biography book 2023

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The best memoirs and biographies of 2023

The rise of Madonna, Barbra Streisand in her own words, plus the stormy relationship of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are among this year’s highlights

F or most writers, a memoir is a once in a lifetime event, but not for the poet and novelist Blake Morrison. Having already written memoirs about his late mother and father, he has turned his attention to his siblings in Two Sisters (Borough). The book details the life of Gill, his younger sister who died in 2019 from heart failure caused by alcohol abuse, alongside his half-sister Josie, the product of his father’s affair with a married neighbour, whose real parentage went unacknowledged for years. Morrison’s account of their struggles is tender, vivid and achingly sad.

O Brother (Canongate) is another brutal and brilliant sibling memoir in which the Kill Your Friends author John Niven recalls the life and death of his charismatic, troubled brother, Gary, who took his own life in 2010. It’s with both humour and pathos that he recalls his and Gary’s early life growing up in Irvine, Ayrshire, their diverging adult trajectories and the “Chernobyl of the soul” felt by Niven and his family after his brother’s suicide.

From siblings to parents and grandparents: Before the Light Fades (Virago) by Natasha Walter reveals how the author’s mother, Ruth, took her life at the age of 75, leaving a note that read: “Please be happy for me. It is a logical, positive decision.” Her death inspires Walter to investigate her family’s history of activism, tracing a fascinating path from her German grandfather Georg, who protested against the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s, via her mother’s campaigning – Ruth was a member of the anti-war group Committee of 100, founded by Bertrand Russell – through to her own direct action with Extinction Rebellion.

Having detailed the trauma endured by her Jewish grandparents and their siblings during the second world war in her 2020 memoir House of Glass, Hadley Freeman turns the microscope on herself in Good Girls (4th Estate), detailing an adolescence blown apart by anorexia. The book is both a fearless account of her hospitalisation and eventual recovery and an important study of this most slippery and misunderstood disorder.

The Pulitzer-winning Stay True (Picador) , by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, is a powerful and beautifully written meditation on guilt, memory and male friendship as the author reflects on the death of his “flagrantly handsome” college friend, Ken, who was murdered in 1998 after leaving a house party. A similarly thoughtful portrait of friendship, Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (Penguin) tells of Michael Laudor, Rosen’s childhood friend with whom he shared a dream of being a writer. In adulthood, Laudor developed schizophrenia, for which he spent time in a psychiatric institution, and, in 1998, committed a shocking murder. In telling Laudor’s story, Rosen paints a bleak picture of how initially hopeful new attitudes towards mental illness fed into a system where those in desperate need of help slipped through the cracks.

In the clear-eyed and courageous How to Say Babylon (4th Estate), the poet Safiya Sinclair documents her traumatic childhood as the daughter of a militant Rastafarian who struck fear into his wife and children and made it clear to Safiya that she should grow into “the humbled wife of a Rastaman. Ordinary and unselfed. Her voice and vices not her own.” In her teens, Sinclair took refuge in poetry and, in defiance of her father, forged her own path. A domineering father also features in Noreen Masud’s lyrical, melancholy A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton), in which the author travels to some of Britain’s starkest landscapes, including Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and Orkney, while reflecting on themes of exile, heritage and her troubled childhood in Lahore, Pakistan.

Subtitled “an anti-memoir”, Wish I Was Here (Serpent’s Tail) sees the Viriconium author M John Harrison sifting through old notebooks and observing how his character and writing have evolved in a career spanning half a century, all the while rejecting the concept of memoir as another form of fiction. Along with providing snapshots from his life, this delightfully oddball and original book functions as a writing manual in which Harrison reveals his own battles on the page. “The problem of writing,” he says, “is always the problem of who you were, the problem of who to be next.”

A beguiling blend of memoir and biography, the Observer art critic Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap (Chatto & Windus) recalls the life of her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming, and that of Carel Fabritius, the 17th-century Dutch artist who was killed aged 32 in the Delft “thunderclap”, an explosion at a municipal gunpowder magazine that caused the roof of his home to collapse. Wrapped around their stories is the author’s own artistic journey, from her early days in London visiting and revisiting Fabritius’s A View of Delft in the National Gallery. Cumming’s luminous descriptions of individual paintings are worth the price of the book alone.

Wifedom (Penguin), by the former human rights lawyer Anna Funder, similarly weaves together memoir and biography to tell the story of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife of George Orwell who died at the age of 39. Having spent a summer reading Orwell, Funder noticed how little he mentioned Eileen, even though she had joined him on research trips and collaborated with him on works including Nineteen Eighty-Four. And so Funder shifted her attention “from the work to the life, and from the man to the wife”, in the process creating a nuanced portrait of a charismatic, pragmatic woman who, for better or worse, sacrificed her talent for the man she loved.

Less a straightforward biography than a series of portraits, Red Memory (Faber), by the Guardian’s former China correspondent Tania Branigan, collates remarkable eyewitness accounts of China’s Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of upheaval, paranoia and persecution beginning in 1966. Among Branigan’s interviewees is 60-year-old Zhang Hongbing, who, as a teenager, denounced his mother to the Communist party, leading to her arrest and execution. Zhang takes Branigan to her grave where, between sobs, he chastises his mother for failing to teach him about independence of thought.

Jonny Steinberg’s richly detailed Winnie & Nelson (William Collins) documents the relationship of the late anti-apartheid activist and first South African president Nelson Mandela and his second wife, the former social worker Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who died in 2018. Both fought racism at great personal cost, though, as this insightful biography reveals, they also inflicted immeasurable cruelty on one another.

Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life (Coronet) chronicles, in enthralling detail, Madonna Louise Ciccone’s path from terrifyingly ambitious trainee dancer to pop colossus, all the while placing her in a wider social and cultural context. This is not just the story of massive sales and reinvention but that of a young woman devastated by the loss of her ultra-religious mother and fearlessly battling patriarchal systems, the conservative right and the Catholic church. Another exhaustive portrait of an era-defining star comes courtesy of its subject. Barbra Streisand’s My Name Is Barbra (Century) clocks in at 992 pages, and charts every step of the winding road from Brooklyn to Hollywood.

If both those books reveal the hard graft behind fame, Erotic Vagrancy (Riverrun), by Roger Lewis, tells of the excess. A twin biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the actors famed for their on-off relationship and lavish lifestyle, the title is borrowed from a furious Vatican statement drafted during the filming of 1963’s Cleopatra in Italy, which accused the pair of “erotic vagrancy”. Lewis’s magnificently entertaining book – a doorstopper at more than 650 pages – brims with outrageous anecdotes attesting to the couple’s obsession with one another and their chaotic and decadent ways (they once hired a yacht for their dogs). Burton and Taylor are seemingly monstrous – infantile, vulgar, narcissistic – but, as depicted here, they are nothing less than mesmerising.

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Best Biographies » New Biography

The best biographies of 2023: the national book critics circle shortlist, recommended by elizabeth taylor.

Winner of the 2023 NBCC biography prize

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Talented biographers examine the interplay between individual qualities and greater social forces, explains Elizabeth Taylor —chair of the judges for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award for biography. Here, she offers us an overview of their five-book shortlist, including a garlanded account of the life of J. Edgar Hoover and a group biography of post-war female philosophers.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman

Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs

1 G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

2 the grimkés: the legacy of slavery in an american family by kerri k. greenidge, 3 mr. b: george balanchine’s twentieth century by jennifer homans, 4 metaphysical animals: how four women brought philosophy back to life by clare mac cumhaill & rachael wiseman, 5 up from the depths: herman melville, lewis mumford, and rediscovery in dark times by aaron sachs.

I t’s a pleasure to have you back , Elizabeth—this time to discuss the National Book Critics Circle’s 2023 biography shortlist. You’ve been chair of the judging panel for a while, so you’re in a great position to tell us whether it has been a good year for biography.

That comes through in the shortlist, I think. There’s a real range here. I think any reader is bound to find something to appeal to their tastes.

Shaping a shortlist seems quite like arranging a bouquet. A clutch of peony, begonia, or orchid stems…each may be lovely, an exemplar in its own way. We aspire to assemble a glorious arrangement—a quintet of blooms that reflect the wildly varied human experiences represented in the verdant garden of biography.

Let’s talk about G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century first, then, shall we? It is your 2023 winner of the NBCC’s prize for best biography; it also won a Pulitzer Prize . It’s also, and correct me if I’m wrong, the most traditional of the biographies that made the list.

G-Man is traditional in as much as Beverly Gage captures the full sweep of Hoover’s life, cradle to grave: 1895 to 1972. In that way, structurally G-Man sits aside the epics of David McCullough ( Truman , John Adams ) and Ron Chernow ( Grant , Alexander Hamilton ).

Unlike those valorized national leaders, Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents , of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: “We cannot know our own story without understanding his.”

In G-Man , Yale University professor Gage untangles the contradictions in Hoover’s aspirations and cruelty, and locates the paradoxical American story of tensions and anxieties over security, masculinity, and race.

“This year, many biographies were deeply rooted in American soil that required years of research to till”

Hoover lived his entire life in Washington D.C., and Gage entwines his story in the city’s evolution into a global power center and delves deeply into the dark childhood that led him to remain there for college. Critical to understanding Hoover, Gage demonstrates, was his embrace of the Kappa Alpha fraternity; its worldview was informed by Robert E. Lee and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the South , in which racial equality was unacceptable. He shaped the F.B.I. in his image and recruited Kappa Alpha men to the Bureau.

For Hoover, Gage writes, Kappa Alpha was a way to measure character, political sympathies, and, of course, loyalty. One of those men was Clyde Tolson, and Gage documents their trips to nightclubs, the racetrack, vacations, and White House receptions. Hoover did not acknowledge that he and Tolson were a couple, but in the end their separate burial plots were a few yards from one another.

While Hoover feels very much alive on the page, Gage captures the full sweep of American history, chronicling events from the hyper-nationalism of the early part of the century, moving into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., making use of newly unclassified documents. When Hoover’s F.B.I. targeted Nazis and gangsters, there was clarity about good guys and bad guys. But by the mid-century, as the nation began to fracture, he regarded calls for peace and justice as threats to national security. Among the abuses of power committed by Hoover’s F.B.I., for instance, was the wiretapping and harassment of King.

Beyond Hoover’s malfeasance, Gage emphasizes that Hoover was no maverick. He tapped into a dark part of the national psyche and had public opinion on his side. Through Hoover, Americans could see themselves, and, as Gage argues, “what we valued and refused to see.”

A biography like this does make you realize how deeply world events might be impacted or even partially predicted by the family background or the personalities of a small number of key individuals.

We should step through the rest of the books on your 2023 biography shortlist. Let’s start with Kerri K. Greenidge’s The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family , which is the story not only of the Grimké Sisters Sarah and Angelina, two well-known abolitionists, but Black members of their family as well.

I was eager to read The Grimkés as I had admired Greenidge’s earlier biography, Black Radical , about Boston civil rights leader and abolitionist newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter. Greenidge, a professor at Tufts University, brings her unique, perceptive eye to African American civil rights in the North.

Now Greenidge’s The Grimkés sits on my bookshelf next to The Hemingses of Monticello , the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Annette Gordon-Reed who exposed the contradictions of one of the most venerated figures in American history, Thomas Jefferson. In the Grimke family, Greenidge has found a gnarled family tree, deeply rooted in generations of trauma.

Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been exalted as brave heroines who defied antebellum Southern piety and headed northward to embrace abolition. Greenridge makes the powerful case that, in clinging to this mythology, a more troubling story is obscured. In the North, as the Grimké sisters lived comfortably and agitated for change, they enjoyed the financial benefits of their slaveholding family in South Carolina.

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After the Civil War, they learned that their brute of a brother had fathered at least two sons with a woman whom he had enslaved. The sisters provided some financial assistance in the education of these two young men, one attended Harvard Law School and the other Princeton Divinity School—and did not let their nephews forget it.

Not only does Greenidge provide a revisionist history of the Grimke sisters, but she also takes account of the full Grimké family and extends their story beyond the 19th century. She delves into the dynamics of racial subordination and how free white men who conceive children — whether from rape or a relationship spanning decades with enslaved women—destroy families. Generations of children are haunted by this history.  Poignantly, Greenidge evokes the life and work of the sisters’ grandniece Angelina (‘Nana’) Weld Grimké , a talented—and troubled—queer playwright and poet, who carried the heavy weight of the generational trauma she inherited.

This sounds like a family saga of the kind you might be more likely to find in fiction.

Let’s turn to Mr B . : George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans, the story of the noted choreographer. Why did this make your shortlist of the best biographies of 2023?

The perfect match of biographer and subject! A dancer who trained with Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York and is now dance critic for The New Yorker, Homans has written a biography of the man known as ‘the Shakespeare of Dance.’ In felicitous prose, Homans channels the dancer’s experience onto the page, from the body movements that can produce such beauty to the aching tendons and ligaments. Training is transformation, Homan writes, and working with Balanchine was a kind of metamorphosis tangled with pain. She evokes the dances so vividly that one can almost hear the music.

“At the heart of biography is the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces”

Homans captures Balanchine in a constant state of reinvention, tracing his life from Czarist Russia to Weimar Berlin , finally making his way to post-war New York where he revitalized the world of ballet by embracing modernish, founding New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine was genius whose personal history shape-shifted over the years. Homans grounds Mr. B in more than a hundred interviews, and draws from archives around the world.

Homans captures Balanchine’s charisma and cultural importance, but Mr. B. is no hagiography. Homans grasps the knot of sex and power over women used in his work. He married four times, always to dancers. They were all the same kind of swan-necked, long-waisted, long-limbed women, and although Homans does not write this, his company often sounds more like a cult than art.

And, of course, there is the matter of weight, which Homans dealt with directly, as did Balanchine. He posted a sign: ‘BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY—YOU MUST WEIGH.’

I don’t think I’ve ever considered reading a ballet biography before, but it sounds fascinating.

The next book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist brings us to Oxford, England. This is Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.

At the outset of World War II , a quartet of young women, Oxford students—Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley—were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men,” as Mac Cumhaill, a Durham University professor, and Wiseman, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, write. In their marvelous group biography, MacCumhaill and Wiseman vivify how the friendships of these women congealed to bring “philosophy back to life.”

As their male counterparts departed for the front lines, this brilliant group of women came together in their dining halls and shared lodging quarters to challenge the thinking of their male colleagues. In the shadows of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, these friends rejected the logical positivists who favoured empirical scientific questions. They didn’t really create a distinct philosophical approach as much as they shared an interest in the metaphysics of morals.

Brilliant. A book that is ostensibly ‘improving’ but which turns out to be absolutely chock-full of gossip sounds perfect to me. Let’s move on to the fourth book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist, which is Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs.

A biography about writing biography ! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs   entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis.

While Melville is now firmly ensconced in the American canon, most appreciation and respect for him was posthumous. The 20th-century Melville revival was largely sparked by a now overlooked Mumford, once so prominent that he appeared on a 1936 Time  magazine cover.

Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times.

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As Mumford grappled with tragedies wrought by World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic and urban decay, Melville had dealt with the bloody Civil War , slavery , and industrialization. In a certain way, this book is about the art of biography itself, two writers wrestling with modernity in a bleak world. In delving into Melville’s angst, Mumford was thrust into great turmoil. Sachs evokes so clearly and painfully this bond that almost did Mumford in, and writes that “Melville, it turns out, was Mumford’s white whale.”

There’s a real sense of range in this shortlist. But do you get a sense of there being certain trends in biography as a genre in 2023?

In many ways, this is a golden era for biography. There are fewer dull but worthy books, more capacious and improvisational ones. More series of short biographies that pack a big punch. We see more group biographies and illustrated biographies. But just as figures and groups once considered marginal are being centered, records that document those lives are vanishing.

The crisis in local news and the homogenization of national and international news will soon be a crisis for biographers and historians. Where would historians be without the ‘slave narratives’ from the Federal Writers Project , or the Federal Theatre Project ? Reconstruction of public events—federal elections, national tragedies, and so on—may be possible, but we lose that wide spectrum of human experience. We need to preserve these artifacts and responses to events as they happen. Biographies are time-consuming labors of love and passion, and are often expensive to produce. We need to ensure that we are generating and saving the emails, the records, the to-do lists of ordinary life.

The affluent among us will always be able to commission histories of their companies or families, but are those the only ones that will endure?

June 30, 2023

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.

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100 Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Chosen by the staff of The New York Times Book Review Nov. 21, 2023

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

Blackouts by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

The Deluge by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

From From by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A History of Burning by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

Holly by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A House for Alice by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

The Iliad by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

Kantika by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

Lone Women by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

Monica by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

Not Even the Dead by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

Take What You Need by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

Witness by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

The 272 by Rachel L. Swarns

Building on her groundbreaking work for The Times, Swarns fashions a complex portrait of 19th-century American Catholicism through the story of the nearly 300 people enslaved on Jesuit plantations who were sold in 1838 to save Georgetown University from ruin.

Anansi’s Gold by Yepoka Yeebo

Yeebo, a journalist, tracks down the elusive story of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who revolutionized the “advance fee” scam (say, a Nigerian prince wants to wire you money), and contextualizes it within a Ghana — and a world — that allowed him to thrive.

Battle of Ink and Ice by Darrell Hartman

This fast paced, true-life adventure revives the headline-grabbing debate over which explorer reached the North Pole first — and which newspaper broke the news.

The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

A literary and compassionate examination of the porous line between brilliance and insanity, this riveting memoir traces the author’s childhood friendship and sometime rivalry with a neighbor and Yale classmate who is now in prison for murdering his girlfriend.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

Howley writes about the national security state and those who get entangled in it — fabulists, truth tellers, combatants, whistle-blowers. Like many of us, they have left traces of themselves in the digital ether by making a phone call, texting a friend, looking something up online.

Built From the Fire by Victor Luckerson

This ambitious history, by a journalist based in Tulsa, provides an authoritative account of the prosperous Black neighborhood decimated by the city’s 1921 race massacre and a gripping portrait of the community resurrected in its aftermath.

Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara

Cobalt is essential to the tech industry, but as Kara’s harrowing account demonstrates, it comes at a high cost: Much of the mineral is mined in toxic conditions for subsistence wages in Congo — all too often, by children.

Crossings by Ben Goldfarb

Goldfarb, an environmental journalist, crafts a fascinating and sensitive look at the costs of roads, both for wild animals and for the humans whose cities are divided by highways along racial lines.

Daughter of the Dragon by Yunte Huang

Huang’s new book, a biography embedded in cultural criticism, is an absorbing account of the life and times of the Chinese American starlet Anna May Wong, whose career spanned silent movies, talkies and television.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

After she was repeatedly confused online with the feminist scholar turned anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf, Klein turned the experience into this sober, stylish account of the lure of disdain and paranoia.

Easily Slip Into Another World by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards

The jazz artist Henry Threadgill’s ardent memoir ranges from his maddening wartime experiences in Vietnam to his boundary-pushing musical career.

The Exceptions by Kate Zernike

Zernike’s excellent and infuriating tale of the fight for fairness at M.I.T. and beyond is not merely a fast-paced account of one woman’s accomplishments but a larger history of women in STEM (or lack thereof).

Fire Weather by John Vaillant

This timely and riveting account of the 2016 McMurray wildfire explores not just that Canadian inferno but what it bodes for the future. Vaillant has a chillingly serious message: This is the inevitable result of climate change, and it will happen again and again.

The Great Escape by Saket Soni

In this gripping account, Soni, a labor organizer, details the story of several hundred Indian men lured to this country on promises of work and green cards, who ended up in semi-captivity in Mississippi until his efforts to free them.

The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer

In talking to people the world over about what paradise means to them, Iyer provides hours of thought-provoking meditations. “Paradise becomes something different in every neighbor’s head,” he says.

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

In this breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood spent becoming the perfect Rasta daughter and an adolescence spent becoming one of Jamaica’s most promising young poets, Montego Bay drips with as much tender sensuality and complexity as the buoyant patois of Sinclair’s parents’ banter.

Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell

In earlier books, Bakewell has written about Montaigne and the existentialists; here, she manages to wrangle seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative with characteristic wit and clarity, resisting the traps of windy abstraction and glib oversimplification.

Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass

This comprehensive treatment of the prosecution of Japanese war crimes after World War II is an elegantly written and immersive account of a moment that shaped not just the politics of the region, but of the Cold War to come.

King by Jonathan Eig

The first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on a landslide of recently released government documents as well as letters and interviews. This is a book worthy of its subject: both an intimate study of a complex and flawed human being and a journalistic account of a civil rights titan.

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta

Having detailed how President Trump's rise to power occurred amid a years-long civil war within the Republican party in his 2019 book "American Carnage," Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, turns his eye on another institution that has become split in two as a result of the former president: the American evangelical movement.

The Land of Hope and Fear by Isabel Kershner

Published months before the Israel-Hamas war, this book by a longtime correspondent in Jerusalem presents a complicated portrait of the many communities and faiths that constitute Israel three-quarters of a century into its existence.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza

In 1990, Rivera Garza’s 20-year-old sister was murdered in Mexico. That case is the inspiration and launching point for this memoir, a personal and cultural look at femicide in Mexico.

Lives of the Wives by Carmela Ciuraru

The relationships at the center of Ciuraru’s lively and absorbing new literary history vary widely, but are united by questions of ego and agency, competition and resentment.

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung

Chung’s powerful second memoir is a look at family, illness and grief, and the way systemic issues like access to health care, capitalism and racism exacerbate loss.

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo

Woo’s book recounts a daring feat: the successful flight north from Georgia in 1848 by an enslaved couple disguised as a sickly young white planter and his male slave. But her meticulous retelling is equally a feat — of research, storytelling, sympathy and insight.

Monsters by Claire Dederer

“Everyone alive is either canceled or about to be canceled,” writes the author of this sometimes maddening, always challenging meditation on polarizing cultural figures (Nabokov, Polanski, et al.) and the struggle to reconcile great art with the misdeeds of its creators.

My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

“I’m the greatest star!” the 21-year-old actress defiantly sang in Broadway’s 1964 hit “Funny Girl.” Nearly six decades later, over 992 pages, Streisand chronicles how she delivered on that promise, a rocket ride from Brooklyn to Malibu.

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley by David Waldstreicher

A beautiful and cogently argued biography offers a radical new vision of the life and work of colonial America’s brilliant Black female poet.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

In this volume of 248 numbered notes, Sharpe assembles memories and insights, artifacts and artworks, balancing the persistence of racism and brutality with a rich variety of Black life.

Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman

A deeply researched and compulsively readable history digs into the scandal-soaked history of the Academy Awards.

Our Migrant Souls by Héctor Tobar

Tobar, a longtime journalist, delivers a kaleidoscopic account of Latino American experience, dispelling stereotypes and underscoring diversity in prose that is by turns lyrical, outraged, scholarly and affectingly personal.

Pageboy by Elliot Page

The Oscar-nominated actor offers a brutally honest account of child stardom, the pressure to conform in Hollywood and, ultimately, the announcement of his gender transition in 2020.

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

The central claim of this manifesto by the Princeton sociologist is that poverty in the United States is the product not only of larger economic shifts, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans.

The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk

This ambitious retelling of the American story, by a historian who is also a Native American, places Indigenous populations at the center, a shift in perspective that yields fresh insights and thought-provoking questions.

The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton

Challenging, ambitious and elegant, this mind-expanding book explores nothing less than “the ultimate nature of reality” through the work of three figures: the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg and the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Schoenberg by Harvey Sachs

Sachs has written well for decades about conventional classical music. This impassioned defense of Arnold Schoenberg — creator of some of the most challenging music ever — might seem surprising from him, but Schoenberg’s life was one of the 20th century’s great narratives.

Sink by Joseph Earl Thomas

The lush prose of this memoir perfectly suits the author’s tender, teeming boyhood imagination, in which video-game and manga characters offered more guidance than volatile adults did. Most remarkable is Thomas’s matter-of-fact depiction of the daily depredations he faced without losing his spirit or his abundant creative gifts.

The Slip by Prudence Peiffer

From Ellsworth Kelly to Agnes Martin to Robert Indiana, a group of scrappy artists gathered in illegal studios at the tip of Lower Manhattan in the 1950s, trying to provide an answer to Abstract Expressionism. This group biography reflects the excitement of those years — and our debt to them.

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista

In powerful, gripping prose, a Philippine journalist recounts her investigation into the campaign of extrajudicial murders under former President Rodrigo Duterte.

Spoken Word by Joshua Bennett

Bennett’s engaging history of a literary and cultural movement that took hold in many realms — including music, theater, film, television and, of course, poetry — tracks its evolution from the earliest days of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side to the first iterations of slam poetry and beyond.

A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell

O’Connell brings literary flourish and a philosophical bent to this investigation of an infamous and confounding Irish murder case.

Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler

This cultural history takes up works by Schoenberg, Britten, Shostakovich and Richard Strauss that reflect on World War II and the Holocaust, urging listeners to consider the link between music and remembrance.

The Undertow by Jeff Sharlet

Anxious about America’s political divides, and fearful that they presage the end of the union, Sharlet spent a year speaking with conservative pastors, gun fanatics and QAnon adherents, among others. The result is an eloquent cri de coeur by a writer struggling to meet political and moral unreason with compassion and grace.

Unscripted by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

This jaw-dropping chronicle by two Times reporters of the final years of Sumner Redstone, the head of Paramount, is an epic tale of toxic wealth and greed populated by connivers and manipulators, not least Redstone himself.

Up Home by Ruth J. Simmons

Simmons’s evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of 12 children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity.

The Wager by David Grann

After the H.M.S. Wager was shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia in 1742, surviving crew members returned to England with dramatic — and starkly conflicting — tales about what had transpired. Grann recreates the voyage in all its enthralling horror.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil

Offering a rare glimpse into the life and culture of China’s brutally persecuted Muslim Uyghur minority, this eloquent memoir by a poet who escaped with his family to the United States (and translated by Joshua L. Freeman) unfolds a horror story with calm restraint.

What An Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman

There are some 260 species of owls spread across every continent except Antarctica, and in this fascinating book, Ackerman explains why the birds are both naturally wondrous and culturally significant.

Wifedom by Anna Funder

Even George Orwell, whose dealings with women were often problematic, admitted that he behaved badly toward his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. This book focuses on O’Shaughnessy, and combines her story with a bravura analysis of female invisibility.

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live by Paul Kix

The 1963 campaign to integrate Birmingham, Ala., led to shocking brutality: youths blasted by fire hoses and set upon by snarling police dogs. Kix, a journalist, weaves those images into a harrowing narrative of a crucial juncture in the civil rights movement.

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Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

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“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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The Best Books of 2023

Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2023 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry.

The Essentials

Fiction & poetry.

The Bee Sting

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

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Biography of X

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

Birnam Wood

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

The Country of the Blind

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

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

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

Fear Is Just a Word

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

Books & Fiction

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

Fire Weather

In 2016, a wildfire ripped through the oil town of Fort McMurray, in Alberta, hot enough to vaporize toilets and bend a street light in half. It was the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This alarming account tracks the destruction, the role of fire in industry in the past hundred and fifty years, and the disregarded alarms about the environment raised by scientists, dating as far back as the eighteen-fifties. “Climate science came of age in tandem with the oil and automotive industries,” Vaillant writes, and their futures are as linked as their pasts. The number of places facing fates similar to Fort McMurray’s is rapidly increasing, even as “our reckoning with industrial CO 2 ” moves painfully slowly.

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

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

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

I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home

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

I Love Russia

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

Judgment at Tokyo

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

King: A Life

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

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

Liliana’s Invincible Summer

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

Master Slave Husband Wife

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

Ordinary Notes

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

The Rediscovery of America

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

Roman Stories

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

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

Some People Need Killing

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

Vengeance Is Mine

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

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

Also Recommended

The Dictionary People

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

How to Build a Boat

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

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

Time’s Echo

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

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

State of Silence

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

The Money Kings

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

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

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

Prophet Song

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

Collision of Power

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

Treacle Walker

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

The Berry Pickers

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

The Manuscripts Club

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

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

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

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

Holler, Child

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

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

Night Watch

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

In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl

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

The Book at War

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

Foreign Bodies

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

Brooklyn Crime Novel

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

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

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

Camille Pissarro

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

A History of Fake Things on the Internet

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

Charlie Chaplin vs. America

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

Let Us Descend

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

The Love of Singular Men

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

Beyond the Wall

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

Naked in the Rideshare

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

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

Mapping the Darkness

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

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

A Council of Dolls

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

The Long Form

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

Lies and Sorcery

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

The Necessity of Exile

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

A Haunting on the Hill

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

The House of Doors

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

Cross-Stitch

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

The Vulnerables

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

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

The Dimensions of a Cave

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

Baumgartner

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

How to Be Multiple

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

Going Infinite

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

The Mysteries

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

The Chapter

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

The Lumumba Plot

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

On Marriage

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

The Revolutionary Temper

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

What the Taliban Told Me

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

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

The Two-Parent Privilege

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

A Volga Tale

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

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

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

Pandora’s Box

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

A City on Mars

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

The Pensive Citadel

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

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

The Body of the Soul

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

The Lies of the Land

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

American Poly

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

This Is Salvaged

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

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

The Boy from Kyiv

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

This Country

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

This Won’t Help

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

The Genius of their Age

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

Black Friend

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

Our Hideous Progeny

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

Blood in the Machine

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

The Burning of the World

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

Emperor of Rome

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

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

A Man of Two Faces

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

American Visions

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

I Must Be Dreaming

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

Revolutionary Spring

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

The Upstairs Delicatessen

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

Fire in the Canyon

Set in the foothills of California’s gold country, this dread-laden novel follows a family who make their living cultivating grapes for winemaking as they attempt to resume their lives in the wake of a wildfire. After an evacuation, they return to the same land, but their environment—increasingly marred by drought, fire, and high temperatures—presents a cascade of fears: not just death and injury from fire but power outages, dangerous air quality, and smoke that might taint their grapes and thus take away their livelihood. The father’s detailed awareness of the region’s weather produces a sense of looming crisis; he notes how often once unusual events now occur—a set of circumstances that make it “hard not to wonder where the bottom was.”

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

In 2002, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., published an annotated edition of “The Bondswoman’s Narrative,” a novel thought to be the first written by an enslaved Black woman. Its author was unknown until Hecimovich, a scholar of Victorian literature, traced the manuscript to Hannah Crafts, a mixed-race captive who was born in 1826. Like her novel’s protagonist, Crafts was likely the offspring of rape, her first captor having been her biological father. As she was passed from one household to the next, she was taught to read and exposed to popular literature; her novel would eventually draw on Dickens’s “Bleak House.” Alongside Crafts’s story, Hecimovich recounts the painstaking process of his research, which included forensic analysis of paper and ink and the creative use of incomplete archives.

Ladies’ Lunch

Segal’s new collection gathers her discursive, wry, and pithy stories about a group of women on New York’s Upper West Side who, for decades, have had a standing appointment for lunch. In these stories, several of which were first published by The New Yorker , the friends face off against the implacable onslaught of time with wit and not a little impatience.

The English Experience

The third in a series of academic satires about Jason Fitger, a hapless Midwestern professor of English, this book finds the divorced failed novelist coerced into chaperoning a group of undergraduates on a winter-break excursion called Experience: England. Fitger harbors “a vague hostility to all things British,” and his sojourn in London is calamitous: he injures himself, bungles his pedagogic responsibilities, and obsesses about his ex-wife’s possible departure for a job in Chicago. The novel’s highlights include the student assignments, many of which are reproduced with their errors intact (“I know my writing needs work but I am not taking it for granite”), and Schumacher’s sympathetic humor, which reveals her characters’ flawed humanity.

The Hive and the Honey

In a quietly powerful short-story collection, Paul Yoon creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Korean diaspora. In these stories, one of which appeared in the magazine , Yoon’s characters struggle to find a place for themselves in a world where life can be capricious and harsh, but sometimes marked by grace.

American Gun

Extremely deadly and easily obtainable, the AR-15 has become a political symbol, both among people who believe that such weapons should have no part in civilian life and those who consider owning one a constitutional right. McWhirter and Elinson are business reporters, and “American Gun” is, in part, a book about how an industry strategized to sell a particular type of gun to a particular type of person—usually a man—whom it could convince that AR-15s were an integral part of his identity. One of the most unexpected questions raised by their history of the semi-automatic rifle, which has been used by the perpetrators of many of the worst mass shootings in American history, is the following: What if the edgelord identity embraced by many mass shooters is not the result of alienation or mental illness but instead speaks to a successful marketing push of an industry doing business as usual?

Reproduction

This work of autofiction juxtaposes a failed attempt to write a novel about Mary Shelley with harrowing stories of Hall’s pregnancies: debilitating nausea, a late-stage miscarriage, an experience of labor that made her feel as if she had “departed from Earth.” Recalling that Shelley was pregnant when she wrote “Frankenstein,” Hall vividly imagines pregnancy’s effect on the novelist’s body and mind. “What am I? she must have wondered. What kind of creature is this?” The last section, a novella in itself, tells the story of a female scientist who “edits” her own defective embryos, altering their genes to make them viable. Hall’s ultimate insight is resonant: “We are all monsters, stitched together loosely, composed of remnants from other lives, pieces that often don’t seem as though they could plausibly belong to us.”

The Unsettled

Set in Philadelphia in the nineteen-eighties, this absorbing novel follows a mother and son as they search for a place to live, eventually landing in a derelict family shelter. Mathis’s chapters alternate among several points of view, but she primarily orbits the mother’s consciousness. Everything in her life is unsettled: her grip on reality, her relationship with her son’s father, her childhood home in a dwindling Black town in Alabama, where her estranged mother lives. As she attempts to chart the “real story” of how things went wrong, the novel suggests that her struggles often stem from outside forces—some arising from racial injustices, others from the fragility of memory and inheritance.

This eminently readable tour of Greek philosophy from approximately 650 to 450 B.C. brings the “sea-and-city world” of Heraclitus and Homer to life. Anchoring his study in Iron Age Greece, with its bustling mercantile economy and conflicting embraces of both slavery and personal autonomy, Nicolson traces the emergence of several key philosophical concepts. In the poetry of Sappho, he locates the stirrings of an interior self; in the writings of Xenophanes, the political mind; in the thought of Pythagoras, an immortal soul. Together, he shows, the early Greeks developed intellectual habits, chief among them the use of questioning as the basis of knowing, which laid the groundwork for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for how we reason today.

The End of Eden

By cataloguing wildlife whose habitats have been thrown into disarray by climate change, Welz, an environmental journalist, details some of the “cascades of chaos” that define our ecological era. In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria decimated the island’s endangered indigenous parrot, the iguaca, killing the last birds able to pass down the species’s language. The depletion of the Pacific Coast’s sunflower sea star has led sea urchins, formerly the starfish’s prey, to begin feeding on seaweed that nearby fish depend on. Welz’s study, which he conceived as an attempt to examine such disruptions “without turning myself to stone,” amounts to a haunting warning.

The Wren, the Wren

Three characters from different generations of an Irish family, each of whom possesses a remarkably different voice, are braided together in this lyrical novel. Nell, a young writer, speaks first, her attention flicking between digital flotsam and a consuming, ambiguous relationship. Her protective mother, Carmel, who also had troubled relationships with men, is portrayed in the third person. The legacy of Carmel’s father, Phil, a “not terribly famous” poet who abandoned his family when his wife became ill, looms over them both. A brief glimpse of his perspective as a child shows us an earlier Ireland—one of hardship and natural beauty. Scattered with snatches of Phil’s verse, and keenly attuned to sensory detail, Enright’s narrative of complex family ties brims with life.

How to Say Babylon

In this remarkable memoir, Sinclair, an award-winning poet, conjures coming of age in Jamaica with her father, a reggae musician who embraced a strict sect of Rastafari and sought to protect his family from the evil and pervasive influence of the West—what Rastafari call Babylon—and coming into her own as a poet, a writer, and a young woman in charge of her own destiny. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

The Civic Bargain

Manville and Ober begin with a simple but persuasive point: that democracy depends not on the creation of constitutions and statutes but on shared understandings among groups. The primal act of healthy democracies is the social bargain, they write, and its product is an idea of citizenship that depends on the coexistence of different kinds of people. The authors trace this idea through the history of democracies, from the Athens of Pericles to the Rome of Cicero, leaping forward, as that history demands, to the slow evolution of British democracy in the seventeenth century and then to the American Revolution and its long aftermath. Throughout the book, Manville and Ober’s model is of civic dialogue rooted in an Aristotelian ideal of “civic friendship.” Citizenship, they suggest, is an escape from clan identity.

A Flat Place

In this memoir, a Pakistani British literary scholar reflects on her complex post-traumatic stress disorder—arising from an abusive childhood in Lahore—while visiting flatlands across the U.K., such as the fens of eastern England and man-made wastelands on the coast of Suffolk. Much like these landscapes, complex P.T.S.D., which results from prolonged, repeated trauma, doesn’t “offer a significant landmark” to focus on. Where hills and valleys are more commonly evoked as metaphors of struggle and overcoming, Masud sees the vast, stark flatlands as “the place of grief, but also the place of the real.” Between vivid descriptions of their geographical features, Masud confronts her childhood memories, her relationships with others, and the post-colonial histories of both of her homelands.

Live to See the Day

At the outset of this sweeping work of reportage about life in the low-income neighborhood of Kensington, in Philadelphia, a twelve-year-old boy and his friends are huddled around a trash can at school, marvelling at a sheet of paper they have set on fire. This childish stunt leads to the boy’s arrest, jump-starting an adolescence and young adulthood marked by incarceration, teen parenthood, and financial precarity. As Goyal follows the boy, along with two others, through the next decade, he depicts in granular detail the suffocating effects of poverty in a “hypersegregated metropolis,” where “eighteenth-birthday celebrations are not rites of passage but miracles.”

Paris Notebooks

This reissued collection of Gallant’s essays and reviews opens with her astute and devastating journals documenting the May, 1968, student uprising in Paris (which appeared first in The New Yorker ) and closes with a review of Georges Simenon’s memoirs from 1985. In between is an incisive and multi-angled view of French society and of literature. The book includes a new introduction by Hermione Lee.

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future

With firm but never dogmatic moral conviction, Johnson pays tribute to the writers, the scholars, the poets, and the filmmakers who found the courage to challenge Communist Party propaganda. These dissenters looked beyond the official lies about the past and the present, and decided to document the truth about forbidden topics, including Mao Zedong’s campaigns to massacre putative class enemies. They often paid for their candor with long prison terms, torture, or death. Their conclusions—presented in homemade videos, mimeographed sheets, and underground journals—didn’t reach a wide audience when they appeared. And yet, as Johnson makes clear in his superb, stylishly written book, the value of their legacy is incalculable.

Loved and Missed

Ruth, the central figure of “ Loved and Missed ,” the British writer Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is a professional caretaker, a schoolteacher whose teen-age students look to her for guidance. Yet Ruth’s pedagogical talents fail her when it comes to her own daughter, Eleanor, who left home at fifteen and suffers from a severe drug addiction. When Eleanor announces that she’s pregnant, it’s a threat of grief compounded—one more life that risks being ruined. At the baby’s christening, Ruth gives Eleanor and her boyfriend four thousand pounds to take her granddaughter, Lily, home with for a week. An unspoken agreement is established: Ruth will raise her granddaughter and Eleanor will visit when she can, which turns out to be infrequently and erratically. It is one of the great charms of the book that Boyt’s descriptions of Ruth and Lily’s quotidian routines are so seductive. Much of the novel depicts, with exquisite detail, the prosaic patterns of Ruth and Lily’s home life. They emerge as people in desperate want—for a daughter, in Ruth’s case; a mother, in Lily’s—who find a way to make do without what they lack.

