Welcome to the 2016 Politics & Prose Holiday Newsletter. In this time of change, books matter more than ever, and we’ve gathered some of the best of the season for this annual catalog. Whether you’re looking for comfort books, commiseration, escape, or ways to understand—these books can help. And our booksellers are always ready with additional recommendations. With our sincerest wishes for a happy holiday season, enjoy!
Ambitious in scope and impressive in execution, Homegoing (Knopf, $26.95) begins in eighteenth-century Ghana with the stories of Esi and Effia, half-sisters—though they don’t know that—whose lives take wildly different paths. Deftly charting parallel histories, debut novelist Yaa Gyasi follows Esi as she is captured by British slavetraders, taken across the Atlantic, and sold into bondage, and, without missing a beat, also traces Effia’s more materially comfortable fate as the wife of the white British governor in charge of overseeing operations related to the export of human chattel. The narrative chronicles both sides of the women’s sundered family, tracing their descendants through seven generations and three hundred years of American and Ghanaian history. In alternating perspectives, Gyasi introduces Esi’s and Effia’s many children, cousins, and spouses, narrating their various experiences and fortunes. These richly told episodes could stand alone as satisfying short stories; as parts of Gyasi’s colorful epic-scale project, they echo larger themes in telling and surprising ways. The combination of Gyasi’s often lyrical prose, the brutal events and lasting joys she recounts, and the diverse, personable characters, make this a haunting and powerful tale of African American life from the collapse of the ancient Ashanti Empire and the callousness of European colonialism to the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and post-colonial Ghana.
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Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, $26) is the chilling game a father proposes to his children. They’re on a boat. The father lies down, closes his eyes; can the ten- and seven-year old steer the craft to safety on their own? All too soon, the children really do lose their father, a man who has suffered from lifelong clinical depression. The legacy of this mental illness, which the father passes on in the form of severe anxiety to his oldest son, Michael, is the focus of Adam Haslett’s powerful, compassionate second novel. Told from the points of view of all five members of this British-American family, the narrative dramatizes how complicated an organism a family is, how very different the temperaments of its members, and how the suffering of one affects all. Michael’s monologues, in particular, challenge the received image of such disabilities as, well, downers. Michael has one of the sharpest, smartest senses of humor in recent fiction. He’s a wicked parodist. He’s also a brilliant amateur musicologist, analyzing and enthusing over everything from disco to house to ska and beyond. Haslett displays remarkable dexterity in conveying these five distinct voices, and his deep insight comes through in prose that sings, getting “down in words what doesn’t live in words.”
Eimear McBride’s debut, A Girl is a Halfformed Thing, won the Baileys Women’s Prize, stunning readers and judges alike with its incandescent prose. What this bold author was trying to do with her Joycean explosion of sentence fragments and rhythms, McBride has explained, was to “draw in all the disparate experiences of the body and the mind and…..express them simultaneously.” She uses this Stanislavkian “method writing” to equally mesmerizing effect in her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (Hogarth, $26), which focuses on a group of actors in 1990s London. Eighteen-year-old Eily tells most of the story. Fresh from Ireland to study drama, she’s dazzled by everything about her new life. “I have a heart that I hope art will burn,“ she declares. In fact, her heart is burned—and pummeled, coveted, spurned, and cherished—by Stephen, an established actor twenty years Eily’s senior. But age is the least of this turbulent relationship’s complicating factors, and as the secrets and regrets come out, McBride relentlessly conveys the full charge of their psychological and physical impact. Stephen, especially, with his “body all battle,” is a brilliant portrait of what passion can do; with Eily we watch as it forces him to the edge of self-destruction, then pulls him back—a life-giving force that ultimately enables survival.
Terpsichore, the muse of dance, inhabits Zadie Smith’s kinetic Swing Time (Penguin Press, $27), a novel that launches and lands passages engaging the complexities of racial identity, class privilege, and the psychic half-life of adolescence. Swing Time revolves around a nameless protagonist/narrator and her childhood friend Tracey—both of whom are bi-racial brown girls, of similar means, who share a burgeoning love of dance’s varied forms. These bonds, however, also mark the fault lines of their simpatico sisterhood, which reverberate into other familial and professional relationships, especially the out-of-synch dynamic between the apolitical narrator and her activist mother. With uncanny rhythm, Smith spins the narrative out, back, and through the three decades of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ’00s, tumbling temporal order and spanning the continents of Europe, America, and Africa. Swing Time also has an intertextual link to several musical routines; Ali Baba Goes to Town, featuring Jeni LeGon, Thriller and Smooth Criminal featuring Michael Jackson, and of course Swing Time, featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, all help drive the plot. Smith’s dance-inspired fiction is a remarkable feat of grace, technique, and verve.
In her outstanding fourth novel, Sabina Murray delivers a charged swathe of the past, studded with nuanced portraits and gorgeous nature writing. The eponymous Valiant Gentlemen (Grove, $27) are the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement (1864-1916) and the British sculptor Herbert Ward (1863-1919). Murray chronicles their thirtyyear friendship from their meeting in the Congo in 1884 to its rupture just before Casement was executed by the British for treason. In between, Murray brings these complex, talented, and passionate men vividly to life—as she does with their families, colleagues, servants, and everyone else they encounter, a cast including Joseph Conrad, King Leopold, and Rodin. Following the protagonists from their youthful colonial adventures and budding artistic ambitions through Ward’s rise to upper-class family life and Casement’s lifelong wandering, poverty, and temporary attachments to men, Murray dramatizes many ongoing moral and socio-economic issues. Her characters’ dialogue crackles with wit and intelligence, conveying both their own perspectives on events and Murray’s insights into these figures as she traces the effects of colonialism’s callous arrogance and the blind assumptions of entrenched racism, sexism, and class discriminations. She sums up the historical abstractions in sharp, unforgettable images, from Africa’s “grass that hisses when the breeze stirs” and “the heart-chug of the steamer” on a river to the quaint Irish scene of “a donkey—picturesque with its basket and emaciated child.”
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The author of this important and timely book grew up in Forsyth County, Georgia, an island of white supremacy for almost a century that remained untouched by the civil rights movement. How that happened is a powerful, complicated, and horrifying story of racial cleansing that writer and poet Patrick Phillips tells as a white man seeking the truth about his own roots. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton, $26.95) examines in vivid and often lyrical detail the events that led to the forcible and violent expulsion of virtually all black people in the county in 1912—many of whom had lived and worked there for generations—and the decades of exclusion that followed. Change finally came to Forsyth with the 21st century, but even today the legacy of racial cleansing simmers beneath the surface. Courageous, beautifully written, and rich in its detailed reporting, Phillips records a genuine but depressing slice of American history whose repercussions continue to be felt in our country today. In 2011, when the Pulitzer committee awarded Siddhartha Mukherjee the nonfiction prize, it praised The Emperor of All Maladies as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal.” Well, he’s done it again in The Gene: An Intimate History (Scribner, $32), which tells the story of the development of genetics by weaving science and social history with some of Mukherjee’s personal narrative about his own relatives. As Mukherjee recalls in the acknowledgments, he was actually so physically and mentally exhausted after Emperor that he hadn’t expected to write another book. But The Gene turns out to be a natural pairing with Emperor—a sort of prequel in that it focuses on biological normalcy before things get distorted into the malignancy of cancer. If you’ve ever wondered how much of our lives is determined by genes or by external environmental factors, read this book. But don’t expect a simple answer!
With the tools of a trained ethnographer, the skills of a literary writer, and a deepseated compassion, Matthew Desmond follows the lives of eight Milwaukee families as they struggled between 2008 and 2009 to turn grinding poverty into stable poverty. He also recounts the activities of their landlords, making Evicted (Crown, $28) a compelling and troubling story of “two freedoms at odds… the freedom to profit from rents and the freedom to live in a safe and affordable home.” Desmond puts these narratives into perspective with statistics, noting that in 2008 tax benefits to homeowners amounted to $171 billion nationally, while direct assistance to the poor for housing was $40.2 billion. In Milwaukee, the nation’s fourth poorest city, rent often consumes 88% of a monthly welfare check, and even the cheapest, barely habitable apartments—clogged drains, no stove, no hot water—may cost just $270 less than a decent place. Eviction, rare even in the Depression, is now a daily occurrence. Meanwhile, though “it took a certain skill to make a living off the city’s poorest trailer park,” it is indeed possible, as it is for an inner-city landlord renting to tenants on or below the poverty line to amass a net worth of $2 million. Desmond explores these disparities in detail and links the crisis of affordable housing to unemployment, crime, racism, poor health, and other socio-economic ills. But what’s most impressive here are the stories. One woman calls some ninety prospective apartments, her standards getting lower as her desperation rises. A seventh-grader attends five different schools in one academic year. Children “sleep” in chairs in overcrowded rooms. Evictions are cheaper for landlords than maintenance, and people can be evicted for nearly anything—or nothing; a call to the police about domestic abuse, for instance, can get a family kicked out as a “nuisance,” and every eviction on someone’s record makes the next apartment harder to come by. Like a plant’s, the life of a research scientist is subject to conditions she can’t fully control: funding, adequate equipment, successful experiments. But while a tree has to stay put, a geobotanist like Hope Jahren is mobile. As long as she has a lab of her own, whether in California, Georgia, or Hawaii, she can set down roots and thrive. A woman in a notoriously male-dominated field, Jahren, aka Lab Girl (Knopf, $26.95) often feels insecure, but she’s a dedicated scientist, and always has been. “I grew up in my father’s laboratory,” she says. Now an award-winning Fulbright scholar and tenured professor, Jahren has had her share of failures. She tells lively stories of exploding glass tubes, of field trips ending in ditches, and anxiety severe enough to be clinical. But her warm and engaging memoir, interspersed with telling mini-essays on germination, soil, pollen, and roots is more than disasters, long hours, and meticulous measurements of leaf growth. Her lab partner and best friend is an endearing character somewhere on the genius end of the Asperger spectrum. He and Jahren share jokes and junk food in addition to a passion for plants, and their continual banter—and Jahren’s spirited prose— make this a compelling and funny story about friendship and adventures that belies the image of scientists as pale and asocial creatures in need of a life.
