided instead as a colonizer and a pedophile. Prideaux, an admirer of Gauguin’s art, felt that she couldn’t sustain the “dishonest and hypocritical position of loving the paintings and hating the man.” So her book sets out to reëxamine Gauguin’s vision, determined to untangle the misdeeds from the mythos, and the mythos from the man.

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  Read more: “What Was Paul Gauguin Looking For?,” by Alexandra Schwartz
• 
  The Scrapbook

  by Heather Clark (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Anna, an American student at Harvard, falls deeply and unaccountably in love with Christoph, who is on exchange from Germany, in this melancholy début novel. Clark’s narrative begins in 1996, but her characters’ entanglement develops under the long shadow of the Second World War, during which their grandfathers fought on opposing sides. As Anna contends with her infatuation, and with the weight of history, Christoph alternately embraces and eludes her, creating a sense that nothing—in their relationship, in the world—is what it seems. Full of references to music, literature, and philosophy, as well as heady discussions of Nazism and the complexities of national memory, this ambitious book, by an accomplished biographer of Sylvia Plath, ultimately fails to connect the stakes of its central romance to those of the larger questions that loom throughout.

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• 
  Whiskerology

  by Sarah Gold McBride (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  Gold McBride, a historian, traces hair’s cultural meaning across the centuries. In medieval and early modern Europe, hair was regarded as something almost external to the body, an appendage rather than an expression of self. By the eighteenth century, it had become an ornament, a visible marker of taste and social rank. The nineteenth century—Gold McBride’s main terrain—saw hair recast as intrinsic, biological, and diagnostic: a substance that revealed the essence of a person. “Whiskerology” is a serious academic book with many points to make about race and gender and their entanglement with coiffure in the United States. But Gold McBride doesn’t shy from delightful anecdotes for those who like to magpie through history’s weirdnesses alongside its grave themes.

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  Read more: “The First Time America Went Beard Crazy,” by Margaret Talbot
• 
  The Strangers

  by Ekow Eshun (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  This stylish group portrait of five Black luminaries—the actor Ira Aldridge, the explorer Matthew Henson, the soccer player Justin Fashanu, the psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, and the activist Malcolm X—is a feat of historical imagination. Eshun’s deeply researched narrative deftly evokes particular chapters of his subjects’ lives, including Aldridge’s arrival in antebellum New York City, where Black ambition was openly mocked, and Fashanu’s struggles to conceal his homosexuality from the press. As Eshun follows the men from crowded New York streets to raucous London alleys to the “delirious sprawl” of Lagos, he occasionally turns his focus inward to recall events from his own life.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Long Distance

  by Aysegül Savas (Bloomsbury)

  Fiction

  In Savaş’s astute and absorbing collection of stories, her protagonists find themselves questioning long-held assumptions about their innate qualities as encounters with friends and strangers, lovers and family members, prompt reëvaluations that can sometimes be gently forgiving and at other times quietly devastating. Several of the entries, including the title story, first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  A Marriage at Sea

  by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  In 1972, an English couple, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, decided to make their home on the ocean. Maurice worked at a printing shop, and Maralyn was a tax-office clerk in the Midlands. Living on a boat was Maralyn’s idea, but it was Maurice who decided that they shouldn’t bring aboard a radio or electronic equipment of any kind—in order, he said, to “preserve their freedom from outside interference.” In 1973, a sperm whale collided with their boat, destroying it, and they were set adrift in the Pacific for a hundred and eighteen days, sustained by little more than a raft, a dinghy, and a store of tinned food and clean water that rapidly dwindled. Elmhirst writes about what happened next, putting the reader inside a world that is both tiny and vast, at once ruthlessly monotonous and violently unpredictable. “A Marriage at Sea” is an enthralling account of a partnership in extremis, and of how the commonest hazards of married life—claustrophobia, codependence, boundarylessness—become totalized amid disaster.

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  Read more: “ ‘A Marriage at Sea’ Is a Study of Couplehood in Extremis,” by Jessica Winter
• 
  Theater Kid

  by Jeffrey Seller (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  Seller, the producer of such lauded musicals as “Rent,” “In the Heights,” and “Hamilton,” chronicles his path from Michigan to Broadway in this graceful memoir. Seller, the adopted son of a mother who worked night shifts at a drugstore and a father whose jobs included circus clown, traces the arc of his life, from discovering his homosexuality at the onset of the AIDS epidemic to working at his own theatre agency. He is bracingly forthright about the harsh realities of the industry, as when he mentions a producer who was more upset about a star losing his voice than about a promoter who had just died by suicide.

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• 
  The Invention of Design

  by Maggie Gram (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  In this blend of history and polemic, Gram argues that the design industry has become a handmaiden of capitalism. In well-crafted profiles of notable designers, including the ceramicist Eva Zeisel and the New Deal-era techno-utopian Walter Teague, Gram shows how contemporary design, whose roots she places in the Industrial Revolution, has evolved beyond simple aesthetic considerations into a “megaconcept” combining notions of “beauty, function, problem solving, human-centeredness, experience, even thinking itself.” She celebrates the designers she profiles, but her message—that we can’t design our way out of structural problems, like the climate crisis—is bleak.

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• 
  Homework

  by Geoff Dyer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This new memoir, by the English writer Geoff Dyer, tracks the comic confusions of a working-class British upbringing. Dyer—a coolly funny stylist and the author of the brilliant “Out of Sheer Rage”—is the only child of a Gloucestershire sheet-metal worker and a school lunch lady. His childhood was shaped by the family dictum of “accepting one’s lot.” With extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration, Dyer recounts the details of his youth: the intricacies of Airfix model airplanes, the TV programs that his family watched, his favorite sweets, the painstaking assembly of a Brooke Bond tea-card library. Throughout, Dyer’s rise is painted as solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened at all.

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  Read more: “A Memoir of Working-Class Britain Wrings Playfulness from Pain,” by James Wood
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Aviator and the Showman

  by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Shapiro’s book, which was excerpted in the magazine, looks at Amelia Earhart without the usual mythologizing and finds an amiably cunning social climber (and error-prone pilot) whose rise to fame, guided in part by her publicity-savvy husband, resembles that of a modern-day influencer.

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• 
  The Compound

  by Aisling Rawle (Random House)

  Fiction

  In this delightfully absorbing novel, an isolated house in the middle of a menacing desert landscape serves as the backdrop of a reality-TV competition. There, a cast of attractive young men and women are recorded with hidden cameras as they complete “tasks”—some innocuous, some sadistic—concocted by the show’s producers. They also pursue romances; if, at sunrise, they are not in bed with a member of the opposite sex, they are eliminated. The novel’s narrator, Lily, convinced that the outside world offers her only “drudgery, day after day,” resolves to win. As the show progresses, the book morphs into a potent examination of self-objectification, of the existential tedium of work, and of the disorientation produced by living in a world where what is genuine and what is performance are difficult to disentangle.

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• 
  How We Grow Up

  by Matt Richtel (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  Richtel, a journalist for the New York Times, sets out to examine the state of modern adolescence, entering a long-running debate over whether smartphone use is increasing anxiety and depression among teen-agers. Rather than questioning the existence of a teen mental-health crisis, Richtel seeks to contextualize it. Phones, in his view, aren’t a singular explanation, even if they are a legitimate concern. Instead, he believes that the distress felt by teens today is a reasonable response to a world whose challenges are increasingly abstract and intellectual rather than physical. At the same time, adolescence itself has changed as the age of puberty has fallen, leaving young people stranded for longer than ever in a state of heightened vulnerability and laying them especially open to the temptations of the smartphone. Here, Richtel treats teens and their phones as part of the broader phenomenon of our tech-­mediated lives. “Adolescents do not just form their own identities,” he writes. “They help form ours. They are the future-makers, and they’ve been doing that for a long time.”

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  Read more: “Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives?,” by Molly Fischer
• 
  Is a River Alive?

  by Robert Macfarlane (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  Rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada provide the settings for this elegant travelogue, which asks whether a natural entity, such as a river, can be regarded as a living thing. Macfarlane approaches the question by contrasting rivers’ legal rights with those enjoyed by corporations—often quite close to those afforded to persons—which dam, drill, and divert rivers in damaging ways. He also considers the “rights of nature” movement. In 2008, some of its precepts were enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution, a development that has helped to protect the country’s waterways—an example of policy that Macfarlane sees as a cause for optimism. “Rivers are easily wounded,” he writes. “But given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed.”

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• 
  The Doorman

  by Chris Pavone (MCD)

  Fiction

  The events of this politically attuned thriller unspool over one fatal day at the Bohemia, a luxury apartment building in Manhattan, where a doorman finds himself ensnared in the high-stakes dramas of the ostentatiously wealthy residents. Pavone deploys signifiers of the contemporary culture wars to conjure a relentlessly polarized New York City, where race, class, and politics suffuse every interaction. Embracing a diverse cast of characters—including society ladies, defense contractors, and a Ukrainian super who spends his evenings on Grindr—the novel ultimately turns on a festering marriage, an ill-fated affair, and a business relationship gone sour, all of which combine to trap the “unerringly patient and unfailingly nice” doorman in a cataclysm.

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• 
  Cooler Than Cool

  by C. M. Kushins (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  Elmore Leonard, who died in 2013, was the author of more than forty novels—Westerns, thrillers, and crime fiction, including “Rum Punch,” “Get Shorty,” and “Glitz.” Kushins’s biography demonstrates that Leonard, as often as not, was writing much closer to the bone than many of his readers suspected. The sense of nothing going to waste—of experiences, lowly or intense, being stashed away for creative recycling—resounds through the book, which excavates Leonard’s relationship to alcohol, his encounters with Hollywood, and his sheer discipline. The result of the latter was a body of work that started a fresh chapter in American prose, defined by a keen sensitivity to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English. Many folks, in many novels, might remark, “You certainly have a long winter.” But only someone in a Leonard novel would reply, “Or you could look at it as a kind of asshole spring.”

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  Read more: “Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch,” by Anthony Lane
• 
  Among Friends

  by Hal Ebbott (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  This finely calibrated début novel hinges on a decades-long friendship between two men, a therapist of humble origins and a lawyer born to money. While the men are at the lawyer’s upstate home celebrating his birthday with their wives and each couple’s teen-age daughter, distinct events—among them an unsparing comment made in private and an ankle injury sustained on the tennis court—seem to set up a monstrous act, the aftereffects of which lay bare the unacknowledged self-interest the relationships are built upon. The book is as discerning as it is pitiless about the transactional nature of human connection. As the therapist reflects, when a friendship is working, “each of you knows that you’ve gone somewhere you can’t get on your own.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Hunter

  by Shuang Xuetao, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (Granta Magazine Editions)

  Fiction

  These stories, from one of China’s most exciting young writers, blend gritty realism with the surreal to capture the texture of contemporary life in the country. From a son who takes his father on a nighttime ambulance ride that unearths buried traumas, to a method actor who grows increasingly suspicious of the world around him, Shuang’s works demonstrate the precarity of his characters’ lives and their environments with a flair for genre and a distinctive, digressive humour. A story from the collection first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Mafalda

  by Quino, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne (Elsewhere Editions)

  Fiction

  The comic strip “Mafalda” was published in Argentina from 1964 to 1973, and has remained a cultural touchstone for Latin Americans ever since, selling tens of millions of books in Spanish alone. Translated into more than twenty-five languages, the strip addressed such subjects as nuclear annihilation, government inefficiency, the “brain drain,” military coups, labor strikes, and the pressures of inflation, and it did so without being didactic since these topics were viewed from the perspective of a precocious and unrelentingly curious six-year-old girl. In June, the first of five volumes that will reproduce the complete “Mafalda” run in an English translation, by Frank Wynne, was released—the strip’s first publication in the United States.

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  Read more: “The Argentinean Comic Strip That Galvanized a Generation,” by Daniel Alarcón
• 
  I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

  by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  This affecting memoir, by a Palestinian American poet, is structured around the arc of a surrogate pregnancy, but it bears the emotional weight of the events that preceded it: infertility, miscarriages, a strained marriage, and exile. Told in fragments, the book spans Alyan’s itinerant upbringing, in Kuwait, Beirut, and elsewhere, and her life as an adult in the United States. Storytelling, especially among women, is shown as a means of establishing continuity, despite ruptures both geographic and political. Meditating on the contradictions that define her bicultural background, Alyan writes, “You exist in both identities like a ghost, belonging to neither.”

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• 
  We Are Eating the Earth

  by Michael Grunwald (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  Grunwald, a journalist whose previous books include a history of the Everglades, lays out a conundrum: humanity, he writes, is facing “some terrible math.” On one side of the equation is a growing need for food; on the other, climate change. To meet rising demand, Grunwald estimates, agricultural output will have to increase by fifty per cent over the next twenty-five years. The challenge is to scale up production without accelerating the climate crisis. Grunwald interviews those trying to square the circle—among them, the creators of a vertical farm built on the site of a defunct Newark steel mill and the founders of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. We need, he writes, to “feed the world without frying the world.” His sobering investigation identifies the obstacles we’ve yet to surmount.

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  Read more: “Do We Need Another Green Revolution?,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
• 
  Toni at Random

  by Dana A. Williams (Amistad)

  Nonfiction

  This study of Toni Morrison’s tenure as a senior editor at Random House draws on interviews, archival research, and correspondence to cast her as a formidable driver of cultural change. Williams, a literary scholar at Howard University, delves into Morrison’s projects—including works by Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Lucille Clifton, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali—to reveal her editorial and commercial acumen. Working in an overwhelmingly white publishing world, Morrison fused professional excellence with cultural advocacy, using her own books’ critical acclaim to push for acquisitions that reflected a wide range of Black perspectives across genres.