The Glint of Light

This naturalistic novel follows a Black environmental scientist who returns home to Chicago from California for his mother’s funeral and, while there, revives a romance with his white high-school girlfriend. The story is shaped by several cataclysmic events, which suit the novel’s backdrop, in which the Presidency of Barack Obama—the pride of the scientist’s late mother—corresponds with a rise in white nationalism. Though the climate crisis and racially charged incidents routinely oblige the scientist to acknowledge his vulnerability, he is inclined to attribute an impartial agency to death: “Class didn’t matter, age didn’t matter; it came at you with an absolute and indifferent force.”

“The Pole,” the new novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, is a love story that unfolds across a language barrier, and a novel about language that can be told only through a love plot. It describes a romance between Beatriz, a fortysomething socialite in Barcelona, and Witold, a Polish pianist in his seventies who has been flown in from Berlin for a recital. At a dinner after the performance, Beatriz and Witold converse briefly in stilted English, neither’s first choice of language. A week later, he sends her a recording of his playing, along with a flirtatious note “to the angel who watched over me in Barcelona.” She keeps thinking it must be a misunderstanding, something lost in the fault lines opened up between the pair’s native languages. “The Pole” was written in English, but it originally appeared in a Spanish-language translation, with the title “El Polaco.” Coetzee told the Barcelona-based newspaper Crónica Global that the Spanish translation “better reflects my intentions” than the original English does. As we read the book, we are, like Beatriz, left to wonder not only what the words on the page mean but if the writer might have intended to say something else entirely.

In 2010, Emily Weiss started her own beauty Web site, Into the Gloss. Within five years, Into the Gloss had given rise to a beauty brand, Glossier; within a decade, Glossier was a billion-dollar business. Meltzer, who previously profiled the C.E.O. for Wired and Vanity Fair , calls Weiss “the last girlboss standing.” Meltzer’s book chronicles the way Weiss’s beauty empire leveraged personality and social-media savvy to sell a fantasy of effortless authenticity. If posting to Instagram was a matter of pretending that a camera happened to catch you living a beautiful life, Glossier was the makeup to match.

Nobody’s quite sure how pockets were invented. As Carlson writes in her delightfully wide-ranging book, there is no definitive starting point, no recorded epiphanies. Yet the history of pockets over the past five hundred years is the history of attitudes around privacy and decorum, gender and empire, what it means to be cool or simply ready for whatever the day may bring. What's striking is the extent to which women have been denied the privilege of pockets: “Why is it that men’s clothes are full of integrated, sewn-in pockets, while women’s have so few?” Carlson asks. Concealed firearms caused one of the first panics associated with pockets, she writes; a more ambient fear was that pockets, as the poet Howard Nemerov once remarked, “locate close to lust.” Carlson’s winning book depicts the range and relevance of the pocket, which can be a metaphor for abundance or perversion, possession or secrecy—and a way of managing the efficiencies of life.

India's Techade

India has, in the past decade or so, launched a digital revolution—one that started quietly but has recently gone “viral on a scale that is unprecedented,” the journalist and academic Nalin Mehta writes. 1.4 billion Indian citizens now have their own twelve-digit identity number called an Aadhaar—a system that underpins an integrated digital ecology known as “the stack.” It’s a bit like a publicly run app store, where the government sets the rules for developers. Mehta’s book is filled with vivid illustrations of the stack’s impact. There’s Lakshmi, a fifty-eight-year-old widow, who uses her Aadhaar card and thumbprint to access a monthly pension. There are a multitude of small venders—fruit sellers, thatched roadside restaurants—that now take payments via cell-phone-scanned QR codes. Other countries in the Global South are starting to adopt the technology, which some see as the digital equivalent of the Green Revolution.

Music is a vital force in this eclectic poetry collection, which travels between the author’s native Jamaica, his adopted home of New England, and other locales. Dub and reggae inspire and inform Channer’s dense, lushly textured compositions. Contemplating place and displacement, the poems emphasize the palimpsestic, remix-like effect produced by emigration and exile: the memory of a left-behind landscape merging with its current reality, as well as with environments more foreign to the transplant. Elegiac underpinnings give way to lyrical exuberance: as Channer writes in “Redoubt,” a poem set against the ruins of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s famed recording studio, “Suffer was a genre, / keening took into his console / then put out.”

The Rigor of Angels

In this sprightly intellectual history, Egginton explores the lives of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the physicist Werner Heisenberg in order to plumb some of the most profound questions of physics and philosophy: the limits of knowledge, the structure of space and time, free will. These thinkers’ battles against “metaphysical prejudices” resulted in complementary, if counterintuitive, insights into the nature of reality; though working in different realms, all three concluded that “we are, and ever will be, active participants in the universe we discover.” While detailing his subjects’ theories, Egginton also foregrounds their relationships, suggesting that world-shaping ideas can be inspired by the vagaries of emotional life.

Digital Empires

During the past decade or so, governments around the world have grown impatient with the notion of Internet autarky. A trickle of halfhearted interventions has built into what the legal scholar Anu Bradford calls a “cascade of regulation.” Bradford’s comprehensive and insightful book on global Internet policy details a series of skirmishes—between regulators and companies, and among regulators themselves—whose outcomes will “shape the future ethos of the digital society and define the soul of the digital economy.” She considers the efflorescence of Internet laws as part of a wider struggle for global power in an emerging multipolar world. As she sees it, the disparate strands of lawmaking can be grouped into different regulatory regimes, or competing “digital empires,” with each approach corresponding, broadly, to a different calibration of powers between nation-state and private enterprise.

“Nobody knows where I am,” one of the narrators in this collection of stories chants. She is in crisis after discovering evidence of her late mother’s secret past, but the line could plausibly be spoken by any of Alcott’s protagonists, who all find themselves off the map in some sense—pushing against expectations, wrestling with desire, and reckoning with ideas of who they are or should be. One character, learning of her lover’s disturbing history, grapples with the question of whether people can change; another attempts to navigate the ethical compromises of her well-paying job. In supple, self-assured prose, Alcott highlights the ambivalence that can come with intimacy and violence, asking whether love is merely another form of circumscription, and whether brutality can sometimes be an antidote to numbness.

The Women of NOW

Katherine Turk’s new history of the National Organization for Women is nominally a group biography, following three somewhat unexpected now leaders: Patricia Burnett, a former beauty queen turned housewife; Aileen Hernandez, the Brooklyn-born daughter of Jamaican immigrants, who worked in labor and civil-rights activism before becoming now’s second president; and Mary Jean Collins, a union leader from a working-class Catholic background, who led now’s formidable Chicago chapter, and discovered her lesbian identity in the process. But Turk’s true subject is now’s early years. Her account reveals a uniquely ambitious political organization, one that achieved remarkable successes while struggling with divergent feminist visions, competing egos, and insufficient funds.

The Caretaker

This immersive novel, set in Appalachia, explores the reverberations of a young man’s decision to elope with a teen-age hotel maid. The only son of a well-to-do family, Jacob is disinherited over the marriage, and soon afterward is conscripted to fight in Korea. He asks a friend, the caretaker of the town graveyard, to look after his wife. The two are shunned—the wife because of the town’s loyalty to her in-laws, the caretaker for the disfigurement he suffered as a result of childhood polio—and form a strong friendship. When news arrives that Jacob has been badly wounded, his parents plot to separate the married couple, but it is the lack of love in the caretaker’s life that shapes the novel most deeply.

The Most Secret Memory of Men

A rollicking literary mystery, “The Most Secret Memory of Men” revolves around the search for a Senegalese author of the nineteen-thirties whose long-lost novel resurfaces in contemporary Paris. The book’s narrator, a young Senegalese writer, is charmingly neurotic, and, having strayed from the “noble path of academia” to become a novelist, completely adrift. When he stumbles upon the writings of T. C. Elimane, the narrator undertakes a months-long quest, trying to find out what happened to the silenced storyteller. An aerobatic feat of narrative invention, Sarr’s book whirls between noir, fairy tale, and satire in its self-reflexive inquiry into the nature of literary legend. Spurning the categories to which African fiction is often relegated, Sarr delivers a demiurgic story of literary self-creation, transforming the sad fate of an author who stopped writing into a galvanizing tale about all that remains to be written.

In 2001, Simmons, a Romanticist by training, became the President of Brown University—and thus the first Black president of an Ivy League institution. Her memoir, which borrows its title from a phrase she and her family use to refer to revisiting their home town of Grapeland, Texas, begins with her youth as one of twelve children born to sharecropper parents. The Simmonses’ straitened circumstances led to her love of the classroom: “a place of brilliant light unlike any our homes afforded.” She dwells on her encouraging teachers, and on the experiences that fuelled her fight against discrimination in higher education.

Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter

Sixty years after “The Feminine Mystique” ignited the second-wave feminist movement, it is still impossible to mention its author’s name without eliciting strong responses. Most accounts of the second wave feature Betty Friedan’s irascibility, her outbursts, her constant need for reassurance, and her tremendous capacity for cruelty. Shteir’s biography, which is rigorously fair to its subject, features all these, and also gives them context—illustrative bits from Friedan’s life that add reasons, if not excuses, for her behavior. The book demonstrates that Friedan, for all her considerable flaws, was one of those characters whom history responds to and who shape public opinion through the force of their personalities.

Cosmic Scholar

The Beat polymath Harry Smith—an eccentric, couch-surfing, bearded bohemian who repaired the holes in his jacket with duct tape and lived on pea soup, mashed bananas, and cigarettes—bears some resemblance to the protagonist of Joseph Mitchell’s masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret.” But, whereas Gould’s life’s work turned out not to exist, this biography argues persuasively that Smith’s contributions to art, anthropology, avant-garde film, and, most of all, popular music were profound. Szwed, also the author of an excellent biography of Billie Holiday, shows how the legacy that Smith left behind—including the six-LP “Anthology of American Folk Music,” from 1952—influenced the sensibilities of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and countless others.

Young Queens

In this triple biography, the dynamics of Renaissance Europe are illustrated through the lives and the politically motivated marriages of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Catherine, who married into the French royal family, leveraged her maternal qualities to win the right to govern on behalf of her young sons. Her daughter Elisabeth married Philip II of Spain to seal an unsteady peace between their two countries. Mary’s strongest loyalty was to her French relatives—leading her to underestimate a dissatisfied Scottish nobility. In an era of empire-hungry monarchs and religious violence, these women, while fulfilling their obligations as wives and mothers, forged diplomatic connections through family ties.

Anansi’s Gold

For two decades, beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, a Ghanaian man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah carried out an astonishingly successful scam by pretending to have inherited billions of dollars from Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first President. Though the inheritance was a fiction, propped up by forged documents and opportunistic coöperators looking to capitalize on political instability, Blay-Miezah swindled his marks out of millions by convincing them that he needed money to access the fund, and used his newfound wealth to become one of the country’s most powerful people. Yeebo, a journalist, skillfully interweaves archival material, F.B.I. records, and interviews to recount the saga of the con man’s career, and to reflect on how lies can be leveraged in the creation of national histories.

Wednesday’s Child

A theme of loss runs through the stories in Yiyun Li’s wise and perspicacious new collection as her characters grapple with the mystery of how we live and how we die. Several of the entries, including the title story, first appeared in the magazine .

The Suicide Museum

Salvador Allende’s ascension to the Chilean presidency, in 1970, was short-lived; a Marxist, he challenged private-sector interests and U.S. influence, and his government was violently overthrown in September of 1973. Dorfman, who served in Allende’s government as a “cultural adviser,” revisits this episode—and its implications—in this new novel. The plot centers around an obsessed billionaire seeking to determine the manner of Allende’s death (was he shot during the coup or did he take his own life?) and link it to an effort to awaken people's consciousness about the climate crisis. Dorfman gives his name to the narrator and central character of his novel; a vast array of other people appear under their real names, including a host of Chilean political figures. Fifty years after Allende’s death, Dorfman wrestles with ideas that don’t fit together comfortably, grappling with Allende's legacy in a world whose sense of crisis has been reframed.

Beyond the Door of No Return

This metafictional historical novel centers on the recollections of an eighteenth-century French botanist, whose voyage to Senegal is irrevocably altered by his fascination with a young woman who has escaped from a slave ship. His account—gleaned from notebooks discovered by his daughter—begins as a travelogue and then transforms into a record of the escapee’s ordeal, which she recounts to the botanist in the course of one long night: a mesmerizing tale of capture, getaway, and revenge. Diop’s novel, which culminates in a terrifying sequence of events, is a testament to fiction’s ability to uncover our self-deceptions, leaving them “as if exposed to the African sun at its zenith.”

Unreliable Narrator

In this collection of essays, the comedian explores the history and science of so-called impostor syndrome, and hilariously mines her life as a depressed, anxious, and shy woman in the public eye to talk about what it’s like to constantly set oneself up for failure—and then get back up onstage.

The corrosive logic of one-sided relationships is the subject of this dryly funny polemical novel, told from the perspective of a young woman obsessed with her married lover and his ex-girlfriend. The narrator provokes the lover in various ways, in the hope that he’ll end his other love affairs, despite her being aware of her delusion. Surveilling the ex-girlfriend on Instagram, the narrator reacts to the woman’s expensive purchases, which she broadcasts to a sizable following, with a mixture of loathing and desire. This woman “lives with real life art that I can’t afford and wouldn’t know how to get,” she thinks, “and I put posters up with Blu Tack like I’m still fifteen years old. Like a fan.”

Dragon Palace

Spirits, animals, and people cohabit the universe of these eight stories, which capture with quirky insight and deadpan humor the strangeness of human relationships. One of the stories, “ The Kitchen God ,” appeared in the magazine.

The Details

This elliptical novel, narrated by an unnamed woman who is confined to her bed by a high fever, consists of four character studies. During her illness, the woman picks up a book—an edition of Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy”—inscribed to her by a former lover. Flipping through it brings back vivid recollections of that woman, whose frosty personality “was part of her—and not as deficiency but as tool, a useful little patch of ice.” These reminiscences lead to others: first of a wayward roommate; then of a “hurricane” ex-boyfriend; and finally of the narrator’s traumatized mother. She relates her textured insights into human nature through small moments. “As far as the dead are concerned,” she muses, “all that matters are the details, the degree of density.”

Some Unfinished Chaos

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose defined a generation; it was turbulent, brilliant, troubling, troubled. He careened from obscurity to literary acclaim and then into seeming obsolescence, Krystal writes, his fall from grace as compelling as his rise. In this impressionistic biography, Krystal weighs Fitzgerald’s genius against his shortcomings, approaching the altar of an icon with an affectionate agnosticism. The book grew out of a piece that Krystal wrote for the magazine in 2009 .

24/7 Politics

This near-encyclopedic exploration of the rise of cable news begins with the lead-up to the 1984 Presidential election, when cable executives and lobbyists set out to dismantle the power of network broadcasters and redirect it to themselves. Brownell, a historian, details how the opponents of network broadcasting successfully cast the industry as “elitist” and peddled cable as a democratizing force that would “empower people, politicians, and perspectives.” Her persuasive account argues that cable’s advocates were, in fact, motivated primarily by profit, and that cable television’s Sisyphean pursuit of ratings and revenue ultimately served to cultivate a toxic media—and political—environment.

A Word or Two Before I Go

Krystal’s witty and generous essay collection purports to be his last, a dénouement to a long career of writing “sentences that lead to other sentences,” many in the pages of this magazine. In one essay, Krystal recalls getting clocked in the face by Muhammad Ali in 1991 on a bus driving down Interstate 78. In the book’s finale, a short story , an aging man regards his life as a composite of moments stretched and compressed, probing time’s capacity to blunt and to sharpen. In this collection, Krystal sifts through his essays and criticism in kind, mulling the stuff that makes life and literature.

Many of the stories in this powerful collection, by a National Book Award finalist, orbit figures who dwell on the past, unable to accept their “forward movement through the entanglements of time.” There is a woman who is obsessed with the wife of her brother’s killer; a son haunted by his mother as he makes plans to install his father in a nursing home; a man whose budding romance ends after he relates a horrific memory. The wounds that afflict Brinkley’s characters stem from social inequality—police brutality, exploitation in the gig economy, and doctors’ racist dismissals of Black patients—and from such universal vulnerabilities as family discord, heritable illnesses, and our own resistance to change.

Father and Son

Like Edmund Gosse’s memoir of the same name, Raban’s posthumously published final work follows an English father and son whose lives take diverging paths. Raban juxtaposes an account of his rehabilitation after a stroke that occurred in 2011, when he was sixty-eight, with his father’s experiences as an artillery officer in the Second World War. The stories never connect, reflecting the divide between the liberal, literary son, who immigrated to Seattle in 1990, and the conservative father, who became a vicar in the Church of England. The war chapters, which excerpt correspondence between Raban’s parents, are compelling, but it is Raban’s reckoning with his own frailty that carries the emotional weight of the book. “What have I lost?” he asks. “And am I fooling myself?”

The Marriage Question

It can be difficult to disinter George Eliot from our reverence, but Clare Carlisle’s eloquent and original book allows us to do just that by examining the scandal and preoccupation of Eliot’s life and work: marriage. Carlisle, a philosopher who has written studies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, combines an eye for stories with a nose for questions. Her book is based on two related premises: that marriage is a private story, about whose intimacies we can only speculate; and that marriage is also a public story, a constantly adjusted fable. In her account, Eliot’s legally unrecognized but happy marriage to George Henry Lewes is understood as both a private and a public feat. Both narratives differently restrict our access, so the ideal historian will need great tact and an impious curiosity. Carlisle has both.

The Philosopher of Palo Alto

As the chief technology officer of Xerox parc, a research company and erstwhile hotbed of Silicon Valley innovation, Mark Weiser believed that screens were an “unhealthy centripetal force.” Instead of drawing people away from the world, devices should be embedded throughout our built environment—in lights, thermostats, roads, and more—enhancing our perception rather than demanding our focus. Weiser’s pioneering ideas, which he refined in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, led to the present-day Internet of Things, but his vision lost out to the surveillance-capitalist imperatives of Big Tech. Tinnell’s profound biography evokes an alternative paradigm, in which technology companies did not seek to monitor and exploit users.

“My husband marks the start of when my life was worth being archived,” the narrator of this black comedy of modern marriage confesses. Ventura’s protagonist, a forty-year-old English teacher and mother of two whose husband works in finance, is a comically exaggerated cliché whose sole concern is maintaining her husband’s interest: she lies to him about her hair color and pretends to be asleep so he doesn’t see her without makeup. But, as the story progresses, the intensity of her fixation is contrasted with his profound indifference, and her vapid exterior is shown to mask desperate anxieties about class, gender, and power.

The Great White Bard

In this lively appraisal, a Shakespeare scholar reckons with her love of the playwright’s works while exploring their role in cultivating “a unique brand of English white superiority.” Karim-Cooper’s attentive readings show how beliefs about race reside in the language of the plays: “Romeo and Juliet” is suffused with metaphors that “elevate whiteness above blackness,” whereas “The Tempest” complicates attempts to describe characters with fixed labels by blurring the boundaries between “beauty and monstrosity” and “civility and barbarity.” Ultimately, as contemporary productions featuring imaginative and diverse casting show, “we all have the right to claim the Bard.”

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

This wily, gleefully clamorous novel opens in 1972, with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but it largely unfolds three decades prior, with the events that led to the skeleton’s existence. Though the Black, Jewish, and newly arrived immigrant residents of the tumbledown Pottstown neighborhood of Chicken Hill have clashing ideas about America, they band together to protect a deaf Black boy from the state’s clutches. The novel’s down-home cadences cloak its elaborate narrative circuitry, and McBride makes farcical use of the fear of newcomers held by white characters, such as the town’s physician, a Klansman. The Jewish woman who runs the local grocery store feels otherwise, saying, of Chicken Hill, “America is here.”