The world should thank the Nobel committee of 2015 for calling its attention to Svetlana Alexievich. A previously little known Belarusian journalist with a remarkable talent for oral history, Alexievich is an unconventional choice in a field of novelists and poets. Yet her books have the complex plots, memorable characters, lyricism, pathos, and truth of any great literary work. This is especially the case with the wrenching Secondhand Time (Random House, $30). Assembling hundreds of interviews conducted since the end of the Soviet era, Alexievich worked to “admit feelings into history.” As she talked to workers and students, victims and executioners, heroes and parents, she tapped into an almost overwhelming vein of emotion; her subjects laugh and cry at once. They give way to cathartic outbursts worthy of the classical tragedies. They exclaim that they’ve never told anyone these things before. Some stories have been repressed for decades, other are as fresh as the ethnic divisions of today’s headlines; all carry an irresistible intensity and urgency. Together, they reflect the “sheer schizophrenia” of this moment in Russian history, when the older generation regrets the lost idealism of communism, defends the “socialist idea,” and wonders if “instead of a motherland, we live in a huge supermarket,” while younger people are impatient with tradition, dismissing the great “Russian novels” because they ”don’t teach you how to become successful, how to get rich.” Can a land of such sharply discordant views cohere? Maybe. When Alexievich abandons individual interviews and records the diverse statements she overhears at public events, the result isn’t incoherence or non sequitur but a monologue as eloquent and compelling as any. Contributors to this section include Nneoma Amadi-Obi, Bradley Graham, Laurie Greer, Mark LaFramboise, Lissa Muscatine, Marc Powers
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How do you measure the overall achievement of a man’s life? It’s a frequently asked and sometimes clichéd question, but one that Ward Just, now an octogenarian, breathes new life into with this contemplative, enigmatic novel. Ned Ayres is a newspaperman through and through, driven to skip college to work for a small-town daily in Indiana, from which he moves on to a larger Chicago publication before reaching the pinnacle of his profession at “the paper” in Washington, D.C. Just’s non-chronological narrative reveals Ned as an editor uninterested in salaciousness or scandal; to him, news reporting is a careful and balanced process, the skill residing in a sense of knowing what to tell and what to leave unspoken between the lines. Ned arrives at this ethos early in his career with a single, shocking story, one that turns on the true identity of a man in his home town. It’s a story with profound repercussions, leaving lives upended in ways Ned never envisaged, and The Eastern Shore (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25) subtly explores the lasting effect of these events on Ned, as well as examining how a man who, having been witness to the extraordinary stories of others his entire life, and having carried their secrets, must ultimately ask what he has to say about himself. Just doesn’t answer such questions directly. Rather, his accomplished novel makes the insights available for those who care to look between the lines. Jon Purves
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Let me begin with a warning: if you hear Colombian writer and think magic realism, Reputations (Riverhead, $25) is not what you’re thinking. This is more like what might happen if a magic-realist hand lifted Philip Roth from Newark, New Jersey, and dropped him in the mountainous suburbs of Bogotá. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling, is considered one of Colombia’s great contemporary writers, and for good reason—his writing is as emotionally and politically acute as it gets, with some Rothian swagger thrown in. The protagonist of Reputations is a man who’s losing his swagger. Javier Mallarino is a revered political cartoonist, an artist who’s made and, perhaps more importantly, destroyed careers. At the start of the novel, he receives an award from the Colombian government: his face on a stamp. He’s official. He’s enshrined—and he doesn’t like it. He never meant to be an insider or a hero, and so when a long-forgotten friend of his daughter’s begins asking questions about the consequences of his work, Mallarino is right there with her, legacy be damned. Lily Meyer
With dark humor and a light touch that don’t entirely mask the anguish behind them, National Book Award-winner Ha Jin examines China’s chilling effect on free speech. Jin’s brisk eighth novel is told from the point of view of New York-based journalist Feng Danlin; selfdescribed as The Boat Rocker (Pantheon, $25.95), Danlin works for an independent Chinese-language news agency and aspires to be a public intellectual, but for now his mission is just to tell the truth. JIn dramatizes questions of censorship, intimidation, and outright deception, following Danlin’s latest story, which involves an outrageously hyped novel by a fledgling writer. Setting out to expose “a lie the size of heaven,” Danlin is pressured by Chinese agents to back off. When he persists, his girlfriend is denied a visa to study in China. Then Homeland Security warns him against upsetting Chinese-American relations. Though Danlin is a naturalized U.S. citizen, he can’t escape emotional and political ties to the country he left. Similarly, he can’t ignore his anger at his ex-wife—who happens to be the novelist at the heart of his current investigation. While this may seem like a minor incident, Jin frames it within larger questions. His short, punchy book asks if journalists anywhere can be truly independent, and if émigrés can ever really leave their home countries. Finally, he wonders if it›s even fair to assume that “the powerless are more decent than the powerful.” Laurie Greer
As she did with each of her previous three novels, including the best-selling The Dogs of Babel, the D.C.-based writer Carolyn Parkhurst again performs complex feats of storytelling with a deceptive ease and grace. In Harmony (Pamela Dorman, $26), Parkhurst uses the alternating voices of a mother and her eleven-year-old daughter to narrate the story of a family buckling from the strain of raising a child on the autism spectrum. Thirteen-year-old Tilly is brilliant but socially challenged. Her language is unrestrained and sometimes vulgar, and her behavior veers between terrifying and odd: during a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant, for example, Tilly launches into a sophisticated critique of regional cuisines while succumbing to a series of physical tics that have her twisting and gyrating and touching her head to the floor. After she is expelled from school, the family takes radical action. Under the sway of a charismatic child behaviorist named Scott Bean, they give up their comfortable lives in the District to move to rural New Hampshire, where Bean is establishing a community for families wrestling with similar issues. Parkhurst’s haunting prologue foreshadows the fact that this bucolic setting will not offer a panacea. There may be no easy answers, but there is love and family to fall back on, as well as palliatives like this book. Susan Coll
Set right here in Northwest D.C., Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Here I Am (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28) is the story of a family in crisis. When Julia discovers a series of explicit text messages on her husband Jacob Bloch’s phone, it spells doom for their relationship and major changes for the couple’s three sons. Meanwhile, an earthquake in Israel leads to chaos in the Middle East that stretches all the way to the Bloch household. With wisdom and humor, Foer has produced another immensely entertaining novel. Here I Am captures the contradictions and enigmas of contemporary life and the immensity of love, even in a disintegrating family. Mark LaFramboise
Jane Austen’s most autobiographical and political novel, Mansfield Park may also be her least read work. Unlike the more popular Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s third published novel, which appeared in 1814, Mansfield Park seems cut from a very different cloth. For that reason alone it’s intriguing—and worth reading. Written at a time when Austen had recently relocated, Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price as she is uprooted from her childhood home and sent to live with her rich relatives. Not a typical Austen heroine, Fanny is introverted and awkward. She seems the perfect foil for the beautiful and charismatic Mary Crawford. Austen’s many references to the slave trade, which had recently been abolished in England, add an unusual political element to her usual social satire. This beautiful Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition (Harvard, $35), with authoritative and illustrative commentary by Deidre Shauna Lynch, Harvard’s Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, caps Harvard’s fine Jane Austen Annotated Editions series; like its companion volumes, it encourages a slow, thoughtful reading of the story and appreciation for the world in which Jane Austen lived and wrote. Susan Skirboll In the Russian translation world, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are Mick Jagger and Madonna. Uncontested rock stars. Their mission is clear: to bring the original Russian into English in its raw, vibrant, honest form. Their work on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is much known and lauded, and has redefined the way we read these beloved authors today. But in Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin (Knopf, $30) it’s clear that Pevear and Volokhonsky have really met their linguistic match. Pushkin’s muscular prose and so-realthey’re-breathing characters pop off the page in these new translations. “The Captain’s Daughter” is a special treat, the tender bravado of Pushkin at its finest in this novella about a love affair during Pugachev’s Rebellion. Liz Hottel
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Readers partial to family sagas or collections of interlocking narratives will love Ann Patchett’s masterful Commonwealth (HarperCollins, $27.99). Taking up different points of view, with reports that sometimes contradict each other, the novel begins with Franny Keating’s christening party, which turns into a drinking party when Bert Cousins shows up with a bottle of gin. But the event has an unexpected outcome, launching a chain of events that leads to the breakup of two marriages and the creation of a blended family. Over the years, one child dies, the others grow up. Reaching adulthood, Franny Keating becomes romantically involved with a writer who bases his successful novel, Commonwealth, on her family’s experiences. Has he stolen Franny’s story? Has he stolen the whole family’s story, or has he only used key events to craft a narrative of his own? Many chapters of this tale might easily stand alone as short stories; instead, Patchett has crafted a novel spanning several generations and offering different perspectives on a single painful truth. This novel poses the questions of who a narrative belongs to and what is or isn’t appropriation, issues that Patchett knows well from the real life controversy about her memoir, Truth and Beauty. Amanda Holmes Duffy
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The devil’s in the details of Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad (Doubleday, $26.95). Taking direction from American slave narratives, the novel confronts the linked heritage of slaveocracy and democracy seeking to ensnare the fugitive teenage orphan, Cora. Cora’s flight from a Georgia plantation and from the slave catcher, Ridgeway, propels her towards fleeting notions of freedom on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. As a subversive text, the novel undermines historical fiction with its fantastic literal dimension of locomotives, train tracks, and subterranean stations; it also outdoes the historical Underground Railroad’s metaphorical network of passageways, covert conductors, and secret safe houses. Colson’s ornate craft deftly depicts America’s reign of terror, inspiring reconciliation. Marc Powers
What if today was the day that you decided to turn your life around? Make the small changes you always wanted to, in order to become the woman you always wished you could be? Maria Semple’s protagonist Eleanor Flood, upon waking one morning, makes that promise to herself in Today Will Be Different (Little, Brown, $27). But, then, life has a way of charting its own course. Eleanor, a former cartoon illustrator, is attempting to resurrect her memoir from the depths of a creativity block. Over the course of one day, Eleanor is confronted with a former coworker who brings up some repressed secrets, a (faking) sick child finding his own identity, and a husband who has been skipping work behind her back for the past week. It is a novel that is lighthearted and quirky, while quietly raising the stakes throughout the day. Fans of Semple’s previous hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, will love and identify with Eleanor’s struggles to maintain balance between a creative career, raising a child, and keeping a marriage fresh and exciting. Keith Vient
In A Gambler’s Anatomy (Doubleday, $27.95) Jonathan Lethem fuses his deep investment in genre tropes with outstanding, innovative writing. At first glance this might be a high-class spy novel, complete with a James Bond-esque intercontinental backgammon hustler, whose shadowy background, growing eye-tumor, and newly unstable sense of self all shape the events of the book. But then Lethem riffs on California stoner culture, with a true-believer anarchist managing a hamburger joint, a maverick brain surgeon operating while blasting Jimi Hendrix, and a deceptively goofy real-estate mogul absorbing myriad counterculture elements into his various enterprises. But there’s more. Lethem also gives a disarmingly earnest look at the soul and how it responds to a tough past and an equally tough future, where physical disfigurement and medical emergencies loom. Through these intertwined narrative strands, Lethem’s profound investment in the marginal worlds of his characters rings true. Jonathan Woollen The mission of eight specially selected Terranauts is to live within a man-made biosphere for two years, harvesting all their food and other supplies from the different habitats within—and boldly going where others have gone before. Set in Arizona in 1994, T.C. Boyle‘s, The Terranauts (Ecco, $26.99) is the story not of the first team to inhabit E2, but the second. Based on the actual 1990s Biosphere project, Boyle’s sixteenth novel revises some classic spacefaring stories by posing a simple question: what if, at any time, the intrepid explorers and adventurers could leave their confined environment and immediately return to normal life? While these scientists are working on many scientific and technological questions, this one, based in human psychology, is the one that most compels them—driving them to surprising and dangerous ends. Told from the alternating point of view of three of the Terranauts, two of whom made the team and one who was cut, Boyle’s historical/speculative story provides a window into what it would be like to live and operate on the cutting edge of science and exploration, all the while knowing that rescue lies just the other side of an unlocked door. Michael Triebwasser
In Heroes of the Frontier (Knopf, $28.95), Dave Eggers tells the story of Josie, who has left her dental practice and taken her two young children in a rickety RV (affectionately called “the chateau”) and fled to the wilderness of Alaska. Their adventure is exciting and memorable, but the most appealing aspect of Eggers’s novel is the depiction of Josie’s kids, Ana and Paul. Ana is an indefatigable force, likely to break anything she touches. Paul is an old soul, wise beyond his eight years, and his sister’s constant guardian. Together the three of them forge a unique and hilarious camaraderie. This is a book that pushes all the right buttons: heart, adventure, intelligence— all woven together to create a great novel. Mark LaFramboise On first picking up Dodgers (Crown, $26), local writer Bill Beverly’s excellent debut, you might think it’s a crime novel. I did. The general structure of the plot is hit-man road trip: teenagers in a minivan set out from Los Angeles to kill a judge for their drug-lord boss. There’s plenty of blood in the book, and lots of running and hiding. But really Dodgers is a Western in reverse. The protagonist, East, has never left LA before he’s dispatched on this hit. He’s never thought about what it might be like to go, well, east. As he roams around the frozen Midwest, he’s more interested in watching other people’s lives than in living his own— understandable, given his line of work. The best section of the novel is a lonely stretch East spends working at a paintball range, growing comfortable in an America very different from the one that used to be his. That comfort can’t last, of course. Dodgers isn’t that kind of book. East’s got to keep moving, discovering new terrain, and though the novel ends at an airport, it feels like he’s riding off into the sunset. Lily Meyer
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Set in 1980, two years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship, Javier Marías’s fourteenth novel unfolds when the country’s wounds are still raw. If the Francoists are going to be prosecuted for their evil deeds, now is the time. But would investigating the past help the present? Is “disinterested justice” on a national scale even possible? Taking its title from Hamlet, Thus Bad Begins (Knopf, $27.95) explores questions of revenge, accountability, and deception, putting these timeless philosophical debates in the context of both a political and a personal framework. The latter proves the more difficult to resolve, and the heart of Marías’s deft, well-paced narrative is an unhappy marriage. His narrator, employed as a personal assistant to a renowned, one-eyed filmmaker, is appalled at how badly his boss treats his wife. His curiosity turns to intrigue. He eavesdrops. He spies. He witnesses. He wonders what mystery he’s piecing together—and why. Recounting these scenes years later, he asks what difference it makes to tell the story; since time “is turning everything into fiction” anyway, who cares about this couple? Unfolding in long graceful sentences, this discursive work is as playful as it is thought-provoking. Marías teases with Shakespeare allusions (his main characters, Juan de Vere and Eduardo Muriel, together seem to stand in for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, perennial candidate for the Bard), as well as references to Hitchcock films, making this both a visual and an intellectual experience, a novel to savor as much for its rich games as for its language and ideas. Laurie Greer
Set in Athlone, Ireland, in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue’s suspenseful ninth novel features superb pacing, vivid historical details, small-town secrets, and questions of faith framed as lifeand-death matters. The protagonist is Lib, a London nurse trained by Florence Nightingale, who comes to the village fresh from the Crimean War. She is charged with discovering the truth about Anna, an eleven-year-old who has fasted for four months, with no apparent ill effects. Can the girl really be sustained by the love of God alone? As tourists and pilgrims flock to see The Wonder (Little, Brown, $27), Lib and a local nun keep watch around the clock; Lib, at least, is sure that someone is secretly passing food to Anna. Her partner sees things differently, and as the tension between them rises, Anna’s health does indeed start to suffer. But little by little Anna confides in Lib, and as Lib comes to understand what’s really going on, she both revises her notions of the Irish and fears she must commit murder in order to save Anna. The final outcome of the case—which is based on actual events—is as startling startling as it is unforgettable. Angela Maria Spring