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• 
  The House on Buzzards Bay

  by Dwyer Murphy (Viking)

  Fiction

  The narrator of this atmospheric thriller, an excursion into the uncanny, is a lawyer based in New Haven who inherits a large house on the coast of Massachusetts. Initially, he shares it with a close group of college friends, “hoping to improve my odds of having company on vacations.” Years later, when he is married with young children, he and his friends reunite at the house for a summer filled with strange events and omens. They arrive to find that there has been a break-in; then one of the guests disappears; then there is a séance. These gothic elements enhance the book’s central preoccupations of trust, fidelity, and the difficulty of fully knowing another person—or oneself. “You get bits and pieces,” the protagonist observes. “The signal is never quite clear.”

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• 
  How to Feed the World

  by Vaclav Smil (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Smil, a professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg and the author of more than forty books, surveys the global food system with a bracing, declarative skepticism. His latest work assesses the scale of the challenge—how to feed a growing population without accelerating environmental collapse—and casts a cool eye on proposed solutions. Take lab-grown meat: producing just one per cent of the world’s current meat output, he calculates, would require roughly a hundred times the bioreactor capacity of the entire pharmaceutical industry. He’s similarly unimpressed by efforts to improve photosynthesis through gene editing. (“Prospects for any early commercial breakthroughs,” he writes, “are “meager.”) The good news, in his view, is that breakthroughs aren’t necessary. Smil makes the case for more pragmatic steps, from managing the food supply more efficiently to eating less meat.

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  Read more: “Do We Need Another Green Revolution?,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
• 
  Endling

  by Maria Reva (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  Animated by dark humor and cool fury, this début novel takes place largely in Ukraine during the period following Russia’s invasion. Its three heroines are employees of a romance-tour company, whose clients—wealthy foreigners who pay to date Ukrainian women—are known as “bachelors.” When the invasion begins, the women are racing across the country, having kidnapped a trailer full of bachelors in an effort by two of the women, who are sisters, to get their missing mother’s attention. As Reva relates the stories of her three main characters—including one whose true passion is snail conservation—her novel hums with bruised faith in the irrational power of hope, whether for peace, love, endangered species, or familial reconciliation.

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• 
  The Second Coming

  by Carter Sherman (Gallery)

  Nonfiction

  About a decade ago, magazines and newspapers began calling attention to a curious trend: young people were having less sex than their forebears. Even though sex has seemingly never been less stigmatized or easier to procure, younger millennials and members of Generation Z—roughly speaking, those who are currently in their teens and twenties—appear to be less interested in it. In “The Second Coming,” Sherman, a reporter for the Guardian, argues that this age cohort is caught in the middle of “enormous and oppositional forces, powered by changes in politics and technology.” The internet has helped to liberalize attitudes toward sex, in part by bringing together people of various sexual minorities, but it has also isolated us. And conservative politicians have spurred a backlash against sexual liberalism, worsening sex ed in America and pushing the old-fashioned idea that sex is only for married heterosexual couples, ideally those who are procreating. Meanwhile, young people are also less likely than previous generations to have sustained romantic relationships, and they are drinking less, something that may reflect a decline in socializing generally. What is really troubling, perhaps, is not what young people are doing with their genitals, or how often, but that they are living in a lonelier world.

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  Read more: “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?,” by Jia Tolentino
• 
  How Things Are Made

  by Tim Minshall (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  In this lively book, Minshall, the head of Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing, assumes the role of an excitable engineer as he illuminates the intricacies of mass production. Alighting on a range of scenarios, from brownie-baking to bicycle assembly, he delineates the web of processes by which commercial goods are produced, including natural-resource management, logistics, and consumer-data gathering. Among his most striking examples is a square of toilet paper—designed for softness, tearability, and integrity, and produced using trees from both hemispheres which have been pulped, dried, re-moistened, glued, and pressed before being shipped away.

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• 
  Murderland

  by Caroline Fraser (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Fraser’s book begins with a typically dry observation: “The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, Starbucks, and serial killers.” What follows is a granular, if poetic, attempt to solve two related mysteries: What might account for the abrupt rise and equally abrupt fall, between the nineteen-sixties and the turn of the century, of the “golden age” of serial killing? And why were so many of these brutes—almost all of them men—cradled in a crescent of psychopathy around Seattle’s Puget Sound? Fraser, who grew up in Tacoma, thinks the region’s ore-processing facilities, which caused staggering concentrations of lead and arsenic in the blood of children, are to blame. “Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes,” she writes, “those insidious killers, shades of Hades.” In her home town, she writes, it was “as if someone had scratched through to the underworld and released a savage wave of sulfur.”

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  Read more: “Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers?,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

• 
  The Last Supper

  by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Elie’s cultural history of the nineteen-eighties examines how a generation of artists borrowed the language and imagery of Christianity to explore moral and existential concerns. Warhol’s “Last Supper” silk screens layered Leonardo da Vinci’s Christ with commercial logos and AIDS-era dread; Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” translated Biblical longing into erotic anguish; and Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” portrayed a Jesus marked by desire and historical contingency. Elie parses not just art works but the uproar that they incited. Conflicts over “authority and individual conscience,” he writes, didn’t fade with the decade; they helped set the terms of the culture wars that continue into the present.

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• 
  The Nimbus

  by Robert P. Baird (Holt)

  Fiction

  In this wry début novel, which reflects on modern parenting and campus politics, a community is upended when a two-year-old boy begins to glow. The boy’s mother wants to hide the child from the public and the wolfish press; meanwhile, her husband, a professor of religious studies, accepts the public’s curiosity, and even steers his floundering Ph.D. advisee toward writing a dissertation on the meaning of his son’s radiance. Baird’s quasi-satirical story emphasizes the tussle between high-mindedness and baser instincts. As a university librarian who has a consequential encounter with the glowing boy observes, “Even in the Divinity School . . . the dictates of reason and good taste were no match for the flash of celebrity.”

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• 
  Apple in China

  by Patrick McGee (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  This scrupulously reported book traces how one of the world’s largest companies “bound its future” to China. By 2015, Apple was investing fifty-five billion dollars a year in the country; it had also trained tens of millions of Chinese workers—a transference of technological expertise that, McGee argues, should be considered a “geopolitical event.” Drawing on interviews with hundreds of current and former employees, McGee delineates the series of imperfect decisions that led the company to concentrate its manufacturing in a single country, whose government has, since the ascension of Xi Jinping, in 2012, increasingly dictated how Apple operates.

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• 
  Rosa Mistika

  by Euphrase Kezilahabi, translated from the Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin (Yale)

  Fiction

  Originally written in 1971, Kezilahabi’s novel of changing cultural attitudes in Tanzania, particularly toward female sexuality, was at first banned, before becoming a classic. Rosa, the eldest of six children, is beaten by her drunken father after he discovers that a boy she walks to school with has written her a love letter. She is determined to focus on her studies and ignore boys, until a conflict at school spurs her to live life more recklessly. Love, disillusion, independence, and disgrace follow. Playing in the space between social realism and fabulist storytelling, Kezilahabi’s novel asks moral questions about parents’ responsibilities and the effects of women’s liberation, sparing no one but withholding final judgment.

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• 
  Spent

  by Alison Bechdel (Mariner)

  Fiction

  With her new graphic novel, Bechdel evokes the nimble, screwball silliness of her early career. The novel’s protagonist is a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who lives in Vermont with her exuberant partner, Holly. Alison’s best friends are characters from Bechdel’s iconic comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” now on the other side of middle age, and still living together in the same group household where fans left them in the two-thousands. “Spent” is polished, intricately detailed, and bursting with bright color—a visual luxuriousness that stands in contrast to the black-and-white and spiky cross-hatching of the original “Dykes.” Even so, the gang is instantly recognizable, though now gray-haired, a bit stouter, and with expressively lined faces.

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  Read more: “Alison Bechdel and the Search for the Beginner’s Mind,” by Charlie Tyson
• 
  Apocalypse

  by Lizzie Wade (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  In recent decades, technological advances have transformed the field of archeology, allowing for the sequencing of ancient DNA and the tracing of long-ago migrations. Drawing on a trove of data, Wade zeroes in on what she terms “apocalypses,” moments in history when “rapid, collective loss” has forced a society to radically change its way of life. “Change” is the key word: Wade argues that certain examples—the climate disasters that displaced Mayans, the fallout from the Black Death—show that nothing has ever fully ended. Nor do apocalypses result in uniformly negative change; as she points out, numerous egalitarian political movements were born of catastrophe.

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• 
  The Book of Records

  by Madeleine Thien (Norton)

  Fiction

  The protagonist of this beguiling novel, Lina, lives with her father in a realm seemingly unbound by ordinary time. “Other centuries were falling down on us like rain through the trees,” she muses. Lina, who is eleven at the book’s start, and her father have fled severe flooding on the Chinese mainland, and now dwell in a mysterious place known as the Sea. Other travellers, who come and go, tell them stories of Hannah Arendt, Baruch Spinoza, and the Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu, which become intertwined with Lina’s days and years. Ultimately, the novel is a meditation on the sheer force of longing—for a lost home, lost loved ones, a future that will never be attained. “A person is not what they know,” one of Lina’s fellow-travellers says. “A person is what they yearn for.”

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• 
  Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg

  by Kenneth Turan (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  Irving Thalberg, who ran production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer through the nineteen-twenties and thirties, endures in Hollywood legend as its boy genius—the prodigy who seemed to unlock the secrets of storytelling in an emerging medium. As Kenneth Turan, who was a longtime Los Angeles Times film critic, argues, Thalberg can only be understood as part of a twin-star system, forever orbiting Louis B. Mayer, his partner and more calculating corporate superior. Mayer craved formulas; Thalberg, we’re told, insisted on pictures that were singular and inimitable. Turan’s new joint biography, part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, is the story of two men who helped make M-G-M the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.

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  Read more: “The Wizard Behind Hollywood’s Golden Age,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  The End Is the Beginning

  by Jill Bialosky (Washington Square)

  Nonfiction

  Told in reverse chronological order, this affecting book relates Bialosky’s experiences caring for her dying mother, Iris. The narrative begins immediately after Iris’s death, following long battles with depression and Alzheimer’s. Over the preceding decade, Bialosky makes torturous decisions regarding her mother’s care. As time recedes, Iris, a mere sketch in the opening chapters, emerges as a richly realized character. Bialosky excels in capturing the nuances of providing end-of-life care to a loved one, and offers astute observations on what the old and infirm want: “To be viewed as they are, as human beings who have led full lives.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Eminent Jews

  by David Denby (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  This joint biography explores the lives and careers of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer—considering their influence on American culture through the prism of their identities as Jewish Americans. “America poured into them, and they, as Jews, poured into America, a happy intermingling made possible by freedoms that Jews had never known before,” Denby writes. A piece on Norman Mailer, which ran in the magazine in 2022, was adapted from an early version of the book.

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• 
  Unforgiving Places

  by Jens Ludwig (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

  In this remarkable new book, Ludwig, the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, reframes our understanding of gun violence by borrowing a heuristic articulated by Daniel Kahneman: the contrast between fast, automatic thinking and slow, deliberative reasoning. This distinction has been applied to many aspects of human behavior; Ludwig’s innovation is to apply it to violent crime. He argues that most violence isn’t calculated and instrumental but, rather, impulsive, an eruption of tempers, and little affected by the threat of harsher penalties. The book’s central claim is that our approach to criminal justice rests on a conceptual mistake: it targets rational, premeditated violence, when most violence is anything but.

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  Read more: “What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime,” by Malcolm Gladwell
• 
  From Our Pages

  The Very Heart of It

  by Thomas Mallon (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  The book presents a collection of journal entries penned during the nineteen-eighties and nineties by the author, who was then an aspiring writer in Manhattan. Merging a young gay man’s keenly observed coming of age, a lively tour of a bygone literary New York, and a devastating portrait of the city during the height of the AIDS crisis, the diaries capture the creative energy and lasting sorrow of a remarkable era. The book grew out of a piece that appeared in the magazine in 2022.

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• 
  Marketcrafters

  by Chris Hughes (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  This economic history argues that America’s prosperity is the product not of an undisturbed free market but, rather, of the hard work of functionaries. Hughes profiles a range of government technocrats working in eras of tumult—including the Great Depression and the energy crisis of the nineteen-seventies—to support the notion that setting clear objectives and giving skilled, intelligent people resources and flexibility will bear fruit. An especially strong section dissects the implementation of the CHIPS Act, a simple policy aimed at bringing semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S., which successfully increased domestic investment in the industry.