A poet’s intimate, immanent sense of her own mortality casts the world into relief in this remarkable collection, published posthumously. With astonishing formal and emotional clarity, in language at once delicate and bold, Hamilton renders afresh enduring questions of time, love, and literature as measures of our individual and shared lives. Excerpts from the title poem were originally published in the magazine.

Why the Bible Began

The peculiar thing about the Hebrew Bible is that, as the scholar Jacob L. Wright suggests, it's so much a losers’ tale. The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts. Wright’s purpose is to explain, in a new way, how and why this happened. He emphasizes the divisions between the southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, which were warring adversaries, and highlights the ways in which each kingdom’s dominant narratives were constantly being entangled by the Biblical writers. Wright’s often brilliant and persuasive book leads us to see ideological fractures in passages that we thought we knew.

This Is Wildfire

Many of the most destructive wildfires of recent years have jumped from forests or grasslands into com­munities situated in what’s become known as the “wildland-urban inter­face,” or WUI . According to Mott, a Montana­-based jour­nalist, and Angle, a professor at the University of Montana College of Business, we’re putting up more homes than ever before in such “areas ripe for fire”—and it’s a big reason that wildfires are becoming more dangerous. The two have suggestions for individuals who want to reduce the odds that their homes will go up in smoke. But, they acknowledge, these sorts of home­-hardening projects do little to address the larger issue of development in the WUI , which, they say, has become a “cycle” that will be “hard to reverse.”

Terrace Story

Leichter’s bewitching second novel is all about space, literal and figurative. There’s real estate: Annie and Edward, cash-strapped new parents, reside in a shoebox city apartment. There’s the metaphoric geography of intimacy, too: George and Lydia are trapped in a marriage full of “blind alleys and impasses.” Rosie is in outer space—a futuristic suburb orbiting Earth—because the planet is having some capacity issues. But the key to it all is Stephanie (single, thirtyish, in sales), and her secret superpower: she can make the world bigger with her mind. She raises ceilings, expands cupboards, adds more room to the local playground, and creates new terrain in a national park. Leichter centers her subtle and witty fable on the off-kilter power dynamics of home life, tearing her characters apart and leaving their stories in pieces, encouraging us to peer into the space between the fragments.

The expectation for an American novel about an African immigrant is that it will perform a task of translation: here is where I come from, and these are the painful circumstances under which I left. This slim, captivating début starkly rejects the trope. Binyam’s narrator is a middle-aged émigré, who’s returning to his birthplace to visit his sick brother after a quarter century abroad. He’s also a nameless cipher, who speaks of himself like a marionette, in a laconic prose that omits motive, proper nouns, and all but the most skeletal description. He is going to a place that resembles Ethiopia, but the context comes to seem unimportant; the real guesswork concerns his relationship to his homeland. Binyam wrings mordant humor from his encounters with others, slowly revealing a latent cruelty. The book ends with no easy epiphany; instead, it questions the exile’s authority to pronounce upon the place he leaves.

The Deadline

Lepore, a staff writer and historian, writes about the grand sweep of history and the exigencies of the everyday with equal panache, and has a knack for entwining them in a way that illuminates both. This new collection of essays—most of which were first published in the magazine—considers everything from the equivocations of government commissions to the provocations of the Bratz doll . Lepore, always mindful of “the hold the dead have over the living,” reconstitutes the American experience as human experience, alert to the comedy and sorrows of its surfaces and its depths.

Temple Folk

These nine short stories follow Black American Muslims who drift toward and away from their faith, judge one another for immodesty, wrestle with upended family lore, and reflect with ambivalence on the impact the Nation of Islam has had on their lives. A woman visiting Egypt questions whether to continue wearing the hijab, another enters into a puzzling and intense online romance with a devout Albanian, and another is haunted by visions of her dead father as she prepares his eulogy. Built largely around vignettes, Bilal’s stories depict characters who serve as sensitive guides to matters of apostasy, racial prejudice, and gender roles.

Brave the Wild River

In 1938, two female botanists set out to document the plant life of the Grand Canyon. Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, undeterred by warnings that the trip would be “a mighty poor place for women,” joined with a river guide and a handful of other boatmen to travel the treacherous Green and Colorado Rivers. Sevigny chronicles the team’s forty-three-day journey, interspersing it with accounts of the adventurers who preceded them, descriptions of plants and wildlife, and the history of Western intervention in an ecosystem long stewarded by Native nations, including the Navajo and the Hualapai. The book also makes the case that Clover and Jotter’s study, conducted shortly after the construction of the Hoover Dam, provides a crucial benchmark in assessing human impact on the environment.

Disruptions

Millhauser is the great eccentric of American fiction; his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between. At the core of his new collection is a disorienting version of the small-town tale. The residents in his archetypal old town are diligent about mowing and watering, touching up the paint on their shutters. Invariably, though, Millhauser’s characters are seized by a collective restlessness. In one story, a town’s residents become obsessed with the idea of darkness, painting their houses black and putting their babies in black diapers. In another, the town is home to forty-one columns; people go up there to live and almost never come down. One of the longer stories takes place in a community where the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood are just two inches tall. Some work in the homes of their (relatively giant-size) fellow-townspeople, removing lint from clothes and scouring attics for ants. Millhauser describes it all in precise detail, and much as he relishes the magical, he has a soft spot for the hum-drum. His genius is to be able to evoke both so urgently.

A collection of essays incubated during the covid lockdown and structured around readings of Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, this urgent volume is suffused with loss. Freud’s notion of the death drive, Rose writes, was influenced by the pandemic of his own time, the so-called Spanish flu, which took the life of his daughter Sophie. That pandemic, by some estimates, wiped out more people than the two world wars combined but was itself swiftly wiped from historical memory; Freud himself seldom mentions it. Rose quotes Walter Benjamin’s observation, in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” that “there used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died.” Like him, she looks askance at the effort to deny the spectacle of dying. “In a pandemic, death cannot be exiled to the outskirts of existence,” she writes. Her meditations on mortality, absence, and plague are haunted and yet strangely energized, full of possibility.

The Peacock and the Sparrow

This crackling début thriller is narrated by a C.I.A. spy, a self-described “aging threadbare bureaucrat” stationed in Bahrain in the wake of the Arab Spring. The novel begins with a series of bombings targeting Westerners. These are blamed on the Bahraini opposition, but the station chief suggests that the spy’s informant, who has become a friend, was involved. No one is beyond the spy’s cascading suspicions, not even a Bahraini mosaicist with whom he is romantically entangled, and whom he approaches with a caution usually reserved for his work: navigating an affair is “not so different, after all, from the delicate give-and-take dance with an informant, an unending alternation between obeisance and control.”

In this study of Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian-born composer who immigrated to the U.S. in 1933, Sachs blends fleet-footed biography with an accessible analysis of Schoenberg’s works. Best known for his development of twelve-tone serialism, Schoenberg believed that he would single-handedly restore Germany’s musical dominance over France, Italy, and Russia; the cold reception that his compositions faced left him imagining himself as a “lonely, misunderstood prophet.” Sachs’s interpretations of these works can be emotionally convincing, and, according to him, Schoenberg’s music is, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said about Wagner’s, “better than it sounds,” in part because appreciation often requires repeated listening.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

Andrew Aziza, the Nigerian teen-ager who is the protagonist of this début novel, describes himself as a “genius poet altar boy who loves blondes.” A Christian who lives in a largely Muslim town, Andy feels ashamed of his preference for the West, which he considers to be a foil to his continent and to his Mama, who reads her Bible slowly and believes in ghosts. This shame is expressed in imaginary conversations with his stillborn brother, his schoolteacher, and the first white girl he meets, with whom he readily falls in love. Animated by a lively voice and a spiritual vision, Buoro’s novel also unfolds a touching critique of the false promise of Western transcendence.

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

This book reimagines the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department following the killing of Michael Brown in 2014; redacting the report word by word, letter by letter, Sealey excavates larger lyric insights about American life from its account of police bias and brutality. An excerpt appeared in the magazine and as an interactive feature on newyorker.com .

My Stupid Intentions

This début novel is narrated by a beech marten named Archy, who is born into a life of hardship: his father dead, his mother barely able—and sometimes failing—to keep the newborn kits alive. Despite its fairy-tale-like feel, the novel is nothing cute. When Archy is lamed in an accident, he is sold to a dealmaking fox, who treats him like a slave before teaching him to read and write. Archy learns about the lives of men, knowledge that prompts a host of religious questions and leads to a restless search for meaning. Life in Archy’s world is a constant fight for survival, and, while Zannoni’s story implies that thinking and instinct may mean different things for animals than they do for us, he provokes the reader to consider just how different their realm truly is.

In the early pages of “Still Born,” which was short-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize, its narrator, Laura, is a total pill. A Ph.D. student in literature, she is avowedly child-free; being a not-mother is the negative space around which she defines her existence and her ethics, and she is evangelical about her stance. She accurately perceives the irrational structural burdens that Western societies place upon mothers, but she mistakes these burdens for proof that motherhood itself must be an irrational choice. One of the welcome surprises of the novel, however, is how quickly it swerves away from Laura’s anti-natalist campaigning, as if Laura, too, wanted out of her own head and into a broader web of experience. Not having children, Laura believes, insures a woman’s freedom to travel, to be consumed with her studies or vocation, to be alone with her thoughts. “Still Born” posits that not having children also grants an equally important freedom to care for people outside of the legal or blood-borne status of family. You don’t have to be a mother—in fact, maybe you shouldn’t be. But you have to do something for whomever you find in, or near, your nest.

August Wilson

As a child, the author of seminal plays including “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was a bookworm: he learned to read by his fourth birthday, and stood out in kindergarten as “a miniature scholar.” This biography deftly traces his ascent to becoming one of America’s preëminent dramatists, recounting his discovery of the blues (“the wellspring of my art”); his founding of the Black Horizons Theatre, in his home town of Pittsburgh, in 1968; and his careful curation of his persona. Hartigan ably argues that his dramas, many of which pay close attention to ancestral lineages and ideas about inheritance, continue to reveal “fissures in the national culture.”

Information Desk

Schiff’s stint manning the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where workaday banalities unfolded amid a sublime setting, inspired this wide-ranging meditation on hallowed objects, institutional power, and insect behavior, an excerpt of which was published in the magazine.

War and Punishment

A young, distinguished, and wholly independent Russian journalist who was forced to flee his country for the West has written a superb account of all that led to Vladimir Putin’s brutal and misbegotten invasion of Ukraine. Zygar became well known as a reporter in Russia with his best-seller, “All the Kremlin’s Men.” Here, through his on-the-ground reporting from Ukraine and Russia, conducted during the past two decades, and an incisive grasp of history, he describes how Putin has willfully distorted the past to serve his purposes. Read in conjunction with works by scholars such as Serhii Plokhy and Timothy Snyder, Zygar’s book provides an ardent, informed understanding of the present.

Last of the Lions

When Jones was drafted into the U.S. Army, in 1953, he refused to sign the paperwork, on the grounds that Black men were not full citizens of the United States. Within a decade, he became a close friend and political adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This striking memoir, anchored on the front lines of the fight for civil rights and ranging far beyond, entwines the social history of a nation with the powerful memories of a life lived at its heart. Read an excerpt on newyorker.com .

The Brothers Karamazov

In “The Brothers Karamazov,” published in 1880, and now available in a lively, fast-flowing new translation by Michael Katz (Liveright), Fyodor Dostoyevsky blended the family novel with the whodunnit. The Karamazov brothers and their father Fyodor fit what Dostoyevsky described as “an accidental family,” sons merely by birth, brothers in name only. In this, they resembled Russia, which he saw as a family at war with itself. The novel has a spoken quality that is meant to communicate the unreliability of memory and the fact that people tend to misunderstand one another far more often than they do the opposite. Katz is particularly attentive to this feature of Dostoyevsky’s prose. His is, by my estimation, the voiciest translation of “The Brothers Karamazov” thus far. He writes at the fever pitch of speech, unleashing the speed and the chaos of the original; narrative unfurls at the mad and authentic pace of human emotion. The book is filled with what you might call “accidental chapters,” culled from court transcripts, hagiographies, love letters, toasts, songs, legal and spiritual confessions. The miracle of this cacophonous novel is that somehow it all coheres; its wildly divergent elements are all made, by Dostoyevsky, to belong.

You, Bleeding Childhood

This collection of short stories from an Italian writer with a cult following delves into the obsessions, anxieties, and detritus of childhood. One of the stories, “ The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz ,” appeared in the magazine.

The Migrant Chef

The Mexican chef Eduardo (Lalo) García Guzmán, the subject of this wide-ranging biography, spent his youth as a migrant worker in the United States, where he learned that “the health of the oranges was more important than his own.” Tillman traces Guzmán’s trajectory from deportee to celebrated chef dedicated to local ingredients, terroir, and transparent supply chains. She evokes how even as Guzmán aims “to hint, via an ingredient” or “a geographic term,” at the history embedded in his menus, he is haunted by the inequities of haute cuisine, and by the circumstances that render locally sourced foods a luxury.

The protagonist of this mystery is a young Pakistani Londoner who earns money writing English subtitles for Bollywood films and longs to translate literary classics. When she receives an invitation to the Centre, a secretive language school that produces native-level fluency in ten days, she enrolls, mastering German and Russian before strange dreams and a hushed-up death alert her to something amiss. The novel explores friendship, purpose, and power; it also frames language as intimate and embodied, casting translation as an opportunity for “a repurposing of things once thoughtlessly imbibed.”

A Most Tolerant Little Town

In 1956, Clinton High School, in Anderson County, Tennessee, became the first Southern high school to be desegregated by court order. Clinton had no history of racial friction, so no one expected trouble. Martin’s striking new book documents how wrong they were. By the end of the school year, pretty much every item in the apparatus of Southern civil-rights resistance had made an appearance in Clinton, from anti-Black slurs and heckling to cross burnings, bombings, and Ku Klux Klan night riders. In October of 1958, the school was destroyed by dynamite. Martin expands upon the existing historical record, interviewing many sources, including most of the twelve Black students who enrolled at Clinton. She is a good storyteller, and, as familiar as the school-desegregation story is, her account illuminates the stark racial divisions in the Jim Crow states and the predominance of segregationist sentiments, even among those who participated in the integration project.

The novelist Ann Patchett is a connoisseur of ambivalent interpersonal dynamics within closed groups. She is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape. “Tom Lake,” Patchett’s ninth and newest novel, is set against the backdrop of the early pandemic, whose claustrophobic intimacy seems almost tailor-made for her interests. In the spring of 2020, Lara is sheltering in place on her family cherry farm with her husband, Joe Nelson, and their three twentysomething daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell. With harvesters scarce, the Nelsons have to pick and process their own fruit; to make the time go by faster, Lara tells the girls about her brief youthful career as an actor and her romance with a castmate, Peter Duke, who went on to a wildly successful career in Hollywood. Patchett airs the suggestion that Lara is stranded in the past only to gently put it to rest. “Tom Lake” guides Lara to equanimity and closure, mostly by awakening her to the value of the people around her. The novel’s alchemical transformation of pain into peace feels, at times, overstated. Yet there’s something subversively wise and self-aware about the book’s investment in its own fantasy. Even as Patchett validates Lara’s performance of contentment, she appears to know that behind the artifice lies a more complicated truth.

The Parrot and the Igloo

This history of the idea that human actions are warming the world to cataclysmic effect opens with brief biographies of the inventors who ushered electricity, and its most troubling descendant, fossil-fuel dependency, into the world. The awareness of human-induced warming dawns in 1896 and resurfaces periodically throughout the twentieth century—in 1956, the  Times  imagined an Arctic so hot that it was home to tropical birds, a landscape that gives Lipsky’s book its title—before battles with skeptics and deniers begin in earnest, in the two-thousands. A consensus finally arrives with the release of the fourth I.P.C.C. assessment, in 2007, but this triumph becomes an anticlimax when governments prove unwilling to regulate fossil fuels.

This comic novel, about a year of crisis for an affluent Jewish family, opens with a dinner party at which each guest is served a meal representing a different socioeconomic background. According to the hostess, Deborah, the matriarch, the purpose of this exercise is “to replicate, in a controlled environment, the lottery of birth.” Yet, the control of the family’s own environment becomes a problem after Deborah’s husband, Scott, is caught falsifying data in a clinical trial. Deborah pursues an affair, their daughter becomes reëntangled with a teacher who groomed her in high school, and their son, a premed student who idolized his father, feels increasingly lost. Ridker’s tone remains light even as his characters struggle to correct course. Writing about psychiatry’s new interest in the “transgenerational transmission of trauma” in his medical-school application, the son wonders, “Who knows what else our parents have unwittingly passed on?”

This biting gay millennial comedy of manners takes place at the holiday home of a wealthy lesbian couple, where two younger, less financially secure couples visit them for ten days. As the older couple derive satisfaction from comparing their lives with those of their guests, a connection develops between a member of each of the younger couples, sparking a consequential outburst. While depicting rituals both mundane and vaunted—revisiting “Gossip Girl,” fights followed by hours of “lesbian processing”—the novel also plumbs its characters’ fears of intimacy, failure, and irrelevance.

Ultra-Processed People

In this grim investigation, the British doctor and medical journalist Chris van Tulleken bravely turns himself into a guinea pig to explore the ins and outs of ultra-processed food (U.P.F.)— food made up of substances that you would never find at home. He has in mind all those cereals and snacks and ice creams we see on supermarket shelves with lists of ingredients that are troublingly long. Van Tulleken “wanted this food,” he reports of his U.P.F. diet. “But at the same time, I was no longer enjoying it. Meals took on a uniformity: everything seemed similar, regardless of whether it was sweet or savoury. I was never hungry. But I was also never satisfied.” His account of what happens to our food during its trip to our gut—and the connection that bad food has to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes—is persuasive and scary. Van Tulleken slowly sickens, and the reader sickens along with him.

Retrospective

The life of the filmmaker Sergio Cabrera provides the raw material for this searching novel, which charts the Cabrera family’s experiences through particularly turbulent periods of the twentieth century. Cabrera’s father, who became an accomplished dramaturge and actor, fled Fascist Spain as a teen-ager; Cabrera himself, along with his sister and their parents, would leave Colombia decades later, when changing political winds made their Communist sympathies a liability. For part of Cabrera’s adolescence, the family of fervent Marxists lived in Beijing, residing in a plush, cloistered compound reserved exclusively for foreigners. When Cabrera attends a retrospective of his work in Barcelona, in 2016, he reflects on this history, on his family’s resentments, and on how intensely held—if impermanent—political convictions inflect individual lives.

Last Call at Coogan’s

Based on interviews with nearly a hundred subjects, this portrait of a neighborhood bar, which operated in Washington Heights from 1985 to 2020, is also a portrait of a modern American city in microcosm. Originally run by a “combustible trio of Irishmen,” Coogan’s functioned as a safe harbor in a high-crime neighborhood whose central tension was the mutual distrust between the Dominican community and a largely white police force. By the time Coogan’s closed—during the covid pandemic, after narrowly surviving a brush with gentrification—the bar had become a local institution that hosted fund-raisers, wakes, and other community gatherings.

This propulsive biography places the drummer and bandleader Chick Webb at the epicenter of the early Swing Era. Despite the spinal tuberculosis that stunted his height at four feet and ended his life at thirty-four, Webb’s strength on the drums reshaped the jazz rhythm section as he “battled” other bandleaders, such as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Crease pays close attention to the details of the recordings of Webb’s band, contextualizing their shifting sound against a backdrop of changing racial dynamics. She also incorporates eloquent testimonies to Webb’s musicianship and generosity from his contemporaries: after their performances, he “would compliment his sidemen’s best solos by singing them, note for note.”

Grand Delusion

The author of this critical consideration of four decades of the U.S. government’s dealings in the Middle East has held positions in the State Department and on the National Security Council, across various Administrations. His historical account is embedded with engaging recollections of his work. In 2002, for instance, he was part of a delegation that briefed Tony Blair on the consequences of regime change in Iraq; the conversation, Simon writes, “never advanced beyond” a “pseudoanalytical nonquestion.” The book concludes with his belief that, ultimately, “the United States would have been better off today had it not been so eager to intervene” in the region.