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With The Rules of Civility, his acclaimed debut novel of 1930s New York, Amor Towles set new standards for elegant prose, wit, and nuanced depiction of class and character. In his second novel this impeccable stylist covers Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the 1950s—but history isn’t really his focus here. Rather, long beguiled by Moscow’s grand Hotel Metropol, Towles wondered what it would be like to live amid such glamor all the time; he dreamt up A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking, $27) to find out. The eponymous figure—perhaps the last of his kind—is Count Alexander Rostov. Truly an “unrepentant aristocrat,” Rostov faces down the Bolsheviks with fine manners and social graces. This personal code of conduct sees him through when he becomes a Former Person in 1922 and is sentenced to indefinite house arrest in the Metropol, where he adapts his impeccable manners to his new position as headwaiter, tutors Soviet apparatchiks in French, and identifies as G-sharp the creak of the mattress springs in the tiny attic room he occupies for thirtytwo years. In this shimmering story of graciousness under pressure, both Rostov and the Hotel retain their dignity throughout the Soviet era, rising above the period’s privations, repressions, and dreaded midnight knocks at the door. Laurie Greer
There can never be too many New York novels, especially New York novels as vivid and passionate as Christodora (Grove, $26), by Tim Murphy. Murphy paints the lives of his many characters against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, art, and the changing city. The stories he tells are stunning, gritty, and devastating. Murphy takes the reader right into the 1980s and inside the devastation and broken lives of those affected by the epidemic, as well as chronicling lesser-known histories of AIDS activism. The disease is the great equalizer, and yet ultimately Christodora is not just about the fight against AIDS. It is also about struggling against personal demons, addiction, and mental illness as well as about the search for family and forgiveness. Chapter by chapter, the characters’ stories piece together a great narrative quilt that makes this novel one of the most emotionally intense and extraordinary reading experiences. Anton Bogomazov Rabih Alameddine’s haunted and haunting fifth novel encompasses East-West tensions, racism, gender issues, illness, and more, though it unfolds over the course of just a few hours in the waiting room of a San Francisco psychiatric clinic. Visited by The Angel of History (Atlantic Monthly Press, $26) and other demons, Jacob, a Yemeni-Lebanese poet, is hearing voices. He’s heard them before, though not in a while, and now the return of familiars such as Death, Satan/Iblis, the Fourteen Holy Helpers (martyred saints no longer officially recognized) threatens to overwhelm him in a flood of unbearable memories, from his early years with his mother as part of the “whorehold” of a Cairo brothel to his father’s abandonment of young Ya’qub to be (re) educated by the French nuns of a Catholic school—all punctuated by news of ongoing drone attacks in Yemen. But what Jacob feels most keenly is the loss of his partner and many, many friends twenty years before. “AIDS killed all of us,” Jacob says, but, in fact, though grief left him “roofless in a downpour,” it did not kill him. Jacob survived—not, as he thinks, “in order to be lonely,” but to remember. As his paralyzing anger at last loosens, he wrests it into the form of stories, journal entries, and Satan’s interviews with the figures in Jacob’s life. As complex as its protagonist, Alameddine’s book is a dazzling cubist portrait of a man deeply hurt by history. Laurie Greer
Unfolding in Switzerland between 1937 and 2002, Rose Tremain’s deeply moving thirteenth novel encompasses the Second World War, but history doesn’t drive the book’s events; rather, it guides them, throwing into relief Tremain’s themes of empathy, sacrifice, and betrayal. The Gustav Sonata (W.W. Norton, $26.95) is the story of lifelong friends who meet in kindergarten. They grow as close as brothers but each yearns for something he can’t get from the other. Gustav, whose father is dead, is the unloved son of an unwanted daughter. He craves his mother’s affection to her dying day—when he’s nearly sixty—learning how to “master” the pain of rejection by laughing instead of crying, which should be “easy,” since “laughing was a bit like crying. It was a strange convulsion; it just came from a different bit of your mind.” Anton, a musical prodigy for whom “the black grand piano open[ed] like an enormous heart, about to gather him in,” wants to be a concert pianist but suffers crippling stage fright and eventually, after decades of anguish, abandons his dream. Tremain depicts the boys, then the men, with great sympathy, as she does all her characters. Whether describing a passionate young woman, a lonely little boy, a man in an ethical quandary, or a frustrated artist, she writes about emotion with rare grace and insight. Like music, her elegant narrative captures the messiest human feelings and lets art transform them into something beautiful and nearly comprehensible. Laurie Greer In Mischling (Lee Boudreaux, $27), Affinity Konar introduces two unforgettable protagonists, twin sisters Stasha and Pearl. Housed in Mengele’s “zoo” in Auschwitz, where experiments are performed on twins, Stasha and Pearl face unspeakable cruelty. Their story is told in their own alternating voices, bringing to life their world in the camp and their existence after liberation. The pair’s hatred for Mengele, their love for one another and their fellow prisoners, and their incredible hope for the future in the face of such barbarism give urgency and energy to the story. Original and very memorable, Stasha and Pearl are remarkable tellers of their own story. Mark LaFramboise
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Starting with a family in the middle of a meltdown, The Mortifications (Tim Duggan, $27) charts a contemporary odyssey. Set in the early 1980s, Derek Palacio’s remarkable debut novel starts with a Cuban mother and her twins fleeing their home as part of the Mariel boat-lift. Soledad leaves the children’s father behind; still committed to the revolution, he has little to live on but his ideals. The narrative, at least at first, focuses on the emigrants’ life in Connecticut, though Cuba is never far from the characters’ minds, and gradually gains full depth and color. But the novel is most impressive for Palacio’s keen psychological insight. With a rare emotional intuition, he reveals his characters’ deepest motivations in ways so clear and sharp, it’s almost shocking how far he can see. Yet these motives make complete sense, as you realize when one twin, Ulises, takes up the life of a tobacco farmer, and the other, Isabel, pursues a life of spirituality. Via these different paths, the family eventually travels full-circle, returning to Cuba, but, as is the way of myth, undergoing a metamorphosis in the process. Jonathan Woollen
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Emma Cline is only in her twenties and The Girls (Random House, $27) is her first novel, but it’s a very impressive beginning. Set in the Bay Area in the late 1960s, the story centers on a disaffected teenage girl growing up in the exurbs with distracted, self-absorbed, divorced parents. Bored and aimless, she finally achieves a sense of belonging when she’s invited to join a cultish group living on a nearby ranch with a narcissistic male leader. As events unfold, it becomes clear that this fictional account is based on Charles Manson and his followers, with cameos by other recognizable figures of that era. While the Manson story is well known, what makes the book so good is Cline’s uncanny grasp of time and place, and her ability to explore the psychology of a desperate young person who wants to do the right thing but struggles to find her own path. A coming-of-age story that speaks to every generation in both its specificity and universality. Lissa Muscatine
In Sweetbitter (Knopf, $25), debut novelist Stephanie Danler draws on her real life experience at two fashionable New York restaurants to produce a vivid and entertaining look at the people, attitudes, and conditions that make upscale restaurant work alluring— intoxicating!—and also crazily oppressive. She has a sharp edge when describing the characters who populate her story, and a plot that dances quickly through the appetizers and main courses, much like one feels reading a menu. Danler also has a sensuous touch when writing about the food itself—you will get hungry reading this book—and like any good chef (or in her case, back waiter) she knows when to add dollops of heavy cream and when a dash of spice will suffice. A first-rate novel about food— and much more. Lissa Muscatine
Smart, funny, original, The Nix (Knopf, $27.95) by Nathan Hill tells the unlikely story of college professor Samuel Andresen-Anderson and the mother who deserted him when he was a child. An aspiring writer with a book overdue, Samuel needs to get down to work or return his substantial advance— unfortunately, long-since spent. But he succumbs to the lethargy of his stifling job and his distracting addiction to video games. When his mother appears on the nightly news, newly famous for bizarrely attacking a political candidate, Samuel thinks his problems may be solved. He sets out to write her story (a bankable project, his editor agrees) and in the process learns the complicated truth about his mother’s young adulthood and the events leading up to her desertion of her son. Mark LaFramboise
Set in sunny Jamaica, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, $26.95) by Nicole Dennis-Benn, chronicles lives that are anything but. While Jamaica is known for its great resorts, few who live there have pampered lives. Thandi, though the youngest in her family, is cast in the role of support and even savior of her mother and sister, Margot. Already, on the basis of her excellent grades, they expect her to raise the family from the island’s endemic poverty. Meanwhile, Thandi’s mother, Delores, sells trinkets to tourists and Margot is one of the local resort’s best workers; they see their labor as an investment in Thandi’s future—and through her, their own. But how realistic is their hope? This novel quickly became one of my favorites because DennisBenn’s writing grabs you and completely immerses you in Jamaican culture and the lives of her characters. She uses her fiction to show how poverty, greed, and colonialism affect those on the island and how these people do their best to make ends meet. Margot, Thandi, and Delores are three characters that will remain in your memory for a long time. Morgan Harding
Brit Bennett, who hails from a beach town near San Diego, started writing her first novel, The Mothers (Riverhead, $26), in her teens. It took seven years (through Stanford and an MFA) to finish. Now twenty-six, she’s emerged as a star on the literary scene. Her terrific first novel explores the bonds between mothers and daughters, an unlikely pair of friends, and a man they have in common. There’s also a Greek chorus of older church “mothers” who try to steer the youngsters on the right path. Bennett deftly weaves in race, religion, abortion, and a few other hot button issues into this compelling, contemporary tale. Lissa Muscatine
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It’s hard to believe that two decades have passed since this sprawling epic fantasy series first hit the shelves. Indeed, with a massively successful HBO television adaptation on the air and an eagerly anticipated sixth installment in the works, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has become a fixture of our cultural landscape. A Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition (Bantam, $50) is a celebration of that legacy. Revisit the warring houses of Westeros—whose calculated moves against each other and in pursuit of the throne blind them to an even greater, looming threat from the North... Experience all the shocking narrative twists and turns that Martin has since become (in)famous for in this sometimes grim but refreshingly realistic and beautifully penned work. This new edition features the illustrative talents of over a dozen artists with gorgeous, full-page artwork preceding each chapter. Slight variances between the visual interpretations of Martin’s words and characters serve as testament to the story’s ability to resonate with so many different readers over the last twenty years and a short introduction by John Hodgeman reminds us why the more philosophical implications of the story remain as poignant as ever. A treat for the longtime fan and the first-time reader alike. Beza Wondie
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Ken Liu is one of the most exciting writers currently working in science fiction and fantasy, and The Wall of Storms (Saga Press, $29.99) may be his best novel. The sequel to last year’s The Grace of Kings, it is set in a world founded in Chinese history, but infused with elements from classic martial arts stories, the plays of Shakespeare, and epics such as The Iliad. Fans of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books may enjoy it for the strong character development, the politicking and tragic moments of violence. But The Wall of Storms has far more to offer than blood and angst. Student and teacher discuss the schools of philosophy, and whether there is any one answer to living an honest life; the wife of the emperor commits unthinkable acts to create a more just society; the gods themselves bicker and cheat and are remade even as the beliefs of the people are remade. You’ll meet Zomi and Thera, two young women from very different backgrounds who fight to save their people from unimaginable horror. And just when you think you have the story figured out, Liu stabs you in the back! Adam Wescott
There are many candidates for The Trespasser (Viking, $27) in Tana French’s sixth Dublin Murder Squad mystery. The eponymous figure could be the murderer, committing a violent crime while leaving no evidence or indication of motive. It could be Detective Antoinette Conway herself, female and olive-skinned, working in the all-male, all-white Irish police squad. It could be an infiltrator feeding the investigators fake leads to deter them from finding the truth. The trespasser might even be Detective Conway’s realization that she has more in common with the blond-haired, Barbie doll-like victim than she is comfortable admitting. Not just a great detective story, French’s novel is a study in how the past superimposes itself on the present, and how memory steers personal perceptions and motives whether the actors are aware of it or not. It’s 1945, and though World War II is still under way, Cenzo Vianello has put away his life as a soldier and is now a small town fisherman living a small life. One day he finds a woman in the water; by some miracle she’s still alive, and he pulls her to safety. Guilia, The Girl From Venice (Simon & Schuster, $27), in Martin Cruz Smith’s fifteenth novel, is wanted by the Wehrmacht SS. As Cenzo assumes the role of her protector, his life becomes as suspenseful as the momentous final days of the war itself. In trying to save this one life, Cenzo finds himself suddenly engaged in a world he’s tried to steer clear of, one rife with Nazi sympathizers, Partisans, forgers, killers, actors, and spies. It also brings him back into contact with his despised brother Giorgio, now a tool of Mussolini’s propaganda machine. If the Wehrmacht and the tides have brought Cenzo and Guilia together, perhaps love and family can keep them from being captured and killed before peace is declared. Section by Bill Leggett
At the center of Francine Prose’s effervescent fifteenth novel is the umpteen-hundredth revival of the cheesy but mysteriously durable musical based on a fictitious classic children’s novel, Mister Monkey. It’s a hack production, in the off-off-off-off Broadway High Line Theater, with a costume budget so spare that Mister Monkey’s costume is sewn from a nubby, brown chenille bedspread that may or may not be full of dust mites, and the actors are generally over-qualified, underpaid, and in one case, ragingly, dangerously, hormonal. It’s a screwball set-up executed to brilliant effect. Told from the alternating points of views of characters both directly and peripherally involved in the play, Mister Monkey (HarperCollins $26.99) hits the sweet spot of great fiction—darkly funny and richly poignant, and full of warmth and humanity, to boot. Consider “a cosmic playwright with a weird sense of humor,” one character urges, setting up scenes full of “unlikely coincidences, improbable events, good and bad surprises.” It’s possibly a meta request from the pen of the author who brought this comic gem to life, urging us to suspend disbelief, and enjoy the ride. Susan Coll Nell Zink’s zany yet unexpectedly moving third novel, Nicotine (Ecco, $26.99), named for a house of squatters working to further smokers’ rights (many smokers have a “medical need” for tobacco to keep their mania and/ or depression under control) loosely traces several decades’ worth of alternative lifestyle movements, from the last gasp of the late ‘70s hippies to the early twenty-first century identitypolitics activists. Along the way, Zink, with her inimitable blend of realism and absurdity, sends up the witting and unwitting contradictions of hospice care (which allowed “no painkillers because they hasten death, and no fluids because they prolong life”), faith (a former Italian Jew who converted to shamanism professes not to “believe in god,” but he does “believe in religion”), and social activism, which can devolve into interchangeable issues and be more about slogans than people. Most of all, Zink targets family, and her protagonist, Penhana “Penny” Baker, has a highly unconventional one, from her New Age father, his much younger, South American Indian wife—who is also his adopted daughter—and her two older half-brothers, one of whom may be her real father. Is this clan dysfunctional, or has it liberated itself from such constraining notions? Zink satirizes both sides, playfully exposing the conventions of the unconventional and the lengths we go for the sake of a cherished self-image. Laurie Greer
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Sequential Drawings (Pantheon, $25) collects a decade of Richard McGuire’s spot illustrations—the small drawings breaking up large pages of text—featured in The New Yorker. Perhaps the master of this art of deceptively simple visual acrobatics, McGuire, the award-winning artist of Here, takes things as familiar as seasonal changes and street scenes and makes them newly arresting with just a few lines. Notice how he renders movement from a mirrored surface through windows and doorways—the illustration is both straightforward and irreverent. Throughout this powerful album, McGuire’s work is humorous without being kitschy, and thoughtful without being overwrought.