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• 
  Heart, Be at Peace

  by Donal Ryan (Viking)

  Fiction

  This short, powerful novel is a sequel to Ryan’s début, “The Spinning Heart,” from 2012, a series of monologues that told stories connected to a failed housing development in Ireland and the economic collapse following the Celtic Tiger. The new book picks up a decade later with a different crisis, this one born of a sudden increase in drugs. Among the novel’s central characters are people engaged in trafficking, a vigilante intent on stopping drug dealers, and the ghost of a man murdered in the first book. The collective effect of their intimate, first-person narratives is that of a confessional, revealing the psyche of a country going through a traumatic change.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Haves and Have-Yachts

  by Evan Osnos (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  Osnos’s new book, built on years of deft reporting for the magazine, is a tour of the cordoned-off places where the richest Americans congregate: megayachts and gigayachts, apocalypse-proof luxury bunkers, parties with pop stars onstage, support groups for big-ticket embezzlers getting out of jail. The ultra-wealthy control more of the country than ever. But what do they want, and how do they get it? What do they fear? As Osnos reveals their motives and their methods, he provides answers that are both funny and disquieting.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Flashlight

  by Susan Choi (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  An expansive novel that jumps through time and from place to place—from Massachusetts to North Korea, from Ohio to Japan, from Indiana to Paris—“Flashlight” explores the history and mysteries of one family: a father, who is ethnic Korean, raised in Japan; an American mother, estranged from her family in the Midwest; a recalcitrant daughter marked by a shocking loss; an illegitimate son who turns up after years. The family’s personal trajectories are interwoven with those of global politics in a way that feels both wrenchingly tragic and entirely credible. The opening chapter of the novel was first published as a story in the magazine.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Spinach King

  by John Seabrook (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  “Don’t write about your family,” Seabrook’s mother, once a journalist herself, told him thirty years ago. “Just don’t,” she said when he asked her to explain. This book, which grew out of several pieces Seabrook has written for the magazine, provides an answer. In 1959, Seabrook was born into the family business, Seabrook Farms. His father, Jack, worked for his father, C.F., a mercurial and domineering figure who had transformed the operation started by his father, an English immigrant, into a frozen-food juggernaut that, in its heyday, grew and packed around a third of America’s frozen vegetables. But within five years the Seabrooks’ role in Seabrook Farms was over. After Jack and his brothers attempted to have C.F. committed to a mental institution, C.F. sold the company and cut his sons almost entirely out of his will. In investigating his family’s sometimes troubled history, Seabrook has produced a sweeping saga about power, privilege, and paranoia in the fields of New Jersey.

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• 
  Children of Radium

  by Joe Dunthorne (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  At once a family history and an account of the author’s piecing together of that history, this lively memoir centers on Siegfried Merzbacher, a German Jewish chemist who worked in his home country during Hitler’s rise, then immigrated to Turkey, in 1935. Dunthorne, a novelist, is Merzbacher’s great-grandson, and he attempts to discover how much his ancestor—who worked for a company run by Nazis which manufactured chemical weapons—understood about his own complicity. Dunthorne draws from Merzbacher’s patchy, unpublished memoirs, and supplements that text with findings from a ranging investigation that took him to such places as Turkish hillsides and radioactive-waste sites.

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• 
  Antimemetics

  by Nadia Asparouhova (The Dark Forest Collective)

  Nonfiction

  We dreamed that the internet would be a pure marketplace of ideas, in which the best notions spread most widely. A new book by the independent scholar Asparouhova examines what we got so wrong. She argues that ideas spread through the world not because of their virtue, as we once hoped, but because of their catchiness. Some bad ideas (“climate change is a myth,” “we should have a C.E.O. as a monarch”) spread widely, because they have something like the quality of a meme. Some good ideas, on the other hand, have the quality of a “self-keeping secret,” or “antimeme.” “Our inability to make progress on consequential topics can be at least partly explained by the underlying antimemetic qualities that they share—meaning that it is strangely difficult to keep the idea top of mind,” she writes. “Antimemetics” is gestural and shaggy, a generative and fun read.

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  Read more: “Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
• 
  The South

  by Tash Aw (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  Spanning a single summer on a struggling Malaysian farm, this bildungsroman, set in the nineteen-nineties, follows a romance between two young men: Jay, whose family owns the farm, and Chuan, the son of the farm’s longtime manager. Switching among points of view, the novel explores the impacts of financial strain, ethnic hierarchies, and class disparity, in addition to the secrets that bind the families of the teen-agers together. These include infidelities, unspoken longings, and thorny questions of land inheritance. Aw affectingly evokes places: the private spaces where queer men congregate without shame; a nearby city where it’s possible to spy the skyscrapers of Singapore; and the farm itself, which will, like its fireflies, go dark one day, “signifying the end of a season—of many tiny lives.”

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• 
  Buckley

  by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  This biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., offers a history of postwar American politics through the life of one of its most theatrical participants. Buckley—a swaggering, inimitable opinionator—wrote three nationally syndicated columns a week, edited National Review, hosted the weekly television show “Firing Line,” and published some fifty books. Though he advised candidates and worked closely with a few, he understood that he was, above all, an entertainer, not a theorist or a politician. Tanenhaus aptly calls him a “performing ideologue.” The book is a smart, stylish, and clear-eyed portrait of a complicated man—and of the rise of American conservatism, with Buckley in a starring role.

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  Read more: “William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Invention of American Conservatism,” by Louis Menand
• 
  When It All Burns

  by Jordan Thomas (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  Centered on the author’s experience with an élite team of firefighters, this analysis of California’s wildfires entwines an account of the state’s 2021 fire season with an appraisal of its record of fire suppression. Thomas, who is also an anthropologist, contends that flawed environmental policy, climate-change denial, corporate profiteering, and the genocide of Indigenous people—who, through controlled burning, nurtured a biodiverse landscape largely protected from destruction—established the conditions for today’s calamitous “megafires.” Wedding anthropological research and elegant descriptions of the natural world, Thomas builds an argument for a clear solution: “igniting more of the land.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Autocorrect

  by Etgar Keret, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica CohenSondra Silverston (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  The stories in Keret’s new collection respond to personal and global events in a way that is both comic and deeply felt. Confronted with war, murder, marital troubles, new technologies, or extraterrestrials, his characters behave and misbehave, are kind and unkind, as they work to make sense of the nonsensical world around them. As Keret notes in one story, “Living is the easiest thing in the world. Surviving . . . that’s another story.” Three stories in the collection, including “Mitzvah,” were first published in the magazine.

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• 
  The Words of Dr. L

  by Karen E. Bender (Counterpoint)

  Fiction

  These often speculative stories take place in worlds in which troubling features of our own are amplified. In one, a young woman living under laws “enforcing motherhood” searches for incantatory words that will end her pregnancy. In another, people “unduly burdened” by feelings of shame have those feelings excised by “noninvasive laser technology” and transferred to shameless government officials, in a societal gambit to improve governance. Beyond the collection’s interest in political commentary, what most animates it is familial heartache. In a particularly affecting tale, the protagonist sees her ailing father and truly grasps that parents and children are “together just temporarily.”

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• 
  The Emperor of Gladness

  by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

  In this novel, a Vietnamese American writer best known for his poetry draws on his own experiences as a fast-food worker. Vuong’s protagonist, Hai, is a drug-addicted college dropout living in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. After he forms an unlikely bond with an elderly widow from Lithuania, whose house he moves into, he begins working at a fast-food restaurant, HomeMarket, where all of the employees are, like him, searching for some kind of home. The novel brims with feeling for these figures, who, though scorned by society, belong to it nonetheless. As Hai tells another character, being flawed “is actually what’s most common. It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is.”

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• 
  William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love

  by Philip Hoare (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

  The artist, poet, and printmaker William Blake, who fused word and image in such visionary works as “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” lived through the French, American, and industrial revolutions. Though Hoare’s book takes up the events of Blake’s life—including his marriage and his lack of commercial success—it is not so much a cradle-to-grave account as it is a compendium of his influence on other artists and thinkers, from Derek Jarman to Iris Murdoch to James Joyce to the pre-Raphaelites. Hoare celebrates Blake and his “fantastical ideas,” and relates his own awe as he seeks out the artist’s surviving prints and looks through a pair of the man’s spectacles.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Shamanism

  by Manvir Singh (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Singh, a contributor to The New Yorker, supplies a vivid study of who shamans are, and why their practices, which predate organized religion, have endured for centuries. He deftly weaves together memoir and fieldwork, reporting from places as varied as Indonesia, the Amazon forest, and Burning Man, and reveals how shamanistic traditions have infiltrated both our culture and our politics. He wrote an essay on the subject in the magazine.

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• 
  The Director

  by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin (Summit)

  Fiction

  This novel re-creates the filmmaking career of G. W. Pabst, the brilliant Austrian director who, in the early Nazi period, made it out of Europe to America—and then, calamitously, went back. Kehlmann, the leading German novelist of his generation, jumps from realism to expressionism, from sombre representation to scenes that might have appeared in the classic German movies being made when Pabst was a young man. The book combines history, biography, and detailed dramatizations of filmmaking; what holds it together is a portrait of Europe in a state of emotional and moral disintegration. The unsurprising news in “The Director” is that most of us fall short of moral heroism and will accommodate ourselves to power one way or another. Some of us even become rapt enthusiasts of the very things that had earlier repelled us.

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  Read more: “In Daniel Kehlmann’s Latest Novel, Everyone’s a Collaborator,” by David Denby

• 
  Valley of Forgetting

  by Jennie Erin Smith (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  This stunning immersion into decades of Alzheimer’s research in Colombia follows a keen doctor, Francisco Lopera, as he and a team look at an extended family genetically predisposed to contracting the disease young, in their mid-thirties and forties. As Smith closely tracks both the scientists and their subjects, she captures the courage of those who dedicate their own suffering to science in pursuit of a precarious hope. In her handling, flat questions about the ethics of medical research are rendered in rich dimension—including, for example, whether to reveal results to study participants who were found to have the genetic mutation that may cause early-onset Alzheimer’s.

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• 
  Who Knew

  by Barry Diller (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir recounts Diller’s career as an entertainment mogul, from his years as the head of Paramount Pictures to the Home Shopping Network and I.A.C. Its first half unfolds against what now feels like an impossibly distant era: a fixed, tycoon-driven entertainment business, which Diller evokes in engaging detail. The second half describes changes that, for good or ill, reshaped more of the media world. In the early nineties, in addition to launching a bid for Paramount, Diller fell, almost by accident, into running a cable outfit even he considered faintly ridiculous: QVC, a home-shopping network. Though Diller’s memoir relates, sometimes movingly, his emergence as a gay man in a hostile world and details the long transition from old media to the internet, the book’s greatest pleasures are its glimpses into the micro-mechanics of consumer capitalism, in forms that are eccentric and deeply entertaining.

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  Read more: “How Barry Diller Stayed on Top,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  The Weaponization of Expertise

  by Jacob Hale RussellDennis Patterson (M.I.T.)

  Nonfiction

  This critical examination of technocratic expertise approaches the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study of what happens when tolerance for open-ended inquiry is restricted. There was something “deeply ironic” about liberals’ formulation of support for science as a religious creed, Russell and Patterson observe; in a time of crisis, this support veered toward dogma, and veneration of expertise became a shibboleth on the left. The authors decry the marginalization of dissenting voices, pointing to deplatformings that they consider “intellectual tyranny.” Their persuasive account illustrates how tentative conclusions proclaimed by the powerful can harden into orthodoxies.

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  Read more: “R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Happiness Forever

  by Adelaide Faith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  In this spare, associative novel of projection and self-acceptance, a young woman, Sylvie, nurses an all-consuming obsession with her therapist. Simply conjuring up the therapist’s image gives her “a sense that a great freedom was close.” As their weekly sessions unspool, the dark outlines of Sylvie’s past are revealed—a controlling ex-boyfriend, an abusive father—and it becomes clear that her longing is driven by imagined visions of the therapist’s glamorous life, situated in a “successful world” that Sylvie is convinced she doesn’t deserve to enter. Though she begins with the conviction that her therapist has “already worked out the meaning of life,” glimpses of her everyday life show her slowly learning to believe in the inherent value of her own existence.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Thinking Machine

  by Stephen Witt (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Witt’s biography of Jensen Huang, a founder of Nvidia, traces the remarkable rise of a company that has come to dominate the market for advanced microchips—and thus to underpin the age of artificial intelligence. The book, which grew out of a piece that Witt wrote for the magazine, in 2023, is not only the profile of an innovative founder but a cogent and engrossing primer on the scientific revolution that is defining our time.

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• 
  In Covid’s Wake

  by Stephen MacedoFrances Lee (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  This investigation by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee offers a look back on the pandemic; its findings are devastating to both the left and the right. The U.S. pattern of “one country, fifty regulatory environments” allows the writers to compare the effects of different policies: school closures, social distancing, mask mandates. Vaccination clearly worked, which is why blue states generally had lower COVID death rates. But in the eleven months before vaccines were available it was another story. Macedo and Lee examine how quickly states adopted lockdowns, how long lockdowns lasted, how often public schools closed, and how generally stringent restrictions were. Their conclusions are chastening, clearly demonstrating the risks of enforcing a “consensus” and purging the countervailing views that make intellectual inquiry work.

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  Read more: “R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  The Lost Orchid

  by Sarah Bilston (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  The main character of this wide-ranging history is Cattleya labiata, a purple-and-red orchid from Brazil. In 1818, it was taken to England, where it helped spark a mania for the flowers before seeming to disappear from the wild. Along the way, the orchid became the subject of scientific speculation (including by Charles Darwin), a fetish in the Victorian era’s burgeoning consumer culture, and an example of the excesses of imperialist extraction. Bilston draws on an extensive body of letters, newspapers, and novels to demonstrate how one rare flower could come “to signal wealth and power, or connoisseurship, or modernity, or attachment to the past, or scientific acumen”—sometimes all at once.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Other Worlds

  by André Alexis (FSG Originals)

  Fiction

  In this collection of nine stories, Alexis, a Trinidadian Canadian, explores both other worlds and the otherworldly. In one story, a son learns about his late father through conversations with the horse he loved; in another, an entire town hibernates in leather hammocks. The book, which also plays with genre, reflects on the difficulty of truly knowing one’s parents, on the nature of belonging—to a family, to a place—and on loss and withdrawal. Two of the stories, including “Houyhnhnm,” were first published in the magazine.

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• 
  Ghosts of Iron Mountain

  by Phil Tinline (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  In 1967, a top-secret government report stating that achieving peace “would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society” was leaked. The document was a hoax—the work of a political satirist—but, as Tinline shows in this riveting history, it was taken seriously by numerous news outlets and by readers, even after it was exposed as a sham five years later. Delving into the circumstances that primed the American public to believe that shadowy élites at the heart of the federal government were conspiring against them, Tinline traces how the report helped fuel various conspiracy theories over the coming decades, from the “CIA plot” to assassinate John F. Kennedy to the rise of QAnon.