Nothing Special

In Nicole Flattery’s début novel, Mae, a teen-ager from Queens, drops out of high school and ends up in Andy Warhol’s Factory as a typist, transcribing the conversations that will become Warhol’s experimental 1968 novel, “a.” For Mae, the recordings are windows into a new world, one that alternately frightens and excites her. The more she listens to the conversations, the more attuned she becomes to the sadness and desperation coursing through them. Everyone she overhears is working hard to turn themselves into larger-than-life characters, being aged and exhausted by drugs, scrambling for a sense of belonging and security that the Factory promises but can’t provide. Lies abound, as does forced cool; the sense of new lives being discovered sits alongside the sense of lives going to waste and people flailing. Warhol himself almost never appears in the novel, but he is a constant presence nonetheless, the sun god that everyone orbits and whose approving gaze they seek. By approaching the famous artist this way, Flattery manages to cannily anatomize his powers and appeal while simultaneously pushing the man himself almost entirely out of the frame.

This incantatory début novel begins in 1978, at a London-area reggae club, where the narrator, a young Jamaican factory worker named Yamaye, meets a furniture-maker with whom she falls in love. Their romance is in full bloom when he is groundlessly accosted by the police, and he dies in custody, at the hands of an officer. This loss spurs Yamaye to seek justice and to attain clarity about a murky aspect of her family. Throughout the story, music salves Yamaye’s wounds; she remembers “dancing in the dark; wet, salty bodies sliding in and out of bleeps and horns and haze; transformed by bassline, a better version of ourselves in the grey light before dawn.”

Eight Bears

There are eight living species of bears, on four continents: polar, panda, brown, black, sun, moon, sloth, and spectacled. Gloria Dickie’s timely survey of these eight groups offers a glimpse into two realities: first, bear populations are plummeting in most of the world, and, at the same time, in some parts of North America they’re coming back to places they haven’t been in generations. Since the nineteen-seventies, American bears in the Lower Forty-eight have been on the move, expanding their range. Not too long ago, Dickie writes, a grizzly turned up in Nathan Keane’s back yard, near Loma, Montana. Told that he should have known better than to keep chickens in bear country, Keane said, at first, “Well, we aren’t in bear country.” But then he reconsidered: “Maybe we’re starting to be now.”

Ninth Building

The author’s youth, which unfolded during the Cultural Revolution, supplies the material for this group of fictionalized connected vignettes. Zou conveys sharp childhood recollections: the book’s narrator watches a man whip a landlord’s widow with braided willow branches, and feels that the suicides that take place around the Beijing apartment complex that anchors his world are both alienating and normal. Later, when he is sent away for reëducation, hard labor replaces violin practice, and gradually he and the society around him learn to accept humiliations, heartbreaks, and the arbitrariness of fate. He begins writing with the hope that “by putting them on paper, these past events would release their hold on me.”

Thunderclap

This memoir of artistic appreciation is centered largely on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, but focusses particularly on two artists, one Dutch, one not: Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, and the Scottish painter James Cumming, who was the author’s father. Laura Cumming, an art critic, challenges the common views of Dutch Golden Age art as being merely representational or as depicting symbols that unlock religious or moral meanings. Instead, she examines details in the paintings to illuminate the ways in which the artists shaped what they saw: the wit in a painting of a flower, the dramatic light falling on a bundle of asparagus. Through this kind of close attention, she finds in the art works both a way to grapple with her father’s death and guidance for living “in the here and now.”

How to Love Your Daughter

Blum’s thought-provoking and forensic novel traces the relationship between an Israeli mother and her estranged adult daughter, who is now living in Europe. Moving between the present and the past, the novel, which was excerpted in the magazine, reveals the moments when a once close and loving bond may have begun to fracture.

So to Speak

This formally inventive collection, which includes self-described “American sonnets” and “D.I.Y. sestinas,” explores Blackness against questions of image and inheritance, storytelling and song, with a gimlet eye to the politically pressurized present. Several poems, including “ George Floyd ,” were originally published in the magazine.

Snow Road Station

At the center of this sensitive novel, set in Ontario in 2008, is Lulu, a middle-aged actress who has returned to the hamlet of her youth for her nephew’s wedding. The town is populated with familiars: her brother, her best friend, a new lover, a new grandniece. Despite experiencing a terrifying sexual assault, Lulu savors the town’s pace of life and decides to stay there, giving up her career and her apartment in Montreal. Hay makes a case for the simplicity of pleasure: “All you have to do,” Lulu thinks, “is put yourself in the way of beauty, put yourself into the incredible swing of it.”

This collection of stories, by an acclaimed Chinese novelist, spans continents and centuries, spans continents and centuries in its depictions of displacement. A band of poets seeks shelter after the devastating earthquake that struck Sichuan Province in 2008; a Chinese woman who moves to Dublin with her Irish husband recalls their fateful honeymoon in Burma; a construction worker who has never left his home town visits New York City; an eleventh-century scholar attempts to finish his book under a death sentence. With wry humor and occasional earthy surrealism, Yan—who was born in Sichuan and lives in Britain—delicately renders both the linguistic and physical manifestations of longing. As one character reflects, it is both “our nature to forget” and “in our nature to resist forgetting.”

An earlier version of this review misidentified Yan Ge’s English-language début.

A Madman’s Will

In 1833, the Virginia congressman John Randolph freed his nearly four hundred slaves while on his deathbed. This detailed history untangles the much publicized legal dispute that ensued, wherein Randolph’s relatives, some of whom argued that he had gone mad, fought against the slaves’ manumission. Randolph left conflicting directives—his last written will bequeathed most of his estate to a relative, but an earlier version emancipated the people he enslaved—and it took thirteen years for a court to uphold his dying wish. May cautions against ascribing honorable motives to Randolph, and stresses that those he freed continued to face prejudice and violence in the North. “Because manumission was just an exercise of the giver’s rights,” he notes, “it changed almost nothing.”

Tabula Rasa

McPhee, a staff writer since 1965, has published dozens of books and more than a hundred pieces for the magazine , with some of the most inimitable prose in American letters. In nimble vignettes, this new collection reflects on those ideas which he never committed to print. McPhee writes about a hot summer in Spain, a Dutch merchant vessel, lunch with Thornton Wilder, and the act of not writing. This incisive catalogue of a singular mind is born of a series of ideas written in our pages —and abandoned along the way.

Fires in the Dark

In this loose sequel to a best-selling memoir of bipolar illness, Jamison, a writer and a psychologist, explores the process of prying a mind from disease or despair. Healing, she writes, depends on “harvesting the imagination” and navigating “the balance between remembering and forgetting”; it also, crucially, relies on support. The book comprises portraits of healers, including W. H. R. Rivers, who treated soldiers who suffered from shell shock during the First World War, and Paul Robeson, who found solace in intuition and in the irrational. Ultimately, Jamison emphasizes the importance of recognizing a diversity of sources of fortitude and models of accompaniment.

After the Funeral and Other Stories

In her fourth collection of stories, Hadley brings her eloquent prose and her psychological acuity to the relationships—between siblings, friends, lovers, parents, and children—that shape us and change us, that call into question our view of ourselves and our place in the world. Several stories from the collection, including the title piece , first appeared in the magazine.

The British journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis used to religiously rinse his plastics before depositing them in one of the color-coded rubbish bins that he and his wife kept at their home. Then he decided to find out what was actually happening to his garbage. Disenchantment followed. At a recycling plant, in New Delhi, he found workers feeding shredded junk into an extruder, which pumped out little gray microplastic pellets known as nurdles. He toured another recycling plant, in northern England, where he learned that nearly half the bales of plastic matter it receives can’t be reprocessed because they’re too contaminated. In the end, Franklin-Wallis comes to see plastic recycling as smoke and mirrors. Over the years, he writes, “a kind of playbook” has emerged: a company pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. Then, when public pressure eases, it quietly abandons its promise and lobbies against any legislation to restrict the use of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wallis quotes a telling remark from Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry: “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.”

Natural Light

The artist Adam Elsheimer, who was born in Frankfurt in 1578 and died in Rome at the age of thirty-two, left only a small corpus of paintings, all but one executed in oil on copper, and most of them diminutive. (In Rome, he was called “the devil for little things.”) Yet his expertise was revered, not least by his friend Rubens, who worked on a much larger scale, and Elsheimer’s reputation has endured. This study does discerning justice to his achievement. Bell’s focus is not just on Elsheimer’s registering of natural details, as the title suggests, but also on his evocation of the supernatural—never richer than in his final masterpiece, “The Flight Into Egypt,” with its miraculous interfusing of homeliness and immensity.

I Do Everything I’m Told

Where, in a poem, is “here”? For Fernandes, it could be New York City, where she lives, or Paris, or Vienna, or any one of the twenty cities that she names in the forty-nine poems of her new collection. Poets have long invoked place names as objects of desire. Fernandes, though, uses them to drop pins on a map of attraction, creating a spatial record of erotic life. In one poem, she boards a plane bound for Zurich and promptly falls in love with her seatmate, a stranger to whom, in the poem’s final lines, she cannot help submitting: “Come see me in Vienna, you say. And I do. / Because I believe so much in being led.” At other times, she’s as reckless with love as she is with verse form. (“Don’t take it personally,” she tells a beloved in “Shanghai Sonnet”: “I am young and nothing is sacred yet.”) In the book’s most moving poems, the geographic mode points to places off the map, not to real life but to potential life. For Fernandes, “here” doesn’t simply designate a place; it enacts a wish.

The Lost Sons of Omaha

This anatomy of a killing in 2020, at a Black Lives Matter protest, tries to recover the essences of two men involved, who were “reduced to grotesques” in the distorting landscape of social media. During a struggle, James Scurlock was shot and killed by Jake Gardner, who died by suicide a few months later. Thanks to duelling political narratives and outright disinformation, Scurlock became “a hoodlum who provoked his own death” and Gardner a “bloodthirsty white supremacist.” Sexton marshals a remarkable volume of investigative material to disentangle fact from fiction, even though he fears that, in this moment, we may find it hard to see the genuine tragedy, which arises from “flawed characters caught up in disastrous circumstances.”

In “ The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church ,” Swarns sets out the involvement of the Jesuit priests who administered what is now Georgetown University in the institution of slavery—notably, through their sale of two hundred and seventy-two enslaved people, in June, 1838. It was an act that led many of those enslaved to be forcibly removed from Maryland to Louisiana, and many family members to be separated. “The 272” grew out of a series of articles that Swarns wrote while reporting for the Times , where she remains a contributor. Swarns sticks closely to chronology and strives for an objective account, even as she depends on conjecture to join the recorded history of the two hundred and seventy-two to the broader experience of slavery in the Americas. The result is a vivid, pointillistically detailed narrative that foregrounds the people who were enslaved even as it tells the story of the school buildings erected with their labor and the institutions sustained and funded by their sale. “Without the enslaved,” Swarns writes, “the Catholic Church in the United States, as we know it today, would not exist.”

The Book of Eve

After a prologue, in which a nun denounces what follows as having been written “to please the Devil,” this novel embarks on a sensuous retelling of the Book of Genesis from Eve’s perspective. According to Eve, Eden “wasn’t desirable, desire didn’t exist there”; “there was no serpent”; and Cain’s offering was “light and joyful” while Abel’s was “unbreathable smoke.” She calls Adam’s idea that earthly life is our punishment for sin a “stupid lie”; for her, the crackling energy of the planet is an inexhaustible pleasure. “Life is good,” Cain says to Adam. “How can you say what Eve has given us is bad?”

A History of Burning

The inciting incident of this epic début novel—spanning four generations, five countries, and nine voices—comes in 1898, when Pirbhai, a thirteen-year-old Gujarati boy, is tricked into indentured servitude and becomes one of many Indians laboring on the East African Railway, in British-ruled Kenya. Pirbhai’s descendants must navigate a complex social and racial hierarchy. Children are born, daughters are married off, and elders are mourned against the backdrop of Pan-Africanism’s rise and the British Empire’s retreat. Oza shows each generation of Pirbhai’s family grappling with what to pass on to the next—a sense of complicity in colonialism; heirlooms and stories from homes long left; anxieties and hopes for the future—and what to let die with them.

The Art Thief

From 1994 to 2001, Stéphane Breitwieser stole art at an unprecedented pace: three out of four weekends per year for eight years. He plied his craft during business hours, in museums, galleries, and auction houses, with tourists and docents and security guards milling around. He never wore a mask. He carried no weapons. And he stole some two billion dollars’ worth of art. Michael Finkel wonderfully narrates this odds-defying crime streak, whose trajectory is less rise and fall than crazy and crazier, propelled by suspense and surprises. Breitwieser pulls off his thefts with surprising minimalism. There is no rappelling from roofs, no triggering of fire alarms, no high-tech devices to shut down security systems. His gear consists chiefly of a Swiss Army knife and, weather permitting, an overcoat. In the book’s final chapters—when the dashing antihero grows old and sad—Finkel does not hesitate to bring down the boom, but he is clear and compassionate about the downfall. An outrageous tale, “The Art Thief,” like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing.

Winnie and Nelson

Eschewing hagiography, this portrait of the Mandelas’ marriage does justice both to the couple’s political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union. Nelson emerges as the quieter force, with Winnie essential to his consecration. She could be shockingly cruel, “a monument to the revolution’s underbelly” who would settle personal scores by leveraging “the contagion of violence that besets unstable times,” most notoriously through her “football club,” an assembly of brutal bodyguards. Still, she was a world-class messenger, crucial in bringing Black South Africa’s plight to the international stage. The Mandelas, Steinberg writes, were “throwing themselves into the maelstrom of history, and nobody in a maelstrom is in control of their journey.”

Okri, a Booker Prize winner, approaches the potential cataclysm of climate change from many perspectives in this multi-genre collection, which is both a work of lyrical imagination and a warning about the dangers we will face unless we take immediate action. A story from the collection appeared in the magazine.

The Covenant of Water

This novel begins in 1900 in southern India, with the arranged marriage of a twelve-year-old girl to a forty-year-old widowed farmer. Big Ammachi, as she comes to be called, has married into a family with a curse: once every generation, a member drowns. Life unspools across seven decades, during which time Big Ammachi’s loved ones suffer maladies that are treated by practitioners of both traditional and Western medicine. The novel is a searching consideration of the extent to which seemingly contrary approaches to healing can coalesce; for a Swedish doctor who has founded a leprosarium, “medicine is his true priesthood, a ministry of healing the body and the soul of his flock.”

Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

This group portrait examines those people—including Jessica Mitford, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn, the war photographer Gerda Taro, and the nurse Salaria Kea—whose commitment to anti-Fascism was galvanized by the Spanish Civil War. Watling deploys a wealth of firsthand testimony and archival materials, not in service of a conventional work of history but in an extended consideration of contemporary concerns: What is the line between solidarity and appropriation in joining the struggles of others? How should writers navigate between objectivity and engagement? “The people in this book were imperfect in their commitment,” she writes. Yet they were prepared to “pick a side anyway.”

The House Is on Fire

The Richmond Theatre fire of 1811 was, at the time, the deadliest disaster in U.S. history, killing seventy-two. This historical novel examines the event and its aftermath through four figures: the stagehand who accidentally starts the fire; a well-to-do widow in a box seat; an enslaved young woman, attending with her mistress but confined to the colored gallery; and a blacksmith, also enslaved, who rushes to the scene and rescues patrons jumping from windows. The bad behavior of the powerful becomes a theme: the theatre company attempts to pin blame on a fabricated slave revolt, and men in the audience trample their wives in making their escape.

The Sullivanians

At its peak, in the mid- to late seventies, the psychoanalytic association known as the Sullivanian Institute had as many as six hundred patient-members clustered in apartment buildings that the group bought or rented on the cheap on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As Alexander Stille writes in his juicy, fascinating “ The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune ,” Sullivanian therapists became “the chief authorities in a patient’s life.” The cult’s founder, Saul Newton, and his top therapists had demoniac control over their patients’ sex lives, social lives, how they earned or spent money, and how they raised—or, usually, didn’t raise—their children. The Sullivanians’ bête noire was the nuclear family, which they identified as the wellspring of all human pathology. Women had to seek permission to get pregnant. While trying to conceive, they would have sex with multiple men, in order to create ambiguity about their child’s biological father. In Stille’s view, “the Sullivanian Institute encapsulates one of the great themes of the twentieth century: the tendency of utopian projects of social liberation to take a totalitarian turn.”

The Late Americans

This novel follows a group of people in Iowa City, many of them M.F.A. students, and explores the ways that dissonant conditions of class, race, and social circumstances can compromise our freedom to pursue art and our ability to fully understand those we love. Amid financial concerns, artistic frustrations, and the judgments, jealousies, and posturing of their classmates, the characters find solace in moments of shared tenderness that transcend the ever-present threat of alienation. In a workshop, one student suggests that another’s poem may “bend our sympathies,” and Taylor’s novel does something similar: his characters reveal selfish or even violent tendencies, but his multifaceted portrayals show each of them to be as innocent and as flawed as any human.

Instructions for the Drowning

These stories, by a Canadian novelist, poet, and musician who died last year, peer keenly into the penumbra surrounding death. A student, fervent and pious, accosts the great Harry Houdini. A man bench-presses at the gym; the bar slips and compresses his lungs; he struggles, but no one sees. A plastic surgeon begs his aging wife to allow him to smooth her wrinkles. Each story’s frame is precisely sized. Heighton’s stories wrestle with life’s uncontrollable endings and beginnings: birth, tragedy, failed resurrection. His characters grasp at time, even as it slips away—violent, sacred, apocalyptic, mundane.

A Stranger in Your Own City

The author, an Iraqi journalist, narrates the American invasion of his country and its aftermath by recounting the lives of a cross-section of Iraqi society, including a Shia man who swaps houses with a Sunni family as sectarianism fractures neighborhoods; a woman doctor working under the Islamic State in Mosul; and a fixer who extorts families whose sons have been detained by security forces, promising to lessen their torture for a fee. Abdul-Ahad is equally caustic about Saddam Hussein, the American occupiers, corrupt Iraqi politicians, and opportunistic religious commanders (“freelance criminal gangsters running their own death squads”). His kaleidoscopic view emphasizes aspects of ordinary Iraqi lives which are lost in the simplistic interpretations of outsiders.

Easily Slip into Another World

“I go back in my memory and I don’t see: I hear,” Threadgill, a Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician and composer, writes in this autobiography. As a child, he taught himself to play his mother’s piano, then learned the clarinet, the flute, and the saxophone (his main instrument). Threadgill is an engaging narrator, touching on racism in the Chicago of his youth, his military service in Vietnam—one band performance is interrupted by a Vietcong raid—and his compositional process. The book’s title refers to a state of mind in which he is able to resist the “mess” of conformity and produce an utterance of his own. “Your neurosis and your dream,” he writes, “they go hand in hand.”

Lament for Julia

The Budapest-born American writer and philosopher Susan Taubes drowned herself, in 1969, days after the publication of her first novel, the cult classic “Divorcing.” Her suicide, at the age of forty-one, has colored the reception of her work, turning her into an icon of doomed femininity. Recently, however, a reappraisal, based in part on newly discovered works, has been revealing a more complex writer and thinker. In the novella “Lament for Julia,” written a few years before the publication of “Divorcing,” an unnamed voice mourns the disappearance of one Julia Klopps, and narrates glimpses of her life. The drama of work comes as much from the mystery of the voice’s relationship to Julia as it does from Julia’s fate. Taubes’s attempts to get the novel published were unsuccessful, but the work was admired by Samuel Beckett, who wrote to his publisher calling Taubes “an authentic talent.”