About as addicting as an all-you-caneat-buffet, Lisa Hanawalt’s Hot Dog Taste Test (Drawn and Quarterly, $22.95) offers some of the funniest comics you’ll read this year. Her cartoon-y visual gags are lavishly colorful and as ridiculous as “Banana Embellishments,” “Snack Realism,” or “Bathroom Problems” makes them sound. Hanawalt’s food journalism somehow captures the passion and complexity of foodie culture, while never letting us forget the absurdity of cubes of scrambled egg or “tiny saffroncoconut ice cream-sandwich topped with Sturgeon caviar.” Please, pick up this book. Every page is a laugh—and where else will you see toucans flirting with deli-counter boys, or fall in love with horses all over again, or learn the meaning of “doof”?
Jules Feiffer’s Kill My Mother was a dramatic and stylish nod to noir that introduced us to Bay City and its iconic P.I., Sam Hannigan. Now here’s Cousin Joseph (Liveright, $25.95) to give us some back story. Opening in the middle of the Great Depression, this prequel introduces Sam as a younger detective than the wise cynic of Kill My Mother; part of the Red Squad, he feels a few twinges of conscience, but can usually repress the guilt. Meanwhile, Bay City is rife with intrigue: Feiffer vividly conveys the period’s battles over unions, the activities of fat-cat Hardy Knox, and the fear of subversive Hollywood films. Unfolding at an elegant, even hypnotic pace, Feiffer’s narrative features a wide-range of characters, and as he sets them dancing on the page, he makes an inimitable contribution to both the graphic genre and the ongoing public debate about immigration, class, race, and identity. Section by Adam Waterreus
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Ten years after Sylvia Beach had to close her legendary Paris bookshop, another American ex-patriate, George Whitman, opened Le Librairie Mistral in a tumble-down 16th-century building on the rue de la Bûcherie. When Beach passed away in 1964, he renamed his “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore” in her honor. Now run by his daughter and celebrating its 65th anniversary, the place has hosted tens of thousands of writers and, since these literary guests—aka Tumbleweeds—were welcome to stay indefinitely if they did a few hours of work for the store, read a book a day, and left a note, has almost as many stories to tell. Shakespeare and Company, Paris (DAP, $34.95) tells these stories decade by decade in rich collages of photos, poems, letters, and more. A book made for browsing, this volume recounts the store’s own life and times as well as inaugurating its new Englishlanguage publishing venture, headed by Krista Halverson. A former managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, Halverson guided the magazine’s art direction and worked with guest designers, experience she’s put to excellent use as editor of this sumptuous album of pictures and spirited anthology of testimonials left by writers ranging from James Baldwin to Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg to A.M. Homes. Angela Maria Spring
The 2015 death of Nobel laureate Günter Grass deprived the world of one of its most intriguing and controversial literary minds; Grass memorably mixed myth and political reality, and especially appealed to readers intrigued by what it meant to be a German citizen during and immediately after the Nazi era. Now available in English, Grass’s final book, Of All That Ends (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28), is as apt a swan song as you might expect from so large, yet so humble, a figure as Grass. Following a string of late-life autobiographies, this book is a series of vignettes, poems, and Grass’s own pencil drawings. The pieces flow loosely from one to the next, and cycle back through a stream of lyrical images (the coffins in which he and his wife will soon lie, his beloved typewriter, the one original tooth still left in his mouth). In the end, it’s a bittersweet, melodious glimpse of Grass’s life in the twenty-first century, which ranged from watching social media from afar to lamenting Germany’s dominant stance in the EU to (as in his earlier work The Flounder) letting loose some of the most evocative writing about food you’ll find anywhere. No single volume can contain Grass’s whole, magisterial spirit, but this is a beautiful distillation. Jonathan Woollen
For more than six decades, Robert Gottlieb stood at the helm of three premier publishing institutions: Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker magazine. A book omnivore, he grew up in a family where reading took the place of dinner-table conversation: “only later did it occur to me this was not normal,” he writes in his engrossing memoir, Avid Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28). Gottlieb’s love of reading segued into an illustrious career in which he edited some of the biggest names in literature, including Toni Morrison, John Le Carré, Robert Caro, and Doris Lessing. Sharing insights into his editing philosophy, he notes that “the most damaging thing an editor can do to a writer is to try to change a book into something other than what it is, rather than to try to make it a better version of what it is already.” This memoir brims with amusing insider anecdotes, such as the mini-crisis that ensued when, nearing the publication date of a book called Catch-18, by a writer named Joseph Heller, Gottlieb and his team learned that a book called Mila 18 was about to be released. This life in words is also an endearing meditation on family and close friendships forged over the years, and it’s seasoned with enough literary gossip to keep the pages turning. Susan Coll
John Aubrey (1626-1697) lived through the English Civil War and the Great Fire of London. He knew Thomas Hobbes, Christopher Wren, Edmund Halley, and Isaac Newton. He was a founding member of the Royal Society. But after his death, he was considered a gossipy eccentric. It took years for his manuscripts to be organized and edited; eventually, Brief Lives, was recognized as a landmark literary work. How do you write the life of a man who transformed biography by including unvarnished details? Ruth Scurr, a Cambridge historian and biographer of Robespierre, does it in John Aubrey, My Own Life (NYRB, $35) by letting Aubrey narrate those details. She searched his papers for autobiographical passages, annotated and arranged them chronologically. Through his own words, we learn about Aubrey’s childhood in an affluent Wiltshire family and his plunge from privilege to hardship in his twenties when his father died. Scurr lets Aubrey reveal his fascinations with science, educational theory, ancient British history, and architecture. He loved village traditions and the innovation of coffee houses. He berated himself for not capturing all he saw. Then there were the money woes, an engagement gone spectacularly wrong, reliance on friends for support, sketching ancient churches, describing (and theorizing about) standing stones, and talking, always talking, to anyone, regardless of social status. He had deep feelings for friends, and never let political and religious differences interfere. He wanted to be remembered through his words. His works could have shared the fate of the old manuscripts he saw used to line pie pans—but eventually his books appeared and his biographical approach was appreciated. Suzanne Morgan
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Any production by the classicist, librettist, poet, and translator Anne Carson is an event. Float (Knopf, $30) is many at once: a collection of twenty-two poems, dramas, lectures, and sui generis word wizardries—some commissioned to accompany installations and dances—this “book” is not a bound volume but a box of chapbooks that resemble sheet music. As such, it begins—wherever you want it to. Plunge in with “Pinplay,” a version of The Bacchae, and you’ll find Dionysos cut down to size as Carson asks, “How many pins can dance on the head of a god?” Or start with the enchanting “Merry Christmas from Hegel,” and you’ll celebrate the holiday with a walk into real snow that’s also “a philosophical space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another.” Carson is seriously playful throughout, scrambling, questioning, and undermining categories of all kinds. ”A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets” takes that “rectangle upon the page” and puts it through a Wonderland of shapes and sizes. Her “Stacks” make and unmake lists, testing definitions by exploring etymologies (including the etymology of etymology), while other pieces lay out the particular challenges of translating screams and silence, or, in “Wildly Constant,” turn Iceland’s library of glaciers into a room of melting books, their grammar a fine silt, their characters drifting, the unmade literature “confusing. / Unforgivable./ An adventure.”
What would you make of a list that includes “sweetness cut into strips,” a memory “that has receded into a niche that can’t be dusted,” and a temple an endless distance away? This is how Mary Ruefle defines “blue sadness,” more familiarly known as the blues. But why should only one color have its moody temperament? Ruefle also finds sadness in pink, orange, and black, and these untitled pieces, scattered throughout her book, demonstrate both this poet’s irrepressible whimsy and a serious inquiry into emotions. Both are heightened by her note directing readers to “substitute the word happiness for the word sadness” and see what happens. Ruefle raises similar questions of genre. Like snapshots of a mind caught in brief pauses, these fully justified blocks of language look like prose. They act like poetry; argue like essays. Track your response to My Private Property (Wave Books, $25); the title piece, the longest in the collection, starts with a nearly unspeakable subject: shrunken heads. Ruefle explains the process, the uses, and the traditions of the shrunken head. Just as you are fully alienated, she points out that civilized Western peoples carry around wallet-sized pictures of loved ones. Whimsy? Wisdom? Something else? You decide.
Sixty poems may not be enough to show everything that’s been going on in American poetry since 1980, but Stephen Burt’s selection is a spirited tour of the “states of the art.” A substantial anthology, The Poem is You (Belknap, $27.95) includes work by icons, by established poets in their prime, and younger writers just making their literary marks. Even long-time poetry readers will find new names here as Burt traces myriad literary movements, from traditional forms to confessional verse to language poetry and into Nuyorican, baroque, alt-lit, and beyond. Terrance Hayes, for instance, who is a painter and pianist as well as a poet, fuses the blues with Dante’s terza rima. Robin Schiff draws on U.S. history, engineering, and Italian poetic forms for an ingenious cultural critique. Juan Felipe Herrera, like a hybrid of Whitman and Ginsberg, melds street theatre with protest poetry. Burt presents revolutionaries as well as poets of ordinary life, poets writing from Native American, Eastern, and Islamic traditions, poets who put everything in, poets who take most things out, poets who push the limits of coherence, giving readers a taste of what it’s like to be dyslexic and/or gender fluid, alienated from categorical thinking. Burt, an enthusiastic reader, Harvard professor, and practicing poet, is an outstanding guide to all of this. Section by Laurie Greer
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If you like large and large-hearted historical epics, with genealogies and maps, Annie Proulx’s colorful, sometimes Dickensian tapestry of a novel is for you. If you like to know characters intimately and feel what it’s like, say, for a half blind old man to see the autumn colors by listening to the leaves fall, or to experience the wreck of a stormtossed boat “sealed in a casket of ice a foot thick,” then this is also the book for you. Covering the development of North America from the Europeans’ arrival in 1693 to its place in a global 2013 economy, Proulx’s narrrative traces the family lines of two indentured woodsmen—Barkskins (Scribner, $32)—there, like most settlers, to clear the land—who make and lose fortunes, family members, and ideals. A lot happens over the centuries, and Proulx’s prodigious research and deft storytelling come together in details of dress and business, manners and vocabulary, wars and industries. Most of all, the narrative follows the ecological catastrophe and near-genocide of Native Americans that was European settlement. Starting in New France—Canada—moving inexorably as today’s pine beetles though Maine, New England, Michigan, and on to the west, with a side trip to the hardwood forests of New Zealand, the novel traces a history of ravaged nature, as settlers engage in an unsustainable trade in lumber, turning what had seemed infinite forests into farms, eroded hillsides, and useless “stumplands.”