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• 
  I Regret Almost Everything

  by Keith McNally (Gallery)

  Nonfiction

  Since 1980, McNally has opened a series of stylish, bustling Manhattan restaurants—the Odeon, Café Luxembourg, Balthazar—that helped to define their moments. Almost all have offered a mix of painstaking aesthetic nostalgia, classic bistro food, and nonchalant service—a well-honed formula heavy on steak frites and subway tile. “I Regret Almost Everything” follows McNally’s path from London’s East End to New York City, where he became, as the Times put it, the “Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown.” In late 2016, he had a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. His second marriage ended, and four months after that he attempted suicide. This tumultuous part of his life frames the memoir: he looks back over his triumphs as he despairs of replicating (or even enjoying) them. In February, 2020, McNally joined Instagram—and so, just as restaurants shut down, he discovered a new sort of scene to cultivate. Reading the memoir is a bit like scrolling through his feed: he’s not really a raconteur, but he’s an energetic collector of rants, vignettes, and curiosities. This isn’t necessarily a strike against the book. If anything, he’s found a new way to give the crowd what it wants.

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  Read more: “Keith McNally’s Guide to Making a Scene,” by Molly Fischer
• 
  The Imagined Life

  by Andrew Porter (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This meditative novel takes the form of an investigation that the narrator, Steven, conducts into the mental breakdown and disappearance of his father, a professor whose life fell apart during his bid for tenure at a Southern California college in the nineteen-eighties. Dual time lines juxtapose the events of that pivotal period, when Steven was eleven, with his efforts as an adult to figure out why his father, “someone who seemingly had everything, would go to such lengths to destroy those things he had.” Hanging in the balance is Steven’s own family life; during his inquiry, he neglects his wife and son. Porter deftly combines a bildungsroman with the story of a midlife crisis to deliver a cathartic resolution.

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• 
  Turning to Birds

  by Lili Taylor (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  Some fifteen years ago, Taylor, while upstate on an “emotional sabbatical” from her acting career, discovered birds. What she noticed first were the many and varied sounds these “flying dinosaurs” make. “During that time of personal quiet,” she writes, “I entered a world of sound outside myself—and I’ve never left.” Embracing the startlingly intense subculture of birding, Taylor attends festivals, makes pilgrimages to places like “the Warbler Capital of the World” (northwestern Ohio), and savors the consciousness-altering power of “bins,” the birder term for binoculars: they “facilitate an experience outside reality. I don’t do drugs; I do bins.” By turns introspective, inquisitive, and funny, the book is a love letter to nature and the solace it can provide.

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• 
  America, América

  by Greg Grandin (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  In his new book, Grandin tells the history of the Western Hemisphere from the Latin American perspective. His account begins in the colonial period, when Spaniards and other Europeans debated the philosophical underpinnings of conquest and slavery, setting in motion an ideological battle between humanism and barbarism which, Grandin thinks, continues to this day. The book has few heroes. One of them is the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, whose most famous work, “A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies,” written in 1542, recounts a litany of sins committed by Spanish conquistadors that las Casas claimed to have personally observed. Grandin makes a persuasive case that las Casas’s humanistic vision became the basis of international law in the Americas and beyond, and eventually informed the governing principles of President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and of the United Nations. Meanwhile, claims that Indians were inferior were echoed in the pronouncements of any number of U.S. Presidents, who argued that the country’s expansion across the continent was justified by Indian or Mexican barbarism.

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  Read more: “What America Means to Latin Americans,” by Geraldo Cadava
• 
  My Name Is Emilia del Valle

  by Isabel Allende, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle (Ballantine)

  Fiction

  Allende, a doyenne of historical fiction, once again ventures to her native Chile with this engaging novel, set in the late nineteenth century. Emilia, the product of an ill-fated liaison between an Irish nun and a dissolute Chilean aristocrat, lives contentedly in San Francisco. But her love for writing—first as a dime novelist, then as a journalist—draws her to Chile, where she reports on the nascent civil war. There, she experiences both heartbreak at the violence she witnesses and the deep sense that she’s found her place in the world: “one day in the far future I will return, because I belong to this landscape.”

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• 
  Melting Point

  by Rachel Cockerell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  In this dazzling début work, the British writer Rachel Cockerell peers into the past and raises up a vast multitude of the dead. At the heart of her tale lies an early-twentieth-century initiative to redirect America’s enormous influx of Jewish immigrants from Ellis Island to Galveston, Texas. The book is composed entirely of primary sources, which jostle against one another without authorial interruption for three hundred and forty-five pages. Only so vast a chorus could do justice to the larger story Cockerell is telling, one that has always been morally complicated and seldom more so than today: the history of an imperilled and exiled people, and their visionary, blinkered, desperate effort to find a place to call home.

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  Read more: “When Jews Sought the Promised Land in Texas,” by Kathryn Schulz
• 
  The Float Test

  by Lynn Steger Strong (Mariner)

  Fiction

  Four adult siblings are the central characters in this novel; after the sudden death of their mother they return to their childhood home to sort through her effects. Jude, the second youngest and the narrator, recounts everything from childhood escapades to recent disappointments, including her sister Fred’s estrangement from the family. Jenn, the oldest, takes on their father’s care, while George, the baby, mopes about his failing marriage. Tensions rise after Fred finds a gun in their mother’s underwear drawer, a discovery that hangs over the novel like a threat. Strong explores the dynamics of siblinghood—alliances and grudges—and interrogates what it means to claim family stories as your own.

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• 
  Your Steps on the Stairs

  by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer (Other Press)

  Fiction

  In this harrowing drama of subtleties, a recently retired man moves from New York to Lisbon after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Presidential election. Awaiting his wife’s arrival, he prepares their new apartment and tries to keep himself busy, but he is pestered by a creeping sense of disaster, both past and future. Again and again, he replays the events of September 11th in his head, noting the reverberations that it had in his life and marriage in the years that followed. Molina writes in pulse-like scenes, and each vignette thickens the novel’s uneasy atmosphere, obscuring our conception of place and, eventually, our conception of what’s real.

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• 
  A Fractured Liberation

  by Kornel Chang (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

  The surrender of the Japanese brought an end to the Second World War, and it also emancipated Tokyo’s colonies across Asia. This history focusses on the Korean Peninsula’s liberation, after which “peasants occupied Japanese-owned farmlands, workers seized control of the factory floor, villagers chased the former colonial police out of town, and women demanded political and economic equality.” But, as Chang writes, the many social movements and political factions that sprouted had only a brief interval to jockey for power before the Soviet Union and the U.S. swooped in. Drawing from diaries, military records, literary works, and his own family’s history, Chang ponders what could have become of “Korea’s Asian Spring.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Capitalism and Its Critics

  by John Cassidy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This rigorous survey of economic history was conceived as a primer and a response to a rising discontentment with capitalism in America and elsewhere. By cataloguing capitalism’s critics—interpreted broadly to include everyone from the Luddites to Karl Marx to dependency theorists—Cassidy, a staff writer at the magazine, documents watershed moments in our past, allowing readers to imagine alternatives. An excerpt appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Careless People

  by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron)

  Nonfiction

  In 2011, Wynn-Williams convinced Facebook to hire her as a “diplomat,” and her incisive memoir tracks the evolution of the company’s political dealings. Wynn-Williams—whose job involved orchestrating “pull-asides” between Mark Zuckerberg and heads of state—documents the platform’s profound disregard for the well-being of users, including an indifference to the hate speech that fuelled genocidal riots in Myanmar, and efforts to court the Chinese government by censoring political activists and sharing user data. “At every juncture, there was an opportunity to make different choices,” Wynn-Williams writes. Instead, Facebook pursued a “lethal carelessness.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Strangers in the Land

  by Michael Luo (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  This sweeping study picks up in the nineteenth century, when tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived in America, and narrates their long, turbulent attempts to be accepted as part of the country. In a series of intimate portraits, Luo, an executive editor at the magazine, especially emphasizes the “driving out” period, when dozens of communities expelled or inflicted violence against their Chinese residents. An excerpt appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Lincoln’s Peace

  by Michael Vorenberg (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  Vorenberg, a historian, picks up the story of the Civil War at the end of the conflict, as it was drawing to a close after unfathomable death and suffering. Vorenberg’s account, despite the intervening carnage, returns us to a situation eerily similar to the one that preceded the war; the white South, though militarily defeated, had no intention of accepting anything resembling racial equality. And, while Robert E. Lee might have declined to resort to guerrilla warfare, many of his lieutenants carried on a program of suppression by terror. In that sense, Vorenberg argues, the Civil War never truly ended.

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  Read more: “Was the Civil War Inevitable?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Crumb

  by Dan Nadel (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  In this diligently researched biography, the graphic novel finds its forebear in the cartoonist Robert Crumb. The book chronicles Crumb’s aberrant life and career, from his early success as the “cartoon voice of the underground” in the nineteen-sixties, when his visual style became emblematic of the counterculture, through his illustrations of the Book of Genesis, in the early two-thousands. Nadel balances admiration for Crumb’s craft with critical evaluations of the artist’s racist caricatures and overt misogyny. What emerges is a complicated and occasionally grotesque portrait of an artist whose “id was out on the page,” and who, Nadel argues, laid the groundwork for a range of successful graphic masterpieces, including Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.”

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• 
  Mỹ Documents

  by Kevin Nguyen (One World)

  Fiction

  In this novel, the U.S. government interns thousands of people of Vietnamese descent in camps across the country following a series of attacks by Vietnamese terrorists. Staring down indefinite detainment, the prisoners rely on documents—identification papers, computer files, ownership records, underground newspapers—to validate their experiences, past and present, as they make their best attempt at “adapting and creating meaningful and fulfilling days,” even when each one is “the same as the last.” Focussing on one family’s struggle to endure a period of intense racial hostility, Nguyen examines the distinct forms that survival can take: withstanding state violence, overcoming familial rifts, and reclaiming one’s life.

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• 
  dd’s Umbrella

  by Hwang Jungeun, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon (Tilted Axis)

  Fiction

  Two novellas—linked loosely by their respective characters’ queer identities and affection for an old-fashioned, near-empty electronics market in Seoul—unfold in the aftermath of a deadly ferry disaster and a movement to oust a corrupt President. Like Hwang’s previous novels, this book is a tender, spooky portrait of outcast friends and lovers. In the first story, d and dd share a “shoddy, exhausting” life that, though cut short, is also happy. The narrator of the second helps raise her sister’s child while struggling to write an elusive “story in which no one dies.” In the face of tragedies both local and universal, the characters ask, “How will today be remembered?”

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• 
  Second Life

  by Amanda Hess (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  This new memoir is a mordant contemplation of the many screens—from ultrasounds and pregnancy-tracking apps to baby monitors and children’s TV—that reflected and mediated Hess’s experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. Through the porthole of her phone, she encounters the “freebirth” movement, made up of mothers who are skeptical of prenatal screenings and tests, hospital births, and pediatric vaccines, referring to conventional pregnancy care as “birth in captivity.” But the book is foremost a mash note to Hess’s firstborn son, and much of its charisma is rooted in its mood of droll astonishment. “The act of photographing him was a compulsive expression of my wonder at his existence,” Hess writes. “It’s him: tap. He is here: tap. He remains: tap.”

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  Read more: “How Much Should You Know About Your Child Before He’s Born?,” by Jessica Winter
• 
  1861: The Lost Peace

  by Jay Winik (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  Winik, the distinguished author of several works about American history, takes up the question of whether the Civil War might have been avoided. The enterprise of avoiding war, though, was likely doomed from the start. Nonetheless, there was an attempt at a peace conference in the period before Abraham Lincoln’s Inauguration, and it was more substantial than most subsequent histories have acknowledged. If it didn’t resolve the crisis, it at least exposed the depth of the deadlock. (Lincoln tried at first to listen and then at last refused.) Here, Winik offers a portrait of two sides talking past each other, tracing the efforts of those who genuinely wanted to prevent war and the trauma of secession.

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  Read more: “Was the Civil War Inevitable?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  When the City Stopped

  by Robert W. Snyder (Three Hills)

  Nonfiction

  The real-life experiences of New Yorkers during the COVID-19 outbreak are at the heart of this collection of as-told-to stories. Snyder highlights the actions, big and small, that people took to help the city survive, including medical personnel who collaborated across hospitals to find health-care solutions, and bus drivers who stayed on their routes. Snyder writes that, while working on the book, he “glimpsed a little-recognized truth of the pandemic: in the days when New York felt abandoned and besieged, it was saved from the bottom up.” He posits that remembering the sacrifices of the types of people he features—teachers, retail workers, E.M.T.s—“is the way to prepare for a better future.”

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• 
  The Maverick’s Museum

  by Blake Gopnik (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  Albert C. Barnes was born into poverty in 1872, in Philadelphia, and went on to make a fortune as the inventor of a topical antiseptic and to amass a staggering collection of modern art. Gopnik’s animated biography chronicles Barnes’s lifelong campaign to make art accessible to the working class, a democratizing impulse that found its greatest expression in the Barnes Foundation, which opened in 1925 to display his acquisitions. But the collector was also known for his irascibility, and Gopnik touches on the contradictions between his high-mindedness—Barnes was a stalwart defender of Black rights and culture—and his temper. Ultimately, Gopnik figures that “Barnes’s public cruelties might be just about balanced by private kindnesses.”