In Dorothy Tse’s first novel, a lonely middle-aged professor named Q falls in love with Aliss, a life-size mechanical ballerina. “Owlish,” translated from Chinese into a playful and sinuous English by Natascha Bruce, is set in a thinly veiled version of Hong Kong, with echoes of the pro-democracy protests of 2019 and 2020. As demonstrations spread across the city, Q retreats into his fecund and unabashedly filthy fantasy life, installing Aliss in an abandoned church and visiting her for hours on end. Tse uses hallucinatory prose to suggest the reality-warping effects of state censorship and to deliver a cautionary tale about runaway imagination. Activists protest unfree elections and the modifying of history textbooks. One student even climbs a clock tower. But Q, caught up in his own mind, hardly notices. “The world around him,” Tse writes, “seemed to vanish into his blind spot.”

V Is For Victory

On becoming President, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt faced two daunting tasks: to pull the country out of the Depression and, in the face of Nazism’s rise, to overcome U.S. isolationism. Such was his success, this paean to F.D.R. contends, “that, if any one human being is responsible for winning World War II, it is FDR.” Nelson focusses on the ways in which New Deal economics and a nascent war effort went hand in hand, as with the bond-sales programs that financed the “arsenal of democracy” policy, and shows us Roosevelt wrangling generals and manufacturers alike. He sees America’s “industrial genius”—factories producing everyday items were enlisted to make armaments—as central to the defeat of fascism, arguing that American workers were war heroes, too.

The fifth, and reputedly the last, of Ford’s books about the character Frank Bascombe, this novel finds Frank now in his seventies and confronting his son Paul’s devastating illness. After Paul, who has A.L.S. (or “Al’s,” as he jokingly refers to it), participates in an experimental protocol at the Mayo Clinic, Frank picks him up in a rented R.V. and they set out for Mt. Rushmore. A melancholy but banter-filled road trip ensues, in which they survey a swath of Middle America—kitsch stops along the way include the World’s Only Corn Palace, where everything is made of corn—and meet various vividly drawn characters. The startling and poignant conclusion unites father and son through love and grief as they learn to “give life its full due.”

A Life of One’s Own

Biggs’s absorbing, eccentric memoir wends its way through chapter-length biographies of women authors whose lives asked and answered questions about domesticity, unhappiness, and tradition: Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante. Within their differences (of era, of means, of race), each charged herself with writing while woman, thus renegotiating their relationship to endeavors long considered definitive of womanhood. Their lives supplied Biggs a measure of clarity in mapping a new life for herself. “This book bears the traces of their struggles as well as my own—and some of the things we all found that help,” Biggs writes of her subjects. Their stories, the ones they lived and the ones they invented, are complexly ambivalent. But Biggs has been a resourceful reader, one who finds what will sustain her.

The Wounded World

This literary history traces the genesis of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ambitious, unfinished study of the role of Black soldiers in the First World War. Du Bois had called on African Americans to “close ranks” (“ first  your Country,  then  your Rights!”), but his postwar research revealed to him the conflict’s horrors—Black troops denied crucial equipment; Black officers convicted in sham trials—leading him to question the merits of the war and the point of Black soldiers’ sacrifice. Du Bois meticulously documented “a devastating catalog of systemic racial injustice,” Williams writes, while showing “an ability to distill it into concise, lively, accessible prose.” The same goes for this book, which weaves a propulsive narrative from a tangle of facts and forces.

An Honorable Exit

Vuillard, who specializes in novels tracking historical events, turns his eye to France’s attempts to extricate itself from the First Indochina War, culminating in the disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954. Vuillard examines not only the battlefield but also company boardrooms and National Assembly watering holes, to capture “how easy it was to be pragmatic and realistic thousands of kilometers away, to draw up a balance sheet and make projections, when you were in no personal danger.” With measured outrage and penetrating irony, he pillories the alternating bluster and euphemism of French decision-makers while emphasizing colonialism’s brutal toll on the Vietnamese.

In a powerful graphic memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Darrin Bell explores how racism—both subtle and blatant—has impacted his life, from childhood to the present. Read an excerpt on newyorker.com .

Samuel Barber

Barber’s music continues to be treasured for its melding of flawless craftsmanship and deep feeling. Barber himself was more complicated, as this fine biography reveals. Born on Philadelphia’s Main Line in 1910, he was an ebullient gay uncle to his extended family, and counted Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Kennedy among his friends. But his personality was tinged with nastiness and melancholia, intensified by alcoholism and by the collapse of his relationship with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Pollack’s account of the psychosexual intrigue that engulfed many of the guests at the couple’s Westchester home is startling in its frankness.

Set in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, this novel follows the Aziz siblings—Walter, Lina, and Donnie—after their mother’s commitment to a mental-health institution. “The sadness was always there, an underground cascade,” Lina observes of her mother, whose condition becomes a reflecting pool around which the siblings gather, peering into themselves, and into her. Simpson darts between their points of view, detailing the vicissitudes of their lives. The novel’s strength lies less in dramatic conflict than in small details, which continually highlight questions of care. Lina speaks about “medieval olfactory therapy with flowers” and about the Belgian town of Geel, where patients are integrated into the community—as her mother never was.

We’re All in This Together...So Make Some Room

The stand-up comedian Tom Papa lays his jokes on the page in this collection of candid essays, addressing universally human topics including getting a car, staying in hotels, and avoiding your family. Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.

The memoirist Claire Dederer’s third book grew out of a viral essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?,” that she published in The Paris Review in late 2017, at the height of #MeToo. In thirteen chapters, “Monsters” moves through a catalogue of familiar names associated with both genius and monstrosity. The usual suspects—Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby—all make an appearance, as well as many others, sorted into categories such as “The Genius,” “Drunks,” and “The Silencers and the Silenced.” Early in the book, Dederer confesses that she has fantasized about solving the question of whether to consume the work of a disgraced artist with an online calculator that could “assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict.” The real question, she eventually decides, is not what “we” do with the monstrous men. “The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist?” By the end of “Monsters,” Dederer’s reckoning with the artists whose work has shaped her has become a reckoning with her own potential for monstrousness. Go ahead, she tells us, love what you love. It excuses no one.

Take What You Need

A delicate meditation on art, family, and ugliness, this novel unfolds in chapters that alternate between the perspectives of Jean, an elderly sculptor living in the Alleghenies, and her estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who, after Jean’s death, comes to collect the sculptures that constitute her inheritance. These works, towers of welded scrap metal that Jean calls “manglements,” have a familial aspect: Jean learned to weld from her father, and the metal comes from her cousin’s scrap shop. The characters dwell not only on the difficulties that arise in family life but also on the ways in which such difficulties can’t be separated from love. Jean recalls that, when she read Leah “Little Red Riding Hood,” the child wanted “no confusion about whether I was speaking as the wolf or the grandma.”

Some historians have charted history as the linear, progressive working out of some larger design, while others embraced a sine-wave model of civilizational growth and decline. What if world history more resembles a family tree, its vectors hard to trace through cascading tiers, multiplying branches, and an ever-expanding jumble of names? This is the model suggested by Montefiore’s book, a new synthesis that approaches the sweep of world history through the family—or, to be more precise, through families in power. The author energetically fulfills his promise to write a “genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe.” In zesty sentences and lively vignettes, he captures the widening global circuits of people, commerce, and culture and offers a monumental survey of dynastic rule: how to get it, how to keep it, how to squander it.

The Plot to Save South Africa

On Easter weekend, 1993, Chris Hani—an A.N.C. commander seen as Nelson Mandela’s likely successor—was assassinated by two white nationalists. Protests and violence followed, threatening to derail ongoing negotiations to end apartheid. This account re-creates the delicate process by which negotiators—Mandela and Cyril Ramaphosa on one side, F. W. de Klerk and Roelf Meyer on the other—struggled to keep the people’s reactions in check and pull the country back from the brink of civil war. Malala also probes the persistent conspiracy theories surrounding Hani’s death. Conceding that these theories may never be proved or disproved, he nonetheless stresses the way that a killing intended to ignite a race war ended up accelerating democratization.

Mozart in Motion

Mozart is one of the composers most mansioned in myth: a prodigy of easy and childlike genius, the story goes. Modern commentary rightly complicates the narrative. In his new book, the English poet Patrick Mackie offers an exemplary biographical approach, nicely balancing the proper spiritual astonishment with the proper cultural curiosity, as he chronicles Mozart’s life through a series of celebrated works. Mackie describes a composer who was eager to please his audiences and who, at the same time, pushed his work into experiment and risk. The author is a sensitive and highly intelligent appraiser of musical form, with a gift for analyzing Mozart’s music as something more than the simple expression of culture and biography.

My Father’s Brain

Spanning seven years, this incisive memoir relates the decline of the author’s father, an eminent agricultural scientist, after a dementia diagnosis. Sandeep, a physician, examines the history and science of dementia and the ethics of making decisions on behalf of the cognitively impaired. He is clear-eyed about his and his siblings’ shortcomings and about the social factors that exacerbate the challenges of helping the elderly. These include cultural biases against those perceived as not rational and Western individualism, which discourages intergenerational homes and thereby increases the obstacles to collective caretaking.

Gravity and Center

This volume of sonnets by one of the form’s most distinctive practitioners calibrates tensions between mind and body, nature and culture, self and society, freedom and restraint. Cole eschews fixed metrical and rhyme schemes but retains the sonnet’s essential sense of rigor and compression, the drama that emerges from its “little fractures and leaps and resolutions.” His approach, which bears the influence of French and Japanese lyric traditions, combines a surrealistic idiom with an enigmatic emotional intensity; the poems feel at once delphic and deeply personal, mapping the thin and porous membrane between their author’s inner and outer worlds.

The Earth Transformed

Frankopan’s essential epic, a history of climate change and its influence over the rise and fall of civilizations, runs from the dawn of time to the present day. By about two and a half billion years ago, enough oxygen had built up in Earth’s atmosphere to support multicellular life, he writes, and by about five hundred and seventy million years ago the first complex macroscopic organisms had begun to appear. The first primates lived in the trees. Then, Homo sapiens began wandering around the understory. “Like rude house guests who arrive at the last minute, cause havoc and set about destroying the house to which they have been invited, human impact on the natural environment has been substantial and is accelerating to the point that many scientists question the long-term viability of human life,” Frankopan writes. He sketches the limits of human self-preservation and imagines a possibly not too distant future in which we fail to address climate change—and cause our own extinction.

Paved Paradise

Grabar makes a serious case for parking as a grave social problem, but he does so in a way that is consistently entertaining. His book is filled with engaging eccentrics, including the New York “traffic agent” Ana Russi, who once gave out a hundred and thirty-five parking tickets in a day. When cars took the place of horses, Grabar writes, the civil-minded assumption in America was that private developers should be obliged to provide sufficient parking to accompany whatever building they had just built. The resulting system created a permanent logjam, in which huge quantities of urban space were consumed by parking, architects and developers faced burdensome design constraints, and the classic main street became impossible to re-create. Grabar’s anti-parking polemic makes a story out of people, not just propositions, and relates many bits of mordant social history in a good-natured and puckish vein.

Biting the Hand

In this affecting memoir, a literature professor whose parents emigrated from South Korea writes about her “inheritance” of what Koreans call  han —a culturally specific mixture of rage and shame—as well as the insidious tendency of “racial shame” to separate “people of color from one another.” Lee mixes personal anecdotes, including experiences of racism, with analyses of racially charged historical events, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, during which “thousands of Korean-owned businesses were looted and torched.” She argues that white supremacy has been bolstered by a “culture of scarcity,” in which “there’s only a certain amount of bandwidth available in the American consciousness to deal with racial oppression.” Changing this will involve rejecting an entire “racial imaginary” that makes room only for the broad categories of white and nonwhite people.

When the World Didn’t End

Turner was a member of the Lyman Family cult until she was sent away at the age of eleven. In this absorbing memoir, she scrutinizes her childhood with anthropological curiosity. With the intimacy of one who grew up in a cult and the distance of one who left it, Turner contemplates the nature of shared belief, at once familiar with its extremes and keenly aware of its covert power over many facets of human behavior. The book grew out of the piece “ My Childhood in a Cult ,” which Turner wrote for the magazine in 2019.

Carmageddon

Knowles, a writer for The Economist , takes up the case against cars, analyzing their contributions to destruction of the urban fabric. He argues that America has exported its car addiction to the developing world, where such ill effects are further exacerbated: “A huge amount of economic growth has been squandered, with the extra income that people are earning being spent sitting in traffic on ever-more polluted roads.” Knowles floats possible remedies, but just as quickly pokes holes in them. The electric car, for example, produces more pollution in its construction than its existence justifies, and driverless cars cause too many casualties. Briskly written and well researched, “Carmageddon” is a serious diatribe against cars as agents of social oppression, international inequality, and ecological disaster.

Two women, living centuries apart, scour the Colosseum for plant samples in this lyrical, incisive novel. In 1854, one helps the botanist Richard Deakin (a historical figure) catalogue the amphitheatre’s flora; in 2018, the other assists an academic tracking the changes in its ecosystem since Deakin’s time. The twin narratives mimic field-work notebooks, with headings by family (Vitaceae, Gentianeae, Ambrosiaceae) and vivid illustrations. Gradually, the women’s fragmentary entries come to reveal a changing climate, the invisibility of women’s work, and the perseverance of unofficial histories. As Simpson Smith writes, “the weeds outlive the narrative.”

Hungry Ghosts

In this novel, set in rural Trinidad in the nineteen-forties, the disappearance of a wealthy farmer upends carefully tended boundaries of class and identity. The farmer’s wife orders one of his employees, part of a community of indigent laborers on the village outskirts, to take over his duties. This man has always taught his family to be content with the status quo, even though he chafes at the limitations of his own life. But, as those with power make a game of his desire for a more expansive life—for sensual pleasure and land of his own—he finds himself increasingly at risk of forgetting what he has told his son about moths drawn to lamplight: “It is that hope that turns on them and gets them killed.”

Actual Malice

During the civil-rights movement, segregationists used coördinated libel lawsuits in state courts to drive Northern media out of the South. It was in this context, in 1964, that the Supreme Court decided New York Times v. Sullivan, a landmark decision that made it harder to win defamation suits against the media. Samantha Barbas, a law professor and historian, unfurls the story of the case, deftly employing archival sources to shed new light on the triumph of press freedom as an outgrowth of the civil-rights struggle. Her book illuminates the effect of libel suits on journalists’ ability to cover the movement, the legal strategies used against those suits, and the impact of the case on the civil-rights movement itself. A heroic narrative in which the litigation helped vanquish segregationists serves to underscore what Barbas calls the “centrality of freedom of speech to democracy.”

In her graphic novel,Benji Nate takes us to the messy, funny, and at times navel-gazey world of a group of hot, young Internet girls, living under one roof. Read an excerpt on newyorker.com.

Holding the Note

Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, captures the tempo and timbre of the great musicians of our time: Leonard Cohen’s divine darkness, Bruce Springsteen’s durable swagger, Mavis Staples’s transcendent gospel . This series of profiles, gathered from the magazine, plumbs the lives and legacies of iconic artists and their indelible work: the people who made the music that made us.

Widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the past century, Derek Parfit was born to a British missionary family in China, and spent most of his life at an Oxford college whose fellows have no teaching responsibilities to distract them from research. Parfit made contributions to questions about identity, future generations, and freedom, but his central project was to argue for the objective nature of morality. Edmonds’s companionable biography tracks this work while assembling a portrait of how Parfit grew from a young boy with strong moral intuitions to a kind, perfectionistic man who believed that the stakes of his mission were so high that he should devote almost all of his waking hours to it.

Go Back and Get It

On her thirty-eighth birthday, the author of this memoir found a century-old photograph of an enslaved ancestor and embarked on a pilgrimage to uncover hidden branches of her family tree. The book’s title is derived from the West African practice of  sankofa , which is “symbolized by a bird in flight with its head craned backward and an egg in its beak.” In spare, often haunting prose, Ford describes the union between her Black great-great-grandmother and her white great-great-grandfather, the lasting trauma of being raped as a child by a relative, and the lynching of forebears “swinging from trees for the crime of being born Black.”

We the Scientists

Niemann-Pick disease type C is a rare genetic disorder whose sufferers face almost certain death by the age of twenty. In a selection of case histories, this book illuminates the painful tension between the extended time frames of medical research and the life spans of those hoping for a cure. Marcus writes of a woman whose twin girls received an NPC diagnosis as toddlers. When the mother sought permission through the F.D.A.’s compassionate-use program to give the girls an experimental drug, profound ethical issues arose: What if the treatment made the girls worse? Given the rarity of the disease, might a one-off experiment preclude sufficient enrollment in a later clinical trial, countering the common good? Marcus shows how parents, by imparting a sense of urgency to the search for a cure, have helped future generations of children even as they could not save their own.

A Small Sacrifice for An Enormous Happiness

The fifteen stories in this collection, set variously in America and India, are propelled by familial anxieties. Chakrabarti’s characters—diverse in race, class, sexuality, and religion—reveal themselves through longings: a closeted man dreams of conceiving a child with his lover’s wife; a lonely married woman secretly builds an airplane in her garage. Elsewhere, would-be do-gooders turn exploitative, as in a story that finds an American man making wild financial promises to the son of his longtime guru. These tales eschew neat conclusions, leaving their protagonists suspended, as one opines of life itself, “between unbearable truths—salvation or suffering.”

The Postcard

In 2003, the French author Anne Berest’s mother went out to gather the mail and found an anonymous postcard: On one side was a photo of the Opéra Garnier; on the other, the names of Jewish family members, who, in 1942, had been deported from France and murdered at Auschwitz. Based in part on her mother’s ensuing research, Berest’s nearly five-hundred-page novel, “ The Postcard ,” fluidly translated by Tina Kover, examines that family history and its present-day reverberations. The first section finds Anne questioning her mother about their family, whose path led from Moscow in 1918, through Latvia and Palestine, and on to France. The story then jumps to Paris in 2018, where Anne’s six-year-old daughter tells her grandmother one day, “They don’t like Jews very much at school.” Berest uses novelistic techniques to give the novel both a detective story’s page-turning urgency and the immediacy of life as it unfolds.

Smith’s illuminating book documents the rise of online traffic-chasing as a twenty-first-century media norm and the ways in which the new laws of traffic—shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, “viral” rates—unseated old power structures. His story focusses on the rise of two figures: Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, and Nick Denton, the founder of the online Gawker Media network. The long story that Smith traces, from the open Internet of Peretti’s early high jinks to today’s atomized and factionalized splinternet, is shaped by the demands of business strategy. At BuzzFeed’s height, the traffic rush was a gold rush; by the end of the decade, traffic had become most powerful as a tool to form political identity. Smith’s book highlights how the race for clicks spawned, then strangled, the new media.

In the Orchard

This novel, an examination of motherhood, unfolds in the course of a night and a day. Maisie, weeks after having her fourth child, lies awake breastfeeding and fretting about money. Her hormonal, sleep-deprived thoughts veer from the banal to the profound: “She couldn’t get purchase anywhere, couldn’t get traction on anything.” The next morning, her family makes its annual visit to a local apple orchard. There, a succession of encounters reminds her of the punishing unpredictability of human existence. Maisie’s contemplation of life as “a series of languishments and flourishes, of withering and blooming,” aptly describes this rhapsodic, plotless book, which nevertheless carries a stinging twist at its end.

Camera Girl

Less than a decade before she became the world’s most photographed woman, Jacqueline Bouvier regularly worked behind a camera for the Washington Times-Herald , soliciting opinions from the capital’s ordinary residents and taking their pictures. “Camera Girl,” Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s new biography of the young Jackie, illuminates this portion of her life, making plain that the future First Lady was clever and educable, a woman who preferred her own curricula—books, socializing, and travel—to anything imposed by the schools that she attended. It was in postwar Paris, Anthony writes, that Jackie perfected a knowledge of “how to be ‘on,’ to make an intentional impression, to invent herself into a character.” Her column at the Times-Herald was called “Inquiring Camera Girl,” and her twenty-month run with it is the charming and informative heart of the book, a lively depiction of a young woman who relished every opportunity to regard the world from her own perspective.