For decades, Peter Wohlleben knew trees primarily as potential lumber. When he started to see them for something more than their commercial value—what he learned astonished him. In The Hidden Life of Trees (Greystone, $24.95), the forestry-commissioner-turned-environmentalist reports that “trees experience pain and have memories,” that they keep time, defend themselves from predators and summon defenders, and that “tree parents live together with their children” and other individuals of their species in mutually-supporting communities. If all this makes plants sound like animals, well, the evidence certainly points that way. Admittedly not afraid to blur these categories, Wohlleben speaks of the trees’ senses of taste and smell, the pain that can cause them to “scream” (such sounds have been measured), and their ability to speak to one another through roots that “crackle.” Usually extending “more than twice the spread of the crown,” tree roots strongly resemble a nervous system—and for good reason. Calling the roots the “brain” of the tree, Wohlleben shows how they regulate the plant’s growth, water use, and sensitivity to light and, perhaps most important, how they communicate with the roots of other trees in a magnificent “wood wide web.” These connections allow trees to alert each other to threats and mobilize the stronger members of the group to support those suffering injury or illness—often enabling weakened trees to survive when they probably wouldn’t on their own (which suggests that a tree can die of loneliness). And there’s much more. Wohlleben explains how trees age and die, why some can live thousands of years, how they can calm wind, why they don’t survive when kept in containers indoors—there’s something amazing on every page of this thoroughly delightful book. If the very term Urban Forests (Viking, $32) seems an oxymoron, Jill Jonnes’s fascinating cultural history of trees in America will be a revelation. From Jefferson’s assessment of seeds as a “public treasure” to the first observance of Arbor Day in 1872 to the planting of a “survivor tree” on the site of the Oklahoma City Murrah building, trees have occupied the emotional and physical center of major events. They’ve also sometimes been the event, and Jonnes chronicles the long and heartbreaking battles against Dutch elm disease, the emerald ash borer, and the blight that wiped out the American chestnut. Today, trees are one of the most important features of livable, sustainable cities. Hard-working urban citizens, trees cool streets and buildings, help control rainwater runoff, and sequester carbon. In addition to these green services, trees also affect a neighborhood’s commerce, crime rate, property values, and general well-being. If the last is hard to quantify, the others are readily measurable, and Jonnes traces the increasingly sophisticated science of urban forestry, showing that thinking about trees as canopy cover rather than as board feet of lumber translates energy savings into dollars and cents (planted on the west side of a building trees save three times what they do if placed on the south side). This perspective also illuminates certain social issues: in 2006, prosperous Bel Air had 53% canopy cover, while lower-income south Los Angeles had just 7%. Trees have a lot to teach us about cities, not least our own, and Jonnes devotes several chapters to the District, recounting how “bleak, inhospitable” mud became the tree-lined National Mall, how Eliza Scidmore, the first woman member of the National Geographic Society, worked for over 25 years to get cherry trees in Potomac Park, and how Casey Trees has re-greened the District, with the help of scores of volunteer urban foresters. Section by Laurie Greer
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings (Skira Rizzoli, $75) is simply a stunning addition to any art book collection. Compiled by Kathryn Calley Galitz, this tome features over 1,000 stunning, full color reproductions of 500 paintings from the collection, organized chronologically, beginning with an Iron Age jar from Iran and ending with a 2014 painting by American artist Kerry James Marshall. The book spans many cultures and deliberately places paintings from different regions side by side, allowing readers to view in one glance works that would likely never appear together in the same museum gallery. The resulting juxtapositions spark unexpected resonances and create connections that would otherwise go unnoticed. In addition to the striking pairings, enlarged details of selected works give readers the opportunity to appreciate the art up-close and personal. This book is sure to delight lovers of history, art, and culture alike. Alexis Jason-Mathews
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As Walter Benjamin was “more than a literary critic,” John Berger is more than an art critic. The work collected in Landscapes (Verso, $26.95) dates from 1954 to 2015 and includes essays, memoirs, and poetry. It showcases Berger’s skills as storyteller and aphorist (“a drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event…a ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself”), and as a Marxist art historian. Defining “landscapes” in the broadest sense, these pieces evoke not only actual places—Ramallah, Finistère— but map the intellectual ground of figures including Roland Barthes, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as exploring the particular terrain of the European peasantry and the Soviet states. “The Moment of Cubism” is quintessential Berger, showing how Picasso and Braque “imagined the world transformed, but not the process of transformation,” and how this marked a shift from the Renaissance, when not the way something was depicted but the subject determined the picture’s expressive power. Berger is as attentive to what lies outside a frame as to the colors and lines within it, and his sincerest wish is that all “art should be an inspiration to life—not a consolation.” Laurie Greer
The pairing of Matisse/Diebenkorn (Prestel, $49.95) was a natural, and the catalog of the exhibit—now at the Baltimore Museum of Art through January 29—is a true delight and joy. Richard Diebenkorn fell in love with the Matisses in the Phillips Collection in 1944, while stationed at Quantico. So began the California artist’s lifelong engagement with Matisse—never in an imitative way, but in his evolving signature style, alternating between figuration and abstraction, culminating in his Ocean Park series. There are many echoes between the artists: shared subject matter and attention to light, audacious brushwork and use of color, even the laying down of paint—sometimes hurried, sometimes rethought and layered. In their drawings, especially their life studies in charcoal, there is the graceful, bravura black lines, and the use of stumps and erasers to create highlights and sensuous greys. The conversation builds with each successive pairing of works on full-page, side-by-side spreads. There are essays by co-curators Janet Bishop and Katherine Rothkopf, by Jodi Roberts on drawings, and an introduction by John Elderfield, former MoMA curator who put on several important Matisse shows, who shares his many memories of Diebenkorn. Don’t miss the show, or the catalog. András Goldinger
While always returning to brushes, canvas, charcoal, and paper, David Hockney has been happy to try new technology—first in his cubist photos and fax-machine collages, now in his drawings on iPads. He has also explored (in Secret Knowledge) how artists in the past used lenses and mirrors to help translate three dimensions onto a flat surface. Now, in dialogue form, Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford explore A History of Pictures (Abrams, $45) “from the cave to the computer screen.” There are provocative discussions on mark making, the depictions of shadows (or their absence), “picturing time” in scrolls and frescos, and the camera “before and after 1839.” The reproductions are superb— and the juxtapositions of images are fresh and bold: Titian’s “Magdelene“ and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, whirlpools in Hiroshige and Disney’s Pinocchio, a Rembrandt sketch and a Chinese brush drawing. Hockney’s quotes are bouncy (“Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting”), but it is the deep connections that he and Gayford make throughout visual history that makes this book come alive. András Goldinger
From Brunelleschi’s Dome to Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling to The Judgment of Paris, Ross King’s award-winning books have interwoven history, art history, and biography, telling great stories in each category. With Mad Enchantment (Bloomsbury, $30)—the title taken from a French critic extolling the buoyancy of Claude Monet’s work— King chronicles the final years of that artist’s life. By 1910 , Monet (1840-1926) was wealthy and well-known, but, like Impressionism itself, he was “in danger of becoming an anachronism,” too old fashioned for the rising avant-garde and too merely pretty to be relevant amid Europe’s rising tensions. King, however, complicates both the easy surface appeal of the Giverny images and the role of art in uncertain times. If the Great War tested France’s resources, Monet’s seemingly endless labor on his Grand Décoration—the monumental series of water-lily paintings—was no less taxing. Measured in yards and feet, the series eventually included nearly 300 canvases; while they caught the play of light and passing currents, the works also reflect Monet’s personal tribulations—deaths of family members and fellow painters, his “loss” of colors, distance, and vision itself due to cataracts—and those of his country as the Germans invaded and whole villages were bombed off the map. Sustaining heavy cultural damage as well as staggering numbers of casualties, France needed its artists, and Monet was supported through his dark periods by his longtime friend, George Clemenceau, France’s prime minister from 1917 to 1920, even as Clemenceau sought moral support for his country from one of its greatest painters. Seemingly ahead of his time, J.M.W. Turner (1775 -1851) was in fact very much of his times—times that, like the painter, kept leaping ahead via feats of imagination and technology. In Turner (Penguin Press, $35), her exhaustive biography of the prodigious British artist, Franny Moyle, whose previous subjects include Constance Wilde and the Pre-Raphaelites, traces the evolution of art and its marketing in the Georgian and Victorian eras from the traditional patronage system to the rise of auctions, galleries, and the independent artist. Turner was very much a model of the latter; proficient in drawings, watercolors, engravings, and oils, he had something to please everyone. His ambition matched his talent, and he was fiercely competitive, lobbying to be admitted to the Royal Academy when he was barely twenty (he was elected at age twenty-six) and identifying the strong points in rivals—then beating them at their own game. While Turner richly fulfilled the British appetite for scenes affirming the country’s “sense of power, solidity, continuity, and heritage,” he depicted Waterloo not as a national triumph, but as the epic slaughter of 40,000 killed in nine hours. Later, though demand for his realistic landscapes—product of an “encyclopedic” vision and compulsive sketching— remained high, Turner redirected his energies from the accurate depiction of a subject to the artist’s response to what he painted. He applied watercolor techniques to oils, exploring new ideas of truth in art. Critics weren’t ready, finding these works too vague, too bright, and too unfinished. But Turner, defended by the young John Ruskin, pressed on.
A.S. Byatt hadn’t heard of Mariano Fortuny until she went to Venice, but once she experienced his home (now a museum), his dresses, and his designs, she found herself thinking about—William Morris. Yet back home in England, on Morris territory, she was haunted by Fortuny. From this strange crossing of artistic wires, Byatt has produced Peacock & Vine (Knopf, $26.95), a sumptuous objet d’art of a book. At once an investigation of how and why these particular creators so captivated her, a celebration of their achievements, and a tribute to design itself, the essay traces “the coming together of life, work and art” of both men. As distinct as they were similar, both Morris (18341896) and Fortuny (1871-1949) were passionate about myths and nature; both worked with a range of materials including dyes and textiles. But where Fortuny revered Wagner, Morris found him “’anti-artistic,’” and where Morris drew on birds and plants for their structure, Fortuny was especially sensitive to their symbolism. As Byatt lovingly describes theses lives, works, and arts, she reaffirms Morris’s faith in “beauty, imagination and order” as the touchstones of all good things. Van Gogh had a habit of abruptly up and leaving places—so it’s not surprising that he ultimately lived and worked in more than twenty towns and cities throughout Europe. The Vincent van Gogh Atlas (Yale, $25) combines biography, graphics, history, and wonderful design to chart this restless painter’s life from Z to A. From Zundert, that is, in the southern Netherlands, where he was born in 1853, to Auverssur-Oise in the South of France, where he died in 1890. Compiled by Nienke Denekamp, a freelance writer and editor, and René van Blerk, senior curator of education at the van Gogh Museum, this colorful and informative scrapbook carries on the spirit of its subject’s letters, featuring pages as full of pictures as of text. Van Gogh left some 1,300 drawings, over 850 paintings, and 800 letters; the editors draw from each of these troves, and put van Gogh’s experiences in the context of the growing railway systems he used, advances in photography, and even the Eiffel Tower, which appears here as the rising stump it was in 1888, when van Gogh was in Paris. There are also glimpses of the weathered palette and paints van Gogh used for working outside and a sketch of him on his deathbed by his own frequent subject, Dr. Gachet. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this multi-layered timeline is comparing what van Gogh saw to what he made of it. A photo of a windmill, of a cypress tree, of a room at the asylum of Saint-Rémy— these are just windmills, trees, and rooms. As reimagined in van Gogh’s artworks, they are something else again. Section by Laurie Greer
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When a teacher asks a diverse group of schoolchildren to describe what makes their families special, one child blushes and tucks her arms beneath her desk, fearful that her family is unlike anyone else’s. But as she listens to classmates describe their families—new babies, grandparents, single parents, blended families, two moms, and even a bunch of “terrible singers”— she comes to realize that A Family Is a Family Is a Family (Groundwood, $17.95), simultaneously unique and similar in love. Sara O’Leary’s warm, humorous dialogue couples seamlessly with Qin Leng’s lively illustrations to create a big-hearted, highly affecting look at families. Ages 3-8. Amy Dickinson
“Pit, pit, pit,” the snow falls. Bundle up, put on your warm outside clothes, and “shhh…let’s go,” because it’s the First Snow (Chronicle, $16.99). Author/ illustrator Bomi Park details the delight of a little girl’s first experience of the most magical part of winter, from the wonder of the first flake to waking up the next morning to see the world blanketed in white. After grabbing her winter essentials, she heads outside with her puppy companion and steadily builds a snowman, “slow, slow, slow.” With arresting yet intimate black-and-white illustrations that invite readers to lose themselves in the quiet beauty of the pages, this picture book is sure to be a winter favorite. Ages 4-6. Kasie Griffitts
A cat always walks through the world with whiskers, ears, and paws, but what do different individuals see when they look at it? They All Saw a Cat (Chronicle, $16.99), that’s for sure, but what each creature perceives is starkly different. To the child, the cat is smiley, soft, and loving. To the flea, it is hairy and vast. To the mouse, it is enormous, threatening, and terrifying. Brendan Wenzel’s simple narrative and unique illustrations, whose colors and patterns shift dramatically with each new set of eyes that gazes upon this fascinating feline, show readers that perhaps perception really is relative. Ages 4-8. Allison Witten
Yoshio is walking through Tokyo on his way to school when he comes across an elderly woman playing the koto, a Japanese stringed instrument. When he asks what her favorite sound is, she replies that it is The Sound of Silence (Little, Brown, $17.99). Katrina Goldsaito’s text tracks Yoshio as he searches for this silence all day long amidst the bustling Tokyo streets, where thoughtfully placed bursts of color accentuate Julia Kuo’s evocative pen-and-ink drawings. After a day of searching, Yoshio discovers that silence, or ma, exists in and around all the other sounds, and he, too, comes to appreciate its value. Ages 6-8. Sharat Buddhavarapu