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• 
  Sister, Sinner

  by Claire Hoffman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Aimee Semple McPherson was, at the height of her fame, more recognizable than the Pope. A “lady preacher,” McPherson founded one of the country’s first megachurches and utilized every medium she could—including, crucially, radio—to spread the Gospel. Born to a farmer and his teen-age bride in Ontario in 1890, she felt called to the work of evangelism in her mid-twenties, and within a decade she was delivering sermons at her own temple, in Los Angeles, featuring elaborate sets and musical numbers that were influenced by the nearby and nascent film industry. Then, in 1926, she vanished and was presumed dead. She resurfaced more than a month later, facing accusations that she had run off with a lover. In “Sister, Sinner,” the journalist Claire Hoffman resurrects much of the glory and tragedy of McPherson’s ministry—and, although McPherson’s disappearance remains something of a mystery, the world that she moved in, and helped to make, comes vividly to life.

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  Read more: “The “Lady Preacher” Who Became World-Famous—and Then Vanished,” by Casey Cep
• 
  The Dream Hotel

  by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)

  Fiction

  Sara Hussein, the protagonist of this dystopian novel, is detained by deputies of the so-called Risk Assessment Administration after a “crime-prediction algorithm” flags that she had a dream about poisoning her husband. Although Sara has not committed a crime, she is placed in a prisonlike “retention center” for observation. Lalami deftly captures Sara’s disorientation as she adapts to the rigid routines of the center, where detainees are experimented upon by a technology company that’s testing the efficacy of product placement in people’s dreams. As an official remarks, dreams are valuable because they reveal “the most private parts of ourselves, from repressed memories to future plans.”

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• 
  The Franklin Stove

  by Joyce E. Chaplin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  In the mid-eighteenth century, during a period of cooling known as the Little Ice Age, Benjamin Franklin began designing a heating device that would be more efficient than the traditional fireplace. Chaplin’s richly textured history documents the brilliant theories and innovations that led to the Franklin stove’s creation, but it also charts the human and environmental costs: produced in part by slave labor on tribal lands, the stove eventually burned coal. This story holds numerous lessons for our era; among them, Chaplin writes, is that any “techno-optimistic” solution to the climate crisis, though it might work in the short term, may have unintended, and potentially harmful, consequences.

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• 
  Hunchback

  by Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Hogarth)

  Fiction

  This slim novel, which won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, is told from the point of view of Shaka, a woman who, like Ichikawa, has a congenital muscle disorder and uses an electric wheelchair and a ventilator. Shaka’s condition has kept her from sexual activity, but not from developing fantasies. “My ultimate dream,” she confesses, “is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman,” and we follow her as she writes lowbrow erotica and considers paying for sex. The difficulty of managing Shaka’s condition—the constant need to suction mucus and the pain of holding a book—interrupts and controls the flow of the story just as it does its narrator’s life.

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• 
  Darkenbloom

  by Eva Menasse, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins (Scribe)

  Fiction

  Darkenbloom is a sleepy border town in an eastern corner of Austria. It has an old castle tower, a central hotel, a couple of supermarkets, and a Jewish cemetery, neglected and overgrown, that no one likes to talk about. In August, 1989, two mysterious men arrive, upending the town’s stubborn quietude and inspiring fears that the strangers might uncover the enormities of the community’s Nazi-era past. Menasse, an Austrian writer, employs a Godlike narrator to clever and powerful effect: it’s a teasing, playful, scathing voice, half inside the community and half outside it. Darkenbloom, it seems, teems with willfully ignorant souls who, when pressed to recall their war years, manage to have been elsewhere: history was what someone else was doing.

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  Read more: “It’s a Typical Small-Town Novel. Except for the Nazis,” by James Wood
• 
  Powers of Reading

  by Peter Szendy, translated from the French by Olivia Custer (Zone)

  Nonfiction

  In this elliptical meditation on the nature of reading, Szendy draws a connection between Phaedrus reading aloud to Socrates, the reading regime of Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” and audiobooks. He argues that the solitary, silent type of reading that has become the norm is “an interiorization of the reading aloud that prevailed” for centuries. “When I read silently,” he writes, “I listen to myself reading.” Much here is theoretical, but Szendy’s ultimate purpose is to point toward a new “politics of reading,” one that will empower the “readee,” or “the one for whom one reads,” amid the proliferation of digital devices and techniques that are “shaking up our experience as readers.”

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• 
  Tilt

  by Emma Pattee (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)

  Fiction

  Annie, the narrator of this propulsive novel, which takes place in a single day, is nine months pregnant and in a Portland IKEA when the “Really Big One” hits the Pacific Northwest. After the quaking subsides, Annie—left with no phone, money, or car—begins walking across what remains of the city. While traversing blazing hot asphalt and mounds of rubble, her mind flits back and forth between her present circumstance and her not so distant past: getting engaged, taking birthing classes, and fighting with her husband, whom she can’t reach. “This is not an Indiana Jones movie where everybody will end up alive,” she says to her unborn baby. “Your father is lost to us now . . . and if I don’t get home, you will be lost to me, too.”

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• 
  Atomic Dreams

  by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (Algonquin)

  Nonfiction

  Tuhus-Dubrow, a freelance journalist, was brought up in the nineteen-nineties by environmentalist parents who opposed nuclear power. As an adult, she still viewed atomic energy skeptically—until she learned that some prominent environmentalists were calling it the world’s best hope for limiting climate change. She set out to learn more, and chronicles her journey of discovery in “Atomic Dreams.” Prominent among the book’s evangelists for nuclear power are Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz, who founded a group called Mothers for Nuclear; both work at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, in central California. Though Hoff was in the control room at Diablo Canyon the day of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, which triggered a chain of crises at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, she eventually came to believe that “our fears were largely misdirected.” Tuhus-Dubrow, in her travels with nuclear proponents, hears versions of this argument over and over. The problem is not that nuclear plants are prone to catastrophic meltdowns; it’s that people are prone to catastrophic thinking.

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  Read more: “Environmentalists Are Rethinking Nuclear. Should They?,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
• 
  Dream State

  by Eric Puchner (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  This expansive novel delineates the multigenerational fallout from a young bride’s impulsive decision to leave her new husband for his best friend. Cece spurns life with a Los Angeles anesthesiologist named Charlie and throws her lot in with Garrett, a depressive baggage handler who lives in Salish, Montana, where Charlie’s parents own a vacation home. The story is no fairy tale; it’s one of “guilt and second-guessing and trapdoor ambivalence opening to regret.” The action, which begins in 2004 and unfolds over the next several decades, is set against the backdrop of an increasingly inhospitable world—glaciers are disappearing, fires are raging, the air is unbreathable—and explores how we might make meaning of our existence in the face of escalating loss.

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• 
  In Praise of Floods

  by James C. Scott (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  This provocative study of rivers by the esteemed political scientist, who died in 2024, offers a posthumous conclusion to a scholarly career of upending conventional wisdom. Scott argues that focussing on the human costs of flooding is anthropocentric. A flood may be, “for humans,” the “most damaging of ‘natural’ disasters worldwide,” but, from “a long-run hydrological perspective, it is just the river breathing deeply, as it must.” In celebrating periodic flooding, Scott is also warning about the costs of human intervention. Dams and levees lead to less frequent flooding, but erosion and deforestation mean more catastrophic floods when these barriers are breached. The more civilized you are, in other words, the less resilient you are.

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  Read more: “James C. Scott and the Art of Resistance,” by Nikil Saval
• 
  The Crossing

  by Richard Parker (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  “American history did not begin in the Northeast. It began in the Southwest,” Parker asserts, in this sweeping history of El Paso, his home town. The account, which starts in the sixteenth century, is one of both endless conflict and cross-cultural accommodation. “El Paso is where Native, Spanish, European, African, Jewish, and Arab cultures fought, bled, died,” he writes, but it’s also where they forged a “vibrantly diverse” society that became a model for the country. Although Parker was moved to write the book after a white nationalist murdered twenty-three people at an El Paso Walmart, in 2019, he strikes a hopeful note: “This isn’t just where America began. If we’re lucky, it can show America how to begin again.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Flesh

  by David Szalay (Scribner)

  Fiction

  Szalay’s novel follows its protagonist, István, through adolescence in Hungary, five years in the army, and a move to London, where he lands a job as a security driver for extremely wealthy clients. István mainly approaches his life as a series of detached events. But his most formative experiences—a moment of physical fearlessness, an intense affair—reverberate, even as he finds himself unable to account for his bursts of violence and desire. An excerpt from the novel first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Taking Manhattan

  by Russell Shorto (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This vivid history chronicles England’s “taking” of New Amsterdam from the Dutch, in 1664. Shorto, however, argues that it was the Dutch, not the English, who sowed the seeds of the multiethnic, religiously tolerant, and unabashedly capitalistic metropolis that would emerge as New York. He recounts the lives and doings of Peter Stuyvesant, the last leader of the Dutch colony, and his adversary Richard Nicolls, the commander of the English invasion. The taking, accomplished without bloodshed, was less a usurpation than it was a merger of two ways of being. Though Shorto describes the joint enterprise with admiration, he also confronts the dispossession of Native inhabitants which preceded it, and the city’s imminent future as a slave-trade hub.

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• 
  Goddess Complex

  by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

  Sanjana, the protagonist of this biting novel, has recently left her husband in Bombay after a dispute over whether to have children. Couch-surfing in the U.S., she contends with her own perceived shortcomings as “a thirty-two-year-old soon-to-be divorcée” who has “twice overdrawn her bank account.” After Sanjana discovers that her ex is in a new relationship, with someone who has an almost identical name and likeness, and that this person is pregnant, she returns to India to finalize her divorce. There, she’s forced to confront her doppelgänger at the wellness retreat that the woman runs for wannabe parents. What follows is a twisted examination of motherhood and the arbitrary expectations of adulthood.

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• 
  The Containment

  by Michelle Adams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This nonfiction work tells the story of a single Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley, which concerned efforts to desegregate public schools in Detroit. Decided in 1974, it remains a landmark of civil-rights law. In 1970, the N.A.A.C.P. filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court on behalf of plaintiffs including Ronald Bradley, a Black child in an under-resourced Detroit school where ninety-seven per cent of the students were Black. (The defendants included William Milliken, the Republican governor of Michigan.) Bradley won in district court, and the judge ordered the redistribution of nearly eight hundred thousand Detroit students through busing. The state of Michigan appealed, but the Sixth Circuit largely upheld the verdict. Then, following an appeal to the Supreme Court, Bradley lost, marking the first major defeat for Black people in a school case after Brown v. Board of Education. Adams, a Detroit native who teaches law at the University of Michigan, writes that Milliken v. Bradley “was where the promise of Brown ended.” Her passionate and well-researched account offers a full appreciation of the campaign for racial justice—in all its complexities.

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  Read more: “Why the Court Hit the Brakes on School Desegregation,” by Louis Menand
• 
  Death Takes Me

  by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Sarah BookerRobin Myers (Hogarth)

  Fiction

  In this novel, a detective, a tabloid journalist, and a professor become obsessed with a string of strange and gruesome killings. The victims are all male, the corpses all castrated, and each crime scene is signed with lines of poetry by the Argentinean writer Alejandra Pizarnik. The story that unfolds is hardly a conventional murder mystery; rather, it’s a genre- and gender-bending exploration of violence and desire, form and fragmentation. Veering between surreal interior monologue, scholarly criticism, and elliptical verse, Garza’s chimerical and metatextual whodunnit unsettlingly posits that no one—not the writer, and perhaps not even, or especially not, the reader—is truly innocent.

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• 
  Mornings Without Mii

  by Mayumi Inaba, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (FSG Originals)

  Nonfiction

  On a summer day in Tokyo, the author of this moving memoir finds a kitten, “a little ball of fluff,” stuck on a fence. After rescuing the stray and naming her Mii, Inaba gradually learns the ins and outs of cat ownership: feeding, play, and the dangers of wandering outside. The book, which spans the twenty-odd years of Mii’s life, describes the daily joys and intimacies of having a pet, the difficulties that come with an aging cat, and the sorrows of outliving one’s animal companion. Inaba’s portrait of the human-feline relationship is reverential, an expression of devotion in its attention to detail.

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• 
  Miracles and Wonder

  by Elaine Pagels (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  Pagels, a Princeton professor emeritus, has written many engrossing books on early Christianity. Here, she ably navigates through the essential but surprisingly unsettled sources that seem to relate the events of Jesus’ life and death, her larger point being that the most improbable Gospel tales serve to patch a fractured narrative. They use familiar tropes and myths to smooth over inconsistencies that believers struggled with from the beginning. The shifting Nativity narratives, for instance, suggest that rumors about Jesus’ parentage existed from the beginning; Matthew’s account of the empty tomb serves, Pagels suggests, to counter skeptical claims that Jesus’ corpse had simply been stolen. She revels in the contradictions and the inconsistencies not as flaws to be explained away but as signs of the faith’s capaciousness. The miracles are miracles because, she explains, they are a source of wonder.

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  Read more: “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Seeking Shelter

  by Jeff Hobbs (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  This moving real-life saga opens with a family—Evelyn and her five, soon to be six, children—living in a small city in California. They move to Los Angeles in search of better schools, but a single mishap leaves them mostly unhoused for the next five years. Hobbs reconstructs Evelyn’s story using interviews conducted after the family’s situation stabilized, but the narrative unfolds with gripping immediacy. Evelyn’s war is waged on the streets, on automated government-aid hotlines, in schools, in hospitals, in low-wage jobs. Most important, it’s also waged in her psyche, which Hobbs wisely foregrounds. Though Evelyn is undeniably a victim of corrupt systems, she possesses a resilience that makes her story nothing short of heroic.

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• 
  What You Make of Me

  by Sophie Madeline Dess (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

  Ava, the protagonist of this unconventional début novel, contemplates her relationship to Demetri, her older brother, as he lies dying of brain cancer, at thirty-one. The siblings became inseparable in their youth, after their mother, an actress who “started off in Shakespeare and ended up in commercials,” killed herself. Demetri grew up to be a documentarian, and Ava a painter—the sort who makes pieces while having sex in an attempt to share “the colors of the experience.” But an attraction to the same woman tested their bond. In the face of tragedy, Dess’s narrator memorably dramatizes the anxiety-inducing exigencies of the creative arts, and the need of artists to remain focussed on their craft.