Shy, the teen-aged namesake of Max Porter’s new novel, is caught between helpless sensitivity and impulsive violence. At fifteen, he spun out of control because his mum gave away his old Hot Wheels toys; not long after, he broke a row of chemistry sets after he couldn’t get an erection with a girl from school. The question animating the novel, Porter’s third, is simple: Will Shy’s inner chaos manifest as childish mischief or something worse? Porter’s gift is his ability to balance a delight in language with precise attention to its mechanics. In “Shy,” he culls from the cramped space of his protagonist’s head about six hours’ worth of mental flotsam, mashing up fonts, registers, characters’ voices, and words themselves to create intricate linguistic effects. The novel ends sentimentally, but, for most of “Shy,” Porter balances social realism and fairy tale in perfect suspension.

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The best biographies to read in 2023.

• Nik Rawlinson

Discover what inspired some of history’s most familiar names with these comprehensive biographies

The best biographies can be inspirational, can provide important life lessons – and can warn us off a dangerous path. They’re also a great way to learn more about important figures in history, politics, business and entertainment. That’s because the best biographies not only reveal what a person did with their life, but what effect it had and, perhaps most importantly, what inspired them to act as they did.

Where both a biography and an autobiography exist, you might be tempted to plump for the latter, assuming you’d get a more accurate and in-depth telling of the subject’s life story. While that may be true, it isn’t always the case. It’s human nature to be vain, and who could blame a celebrity or politician if they covered up their embarrassments and failures when committing their lives to paper? A biographer, so long as they have the proof to back up their claims, may have less incentive to spare their subject’s blushes, and thus produce a more honest account – warts and all.

That said, we’ve steered clear of the sensational in selecting the best biographies for you. Rather, we’ve focused on authoritative accounts of notable names, in each case written some time after their death, when a measured, sober assessment of their actions and impact can be given.

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Best biographies: At a glance

• Best literary biography: Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley | £20
• Best showbiz biography: Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood | £6.78
• Best political biography: Hitler by Ian Kershaw | £14

How to choose the best biography for you

There are so many biographies to choose from that it can be difficult knowing which to choose. This is especially true when there are several competing titles focused on the same subject. Try asking yourself these questions.

Is the author qualified?

Wikipedia contains potted biographies of every notable figure you could ever want to read about. So, if you’re going to spend several hours with a novel-sized profile it must go beyond the basics – and you want to be sure that the author knows what they’re talking about.

That doesn’t mean they need to have been personally acquainted with the subject, as Jasper Rees was with Victoria Wood. Ian Kershaw never met Adolf Hitler (he was, after all, just two years old when Hitler killed himself), but he published his first works on the subject in the late 1980s, has advised on BBC documentaries about the Second World War, and is an acknowledged expert on the Nazi era. It’s no surprise, then, that his biography of the dictator is extensive, comprehensive and acclaimed.

Is there anything new to say?

What inspires someone to write a biography – particularly of someone whose life has already been documented? Sometimes it can be the discovery of new facts, perhaps through the uncovering of previously lost material or the release of papers that had been suppressed on the grounds of national security. But equally, it may be because times have changed so much that the context of previous biographies is no longer relevant. Attitudes, in particular, evolve with time, and what might have been considered appropriate behaviour in the 1950s would today seem discriminatory or shocking. So, an up-to-date biography that places the subject’s actions and motivations within a modern context can make it a worthwhile read, even if you’ve read an earlier work already.

Does it look beyond the subject?

The most comprehensive biographies place their subject in context – and show how that context affected their outlook and actions or is reflected in their work. Lucy Worsley’s new biography of Agatha Christie is a case in point, referencing Christie’s works to show how real life influenced her fiction. Mathew Parker’s Goldeneye does the same for Bond author Ian Fleming – and in doing so, both books enlarge considerably on the biography’s core subject.

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1. Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees: Best showbiz biography

Price: £6.78 | Buy now from Amazon

It’s hardly surprising Victoria Wood never got around to writing her own autobiography. Originator of countless sketches, songs, comedy series, films, plays, documentaries and a sitcom, she kept pushing back the mammoth job of chronicling her life until it was too late. Wood’s death in 2016 came as a surprise to many, with the entertainer taking her final bow in private at the end of a battle with cancer she had fought away from the public eye.

In the wake of her death, her estate approached journalist Jasper Rees, who had interviewed her on many occasions, with the idea of writing the story that Wood had not got around to writing herself. With their backing, Rees’ own encounters with Wood, and the comic’s tape-recorded notes to go on, the result is a chunky, in-depth, authoritative account of her life. It seems unlikely that Wood could have written it more accurately – nor more fully – herself.

Looking back, it’s easy to forget that Wood wasn’t a constant feature on British TV screens, that whole years went by when her focus would be on writing or performing on stage, or even that her career had a surprisingly slow start after a lonely childhood in which television was a constant companion. This book reminds us of those facts – and that Wood wasn’t just a talented performer, but a hard worker, too, who put in the hours required to deliver the results.

Let’s Do It, which takes its title from a lyric in one of Wood’s best-known songs, The Ballad of Barry & Freda, is a timely reminder that there are two sides to every famous character: one public and one private. It introduces us to the person behind the personality, and shows how the character behind the characters for which she is best remembered came to be.

Key specs – Length: 592 pages; Publisher: Trapeze; ISBN: 978-1409184119

Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

2. the chief: the life of lord northcliffe, britain’s greatest press baron by andrew roberts: best business biography.

Lord Northcliffe wasn’t afraid of taking risks – many of which paid off handsomely. He founded a small paper called Answers to Correspondents, branched out into comics, and bought a handful of newspapers. Then he founded the Daily Mail, and applied what he’d learned in running his smaller papers on a far grander scale. The world of publishing – in Britain and beyond – was never the same again. The Daily Mail was a huge success, which led to the founding of the Daily Mirror, primarily for women, and his acquisition of the Observer, Times and Sunday Times.

By then, Northcliffe controlled almost half of Britain’s daily newspaper circulation. Nobody before him had ever enjoyed such reach – or such influence over the British public – as he did through his titles. This gave him sufficient political clout to sway the direction of government in such fundamental areas as the establishment of the Irish Free State and conscription in the run-up to the First World War. He was appointed to head up Britain’s propaganda operation during the conflict, and in this position he became a target for assassination, with a German warship shelling his home in Broadstairs. Beyond publishing, he was ahead of many contemporaries in understanding the potential of aviation as a force for good, as a result of which he funded several highly valuable prizes for pioneers in the field.

He achieved much in his 57 years, as evidenced by this biography, but suffered both physical and mental ill health towards the end. The empire that he built may have fragmented since his passing, with the Daily Mirror, Observer, Times and Sunday Times having left the group that he founded, but his influence can still be felt. For anyone who wants to understand how and why titles like the Daily Mail became so successful, The Chief is an essential read.

Key specs – Length: 556 pages; Publisher: Simon & Schuster; ISBN: 978-1398508712

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe Britain's Greatest Press Baron

3. goldeneye by matthew parker: best biography for cinema fans.

The name Goldeneye is synonymous with James Bond. It was the title of both a film and a video game, a fictional super weapon, a real-life Second World War plan devised by author Ian Fleming, and the name of the Jamaican estate where he wrote one Bond book every year between 1952 and his death in 1964. The Bond film makers acknowledged this in 2021’s No Time To Die, making that estate the home to which James Bond retired, just as his creator had done at the end of the war, 75 years earlier.

Fleming had often talked of his plan to write the spy novel to end all spy novels once the conflict was over, and it’s at Goldeneye that he fulfilled that ambition. Unsurprisingly, many of his experiences there found their way into his prose and the subsequent films, making this biography as much a history of Bond itself as it is a focused retelling of Fleming’s life in Jamaica. It’s here, we learn, that Fleming first drinks a Vesper at a neighbour’s house. Vesper later became a character in Casino Royale and, in the story, Bond devises a drink to fit the name. Fleming frequently ate Ackee fish while in residence; the phonetically identical Aki was an important character in You Only Live Twice.

Parker finds more subtle references, too, observing that anyone who kills a bird or owl in any of the Bond stories suffers the spy’s wrath. This could easily be overlooked, but it’s notable, and logical: Fleming had a love of birds, and Bond himself was named after the ornithologist James Bond, whose book was on Fleming’s shelves at Goldeneye.

So this is as much the biography of a famous fictional character as it is of an author, and of the house that he occupied for several weeks every year. So much of Fleming’s life at Goldeneye influenced his work that this is an essential read for any Bond fan – even if you’ve already read widely on the subject and consider yourself an aficionado. Parker’s approach is unusual, but hugely successful, and the result is an authoritative, wide-ranging biography about one of this country’s best-known authors, his central character, an iconic location and a country in the run-up to – and immediately following – its independence from Britain.

Key specs – Length: 416 pages; Publisher: Windmill Books; ISBN: 978-0099591740

Goldeneye: Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

4. hitler by ian kershaw: best political biography.

The latter portion of Adolf Hitler’s life, from his coming to power in 1933 to his suicide in 1945, is minutely documented, and known to a greater or lesser degree by anyone who has passed through secondary education. But what of his earlier years? How did this overlooked art student become one of the most powerful and destructive humans ever to have existed? What were his influences? What was he like?

Kershaw has the answers. This door stopper, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, is an abridged compilation of two earlier works: Hitler 1889 – 1936: Hubris, and Hitler 1936 – 1946: Nemesis. Yet, abridged though it may be, it remains extraordinarily detailed, and the research shines through. Kershaw spends no time warming his engines: Hitler is born by page three, to a social-climbing father who had changed the family name to something less rustic than it had been. As Kershaw points out, “Adolf can be believed when he said that nothing his father had done pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely rustic name of Schicklgruber. ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ would have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero.”

There’s no skimping on context, either, with each chapter given space to explore the political, economic and social influences on Hitler’s development and eventual emergence as leader. Kershaw pinpoints 1924 as the year that “can be seen as the time when, like a phoenix arising from the ashes, Hitler could begin his emergence from the ruins of the broken and fragmented volkisch movement to become eventually the absolute leader with total mastery over a reformed, organisationally far stronger, and internally more cohesive Nazi Party”. For much of 1924, Hitler was in jail, working on Mein Kampf and, by the point of his release, the movement to which he had attached himself had been marginalised. Few could have believed that it – and he – would rise again and take over first Germany, then much of Europe. Here, you’ll find out how it happened.

If you’re looking for an authoritative, in-depth biography of one of the most significant figures in modern world history, this is it. Don’t be put off by its length: it’s highly readable, and also available as an audiobook which, although it runs to 44 hours, can be sped up to trim the overall running time.

Key specs – Length: 1,072 pages; Publisher: Penguin; ISBN: 978-0141035888

5. Stalin’s Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow by Deyan Sudjic: Best historical biography

Boris Iofan died in 1976, but his influence can still be felt today – in particular, through the architectural influences evident in many mid-century buildings across Eastern Europe. Born in Odessa in 1891, he trained in architecture and, upon returning to Russia after time spent in Western Europe, gained notoriety for designing the House on the Embankment, a monumental block-wide building containing more than 500 flats, plus the shops and other facilities required to service them.

“Iofan’s early success was based on a sought-after combination of characteristics: he was a member of the Communist Party who was also an accomplished architect capable of winning international attention,” writes biographer Deyan Sudjic. “He occupied a unique position as a bridge between the pre-revolutionary academicians… and the constructivist radicals whom the party saw as bringing much-needed international attention and prestige but never entirely trusted. His biggest role was to give the party leadership a sense of what Soviet architecture could be – not in a theoretical sense or as a drawing, which they would be unlikely to understand, but as a range of built options that they could actually see.”

Having established himself, much of the rest of his life was spent working on his designs for the Palace of the Soviets, which became grander and less practical with every iteration. This wasn’t entirely Iofan’s fault. He had become a favourite of the party elite, and of Stalin himself, who added to the size and ambition of the intended building over the years. Eventually, the statue of Lenin that was destined to stand atop its central tower would have been over 300ft tall, and would have had an outstretched index finger 14ft long. There was a risk that this would freeze in the winter, and the icicles that dropped from it would have been a significant danger to those going into and out of the building below it.

Although construction work began, the Palace of the Soviets was never completed. Many of Iofan’s other buildings remain, though, and his pavilions for the World Expos in Paris and New York are well documented – in this book as well as elsewhere. Lavishly illustrated, it recounts Iofan’s life and examines his work in various stages, from rough outline, through technical drawing, to photographs of completed buildings – where they exist.

Key specs – Length: 320 pages; Publisher: Thames and Hudson; ISBN: 978-0500343555

Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow

6. agatha christie: a very elusive woman by lucy worsley: best literary biography.

Agatha Christie died in 1976 but, with more than 70 novels and 150 short stories to her name, she remains one of the best-selling authors of all time. A new biography from historian Lucy Worsley is therefore undoubtedly of interest. It’s comprehensive and highly readable – and opinionated – with short chapters that make it easy to dip into and out of on a break.

Worsley resists the temptation to skip straight to the books. Poirot doesn’t appear until chapter 11 with publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which Christie wrote while working in a Torquay hospital. Today, Poirot is so well known, not only from the books but from depictions in film and television, that it’s easy to overlook how groundbreaking the character was upon his arrival.

As Worsley explains, “by choosing to make Hercule Poirot a foreigner, and a refugee as well, Agatha created the perfect detective for an age when everyone was growing surfeited with soldiers and action heroes. He’s so physically unimpressive that no-one expects Poirot to steal the show. Rather like a stereotypical woman, Poirot cannot rely upon brawn to solve problems, for he has none. He has to use brains instead… There’s even a joke in his name. Hercules, of course, is a muscular classical hero, but Hercule Poirot has a name like himself: diminutive, fussy, camp, and Agatha would show Poirot working in a different way to [Sherlock] Holmes.” Indeed, where Holmes rolls around on the floor picking up cigar ash in his first published case, Poirot, explains Worsley, does not stoop to gather clues: he needs only his little grey cells. Worsley’s approach is thorough and opinionated, and has resulted not only in a biography of Christie herself, but also her greatest creations, which will appeal all the more to the author’s fans.

As with Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye, there’s great insight here into what influenced Christie’s work, and Worsley frequently draws parallels between real life events and episodes, characters or locations in her novels. As a result of her experiences as a medical volunteer during the First World War, for example, during which a rigid hierarchy persisted and the medics behaved shockingly, doctors became the most common culprit in her books; the names of real people found their way into her fiction; and on one occasion Christie assembled what today might be called a focus group to underpin a particular plot point.

Worsley is refreshingly opinionated and, where events in the author’s life take centre stage, doesn’t merely re-state the facts, but investigates Christie’s motivations to draw her own conclusions. This is particularly the case in the chapters examining Christie’s disappearance in 1926, which many previous biographers have portrayed as an attempt to frame her husband for murder. Worsley’s own investigation leads to alternative conclusions, which seem all the more plausible today, when society has a better understanding of – and is more sympathetic towards – the effects of psychological distress.

Key specs – Length: 432 pages; Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton; ISBN: 978-1529303889

Buy now from Waterstones

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The Best Books of 2023 So Far

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

The best books of the year so far serve as a great reminder to always question the stories we hear. Where do they come from? And who gets to tell them? When we deconstruct history and look at its pieces in a new light, as many of these books do, we see things differently. In his page-turning new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. , Jonathan Eig provides an illuminating window into the activist’s emotional core . In Dyscalculia , Camonghne Felix reconsiders her romantic past to better understand her relationship with love. And in Biography of X , Catherine Lacey reveals how easily the ideas we hold as truths can fall apart through her protagonist’s quest to learn about her wife’s mysterious past. Here, the best books of the year so far.

A Living Remedy , Nicole Chung

In her first memoir, TIME contributor Nicole Chung described her experience growing up as a Korean American adoptee in a predominantly white town. Her follow-up, A Living Remedy , continues her exploration into identity, this time focusing on her grief after losing both of her parents. Chung’s father died of diabetes and kidney disease in 2018. Then, less than a year later, her mother is diagnosed with cancer and later dies during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Chung wrestles with these overwhelming losses in A Living Remedy , she dissects the inequities inherent to American society by recounting the challenges her parents faced in accessing medical care. The result is a moving portrait of a daughter reckoning with her place in a broken world—and making sense of life without her parents in it.

Buy Now : A Living Remedy on Bookshop | Amazon

King: A Life , Jonathan Eig

Jonathan Eig’s book on Martin Luther King Jr. is the first biography of the civil rights icon in decades. It’s a refreshing portrait of King, offering an intimate look inside the life of a man whose massive contributions to American history are known but whose emotional complexities are less so. Eig digs into everything—King’s family origins, his relationship with his wife, the pressures he faced from being so influential so early in his career—to create a portrait of the late activist that captures the dynamic and flawed human that he was. It’s a deftly researched and highly accessible account of a leader, and a new view into the many overlooked parts of King’s story.

Buy Now : King on Bookshop | Amazon

Our Share of Night , Mariana Enriquez

Spanning multiple decades, Argentine author Mariana Enriquez’s weird and wonderful novel, newly translated into English by Megan McDowell, doesn’t fit into just one genre. Oscillating seamlessly between historical fiction and supernatural horror, Our Share of Night centers on Juan and Gaspar, a father and son who are grieving Rosario, the wife and mother they just lost in a car accident. Complicating things is the fact that they are also on the run from the ruthless cult from which Rosario descends. Better known as the Order, the cult will do just about anything to achieve immortality, and Gaspar has developed powers that would make him a valuable asset. Set against a comprehensive backdrop of Argentine history, Our Share of Night offers an absorbing window into a terrifying, fantastical world.

Buy Now : Our Share of Night on Bookshop | Amazon

Dyscalculia , Camonghne Felix

In her debut memoir, poet Camonghne Felix details how a devastating breakup propels her into deep despair, forcing her to confront lingering childhood trauma and struggles with her mental health. Throughout, she returns to the learning disorder she faced as a child, “dyscalculia,” which made it difficult for her to understand math. In holding her dissolved relationship to the light, Felix wonders about the miscalculations she’s made when it comes to love. Her memoir is a striking meditation on pain, heartbreak, and what it takes to truly heal.

Buy Now : Dyscalculia on Bookshop | Amazon

The Wager , David Grann

In 1740, a British vessel called His Majesty’s Ship the Wager departed England on a mission to capture a Spanish galleon. But the Wager wrecked near the coast of Patagonia, and those who survived endured months of starvation and hardship. At least, that’s what the 30 sailors who made it out alive explained when they eventually arrived in Brazil. But months later, when a trio of castaways from another ship land in the same spot, they share a very different version of the events that took place in Patagonia. David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z , peels back the layers of a complex maritime drama in a masterfully drawn work of narrative nonfiction.

Buy Now : The Wager on Bookshop | Amazon

This Other Eden , Paul Harding

Inspired by real-life events that took place on Maine’s Malaga Island, one of the first racially integrated communities in the Northeast, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding tells a grueling tale of isolation and injustice. In 1792, a formerly enslaved man and his Irish wife first arrived on the fictional Apple Island. More than a century later, the couple’s descendants are still there, and while their lives aren’t easy, they are at least far from the dangers happening inland. But any measure of peace they’ve secured is upturned by the presence of a missionary. The residents face eviction—and the threat of being institutionalized on the mainland. Harding follows a cast of characters through this horrifying upheaval as they grapple with what it means to belong.

Buy Now : This Other Eden on Bookshop | Amazon

The Half Known Life , Pico Iyer

Does paradise really exist? The question is at the center of Pico Iyer’s dazzling new work of nonfiction, which examines the many ways different cultures search for purposeful existence, and the paradoxical struggle for peace in a violent and fractured world. From Japan’s mountain temples to the streets of Belfast, Iyer wonders where utopia begins and how we can access it. In doing so, he suggests that paradise may not be a destination, but instead a journey.