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Subways, sushi, bakers, and stonemasons: urban personalities and adventures await young city dwellers in a set of new board and picture books. A multigenerational team jaunts through colorful retro illustrations and the diverse wonders of metropolitan life in Cityblock (Abrams Appleseed, $16.95), the latest offering from author/illustrator duo Christopher Franceschelli and Peskimo. Though smaller in size, Brian Biggs’s Tinyville Town swells with spirit. When residents of the town encounter a dramatic problem (yikes! traffic jam!), Tinyville Town Gets to Work! (Abrams Appleseed, $16.95), enlisting the help of its citizens to construct a solution. An attendant board book, Tinyville Town: I’m a Veterinarian (Abrams Appleseed, $7.95), digs deeper into the profession of one good-hearted resident as she cares for animals from sunup to sundown. Certain to capture the attention and hearts of city kids, the books also highlight universal elements of community and will appeal to readers regardless of zip code. Ages 2-5. Amy Dickinson
Enjoy four classics of young people’s literature afresh with these new editions. For the littlest book lovers, the 20th anniversary edition of My Very First Mother Goose (Candlewick, $24.99) is a surefire hit: it contains the same classic tales, collected by folklorist Iona Opie, and time-tested illustrations by Rosemary Wells in a fresh new case and cover and includes a note from Opie about Mother Goose’s influence through the ages. David Macaulay, meanwhile, has released a gloriously updated version of his classic The Way Things Work. The Way Things Work Now (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35) features updated information and entire new sections, including one entitled “The Digital Domain.” Wizards and Muggles alike will adore Jim Kay’s sumptuously illustrated version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Arthur A. Levine, $39.99), the second installment of J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster series, while the generations of readers who loved S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (Penguin, $20) will revel in the extensive bonus material—from some of Hinton’s personal photographs to original review clippings—included in this 50th anniversary edition. Various ages. Janet Minichiello
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Rural Maine is a long way from the big city that Reena is used to, both in mileage and familiarity. Reena is excited about the change, however, and ends up embracing the opportunity to care for a cow named Zora under the supervision of an elderly and very particular neighbor. The bond that girl and cow form is undeniable, but when the prospect of entering Zora into the local agricultural fair arises, Reena isn’t sure that either of them is ready. But with the help of neighbors, friends, and family, perhaps anything is possible. Told in Sharon Creech’s striking and unforgettable verse, Moo (HarperCollins, $16.99) brings readers on a satisfying and heartwarming journey. Ages 9-12. Allison Witten
Author Cynthia Rylant and illustrator Arthur Howard have joined forces one last time to create the final installment of the beloved Mr. Putter & Tabby series. In their last escapade, Mr. Putter and his cat Tabby become a bit restless during the winter months: “things [are] a little slow,” and their favorite napping place, the hammock, is buried under a pile of snow. Luckily, with the help of their daring neighbor Mrs. Teaberry and her dog Zeke, Mr. Putter & Tabby Hit the Slope (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $14.99) and find a way to enjoy the cold in this delightful winter read. Ages 5-8. Kasie Griffitts
Juana loves her native city of Bogotá, Colombia, maybe even as much as she loves her canine “furry amigo” Lucas. Not only does this amazing perro know how to be a fútbol goalie; he can also sense when Juana has had a bad day, such as when she learns that she has to take English lessons in school. She doesn’t see the point of trying to learn this confusing new language—until her grandparents promise her a trip to the Spaceland amusement park in Florida. It’s time to show inglés who’s boss! Local author/ illustrator Juana Medina’s charming autobiographical story and endearing illustrations guarantee that Juana and Lucas (Candlewick, $14.99) will make many friends among young readers. Ages 6-9. Janet Minichiello
For more of our favorites, pick up a copy of the 2016 Children and Teens Department newsletter!
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Imagine a place where color is currency, up can also be down, and topsy-turvy adventure is almost required. This is a world known as Furthermore (Dutton, $17.99), and it’s where 12-year-old Alice must go if she wishes to find her missing father. With her sole companion, a young guide named Oliver with his own quirky secrets, it’ll take all her wits to return home to Ferenwood in one piece. Inspired by literary classics such as Alice in Wonderland, Tehereh Mafi has woven a new fairy tale that’s full of fast-paced fun and unexpected friendship. Ages 9-13. Emi London A beautiful young woman. An evil, jealous stepmother. Seven…boys? Matt Phelan’s brilliantly original graphic rendition of Snow White (Candlewick, $19.99) is not for the faint-hearted. Set in 1920s New York City, Snow’s father is a stockbroker and her stepmother a Broadway star known as Queen of the Follies; a stock ticker replaces the omniscient mirror; and a Macy’s holiday window becomes the glass coffin. The Art Deco font used for the title and chapter headings reflects the era, and Phelan’s primarily black-and-gray pencil, ink, and watercolor illustrations provide a stark contrast to the occasional burst of red and the full-color, happily-ever-after ending. Ages 10-14. Heidi Powell
Castle “Ghost” Cranshaw likes sunflower seeds, basketball, and has a lot of “scream inside.” Running fast isn’t something he’s ever had to practice; it’s just something he’s known how to do ever since the night he and his mom had to run for their lives. He doesn’t give this talent a second thought— until the day he crashes a track team practice and the coach asks him to join the lineup. From the first sentence of Ghost (Atheneum, $16.99), the first book in the highly anticipated Track series, Jason Reynolds brings the reader into the fast-paced and impactful story of a young teen chasing his dream while struggling to keep his emotions in check and navigate the consequences of his decisions. Ages 1014. Donna Wells A group of travelers staying at the same inn amuse themselves by telling each other stories about three very special children and their supposedly resurrected greyhound. Little do the raconteurs know that the man quietly listening to their tales is on a mission for King Louis of France, who is waging a crusade. The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog (Dutton, $17.99) imparts stories of miracles, dragons, religion, and more to reveal a mysterious world “full of wonders—and endlessly maddening,” but always amazing. Although younger readers may miss the echoes of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, they will be engrossed by Adam Gidwitz’s clever presentation of the Middle Ages. Hatem Aly’s illustrations evoke illuminated manuscripts and enhance this striking and satisfying adventure. Ages 11-14. Maria Salvadore Master illustrator Shaun Tan (The Arrival) has now turned to sculpture to capture the essence of 75 of the Grimms’ most famous fairy tales. The photographed tableaux in The Singing Bones (Arthur A. Levine, $24.99) harken back to the campfires and hearths where tales were once told and retold. Inspired by Inuit and pre-Columbian art, Tan’s small sculptures are spooky, wondrous, and whimsical. As Neil Gaiman notes in his foreword, these talismanic objects have a tactile quality; they seem to invite the reader to reach through the page and touch them. Excerpts from the Grimms’ tales translated by Jack Zipes accompany each tableau and are summarized in a paragraph at the end of the book. Ages 12 and up. András Goldinger
Sefia has been on the run from her father’s assassins for years with only her Aunt Nin for company. When Nin is captured and Sefia suddenly finds herself utterly alone, she decides that learning more about the mysterious object she carries with her that her pursuers so desperately desire might help her rescue Nin and avenge her father. Teens will be amused by Sefia’s puzzlement over the rectangular object with patterns of black lines printed on its pages, easily recognizable as a book. In her debut novel The Reader (Putnam, $19.99), Traci Chee weaves Sefia’s tale with that of other characters to provide a full picture of a world in which words are magic, literacy is nonexistent, and the powerful want to keep it that way. Ages 13-16. Sharat Buddhavarapu Henry Page has never been in love— at least, not until Grace Town walks into his classroom. What with her baggy boys’ clothes, walking cane, and obvious chip on her shoulder, she’s not your typical romantic heroine, but none of that matters as the two begin what quickly reveals itself to be a doomed relationship. Henry can’t help trying to “fix” Grace as he learns more about her complicated past and present, but he’s about to learn that there are some things even love can’t cure. Told with plenty of humor and refreshingly contemporary dialogue, Krystal Sutherland’s heartbreakingly smart debut Our Chemical Hearts (Putnam, $17.99) teaches readers the difficult lesson that sometimes, loving means letting go. Ages 14-18. Emi London When Vic Bennucci arrives in Hackensack, New Jersey with little more than an urn filled with his father’s ashes, his prospects are not very bright. But then he meets Mad, a scarred girl with her own secrets, who initiates him into a group of semi-homeless young people with traumatic histories. As the Kids of Appetite (Viking, $18.99) help their newest member carry out his father’s wishes regarding the scattering of his ashes, Vic falls hard for Mad— and another of their number is falsely accused of murder. David Arnold’s latest novel is a gripping look at what happens when innocent young people fall through the cracks of society. Ages 14 and up. Janet Minichiello
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As a child, legendary congressman John Lewis was in charge of the chickens on his family’s sprawling Alabama farm. He got up early every morning to feed them dried corn, line their nests with straw, and talk to them. Inspired by the music and ministers of his family’s church, John also began Preaching to the Chickens (Nancy Paulsen, $17.99). He didn’t mind that his brothers and sisters mockingly called him Preacher: he hoped that one day his words really would move people to action. Jabari Asim provides a glimpse into the roots of Lewis’s activism, which began with the civil rights movement and continues today. E.B. Lewis’s watercolor and gouache illustrations gloriously emphasize the lighting of each scene and perfectly match the tone and mood of this simple yet prophetic story. Ages 5-8. Heidi Powell
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps as well known for her objections as she is for her dedication to fairness and equality. I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes her Mark (Simon and Schuster, $17.99) documents Ginsburg’s lifelong ease with raising concerns about the status quo. From academics to hobbies and family life, she didn’t believe in adhering to restrictive social norms for girls and minorities, a conviction that made history as she ascended to the bench of the highest court in the United States. Debbie Levy narrates Elizabeth Baddeley’s comicbook-like illustrations to tell this amusing and inspirational tale, with a refreshing emphasis on the fact that constructive disagreement is a vital part of life. Ages 7-10. Allison Witten
“Some pig!” famously declared Charlotte the spider in E.B. White’s classic novel Charlotte’s Web. Now, acclaimed author/ illustrator Melissa Sweet admiringly proclaims that White was Some Writer! (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $18.99) in her picture-book biography of the beloved author. The cleverly executed scrapbook-like format allows room for photos, memorabilia, personal letters, and manuscripts, as well as numerous quotations that reveal White’s inner character. Tidbits such as how White added two eyes and three hairs to Garth Williams’s drawing of Charlotte to complete it, or how the story of Stuart Little came to White in a dream on a train, will make fans of all ages agree that this is some book! Ages 8 and up. Margaret Orto
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Seeking a thoughtful biography? Striking illustrations? Children’s poems that wake you up to the world around you? You’re in luck: Are You an Echo?: The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko (Chin Music, $19.50) weaves all these elements into a harmonious whole. Michiko Tsuboi and Sally Ito have translated a selection of Kaneko’s poems, accompanied by the original Japanese text, into English for the first time, while David Jacobson provides a compelling account of her short but eventful life. With warmhearted illustrations from Toshikado Hajiri, this volume digs deeply into the empathy, sorrow, and joy that define life as we know it. Ages 6-11. Amy Dickinson
Bacus. Mulvina. Athelia. Qush. Dora. Peggy. Jane. John. Betty. Charlotte. Stephen. These names don’t sound familiar for a reason: they belong to slaves whose stories were lost in the oblivion of hatred, inhumanity, and racism— until three-time Coretta Scott King Award winner Ashley Bryan came into possession of the 19th-century document that listed them as property for sale. In Freedom Over Me (Atheneum, $17.99), Bryan pays tribute to each of these individuals with a portrait and two poems, one to describe the reality of life on the plantation and one to give voice to dreams that never came true. This is a deeply moving book that will carry the names of these now-unforgotten souls into the hearts of readers young and old. Ages 10-14. Janet Minichiello
Whether you are an avid naturalist, a mere dabbler in natural history, or a newcomer to the field, you will find A Child’s Introduction to Natural History: The Story of Our Living Earth—From Amazing Animals and Plants to Fascinating Fossils and Gems (Black Dog & Leventhal, $19.99) an enthralling read. Opening the book is like stepping into a natural history museum; feel free to dip into “exhibits” on microlife, reptiles, or tundra, or devote yourself to taking a comprehensive tour from cover to cover. Author Heather Alexander and illustrator Meredith Hamilton have created an engaging format using sidebars, illustrations, and photographs to introduce fascinating facts, famous naturalists, scientific vocabulary, and even exciting experiments to budding scientists. Ages 9-12. Heidi Powell
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When you’re looking for something truly special to give, try one of these distinctive new volumes. Any children’s literature aficionado would treasure three new books that commemorate titans of the genre: A Celebration of Beatrix Potter (Warne, $25) contains excerpts from nine of Potter’s most beloved tales, which serve as inspiration for testimonials and creative new illustrations from luminaries such as David Wiesner and Rosemary Wells. Andrea Davis Pinkney pays tribute to Ezra Jack Keats and his classic The Snowy Day with A Poem for Peter (Viking, $18.99), illustrated by Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson. Or why not revisit Tomi Ungerer’s most beloved stories, including The Three Robbers, with Tomi Ungerer: A Treasury of 8 Books (Phaidon, $49.95)? This stunning collector’s edition includes bonus features such as previously unpublished material and an exclusive interview with the master himself. Book lovers big and small, meanwhile, will adore the collaboration of author/ illustrator Oliver Jeffers with typographic artist Sam Winston that gave birth to A Child of Books (Candlewick, $17.99), a little girl who climbs up mountains and sleeps on clouds made of blocks of quotations from classic children’s novels as she gives a new friend a tour of the myriad worlds to be discovered through reading. Anne Herbauts experiments not only with type, but with format, texture, and more in What Color is the Wind? (Enchanted Lion, $19.95), a poetic exploration of how people can experience the same thing in different ways. Finally, make 2017 A Year Full of Stories (Frances Lincoln, $19.99): tales from around the world gathered and retold by Angela McAllister and illustrated by Christopher Corr symbolize important holidays throughout the year, with the Iroquois legend “How the Bear Clan Learned to Heal” marking World Health Day and the Arabic “The Boots of Hunain” celebrating Ramadan. Each of these titles will fill a particular niche on your favorite bookworm’s shelves. Various ages. Janet Minichiello
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Punderdome (Random House, $20)
Silicone, Airtight Lids (Charles Viancin, $11.95–$12.95) In flowers wrought of silicone, The merchants of Viancin trade; All cookery of middle-Earth These cunning blooms appear to aid. When braising in the microwave, No steam escapes their flowery grip; While at repast in wooded glade, They serve to cover cheesy dip. And everlong these blossoms last, Through countless lives of mortal men— At breakfasts and at birthday feasts They may be used oft and again.