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• 
  No Fault

  by Haley Mlotek (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Mlotek, a Canadian writer, ended a marriage in her late twenties. In her new book, she writes that this experience “hadn’t defined my feelings, but it had changed the shape of them in a way I couldn’t have predicted and probably would never recover from.” Alongside her personal narrative, “No Fault” offers a social history of divorce and meditations on the cultural detritus she turned to while grappling with her separation—from Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” to a 2001 paparazzi photo of Nicole Kidman to Joan Didion’s “The White Album.” The book stands out for its avoidance of clear-cut binaries; Mlotek’s analysis is defined by an insistence on ambiguity, and her reticence about her own divorce is perhaps the most romantic thing about it, testifying to an abiding intimacy that transcends any legal relationship.

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  Read more: “Who Gets to Define Divorce,” by Molly Fischer
• 
  Adaptable

  by Herman Pontzer (Avery)

  Nonfiction

  Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, offers an engrossing, richly informative exploration of human biological diversity. He catalogues a great many examples, from East African hunter-gatherers whose life styles shield them from cardiovascular disease to Southeast Asian sea nomads with genetic adaptations that let them spend hours a day underwater. By revealing how our variable bodies respond to a wide range of environments, Pontzer challenges us to rethink assumptions that underpin our social and medical systems: ideas about disease, treatment, excellence, procreation. These assumptions, he shows, rest on a flawed monolithic image of the human body, a prototypical Homo sapiens whose vulnerabilities remain unchanged across climates and genetic histories. “There is no textbook human,” he writes, and, if we’re to better serve humanity’s needs, we must develop policies and practices that take into account the physiological diversity of our species.

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  Read more: “Medical Benchmarks and the Myth of the Universal Patient,” by Manvir Singh
• 
  Dust and Light

  by Andrea Barrett (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In these collected essays, Barrett, an acclaimed novelist, explores the relationship between fiction and nonfiction. For her, research creates “the bones” of a story, and imagination provides “the breath and the blood.” By way of example, she recounts how the experiences of American soldiers stationed in Russia during the early twentieth century influenced her story collection “Archangel.” She also highlights how history informed the work of her literary influences, like Hilary Mantel. The late author’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy, Barrett writes, uses details from Thomas Cromwell’s life as “nucleation sites around which emotion engages and metaphors are richly made.” Barrett’s book is an ode to fiction’s unique ability to illuminate history—not as fact but as felt experience.

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• 
  Perfection

  by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes (New York Review Books)

  Fiction

  The couple at the center of “Perfection” have moved from an unnamed country in southern Europe to Berlin in the twenty-tens, to pursue an art-adjacent life style and careers in graphic design. Like the laptops on which they work and play, Anna and Tom’s aesthetic preferences are always on the brink of obsolescence, and checking for updates is a full-time, if passive, occupation. The two move as one: they talk neither to each other nor to anyone else, and travel through a world littered with the cultural signifiers of intellectualized upward mobility (houseplants, hardwood floors). Latronico documents their decisions and demurrals with an elegant proportion of sly commentary to detached reportage. “Perfection,” an homage to “Things,” Georges Perec’s classic 1965 novel of modern malaise, captures a culture of exquisite taste, tender sensitivities, and gnawing discontent.

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  Read more: “ ‘Perfection’ Is the Perfect Novel for an Age of Aimless Aspiration,” by Alice Gregory
• 
  Original Sins

  by Eve L. Ewing (One World)

  Nonfiction

  This stark critique of America’s schools anchors our current educational system in eighteenth-century ideas about race and intelligence. Tracing a line from Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” through Jim Crow to present-day policies on housing, zoning, and standardized testing, Ewing argues that this system was always intended to operate differently for different people. It aimed to make good citizens out of whites and “a class of subservient laborers” out of Blacks, and to culturally erase Native Americans altogether. For Ewing, the varying life outcomes of these groups indicate that our schools not only reflect society’s racial hierarchies but “play an active role in constructing, normalizing, and upholding them.”

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• 
  Notes on Surviving the Fire

  by Christine Murphy (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Sarah, the narrator of this début novel, is a graduate student who studies the kinds of violence that Buddhism considers justifiable. She’s also the recent survivor of a sexual assault, and her attacker, whom she calls Rapist, is in her department—where he has remained despite her report of the incident. After Sarah discovers her best friend dead, she senses foul play and decides to pursue justice, this time on her own terms. The novel’s strength lies in Sarah’s duality: having grown up hunting, she is “as comfortable with Tibetan hagiographies as with the beating hearts of bloody things.” The narrative is equally layered, with a thriller’s bones, a satire’s glare, and a comeuppance story’s anarchic spirit.

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• 
  Immaculate Forms

  by Helen King (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  King, a British classicist, is interested in the many ways that women’s bodies have been misunderstood by the Western world, including the damage done by Christianity. Her lively study is organized not by time period but by body part—breast, clitoris, hymen, and womb—a choice that makes it less a sustained argument in support of a certain kind of femaleness than a compendium of trivia ranging from Eve to Mary, from ancient-Roman wet nurses to Victorian clitorectomy clinics. But the variety and contradiction of the trivia provide its own kind of argument. “The story I will tell,” King writes, “is not a reassuring narrative of progress, but one with no clear direction, no steady, logical development toward a ‘now’ in which we know pretty much all there is to know.” The book leaves you with the impression that, no matter what you believe to be obvious and natural about the female body, somebody in power once believed the exact opposite.

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  Read more: “The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Virgins,” by S. C. Cornell
• 
  When the Going Was Good

  by Graydon Carter (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Carter, a former editor of Spy, the New York Observer, and Vanity Fair, has been held up over the years as a force of style, both in his personal taste and in his expansive vision of creative work, which grew from his editorial experiences during a prosperous and thrilling era in American magazines. This winsome memoir is a recounting of that period, brisk, bright, and full of well-told anecdotes about celebrities, artists, and other power players in Carter’s orbit. The book trades in a familiar New York style of information-sharing by which outsiders are allowed to feel like insiders, and sometimes—because Carter’s career has been one of turning tables endlessly—the other way around. “Somehow, in my case, with a lot of mishaps and a dollop of good luck along the way, things just worked out,” Carter writes: the voice of a man who tasted the best of the American century and still left the party early, with his dignity intact.

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  Read more: “Graydon Carter’s Wild Ride Through a Golden Age of Magazines,” by Nathan Heller
• 
  Strike

  by Sarah E. Bond (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  Rebellion in ancient Rome is commonly associated with a single man: Spartacus, the leader of the Third Servile War. But this incisive history contends that it’s a mistake to attribute the uprising to a single individual’s ingenuity, or to imagine that any act of collective defiance in the Empire was an isolated occurrence. Bond shows how professional and trade associations empowered bakers, gladiators, charioteers, and the like to wield their leverage—for example, by withholding their labor—in pursuit of improved conditions. Employing “strategic anachronism,” she connects their struggles to contemporary union efforts, emphasizing the ways in which, from antiquity to the present, solidarity among workers has persisted despite backlash from the ruling classes.

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• 
  Lower than the Angels

  by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  In this thrilling and comprehensive new book, MacCulloch, a historian at Oxford, argues that marriage and family have in historical terms come only lately into fashion among Christians. For much of Christian history, he suggests, all sex was sinful—even the marital and procreative, even the unconscious. “It is better to marry than to burn,” the apostle Paul famously wrote, but even better was to douse the flames of lust with an analogous but more elevated communion with God, to partake in what MacCulloch calls the “substitute families” of a celibate religious life. MacCulloch points out that this approach is much like the compromise that some churches, including the Anglican and Catholic ones, have struck with gay couples today.

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  Read more: “The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Virgins,” by S. C. Cornell
• 
  There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

  by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi SmithJennifer Russell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Poetry

  These poems—drawn from several of the revered Danish writer’s collections and published together in English for the first time—are tinged with the longing of Ditlevsen’s inner child. The poet, who died in 1976, injects mournful omniscience into explorations of heartache. The young girl living inside Ditlevsen stares at a reflection of her adult self, “searching for something she hopes to recover.” What is recovered through the writer’s deceptively plain language, confined in her earlier work by rhymed verse but free from form in later years, is her yearning for “Protection / against every kind / of desire.”

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• 
  Red Scare

  by Clay Risen (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  The Red Scare reshaped every institution in American life: Hollywood, labor unions, churches, universities, elementary schools—and, above all, the national-security state. Risen, a journalist at the New York Times, describes the biggest showdowns and the many oddities of the anti-Communist surge, in addition to the fear and suffering of those who bore the brunt of it. His book, a marvellous accounting that covers many moments of high drama, also usefully lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible, from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets. It also describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end.

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  Read more: “How the Red Scare Reshaped American Politics,” by Beverly Gage
• 
  The Boyhood of Cain

  by Michael Amherst (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  In this tender début novel, Daniel, the precocious pre-teen protagonist, comes of age in rural England. After an illness and financial mismanagement force his father to accept early retirement, the family relocates from a suburban town to the countryside. The narrative follows Daniel as he adjusts to his new surroundings and contends with a series of disappointments and troubling discoveries. He learns of his mother’s jettisoned dream of becoming an actress; he grows close to a teacher whose attention proves capricious; and he becomes infatuated with a new classmate, who has a “glorious body.” No longer just an observer of the adult world, Daniel learns difficult lessons about life and sexuality.

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• 
  Rot

  by Padraic X. Scanlan (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  This vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine is richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship. Scanlan convincingly argues that the famine was the product of a particularly virulent form of exploitative capitalism that left millions of people exposed to the instability of short-term rental of land, to fluctuating food markets, and to wages driven downward by the pressure of too many laborers looking for too little work. As he puts it, “Intensive monoculture made Irish potatoes vulnerable to blight. The solutions proposed to mitigate famine were themselves the product of a kind of intellectual and political monoculture. Solutions were unimaginable outside the market that fuelled the crisis to begin with.”

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  Read more: “What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly,” by Fintan O’Toole
• 
  From Our Pages

  Dream Count

  by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Adichie’s novel is a braided account of four women, in Nigeria and America, reflecting on the choices and missed opportunities that led them to their current lives. Partnerships are forged and broken. Secrets shared between Adichie’s characters—of ambitions thwarted and dreams realized—liberate them even as they tether each to the inexorable patterns of existence. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  The Moral Circle

  by Jeff Sebo (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  What kind of ethical consideration do we owe insects, plants, or A.I. systems? This book argues that if entities have the capacity for welfare—the ability to be helped or harmed—they should be included in our moral circle, which Sebo defines as “the set of beings who matter for their own sakes.” Using a series of thought experiments, he suggests that our moral intuition may not be the most useful tool for evaluating the ethics of our conduct, especially when it affects beings that are far removed from our everyday experience, either geographically or evolutionarily. “Taking this virtuous path,” Sebo concludes, “requires telling ourselves new stories about the meaning, purpose, and value of human existence.”

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• 
  A Matter of Complexion

  by Tess Chakkalakal (St. Martin’s)

  Nonfiction

  Charles W. Chesnutt, the subject of this well-considered biography, was born to free people of color in 1858. He could have passed as white, but he identified as Black; he was, he explained, “quite willing for the colored people to have any credit they could derive from anything I might accomplish.” Though he often wrote about “the race question,” he wanted his work to appeal to readers with wide interests, believing that, as Chakkalakal writes, “only by putting the individual over race will the race be served.” This conviction was not generally embraced by the generation of Harlem Renaissance writers that followed, but Chesnutt’s work was nevertheless a catalyst for the movement.

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• 
  Homes for Living

  by Jonathan Tarleton (Beacon)

  Nonfiction

  Tarleton, an urban historian, recounts the history of—and examines threats to—the Mitchell-Lama program, a nineteen-fifties housing initiative that allowed New Yorkers to purchase “limited equity” co-ops, low-cost apartments that they technically owned but couldn’t resell or pass down. The author focusses on two buildings, Southbridge and St. James, whose residents were given the opportunity to “go private”—that is, to leave the Mitchell-Lama system and sell their homes at market rate. Tarleton found that the residents were under the spell of something other than money. To them, ownership came with a vision of boundless possibility. In their longing, Tarleton sees the effects of what he calls “over a century of public policy and real estate propaganda.”

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  Read more: “What Do We Buy Into When We Buy a Home?,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Theory & Practice

  by Michelle de Kretser (Catapult)

  Fiction

  De Kretser’s seventh novel begins on a historical note—in 1957, an Australian geologist contemplates a past romance—before swerving abruptly. “At that point, the novel I was writing stalled,” the unnamed narrator interjects. Afterward, the story edges closer to autofiction, following the experience of the narrator, a young Sri Lankan Australian woman, as she attends graduate school in Melbourne. While working on a thesis about Virginia Woolf, she considers what it means to be a “modern woman” in an intellectual milieu saturated with French theory. Drawn into an affair with another student, she grapples with her feminism and discovers unexpected points of contact between ideas and physical passion.

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• 
  Jesus Wept

  by Philip Shenon (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  The topics of this fleet and vivid new account of the papacy’s recent history are familiar—disputes over sexual mores, war and peace, church and state, money, and the reach of Vatican authority—and so are the author’s assessments of them: the problem is that the churchmen who run things are corrupt, secretive, hypocritical, and illiberal. But the depth of Shenon’s reporting, combined with his strict observance of chronology, gives fresh emphasis to material lost in the churn of the news cycle. The narrative suggests a comprehensive insight about Catholicism in our time: since the nineteen-sixties, the striking changes in the ways that the Popes comport themselves have masked the Church’s stubborn resistance to change.