Buy Now : The Half Known Life on Bookshop | Amazon

Greek Lessons , Han Kang

After losing her mother and custody of her son, the unnamed narrator of Han Kang’s stirring novel, newly translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, decides to learn a new language. Then, one day while in her Greek class, she attempts to say something, but no words come out. Her voice is gone. In the same moment, across the room, her teacher is facing a battle against his depreciating vision. As the two bond over their puzzling sensory losses, they form an intense connection. Kang captures their relationship—and the relationships they both have with language and love—in quietly beautiful detail.

Buy Now : Greek Lessons on Bookshop | Amazon

Biography of X , Catherine Lacey

X is one of the most iconic and prolific artists and writers of the 20th century. The world is familiar with her work as a creative visionary—though no one, not even her wife, knows her real name or where she was born. After X suddenly dies, her wife, CM, decides she’s overdue to learn that information, and attempts to find answers to the questions that have been haunting her. X is a fictional character, but Catherine Lacey’s propulsive and kaleidoscopic novel makes her story feel plausible, piecing together the character’s life with an engrossing alternate history of the United States that’s full of references to real-life artists and writers. As CM uncovers more of X’s delectably illustrated past, Lacey unfurls a wholly original celebration of art, identity, and grief.

Buy Now : Biography of X on Bookshop | Amazon

Lone Women , Victor LaValle

It’s 1915 and mystery is swirling around Adelaide Henry, the daughter of Black farmers in California. When Victor LaValle introduces the character in his bruising fifth novel, she’s just set her family’s home ablaze. She’s on her way to Montana as a homesteader to collect on the promise of free land being offered by the government to “lone women” who are able to make it habitable. As Adelaide makes the trek, she brings with her a large trunk containing a secret that threatens to upend her life. Blending magical realism, history, and suspense, LaValle unravels a startling narrative about a woman running away from her troubled past and the horrors she faces as she tries to forge a better future.

Buy Now : Lone Women on Bookshop | Amazon

After Sappho , Selby Wynn Schwartz

Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and published in the U.S. this January, After Sappho is a tale of creativity, desire, and sexuality. Though it’s technically a novel, to categorize it as such would undermine Selby Wynn Schwartz’s thrilling reimagination of history and literary criticism, which culminates in a work of fiction that is deeply rooted in reality. In the book, Schwartz revisits the lives of groundbreaking early 20th-century feminists, from writers to actors to dancers, to explore the challenges they faced as queer artists with great contributions to make to the world. Schwartz weaves a tapestry of their voices to create a timeless yet timely narrative.

Buy Now : After Sappho on Bookshop | Amazon

The Covenant of Water , Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese, the best-selling author of the 2009 novel Cutting for Stone , returns with another epic tale, this time focusing on the fate of a cursed family in southern India. The Covenant of Water begins in 1900 as a 12-year-old girl marries a 40-year-old widower with a young son. Some years after their wedding, the girl discovers her husband’s son drowned in a ditch. It’s a cruel suffering that the family can’t seem to shake—they keep losing more of their own to the same fate—and they become determined to figure out the source of this strange affliction. Verghese follows the family over the course of nearly 80 years in this powerful and sweeping story about love, loss, and the strength of the human spirit.

Buy Now : The Covenant of Water on Bookshop | Amazon

Y/N , Esther Yi

The unnamed narrator of Esther Yi’s electric debut novel is obsessed with a K-pop idol named Moon. Bored with her life in Berlin, the narrator writes fan fiction about Moon, describing an imagined relationship with one of the most famous musicians in the world. Then the lines of reality start to blur: as the protagonist of her stories travels to Seoul to be with Moon, the narrator decides to make the journey, too. Yi weaves these threads together in sharp prose, offering an inventive novel about the strange and surprising stakes of worshiping a pop idol.

Buy Now : Y/N on Bookshop | Amazon

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The 14 fall 2023 pop culture memoirs and biographies we're most excited to read

From Barbra to Peloton instructors, there's no shortage of great pop culture reads this fall.

Here at EW, we're pop culture junkies.

If there's a behind-the-scenes story or a personal hot take from a celeb, we are here for it. Chances are, if you're reading this you are too. And this fall, there is no shortage of engrossing, juicy new memoirs and biographies shedding light on all corners of the entertainment industry.

From Old Hollywood (Charlie Chaplin, Lena Horne, Greta Grabo) to the music industry (Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears, Geddy Lee) to the virtual gym (Cody Rigsby), pop culture figures across the gamut are telling their stories (or receiving new evaluation) in a slew of new titles hitting shelves this season.

Here are the 14 pop culture memoirs and biographies we're most excited about in fall 2023.

Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo by Lois W. Banner

Historian and biographer Lois Banner ( Marilyn: The Passion and The Paradox ) takes one of Hollywood's most enigmatic figures as her latest subject. Drawing on over a decade of research in archives across ​​Sweden, Germany, France, and the United States, Banner examines the shadowy personal life of the woman most famous for stating, "I want to be alone." While Garbo captivated audiences with her beauty and mysterious persona, this book offers an insightful portrait of her private life, interrogating her feminism, sexuality, mental health, and more. Garbo rose to fame on the silent screen, but this new biography gives voice to her life in unparalleled fashion. (Sept. 5) — Maureen Lee Lenker

XOXO, Cody by Cody Rigsby

With XOXO Cody , the beloved Peloton instructor shows he has range. His memoir aims to make readers laugh and tear up in equal measure. He delivers his hot takes and humorous advice about living life right while also diving into the difficult moments in his life that shaped the adult he is. As he delves into growing up gay and his issues with his parents, Rigsby provides an opportunity for folks to get to know him better. XOXO Cody is inspiring and raw, but also a great reminder that laughing our way through something is a solid option. (Sept. 12) — Alamin Yohannes

Leslie F*cking Jones by Leslie Jones

Saturday Night Live alum Leslie Jones is known for her disarming frankness, and in her new memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones , the comic invites readers even deeper inside her brutally honest thoughts. Jones' sense of humor is intact even as she opens up about her experiences with childhood sexual abuse, abortion, and family tragedy, as well as the racism and sexism she's fought in stand-up comedy and from online trolls who made her life hell after she was cast in the women-led Ghostbusters . SNL fans will be especially interested in her tales from the show, including who she did and did not get along with, and hilarious details of an unaired sketch about killing Whoopi Goldberg . (Sept. 19) —Jillian Sederholm

Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy by Stephen M. Silverman

Stephen Sondheim may have died in 2021, but his spirit lives on among the Broadway faithful. This month alone marks the premiere of the third Sondheim revival since his passing, as well as the premiere of Here We Are , a posthumous presentation of the Luis Buñuel-inspired musical he was working on until the end. Somewhere between a biography and a coffee-table book, Stephen M. Silverman's new title makes a perfect companion to our current age of Sondheim remembrance. The master of the modern musical is chronicled with textual highlights of his life story (with Sondheim's sardonic wit on display in frequent direct quotes), but also helpfully accompanied by many, many photos of his legendary Broadway career — and the actors, artists, and celebrities he crossed paths with along the way. (Sept. 19) — Christian Holub

Thicker Than Water by Kerry Washington

In her memoir, Kerry Washington bares it all. After a long-kept family secret is revealed, the actress and producer looks back at her life to share what she has overcome and learned over the years. From past traumas to wisdom she's received through her roles, Washington is bringing fans into her world like never before. Through these stories, she tells readers of her fight to redevelop her own understanding of family as she started her own. Thicker Than Water is a poignant and captivating exploration of how she became the woman she is today. (Sept. 26) — A.Y.

Worthy by Jada Pinkett Smith

Though Jada Pinkett Smith has spent the last couple of years peeling back the layers on Red Table Talk , she still feels like people misunderstand her. In Worthy, she attempts to tell her story, her way. From Baltimore to Hollywood, and through suicidal ideation to self-acceptance and healing, Pinkett Smith recounts her journey to reflection and healing. (Oct. 4) — Yolanda Machado

Thank You: Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin by Sly Stone

In the late '60s, Sly Stone was the embodiment of cool, an impossibly stylish funk master and preternatural hitmaker. He was also a man who carted around a violin case filled with cocaine wherever he'd go. If his drug use could conjure magic in the studio, it also destroyed the Sly and the Family Stone frontman's relationships, wiped out his earnings, and made him a recluse. Now 80 years old and sober, the living legend is finally releasing his memoir, a cautionary tale and the story of one of rock's true great visionaries. (Oct. 17) — Jason Lamphier

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

Britney Spears is finally ready to tell her story the way she's never been able to before. One of the world's biggest and most misunderstood pop icons is releasing her memoir, The Woman In Me , a little over two years after revealing harrowing details in open court about how her life wasn't her own under the conservatorship of her father for over 13 years. Now that the court-ordered conservatorship has been dissolved, Spears' chronicles her "brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope," allowing her fans to finally see the woman behind the music. (Oct. 24) — Sydney Bucksbaum

Being Henry: The Fonz...and Beyond by Henry Winkler

The guy who played one of the coolest characters ever on-screen is also known as one of the nicest ever off it. So how exactly did mild mannered Henry Winkler transform himself into the Fonz? The Emmy-winning actor takes us inside his original Happy Days audition as part of a memoir that goes through Winkler's entire career — from The Lords of Flatbush through Barry . And yes, he explains in full detail why in the world he jumped that damn shark. (Oct. 31) —Dalton Ross

Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed by Donald Bogle

Donald Bogle, revered historian of Black Hollywood, tackles one of the most iconic Black Golden Age stars — Lena Horne. Using a combination of interviews, press accounts, studio archives, and historical research, Bogle offers up a lush portrait of Horne, from her professional triumphs and bitter disappointments to her activism and role in breaking barriers for Black performers and Black women throughout her career. Bogle tells Horne's story accompanied by stunning photographs in this coffee table-style book that allows for never-before-published images of Horne to shine. (Oct. 31) — M.L.L.

Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman

While Charlie Chaplin's life has been chronicled many times, biographer Scott Eyman ( John Wayne: The Life and Legend; Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise ) drills down on Chaplin's fall from grace and exile from America in the back half of the Little Tramp's career. In the wake of the Red Scare and Chaplin's own sexual scandals, he was denied re-entry into the United States in 1952 following a trip to Europe. Eyman examines the events leading to this exile, the political turmoil at play, and Chaplin's years making his final two films in London. It's both a fascinating historical study and a cautionary tale about the perils of hysteria and extremism pervading government practices. (Oct. 31) — M.L.L.

My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

For years now, Barbra Streisand has spoken of her long-gestating memoir, and it's finally here. In her inimitable way, Streisand tells the story of her life, from her childhood in Brooklyn to her legendary Broadway breakout in Funny Girl to her success in Hollywood as an actress and director. Full of her signature frankness and dry humor, the memoir gives fans an unprecedented look at Streisand's life, from her personal struggles to her professional triumphs, all with a reminder that through the decades, nobody was going to rain on her parade. (Nov. 7) — M.L.L.

My Effin' Life by Geddy Lee

Living in the limelight may be the universal dream for some, but for Rush frontman Geddy Lee, it's simply another chapter in his effin' excellent life. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer — who played bass, keyboards, and sang on the progressive rock band's biggest hits — holds nothing back in his highly-anticipated memoir. From being named after his grandfather who was murdered during the Holocaust to sharing intimate tales of life on the road with bandmates Alex Lifeson and the late Neil Peart, Lee puts aside the alienation and gets on with the fascination surrounding his extraordinary life in an honest, hilarious, and heartfelt way all his own. (Nov. 14) — Emlyn Travis

The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story by Sam Wasson

If he had only made The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola would already be remembered as one of the most successful American directors of all time. But his ambitions always went far beyond that, and the filmmaker promises he has one more masterpiece on the way in the form of the mysterious utopian magnum opus Megalopolis . This new book by Sam Wasson (who already proved himself one of the great modern chroniclers of the New Hollywood era with the Chinatown making-of story The Big Goodbye ) chronicles the road to heaven Coppola trod after descending to Hell with Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam War epic is already the subject of much reporting, but Wasson boasts unprecedented access to Coppola's personal archive — as well as a first-hand look at the making of a movie we can't wait to see. (Nov. 28) — C.H.

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Biography.com

10 Books About Philosophers That Will Change Your Mind for the Better

Posted: October 11, 2023 | Last updated: October 12, 2023

Philosophy quite literally means “love of wisdom.” What book-lover wouldn’t want to dive deeper into that? But finding the best books about philosophy to start your philosophical journey can feel like a daunting task. In a perfect world, we’d all have Chidi Anagonye tutoring us on the teachings of Plato , Aristotle , and Voltaire . In real life, philosophers and their philosophies can seem too heady and inaccessible to explore casually.

But studying philosophy is a worthwhile endeavor for anyone to pursue. Reading about different philosophers and their ways of thinking can help you reframe your own biases about the world, improve your critical thinking skills, and gain more confidence in debating tricky subjects. Philosophers can also offer models for improving your public speaking, solving ethical problems, and interacting with new kinds of people. Reading books about philosophers can even help you find—or simply solidify — your personal moral code.

Whether you’re looking to hone your logical thinking skills, explore the world of aesthetics, or ponder mind-blowing existential questions, these 10 books about philosophers and philosophy will serve as a great starting point.

1) 'The Last Days of Socrates' by Plato

If you’re looking to read some books about philosophers, it’s hard to find a title more classic than this one. In a series of four dialogues, Plato recounts the trial, final days, and death of his philosophical mentor, Socrates . While historians continue to debate just how reliable a source Plato is on the life and beliefs of his famous teacher, these dialogues are nevertheless a classic introduction to classical philosophy.

2) 'Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction' by Jonathan Barnes

Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series offers exactly what it says on the tin for a huge variety of topics. Its volumes dedicated to various philosophers are a great way to cover the basics of philosophy in a short period of time. This short and sweet commentary on Aristotle and his ideas is the perfect place to start.

3) 'The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained'

This book uses vibrant graphics and clear, accessible text to introduce history’s most impactful philosophers to even the most intimidated readers. In addition to key quotes from more than 100 of the great thinkers of philosophy — including Siddhartha Gautama, Niccolo Machiavelli , and Thomas Hobbes — the book features graphs and cartoons to help explain complex concepts.

4) 'The Philosopher Queens' by Rebecca Buxton

As far as historical biographies go, books about philosophers are already in something of a niche category. But books about female philosophers throughout history are even more scant. This book, written by a duo of modern-day philosophers, aims to finally bring the women of philosophy to center stage. It shares the stories of 20 influential female thinkers, from Hypatia to Angela Davis .

5) 'How to Think Like a Woman' by Regan Penaluna

Regan Penaluna blends memoir, biography, and criticism to tell the stories of four women philosophers, including groundbreaking feminist Mary Wollstonecraft . Penaluna uses her own struggles against sexism in academia in concert with the lives of the women who’ve inspired her to muse on how philosophy might have evolved if women had been given more airtime.

6) 'Philosophers: Their Lives and Works'

If you’re looking for less of an academic deep-dive and more of a lovely overview of the world’s most impactful philosophers, this entry in the DK History Changers series should suit you perfectly. Introduced with a stunning portrait of each featured philosopher, the 100 biographies in the book trace the lives and ideas of Noam Chomsky , Confucius, Karl Marx , and more.

7) 'Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution' by Mary Gabriel

Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Gabriel uses extensive research and masterful storytelling to present a rarely-seen facet of philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx . The epic narrative spans decades to show how Marx’s marriage and family life suffered and persevered through the years he spent crafting his defining masterpiece. The remarkably in-depth account of the Marx family is both informative and poignant.

8) 'Henry David Thoreau: A Life' by Henry David

Many books have taken up various aspects of Henry David Thoreau ’s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.” Walls presents a complete portrait of the famous transcendentalist, drawing on previously unpublished writings to better explore his philosophy, values, and life.

9) 'How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment' by Skye C. Cleary

This lively, engaging book sits at the intersection of biography, self-help, and philosophy. Philosopher and writer Skye C. Cleary uses the life and teachings of Simone de Beauvoir to instruct readers on how to live more purposeful, authentic lives in the age of social media and self-exposure. Clear, accessible, and engaging but still deeply thought-provoking, Cleary’s writing proves that de Beauvoir’s philosophy is more relevant today than ever.

10) 'Lives of the Eminent Philosophers: Diogenes Laertius' By Pamela Mensch

Looking for philosophy 101? First compiled in the third century AD, this anthology from Diogenes Laertius covers Ancient Greek philosophers from Pythagoras and Socrates to Aristotle and Epicurus. This English translation by Pamela Mensch offers a lively, accessible text with ample footnotes and annotations to contextualize content for the reader.

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The Boys’ Life of Abraham Lincoln is a biography with many anecdotes that takes one deeper into the thoughts, personality, and beliefs of the man that was Lincoln. While the title indicates the book is about Lincoln’s life as a boy, the book is a full, if somewhat shortened biography. It is very well written and was a joy to record. One might ask, "Who was Helen Nicolay?" Her father, John George Nicolay, was Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and doubtless much of the material comes from his complete biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln, The by Helen Nicolay Helen Nicolay

• SEP 28, 2023

Chapter 1 - A President's Childhood

Chapter 2 - captain lincoln, chapter 3 - lawyer lincoln, chapter 4 - congressman lincoln, chapter 5 - the champion of freedom, chapter 6 - the new president.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

• Sam Taylor-Johnson
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• Marisa Abela
• Eddie Marsan
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• Trivia Marisa Abela did all the singing in this film herself. She trained extensively to mimic Amy Winehouse 's vocals.

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• Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes

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The Most Targeted Books of 2023

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky .

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No real surprises here, and the consistency is part of the point. The ALA has released its report about  the 10 most challenged books of 2023 , and you’ve probably guessed already that they are books that explore issues related to race and LGBTQ+ identity and experience.  Speaking the the  New York Times ’s Alexandra Alter , Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom, sums it up: 

More and more, we’re seeing challenges that say, simply, This book has a gay character, or, This book deals with L.G.B.T.Q. themes, even if it has no sexuality in it…We’re seeing those naked attacks on simply the visibility of and knowledge about L.G.B.T.Q. lives and experiences.

Or as my colleague Kelly Jensen regularly reminds us: it’s not about the books. Book challenges are just the thin end of the wedge in the far-right’s effort to whitewash American history and erase queer folks and people of color from public life. Eyes on the prize, friends. Call your reps, go to school board meetings, show up for local elections, and subscribe to  Literary Activism to stay plugged in. 

A Rip(ley) Roaring Good Time

Netflix’s  Ripley , a limited-series adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s  The Talented Mr. Ripley  landed last week, and it is something of a magic trick. Shot in black and white, it channels a noir vibe that couldn’t look more different from the shiny glamour of the 1999 film (which holds up, BTW, I rewatched it before diving in). The old-school look and feel, combined with Andrew Scott’s masterful interpretation of Tom Ripley, make for a darker, more sinister tone that captures the original just as well as Anthony Minghella’s glitzy, star-studded spin did. Will I ever recover from Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf? Signs point to no. Truly good adaptations are hard to find, and it’s the rare story indeed that lends itself to two, especially when they approach the material in such distinct ways. Don’t just take my word for it: here’s NPR’s Linda Holmes on  why black and white was the right choice .

Summer Reading, Here We Come

Spring fever is in full effect where I live, and I’ll be honest, all I really want to do is sit on my stoop with a book and a mason jar of bourbon lemonade. It doesn’t help that  Publishers Weekly dropped their ginormous summer reading guide . A new  Kevin Kwan ! A new  Claire Lombardo ! A new  memoir-meets-cultural-criticism look at American divas on stage and off!

Today in Books, But Make It a Podcast

If this newsletter is your jam, you’d probably like  the Book Riot Podcast . Twice a week, Jeff O’Neal and I discuss the most interesting news from the world of books and reading. I spent last week at the PLA conference (librarians are rad, y’all), so Book Riot’s director of content Sharifah Williams sat in for me. She and Jeff had a great conversation about book design as environmental activism, rumors that Spotify will hike prices, and more. Listen up. 

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