If you know someone who loves playing with language and inventing puns, Punderdome is the perfect gift. Created by a father-daughter team as weekly pub-quiz-type competition, Punderdome is part Apples to Apples, part word puzzle—and wildly fun. The basic premise is this: one player draws two cards from a deck, while the rest of the players have a limited amount of time to come up with a pun that involves both cards. When time is up, the person who drew the two cards chooses the most pleasing pun. For example, if the cards drawn are “taxes” and “school”, you might say: “what do you call a room at IRS school? An audit-torium!” It’s creatively and intellectually challenging and endlessly delightful, equally great for family game night or a dinner party. Emily Riehl-Bedford
Rainbow Stick (Prodia, $11.95) and Rainbow Maker ( Kikkerland, $35) The most effective prescription-strength anti-depressants are now available over the counter—just in time for the holidays. The Rainbow Stick and the Rainbow Maker will mesmerize your blues away. Twirl the Rainbow Stick and watch a shimmering bubble shape-shift before your dazzled eyes. Then hang the Rainbow Maker in a cold winter window and let it refract the sun’s rays while glorious color blazes across your chastely tasteful walls. Warning: Consult your dealer before using in combination with other drugs. Common side effects include spontaneous whistling, an insatiable longing for unicorns, and hiccups. Leah Kenyon
Leah Kenyon
Climate Change Mug (Unemployed Philosophers Guild, $16) Want guilt with that? Pour hot liquid into the Climate Change Mug and watch as Earth’s coastlines disappear. Whether it’s a replacement for disposable cups, or a memento mori, no amount of sugar will make that brew any sweeter. For best results, use with fair trade coffee. Leah Kenyon
Baggu Totes Bookbone (Savannah Plastics, $9.95) Garlic-cheddar snickerdoodles anyone? Don’t let bad cookies happen to good people. Use a weighted BookBone bookmark to keep that recipe on the right page. Or use your BookBone to maintain a novel’s suspense—no accidentally flipping from page 122 to page 363 to learn, too soon, that the charming old lady next door was planting more than herbs in her kitchen garden. Other uses: paperweight, non-lethal cosh, toupee anchor. Leah Kenyon
(Baggu, $10.95) The next time you have to jump out of an airplane make sure to open Baggu for a parachute. Everything you’ve placed inside before your emergency jump is safe so don’t worry. Your keys, wallet, books, car, dogs, sunglasses, groceries, and coffee will all land with you in style. Just face it, it’s a lifesaver. Taren Stewart
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Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) wasn’t an urban planner, though The Death and Life of American Cities, with its model of the “mixed-income, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, sensitively scaled, densely populated community” remains one of the twentieth century’s most influential books. Nor was she an economist, though economics was at the heart of her work. She had no academic credentials at all, not even a bachelor’s degree. What she had was courage, curiosity, and an ongoing “conflict with received wisdom.” Robert Kanigel calls her “some odd breed of genius,” and her iconoclastic spirit infuses every page of his energetic Eyes on the Street (Knopf, $35). Jacobs said she “grew up with the idea that she could do anything”; she proceeded accordingly, leaving Scranton at age eighteen to become a writer in New York. She wrote on everything from furs and diamonds to Cold War propaganda and the metal industry, freelancing for Vogue, then working as a staff writer for Amerika (a publication of the Office of War Information), Iron Age, and Architectural Forum. Later, it was all books. Books—and a long and happy marriage to the architect Robert Jacobs, three unconventional children, and indefatigable social activism. Her fight against Robert Moses and his expressway was only one of Jacobs’s many battles; she protested the Vietnam War, was arrested twice, and moved to Toronto to keep her sons from being drafted. There she continued to work against large-scale urban renewal projects, and her home became a headquarters for community organizing. Ideas were Jacobs’s lifeblood and she was never more charismatic—never more of a people person—than when she was in the middle of a passionate debate. Laurie Greer
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Julia Ward Howe is best known for having written “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and history and literary buffs may also recognize her as poet, abolitionist, and advocate for women’s suffrage. But until now far less has been written about the depths of her misery in marriage, her secret writings or, on a brighter note, her proximity to the cultural and political leaders of her day. The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (Simon & Schuster, $28) by the superb literary critic and author Elaine Showalter, immerses readers in Howe’s public and private worlds—her civil wars. Seeing Howe through the lens of history, and with an honest but compassionate eye, Showalter describes her subject’s gallant but often tenuous attempts to match her great gifts, ambitions, and opinions against the challenges and expectations placed on women in nineteenth-century America. Part biography, part history, part social criticism, this is narrative non-fiction at its best—a story that tells a bigger story, one that engages the reader so deeply and on so many levels that, once you start reading, you won’t want to put it down. Lissa Muscatine
In The Six (St Martin’s, $29.99), a comprehensive account of the famous Mitford sisters, British journalist, writer, and biographer Laura Thompson revives a world both gone utterly and forever, and strikingly, disturbingly familiar. These crazy, dramatic, improbable lives play out against a background of mass rallies, simplistic, violent ideologies, rampant, resurgent nationalism and, finally, war. As the Mitfords rub shoulders with Churchill and Hitler, Mosley and Kennedy, their personal beliefs, actions, and rivalries, along with their devastating consequences, mirror the fractures in the wider world. Celebrities in a time even more ruthlessly judgmental than our own, the sisters were protected by breathtaking privilege and entitlement; they were symbols of inequality, and yet were often broke; lived close to power and history, and were powerless to change it; they were so clever, and yet so mad; so beautiful and yet so, so ugly. The Novelist, the “Normal” One, the Fascist, the Nazi, the Communist, and the Duchess, otherwise known as Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah, along with their parents and their brother, Tom, are forever linked as the “mad, mad Mitfords.” After all the myth-making, the novels and memoirs, the spin and the damage control, the fights and the reconciliations, Thompson’s book is a reminder that truth is still sometimes stranger, and more interesting, than fiction. David Maritz
In her first book, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why (Melville House, $25.99), the immensely talented young feminist writer, Sady Doyle, explores the phenomenon of women celebrities who rise to fame only to be derailed by a public “trainwreck.” Doyle, a staff writer at In These Times who founded the blog “Tiger Beatdown,” suggests that this is the predictable outcome for women who dare to deviate from conventional rules of female behavior. While her focus is on contemporary figures such as Whitney Houston, Miley Cyrus, and most of all Britney Spears, she traces the historical lineage of the trainwreck phenomenon back to Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë, Sylvia Plath, and Billie Holiday. The explosion of new media has only exacerbated the problem in recent times, making it easier to humiliate women public figures and harder for them to regain their footing. Political trainwrecks get brief attention from Doyle, but her ideas certainly reverberate in the aftermath of the 2016 campaign. Rebecca Traister’s new book was one of the most anticipated works of nonfiction in 2016, and for good reason. Described by writer Anne Lamott as “the most brilliant voice on feminism in this country,” Traister had already produced a searing examination of sexism and gender stereotyping in the 2008 presidential campaign (Big Girls Don’t Cry) before turning her attention to the experience of unmarried women throughout American history. All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (Simon & Schuster, $27; paper, $17) is a masterful exploration of how unmarried women are redefining notions of love, attachment, and marriage, and in the process are gaining unprecedented political, social, and economic power. Traister intersperses her own personal (and often very funny) experiences into the larger historical context, making for a fascinating book that has serious implications for American politics now and in the future. Section by Lissa Muscatine
Before there was Hillary, there was Eleanor. The third volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s magisterial biography, Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After (Viking, $40), covers the period from 1939 to 1962, completing Cook’s comprehensive and widely praised portrait of FDR’s wife with an account of the time when she most passionately fought for civil rights—battling against both racial and religious prejudices. In her daily newspaper columns and regular lecture tours, the first lady confronted the pre-war climate of xenophobia and bigotry, pushing for more generous immigration policies, especially for the burgeoning number of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Later, when the State Department refused to honor her pleas on behalf of wartime refugees, Mrs. Roosevelt’s controversial crusade made her hated by many Americans, mocked by the press, and targeted by the FBI, which monitored her mail. Although Cook never mentions Hillary Clinton, her admiring, unfailingly fascinating biography makes clear that the independent and courageous 32nd first lady is Hillary’s ideal role model. And though Eleanor dismissed the idea of ever holding public office herself, she was the first First Lady to speak at a political convention, and she accepted President Truman’s post-war appointment to serve as a U.S. delegate to the U.N., a position in which Cook believes she demonstrated leadership and diplomatic skills. Barbara Meade One of the standout biographies of the season is Victoria: The Queen (Random House, $35) by Julia Baird, an engaging portrait of one of the most famous and influential monarchs in European history. Victoria was the longest-reigning English monarch until her great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, broke her record in 2015. At a time when women were supposed to be submissive and subservient to men, Victoria reigned over the vast British Empire at the pinnacle of its power and influence. Baird’s book covers the whole of Victoria’s life, from her childhood in Kensington Palace through her marriage to her first cousin Albert and her sixtyfour-year monarchy until her death at the age of eighty-one. Her reign saw a massive expansion of the British Empire as well as significant political, industrial, and cultural changes and progress. This survey of her life focuses not just on her personal and professional triumphs but also on her missteps and flaws, presenting a well-paced, compelling portrait of a powerful woman who was, at the end of it all, still profoundly human. Baird’s book is biography at its best. Alexis Jason-Mathews
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer and a six-time champion, gracefully extended his personal spotlight to an international platform of social justice (as well as to literature: he’s written several history books, autobiographies, mysteries, children’s books, and graphic novels). Now he merges these passions and rallies for the win with Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality beyond Black and White (Time Home, $27.95). Working with his frequent co-writer Raymond Obstfeld, Abdul-Jabbar deploys history and statistics to assess America’s current state of angst with regard to Islamophobia, media bias, rape culture, and the social plague of inequality reflected in housing, education, employment, sexism, and racial profiling. To keep these themes poignant, lyrical, and connected, the authors put them in a musical framework, drawing from songs as a source for chapter titles and segues; give a listen to Marvin Gaye’s “Makes Me Wanna Holler,” Imagine Dragons” “Radioactive,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The latter initiates the book with the haunting refrain: “...when you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer/superstition ain’t the way.” Through its elevating soundtrack and accessible discourse, Writings on the Wall offers and inspires solutions, encouraging fundamental change and renewing belief in the power of community. Marc Powers
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Following in the footsteps of James Baldwin and his collection of essays, The Fire Next Time, Jesmyn Ward has gathered the work of today’s leading black writers for The Fire this Time (Scribner, $25). Featuring Claudia Rankine, Edwidge Danticat, Isabel Wilkerson, and many others, this collection makes an important contribution to the current discussion of race relations in America. Ranging from essays on Rachel Dolezal and the murals instructing New Yorkers what to do if they witness police brutality, to poetry and the legacy of Baldwin and his contemporaries, this forum reminds readers that the black community continues to experience the same bias it did when Baldwin was living and working. These pages are full of history, cultural criticism, and vivid first-hand accounts of what it means to be a part of the black community. Readers familiar with The Fire Next Time will find that its namesake does not copy nor repeat Baldwin’s original work, but draws from that powerful writer and expands on his thought in new ways. This quickly became one of my favorite books of the year. The power of hearing multiple black voices in one collection makes The Fire This Time well worth reading and a great holiday gift. Morgan Harding
If any book this year can help explain the sense of alienation and rage felt by poor and working-class whites in the rust belt and Appalachia, it’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (HarperCollins, $27.99) by J.D. Vance. This is not a political book. It’s a memoir and cultural exposé written by a young, white, straight, Protestant male who grew up in hillbilly country—a part of Ohio that could just as easily have been in the most depressed parts of Kentucky. Vance’s family suffered from the afflictions so often present in poor white communities—the very communities whose votes contributed to the election of Donald Trump this year. Vance chronicles joblessness, alcoholism, drug addiction, marital strife, domestic violence, inadequate schools, and more. That Vance made it out of his chaotic and often dysfunctional surroundings (his first stop was the military) is a testament to his own grit and intelligence, but also to his luck in having a few family members who, even amid their own turmoil, didn’t give up on him. A graduate of Ohio State and Yale Law School now working in the Bay Area, Vance still yearns to understand his former and current worlds and the enormous cultural chasm that divides them. This book is poignant and timely—a must read for anyone confounded by the class and cultural dynamics shaping America today. Lissa Muscatine