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  Read more: “The Pope’s Role Has Changed in Our Time. But Has the Church?,” by Paul Elie
• 
  The Many Lives of Anne Frank

  by Ruth Franklin (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  This book depicts the rich texture of Frank’s life, and the “complicated genesis” of her published diary, while also exploring her afterlife as a “figurehead against prejudice,” one whose story has been edited, censored, commodified, and appropriated. Franklin, an award-winning biographer, details how Frank’s legacy was formed, and sometimes deformed, by her father, Otto, who survived her. Otto’s role as the keeper of Frank’s memory is “perhaps the most confusing—and most contested—aspect of Anne’s story,” Franklin writes. With sensitivity and assiduous research, she constructs a vivid cultural history that advocates for a reëvaluation of Frank, not as a symbol or a saint but as a human being and a literary artist.

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• 
  A Gorgeous Excitement

  by Cynthia Weiner (Crown)

  Fiction

  The title of this assured début novel is taken from Freud’s description of cocaine’s effects. That drug, combined with prescription medications, sex, and alcohol, fuels the narrative, which is closely modelled on the real-life death of a Manhattan teen-ager in 1986—the so-called Preppy Murder case. The summer before the protagonist, Nina, leaves the Upper East Side for Vanderbilt, she is searching for someone to “please God take her virginity.” She soon meets Gardner, a devious and charming troublemaker who fills her with a “buzzy euphoria.” Nina follows him on a series of dangerous outings that lead her to grow disenchanted and wary. “Everything’s too big to get my head around,” she says, as she begins to reckon with the compromises of adulthood.

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• 
  Ends of the Earth

  by Neil Shubin (Dutton)

  Nonfiction

  In this comprehensive yet concise history of modern polar exploration, Shubin, a professor of evolutionary biology, mixes urgent scientific findings about glaciers and sea-level rise with prescient geopolitical histories of Arctic territorial disputes. Throughout, Shubin relates stories from his own field expeditions: a pilot lands a propeller plane in an icy valley; a crew member stumbles on kaleidoscopic hues of blue while spelunking in Antarctic crevasses; Shubin’s team discovers a field of dinosaur footprints that had been miraculously preserved under layers of ice. Such descriptions enliven the book, and capture Shubin’s reverence for both the beauty and the mysteries hidden in the cold, barren tundra.

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• 
  Stone Yard Devotional

  by Charlotte Wood (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  Short-listed for the Booker Prize, this quiet, probing novel follows a middle-aged woman as she moves into a cloistered religious community near the town where she grew up. The narrator has left her marriage and her job without announcement, and this sudden abstention is also thrust upon the reader; details from the woman’s former life filter in slowly, but much of the past remains obscure. Instead, the narrator documents her trials at the convent—a plague of mice, the arrival of a murdered nun’s bones—where the ordinary and the extraordinary collide. Here, faith is more than foolishness but less than sacrosanct, and one woman’s disappearance becomes a rumination on what it means to exist.

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• 
  Cold Kitchen

  by Caroline Eden (Bloomsbury)

  Nonfiction

  Primarily unfolding in the kitchen of an Edinburgh apartment, this cozy memoir offers rich descriptions of international foods stored in the pantry and cooking on the stove. But “a kitchen is a portal,” Eden writes. These domestic scenes spark recollections of visits to Central Asia—Istanbul, Riga, Siberia—and each chapter closes with a recipe for a now familiar dish. In the book’s strongest moments, Eden gestures toward the political significance of her culinary escapades abroad. At a café in Poland, she reflects on the legacy of the Second World War; in Kyrgyzstan, she ventures out for clover dumplings in the aftermath of protests there. In so doing, she asserts that food can be as valuable as a place’s “history, architecture and civic life.”

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• 
  Love and Need

  by Adam Plunkett (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost’s peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost’s personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man.

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  Read more: “The Many Guises of Robert Frost,” by Maggie Doherty
• 
  Code Noir

  by Canisia Lubrin (Soft Skull)

  Fiction

  This collection of “fictions”—many too strange to be called stories—is filled with disappearances, deaths, and gnomic pronouncements. Lubrin, a St. Lucian-born Canadian poet, writes that “the murderers in this draft are those who write the laws,” referring to the titular seventeenth-century French edict that governed the traffic and ownership of Black people. Text from these regulations appears between Lubrin’s pieces, hauntingly drawn over by the artist Torkwase Dyson. The collection displays tremendous stylistic breadth: one work simply describes seventeen dogs, another features a mathematically gifted conch shell, and others are closer to poetry, with only a few plotless lines. The over-all effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of “history’s wide grave.”

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• 
  Victorian Psycho

  by Virginia Feito (Liveright)

  Fiction

  Winifred, the protagonist of this Victorian-era grotesque, takes a position as a governess at an English manor. The lady of the house, Mrs. Pounds, has instructed her to cultivate “good moral character” in her children, but Winifred senses “a Darkness” in Mrs. Pounds, one that she herself shares: it “rests within my rib-cage, a jailed animal grown listless with domestication.” Vandalism and lechery are among the milder affronts that occur on Winifred’s watch, and her narration, though sombre, sparkles. “It fascinates me,” Winifred reflects, “that humans have the capacity to mortally wound one another at will, but for the most part, choose not to.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Lorne

  by Susan Morrison (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  The New Yorker’s articles editor spent a decade on this sly, anecdote-stuffed biography of Lorne Michaels, the producer who created “S.N.L.” Her witty and insightful portrait incorporates hundreds of interviews, including writers and comedians—such as Tina Fey, Bill Murray, and Will Ferrell—who got their start on the show. An excerpt appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Land Power

  by Michael Albertus (Basic)

  Nonfiction

  In the past few centuries, land has changed hands on major scales: from nobles to commoners during the French Revolution, from Native peoples to European settlers in North America, and from the wealthy to the poor in China, Russia, and Mexico. This sweeping study examines the results of such shifts, which, the author argues, are what set countries on diverging developmental paths and produced a host of modern social ills. The seizure of land by settlers, for instance, entrenched racism, and collectivization under Communist regimes led to environmental destruction. But Albertus is optimistic. Better policies, he insists, show the power of land as “a tool for forging a more just and sustainable world.”

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• 
  Helen of Troy, 1993

  by Maria Zoccola (Scribner)

  Poetry

  This exuberant début poetry collection recasts the titular heroine as an Appalachian housewife reckoning with the tyrannies of beauty, domesticity, and small-town gossip during the late twentieth century. Zoccola’s Helen is neither femme fatale nor damsel in distress; here, the “face that launched a thousand ships” belies a person with a teeming, tenacious mind and implacable appetites. She catalogues her pregnancy cravings—“corn chips. sliced watermelon. microwave pizza rolls”—and pursues an affair. Defiant, Helen sings of her rage against “a life of small mercies and small choices,” illuminating the perennial struggle between a unique yet universal woman and the world that would confine her.

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• 
  After Lives

  by Megan Marshall (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

  In this slim volume of essays, Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, turns inward, reflecting on her discovery of old personal paraphernalia, including letters and photographs. She writes of her grandfather, Joe Marshall, who oversaw photography and film for the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War, and of Jonathan Jackson, a Black high-school classmate, who was killed at seventeen when he tried to free his older brother, a Black Power activist, from prison. The book also contains anecdotes about the death of her partner and revelations about her mother, a gifted painter who sacrificed her art in order to help raise her family.

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• 
  The Riveter

  by Jack Wang (HarperVia)

  Fiction

  Set in Canada, the U.S., and Europe during the Second World War, this historical novel explores the life of a Chinese Canadian man, Josiah Chang, whose romance with a white woman, Poppy, undergirds his drive to prove himself. Tracing Josiah’s trajectory from lumberjack to shipyard riveter to ambitious serviceman, Wang offers a protagonist of unflappable morality and decency. Despite racially discriminatory laws barring him from enlisting (and gaining citizenship), Josiah nonetheless joins an élite parachuting battalion and intervenes to prevent war crimes. Nodding toward this Odyssean journey, Wang’s novel presents a familiar tale of war and homecoming, rife with correspondence, death, and pangs of yearning for a beloved back home.

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• 
  The Secret History of the Rape Kit

  by Pagan Kennedy (Vintage)

  Nonfiction

  In the Chicago metro area of the nineteen-seventies, about two thousand rapes were reported to the police every year—and, unsurprisingly, many thousands more went unreported. A nonprofit executive named Marty Goddard came up with an idea for a forensic kit that could be used in all rape exams. Soon, Chicago became “the first city to widely adopt a standardized sexual-assault forensic kit,” Kennedy writes. DNA evidence in rape kits has exonerated the innocent—including many Black men who were falsely accused of assaulting white women—and cracked decades-old cold cases, among them that of Joseph DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer. But, as Kennedy makes painfully clear, the rape kit has also become a paradoxical symbol of systemic indifference toward rape and its victims. Every few years, a scandalous news report emerges about one municipality or another that either hoarded or destroyed unprocessed kits. Despite efforts to clear the backlog, hundreds of thousands of kits sit untested nationwide, and ten states still have no tracking system for them.

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  Read more: “The Frustrated Promise of the Rape Kit,” by Jessica Winter
• 
  Shattered

  by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  On Boxing Day, 2022, Kureishi, a novelist and screenwriter, experienced an accident that left him tetraplegic. The diary entries that constitute this book, dictated from hospital beds in Rome and London, offer an unflinching look at Kureishi’s affliction. Interspersed throughout are recollections of his boyhood and his family: he reminisces about his father—a civil servant from Bombay who named his son after a cricket player—and broods about his mother. Amid the monotony of hospital routines and physiotherapy sessions, writing becomes Kureishi’s anchor: “I am determined to keep writing, it has never mattered to me more.”

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• 
  The Dissenters

  by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf)

  Fiction

  This novel, the first written in English by one of Egypt’s leading authors, takes the form of letters from a man in Cairo to his sister, who lives in America. In the letters, the man interweaves their mother’s story—involving a failed first marriage, female genital mutilation, an affair, and transformations from secularism to religiosity and back again—with reflections on his own life, his experience of her recent death, and the wider history of his country. Designating himself “a truth-seeker, a lover, a revolutionary,” the man notes that he “could never be any of those things if I didn’t understand that I was an Egyptian woman’s son.”

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• 
  New and Collected Hell

  by Shane McCrae (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Poetry

  In an allusion to Dante and his Inferno, this book-length poem follows a poet on his journey through an underworld that has been audaciously recast in a post-millennial context and vernacular. McCrae’s Hell contains a human-resources “bunker,” conducts intake interviews, shows the damned on screens that hang above gray cubicles sprawling endlessly in all directions, and communicates by fax machine only. The narrator’s guide says “It’s mostly assholes who think Hell’s where justice happens Hell / Is sorrow’s Heaven where it goes to live forever with / Its god the human body.” Unlike Dante’s narrator, McCrae’s neo-Virgil never gains any real clarity. The poem’s meticulous inventory of one person’s anguish stands alongside the equally emphatic impossibility of capturing the whole.

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  Read more: “The Poet Shane McCrae Goes Back to Hell,” by Elisa Gonzalez
• 
  In Defense of Partisanship

  by Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia Global Reports)

  Nonfiction

  In this concise treatise, Zelizer argues that the solution to the dysfunction in American politics lies not in third-partyism, bipartisanship, or a strengthened executive branch but, rather, in an improved two-party system. He lays out the case for why such a system still represents “the best way to organize and direct the deep tensions that always exist within the electorate.” Tracing the Democratic and the Republican Parties from their births through the congressional reforms of the nineteen-seventies (which ushered in the era of intense partisanship we know today), Zelizer dissects what has gone wrong and provides a clear and accessible blueprint for further changes—including ending the filibuster and eliminating the debt ceiling.

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• 
  Somewhere Toward Freedom

  by Bennett Parten (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  In the fall of 1864, General William Sherman took sixty thousand Union soldiers some two hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to the ocean, scorching a vast swath of the state along the way. The campaign is remembered as a path of destruction, a total war waged against the white civilians of the South. Yet to the many enslaved people across the state who left their homes and followed Sherman to the sea, the march meant freedom. This is the central narrative of Parten’s new book, “Somewhere Toward Freedom.” Parts of this story have been told before, in broader works about the Civil War or emancipation or the march itself. But Parten’s may be the first to make freedpeople its sole focus, and to claim that they were essential to the march’s meaning.

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  Read more: “The Other Side of Sherman’s March,” by Scott Spillman
• 
  Blob

  by Maggie Su (Harper)

  Fiction

  In this slyly self-aware and gently comic novel, a twenty-four-year-old college dropout, Vi, who is stuck in a dead-end job and getting over a bad breakup, discovers a blob on the ground outside a dive bar. She takes the blob—which to her recalls “the slime I made as a kid”—back to her apartment and shapes it, golem-like, into her ideal boyfriend, whom she names Bob. Vi is chubby, socially awkward, and uneasy with her own “otherness” (she is the child of an Asian father and a white mother), and she seeks conventional perfection in Bob, who develops washboard abs and movie-star looks. But problems arise when Bob starts to feel desires of his own—a turn that both accelerates the novel’s sharp plot and enriches its examination of the complex relationship between longing and identity.

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• 
  Everything Must Go

  by Dorian Lynskey (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  Lynskey, a British journalist and podcaster, has assembled a host of biological, geological, archeological, literary, and cinematic permutations of apocalyptic finales, leaving no stone unturned. Popular culture complements literary culture; Lynskey fearlessly juxtaposes Skeeter Davis’s song “The End of the World” (about heartbreak) with Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man.” This multilayered narrative pays respects to Saul Bellow, Norman Cohn, Richard Hofstadter, and Susan Sontag. A recap of the Y2K scare, which now seems quaintly innocent, reminds us of simpler tech times; Lynskey also dwells briefly on the possibility of malicious rogue A.I. The author allots space to all sorts of apocalypses—sudden infertility, rising seas, nuclear war—but, for the most part, “Everything Must Go” relishes the opportunity to ruminate on our apocalyptic obsessions: doom without the gloom.

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  Read more: “What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End,” by Arthur Krystal
• 
  Black in Blues

  by Imani Perry (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

  This cultural history of the color blue, and how it threads through Black lives and “the peculiar institution of slavery,” opens with the indigo trade in the sixteenth century. The dye’s production by enslaved individuals was, Perry writes, “an early and clear example of a global desire to harness blue beauty into personal possession.” Touching on a range of historical, artistic, musical, and literary references—from the color’s significance in Yoruba cosmology to the blue candles used in hoodoo rituals to the “tremor” of the “blue note”—Perry illuminates how the color has been variously associated with mourning, spiritual strength, and forces of freedom and oppression.

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• 
  Make Your Own Job

  by Erik Baker (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

  Mantras like “do what you love,” “bring your whole self to work,” and “make a life, not just a living” can seem like a distinctly modern phenomenon, but Baker, a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard, argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal meaning is part of a long-standing national preoccupation. His new book, an exercise in intellectual history, is concerned less with the chronological development of American entrepreneurship than with the idea of it. Baker aims to track the anxieties and desires of a society undergoing epochal transitions and the promulgation of what he calls “the entrepreneurial work ethic”: an orientation that is highly individualistic and competitive.

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  Read more: “The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic,” by Anna Wiener
• 
  My Darling Boy

  by John Dufresne (Norton)

  Fiction

  In this novel, a sensitive portrait of parenthood, a divorced, retired newspaperman named Olney, now working part time at a miniature-golf course in Florida, embarks on a quest to save his son from opioid addiction. Along the way, he encounters a host of Florida-gothic figures, both comic and tragic, including a reverend with a cable-access show and blind octogenarian twins. His relationships with these peculiar characters contribute to the novel’s emotional power, even as the devoted Olney finds little respite or reason for hope: “He thinks of all the people who have come and gone in his life, and how once they start going, they don’t stop.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Vanishing Point

  by Paul Theroux (Mariner)

  Fiction

  The eighteen stories in this new collection look toward the “vanishing point”: in some cases, the end of life; in others, a different kind of ending. “I know exactly what is coming for me,” one character says. “This is not clairvoyance. It is the bleak certainty of a private promise.” In the stories, which jump from continent to continent, a man realizes, to his dismay, that his anger can be mysteriously weaponized; another comes up with a twisted way to resist his wife’s plan to move to assisted living; a boy in Massachusetts weighs the pleasure of transgression against the state of his immortal soul. All the narratives look at life at an angle, shining unfamiliar light on both its sweet and its bitter offerings. Two of the stories, including the title story, were first published in the magazine.

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• 
  American Laughter, American Fury

  by Eran A. Zelnik (Hopkins)

  Nonfiction

  This sobering history tracks how humor, with “its double-edged nature,” was deployed on this side of the Atlantic between 1750 and 1850 to tear down old hierarchies and build up new ones, in the process helping the young United States become a democracy reserved for the benefit of white men. With examples including rebellious colonists’ proud adoption of “Yankee Doodle” as their anthem—the song was initially sung by British troops, to make fun of supposedly unsophisticated locals—and the emergence of blackface minstrelsy, Zelnik shows how white settlers used playfulness and humor to position themselves as the rightful owners of the land, to the exclusion not only of foppish Brits but also of Indigenous and Black Americans.

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• 
  Open Socrates

  by Agnes Callard (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  We often imagine the Socratic method as a kind of heightened Q. & A.: professors peppering their students with queries, fervent debates in which we poke holes in one another’s arguments. In fact, Callard argues, the philosopher’s intervention was more radical: he inaugurated a whole way of life. It involves the uncomfortable, even painful, process of questioning the basic ideas through which you’ve organized your existence. Crucially, this is a social process. “The standard approach to thinking privileges what is private and unvoiced,” Callard writes. Socratic thinking inverts this picture. Thinking, Callard suggests, happens when two people who see themselves as equals pursue a question together.

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  Read more: “Should You Question Everything?,” by Joshua Rothman
• 
  Too Soon

  by Betty Shamieh (Avid Reader)

  Fiction

  This début comic novel, by an accomplished playwright, stitches together the lives of three generations of Palestinian women as they search for personal freedom. Spanning six decades and told from alternating points of view, the story follows Zoya, who flees a besieged Jaffa for the U.S. in the nineteen-forties; her daughter, Naya, and her experience as the child of refugees in the seventies; and Naya’s irreverent daughter Arabella, who, in Palestine in the twenty-tens, endeavors to direct a gender-reversed production of “Hamlet.” As Shamieh balances her characters’ painful family history and their boisterously funny voices, the women navigate between the “push to be modern, radical, and free” and the “pull to find comfort in a community and identity” born of tradition.

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• 
  Gliff

  by Ali Smith (Penguin)

  Fiction

  Smith’s playful new dystopia follows two children as they navigate a heavily surveilled world in which tech is omnipresent, and oppressive. People who fall out of the system—people who, for instance, cannot authenticate themselves on their device, or, perhaps, don’t own a device—are deemed “unverifiable.” One day, the children wake up to find that a red circle has been painted around their house. When they move to a new location, it happens again: another red circle. It’s a warning sign that puts them at risk of being sent off to a brutal “re-education” center. Suddenly, they’re on the run. Part of the joy of “Gliff” is that, while it is set in a dark future, there are moments of genuine humor. The questions the siblings must answer while travelling are specific to the point of absurdity: what brand of toothpaste they use, and why, and whether they are a dog or cat person. At one point, one of the children says, “Yeah but a passport doesn’t prove we’re us. . . . We prove a passport’s it. We just are us.”

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  Read more: “Ali Smith’s Playful Dystopia,” by Anna Russell

• 
  American Oasis

  by Kyle Paoletta (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  For many Americans, the cities of the Southwest are beautiful but slightly terrifying vacation destinations. In this elegant book, Paoletta, who is from New Mexico, argues that these desert cities’ histories of survival make them ideal models for other American metropolises. Through a series of sensitive portraits of the region’s biggest cities—including Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas—Paoletta demonstrates how Southwesterners’ centuries of experience with extreme heat, water scarcity, and “stitching a complex social fabric” from groups of Native Americans, Hispanics, Anglos, and immigrants can impart lessons for other cities facing similar challenges.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  We Do Not Part

  by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewonPaige Morris (Hogarth)

  Fiction

  In the latest work from the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a woman, Kyungha, must travel from Seoul to Jeju Island before the end of the day, in order to keep her friend’s pet bird from dying of thirst; during the journey, she navigates the perils of an increasingly ferocious blizzard and contemplates the different ways that people endure pain, as well as the ways that they make life bearable and forge on. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.

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• 
  Before Elvis

  by Preston Lauterbach (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  This book considers the influence on Elvis Presley of Black musicians, especially the gospel and R. & B. pioneers of the nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties. Drawing from both existing scholarship and firsthand reporting, Lauterbach highlights the artists who originated the songs and invented the techniques with which Presley captivated white audiences, such as Big Mama Thornton—the first singer of “Hound Dog”—and the jazz guitarist Calvin Newborn. The book also chronicles the injustices Black musical pioneers endured, including withheld copyright credits and royalties, and the racism of machine politicians like Memphis’s E. H. (Boss) Crump and the censor he hired, who was determined to ban any material that showed Black people in a positive light.

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• 
  The Sirens’ Call

  by Chris Hayes (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  In the past fifteen years, an avalanche of literature has been published about how technology has ruined our attention spans. Hayes’s new book is perhaps the most sophisticated contribution to the genre. He openly acknowledges that technology panics—induced by everything from comic books to television—have a long history, but he argues that we are living in unprecedented times. Drawing on his own experience as an anchor at MSNBC, where he has observed thoughtful journalists debase themselves in their scramble to retain straying viewers, Hayes makes the case that “focus is harder and harder to sustain.” For this, he blames digital tools that capitalize on our psychological hardwiring; some things we pay attention to by choice, and others we simply find hard to ignore. “Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured,” Hayes writes. “The scale of transformation we’re experiencing is far more vast and more intimate than even the most panicked critics have understood.” And the painful twist is that the thing we really ought to focus on, climate change, “evades our attentional facilities.”

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  Read more: “What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?,” by Daniel Immerwahr
• 
  Going Home

  by Tom Lamont (Knopf)

  Fiction

  At the start of this brilliantly observed début novel, Téo, a traffic-laws instructor, is babysitting the two-year-old son of his childhood friend (and lifelong crush) Lia—not knowing that Lia, a single mother, will use the time to kill herself. When social workers dispatched after the incident deem the rules-abiding Téo to be one of the child’s “better bets,” he is tasked with serving as the boy’s caregiver until a permanent guardian can be found. A trio of unhelpful but well-meaning figures support him: his ailing father, their temple’s unpopular new rabbi, and a hedonistic friend. While teasing the reader with questions about the child’s paternity, Lamont’s story of a make-do family revels in the often comically porous borders of faith, home, and adulthood.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

  by Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg (New York Review Books)

  Fiction

  This volume includes forty-four previously uncollected stories by Gallant—a master of the form, who published more than a hundred stories in The New Yorker. Painstakingly tracked down and assembled by Garth Risk Hallberg, the stories span Gallant’s writing life from 1944, when she was twenty-two, to 1987, and are full of her pointed wit, her acute observations, and her profound understanding of the desire, terror, and loneliness that drive us. Twenty-nine of the stories, including “Up North,” were first published in the magazine.

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• 
  Another Man in the Street

  by Caryl Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  This finespun and structurally intrepid novel follows a West Indian man, set on becoming a journalist, who immigrates to London in the nineteen-sixties. As the novel skips around in time—touching down, among other moments, just before the Second World War and in Thatcher’s era—it tells the stories of the immigrant and of two people he meets in London. One is a white Englishwoman who becomes his longtime partner and must, in the run-up to the millennium, reckon with obscured parts of his life. As the three grapple with various dislocations, they weigh the notion that they “must draw a veil across the past and never again attempt to peer behind it.”

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• 
  Rosarita

  by Anita Desai (Scribner)

  Fiction

  In this hushed, exacting novel, a woman from Delhi resettles in San Miguel de Allende, where she is forced to reckon with her past by an older stranger who claims to have known her late mother. The story follows the transplant as she skeptically trails her mysterious new guide across the supposed sites of her mother’s youth in a foreign land. Throughout their journey, the past’s influence on the present grows ever more pervasive, and the woman’s failure to escape her upbringing emerges as a failure to truly know it. The more she discovers of her mother’s life, the more haunting its opacity becomes.

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• 
  Embers of the Hands

  by Eleanor Barraclough (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  This lively history of the Viking Age—which lasted from roughly 750 to 1100 C.E.—moves beyond tales of seafaring warriors to capture everyday people: women, children, merchants, healers, walrus hunters. Given the scant evidence of these histories in the written record, Barraclough seeks them instead in archeological artifacts, from a rune stick found in the rubble of a tavern in Norway reading “GYDA SAYS THAT YOU SHOULD GO HOME” to an amber figurine of a swaddled baby found in Denmark. If each individual artifact reveals relatively little, the enormous array Barraclough assembles—from Scandinavia, Western Europe, Newfoundland, and trading posts as far east as present-day Russia—adds depth to the traditional portrait of Viking culture.

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• 
  Aflame

  by Pico Iyer (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

  For more than three decades, Iyer, an essayist and a novelist, has spent several weeks a year at a silent retreat in a monastery in Big Sur, California. In this spare, delicately woven memoir, he combines portraits of the people he has encountered during his stays with crystalline descriptions of the natural setting and philosophical ruminations on the purposes of retreat. If Iyer’s ultimate goal is to illuminate a certain state of feeling—the incendiary sense of being alive hinted at in the title—his focus radiates outward: “It’s writing about the external world that feels most interior,” he tells a fellow silence-seeker. The result is a powerful work of observation in which deep truths seem to arise almost by accident.

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• 
  Mood Machine

  by Liz Pelly (Atria)

  Nonfiction

  Pelly’s book is a comprehensive look at how Spotify, the largest streaming platform in the world, profoundly changed how we listen and what we listen to. Founded in Sweden in 2006, the company quickly distinguished itself from other file-sharing services and music marketplaces by tracking the listening habits of its users, allowing it to anticipate what they might want to hear and when. Spotify began curating career-making playlists and feeding them to subscribers. Pelly sympathizes with artists who must contend with superstars like Adele and Coldplay for slots in these lineups, but her greatest concerns are for the listeners. For Pelly, it’s a problem less of taste than of autonomy—the freedom to exercise our own judgment, as we often did when encountering something new while listening to the radio or watching MTV. Spotify’s ingenuity in serving us what we like may keep us from what we love.

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  Read more: “Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Playworld

  by Adam Ross (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Griffin, the teen-age protagonist of this engrossing coming-of-age novel, set on the Upper West Side in the early nineteen-eighties, is living an unusual childhood: an actor in a hit TV show, with parents in the performing arts, he longs to do normal-person things, like fall in love with someone his own age. But Naomi, a thirtysomething friend of his parents’, has other ideas for him, as does his abusive high-school wrestling coach. Onscreen, Griffin plays a superhero; if he has a superpower in real life, it is detachment. Things come to a head one fateful summer as, amid personal and family tumult, the maturing Griffin begins to inhabit his most important role: himself.

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