Extending her ground-breaking work on emotional values to the political sphere, the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild made ten extended visits to the Louisiana bayou region between 2011 and 2016. There she met with some sixty supporters of the Tea Party. Her goal wasn’t to argue, debate, or change minds—she wanted simply to get a sense of white conservatives’ feelings about current issues, especially those relating to the environment. Strangers in Their Own Land (New Press, $27.95) is her vivid and illuminating report of these discussions, which ranged from fracking to fish fries, sinkholes to Fox News. Viewing the Tea Party as “a culture” not just a politics, Hochschild strove to scale the “empathy wall” that divides people of different beliefs and to understand The Great Paradox: what makes those most in need of government assistance vote against it? Why, in the second poorest state, where 44% of the budget comes from federal funds, where the land and water have been ravaged by petrochemical and other industries, are people so avidly against federal regulation? It’s not that no one notices or cares about these problems; part of it is that they look to their own tight-knit communities for the kind of support progressives expect from the government. Other parts are more complicated, and Hochschild, a keen and respectful listener, lets these local leaders, current and retired factory workers, long-time farmers, Pentecostals, and many more, have their say. And when she returns home, she begins to see Berkeley through their eyes. Laurie Greer Julissa Arce’s parents left Mexico for the United States when she was three years old. For most of the next decade she lived with relatives in Mexico while her parents looked for work across the border. Arce was finally able to join them in Texas when she was eleven, entering the U.S. on a temporary tourist visa. When her visa expired, she stayed in Texas, attended high school and worked to help her parents try to scratch out a living. Even after her parents returned home, she stayed, running their food cart, going to the University of Texas, excelling in her studies, and landing a job on Wall Street, where she was a rising star with a six-figure salary to prove it. There was only one problem: She was still an undocumented immigrant, a fact she had to conceal from her Wall Street employers—Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch—as well as her peers, friends, and others out of fear she would be deported. My (Underground) American Dream (Center Street, $27) is her remarkable story and a reminder of the struggle and contributions of millions of immigrants who come to the United States in search of their dreams. Lissa Muscatine
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is here at last. To introduce itself, the long-awaited nineteenth member of the Smithsonian Institution commissioned essays from two dozen leading scholars and writers. These join nearly 280 photos of objects from the museum’s vast collection for the handsome, revelatory Dream a World Anew (Smithsonian, $40). Taking its title from a Langston Hughes poem and closing with Maya Angelou’s injunction to “lift up your hearts,” the book is truly an inspiration—one grounded in several centuries of struggle. Curated by the museum staff under the guidance of editor and deputy director Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Dream traces the experiences of African Americans from slavery to the Civil War, Reconstruction to the Great Migration, the Civil Rights movement to the cultural achievements of today. The photos include familiar faces—Harriet Tubman, Ralph Abernathy, Nina Simone—and introduce new ones—a former slave who sued for freedom and became a millionaire, a decorated World War I hero—along with objects ranging from Nat Turner’s Bible to minstrel show posters to Michael Jackson’s black fedora. The museum’s mission, as founding director Lonnie G. Bunche III states in his introduction, is to show “new audiences…the impact of black history and culture…to centralize the African American experience as a history that has shaped the identity of all Americans”; this book makes an exciting and important contribution to that end.
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The kidnapping of Patty Hearst by an obscure group of self-styled, violent revolutionaries calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army became one of the defining events of the 1970s. Unfolding live on nationwide TV, it riveted viewers for months as Hearst, a granddaughter of famed publisher William Randolph Hearst, appeared to side with her captors, posed as a machine-gun toting Tania—her nom the guerre—joined in robberies, and conspired to set off bombs. Arrested after nineteen months and charged with robbery, Hearst argued that her actions had been coerced. But she was convicted and sentenced to seven years, only to be released by Jimmy Carter after twenty-two months and ultimately pardoned by Bill Clinton. She married, wrote a memoir, and went on to lead a life of comfort and privilege. But in American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (Doubleday, $28.95), legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin brings new information and insight to what we thought we knew about this extraordinary story and to the central question of whether Hearst was a brainwashed victim or a willing participant in the SLA’s crimes. Bradley Graham
Now is the time for this book. Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon, $35) is an in-depth look at a five-day revolt, and its aftermath, in one of the country’s most notorious prisons. To demand more humane treatment, 1,300 prisoners took charge of the entire facility, holding hostages to bolster their bargaining power. On the fifth day, the state stormed the prison with a show of brutal force, killing thirty-nine men—prisoners and hostages alike—and injuring hundreds more. Ultimately, only prisoners were tried, no state officials were held accountable, no support was given to the devastated victims and their families. This National Book Award Finalist is a report on mass incarceration, basic civil rights, and governmental abuse of power. Like I said, now is the time for this book. Jenny Clines
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No hospital in American history has been the source of more lore, whispers, and tabloid exposés than New York’s Bellevue. David Oshinsky’s wellresearched historical account, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital (Doubleday, $30), makes for reading as compelling as any true-crime thriller. The author of Polio and Worse than Slavery, Oshinksy delves bravely into all the corridors of Bellevue’s past. On the one hand Bellevue was one of the largest hospitals in American history and housed many of the best medical researchers, attending physicians, and professional nurses of the nineteenth century. On the other, it was viewed as a “bare-bones receptacle for the poorest of the poor, the dregs of society, the semi-criminal, starving, unwelcome class, who suffer and die unrecognized.” An absorbing topic, no doubt, and when you package it with Oshinsky’s easy writing style, you’ll spend hours engrossed in this book only to emerge wondering where the time has gone. Jenny Clines
In Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Doubleday, $29.95), Jane Mayer, an accomplished investigative journalist for The New Yorker, explores how right-wing billionaires, most notably David and Charles Koch, have shrewdly, systematically, and ruthlessly influenced such major centers of power in America as political institutions, academic establishments, courts, think tanks, and foundations. Drawing on court records, extensive interviews, and many private archives, Mayer traces how these enormously wealthy individuals with extreme libertarian views have furthered an agenda that has fortified their own corporate and political interests at the expense of meaningful financial, environmental, and labor reform. Mayer’s book contributes significantly to public understanding of the dark money that is tainting America’s political process, civic life, and democratic values. Four years ago, in the autumn of 2012, Mark Thompson was about to move from England to the United States to take up his new job as president and CEO of The New York Times. He had spent much of his career at the BBC, his final eight years there as director-general. But before moving to New York, he visited his alma mater, Oxford, where he delivered three lectures on rhetoric and the art of public persuasion. Those talks became the basis of his new book, Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? (St. Martin’s, $27.99). What remarkable timing for a book on the language of politics! But while Thompson does spend time assessing Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric, his work is a larger examination of how political language has evolved and how public discourse generally has degenerated, with damaging consequences for public trust and confidence. Freely mixing personal experiences with criticism and opinion, Thompson has produced a book that, as Publishers Weekly put it, “manages to be an exemplary investigation, a history, an autopsy, a practical manual, and a cautionary tale all at once.” Section by Bradley Graham
Alan Greenspan, who ruled the Federal Reserve for nearly twenty years from 1987 to 2006 as the most influential economic statesman of his time, has been a rather paradoxical and certainly controversial figure for many of us. He’s the libertarian ideologue who proved to be a skilled political pragmatist, and historical considerations of him have run the gamut from legendary maestro who masterfully maintained stable prices to villainous central banker who, whether through incompetence or a naïve belief in efficient markets, allowed for the disastrous financial bubble that burst in 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Sebastian Mallaby, an experienced journalist and author of several previous works on financial subjects, takes a very thorough and balanced approach in his comprehensive biography, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (Penguin Press, $40). The book, which Mallaby spent five years researching and writing, challenges the conventional notion that Greenspan believed blindly in models of market efficiency and underestimated the risk of what was happening with out-of-control mortgage securities. Rather, Mallaby argues persuasively, Greenspan’s main mistake was more a reluctance to act, the result of a reflexive passivity and instinct for political survival. Bradley Graham
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Like Stephen Hawking, “one of those physicists who know that time travel is impossible but also know it’s fun to talk about,” James Gleick, author of Chaos and The Information, plays with a century’s worth of ideas about time, from its secret identity as the fourth dimension to alternative sequences for past-present-future, to the obsolescence of the future itself in the digital age. His point of departure for this buoyant yet substantial “history” of Time Travel (Pantheon, $26.95), a phenomenon that hasn’t quite happened yet, is H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895, which marked the divide between old notions of cyclical time and the modern sense of time as an inexorable advance. Until the twentieth century, there were no time zones, no daylight saving time, no centennial celebrations. Utopias and dystopias were distant lands, not visions of the future. Gleick lays out the technological and scientific contributions to this new concept of time as well as examining what the changes meant for age-old questions about free will and the nature of consciousness. But “the rules of time travel have been written not by scientists but by storytellers,” and Gleick focuses on the literature of time, dipping into works by Wells’s contemporary, Proust, and their long line of descendants such as Asimov, Gibson, Calvino, Stoppard, and Wallace. Gleick has a sharp eye for wit, puzzles, and the telling paradox; if you don’t already have a taste for science fiction, his sampler will send you after more of this “roisterous temporal complexity.” Laurie Greer
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In Calculating the Cosmos (Basic Books, $27.99) award-winning scientist and math popularizer Ian Stewart takes the majesty and complexity of our universe and explains it, bit by bit, according to how the numbers add up. In addition to showing how math helps us understand the cosmos as it is (and will be), Stewart also humanizes and contextualizes our history of calculations. Through short summaries he explains how we came to better understand the universe, detailing our record of insights, mistakes, recalculations, and lucky guesses. Discussing everything from how the bodies in our solar system affect each other to whether dark matter exists, and on to speculations about how new discoveries may guide future deep space exploration, this book is for anyone who is fascinated by looking at the stars and wants to better understand their—and our—place in the universe. Bill Leggett
Spectrography is a way of studying stars by taking pictures that separate astral light into different wavelengths. The practice was pioneered by Dr. Henry Draper of Harvard Observatory in the late nineteenth century, but the long and detailed work of interpreting the images and classifying the stars was done by a group of women. In this long overdue tribute to Harvard’s “human computers,” Dava Sobel, author of the classic Longitude, brilliantly intertwines science, history, and biography, charting not only the advances in astro-physics from the 1870s to the 1940s, but following the progress women made in establishing themselves in a notoriously male-dominated field. The Glass Universe (Viking, $30), then, refers both to Harvard’s archive of hundreds of thousands of photographic plates and to the barriers women faced in becoming astronomers. The Harvard Observatory was more supportive of women than most; with fellowships endowed by Draper’s widow, the institution specifically looked for women with an aptitude for math, and its male directors gave them titles, publication opportunities, and credit for their discoveries. If they paid them less than men earned, Sobel points out that funding for scientific projects was always insufficient and unreliable. United in the quest to classify the heavens, the men and women of Harvard’s “little city of science” generally worked with and respected each other as equals, and it’s the work that Sobel spotlights here, documenting the many novae, variable stars, and much more discovered by women including Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Cecilia Payne—names unfamiliar to most of us, but essential in forming how we see both the cosmos and the lab. Laurie Greer Before he became “the architect of the nuclear age,” Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was known to his colleagues as The Pope of Physics (Holt, $30) for his infallible accuracy. One of the rare physicists equally adept as a theorist and an experimentalist, Fermi was also one of the few to be self-taught; a math prodigy, in 1915 he discovered a book on mathematical physics written in Latin in the 1830s and was hooked. As Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin recount in their masterful history of Fermi’s life, times, and work, the Nobel laureate was “seemingly impervious to fatigue, frustration, or dissatisfaction,” where science was concerned. Yet the authors, both related to people who knew Fermi, draw out the unfailingly thoughtful, complex man behind the world-changing discoveries. Claiming to be apolitical, Fermi was eager to make Italy a center for scientific research. Later, he was more attuned to the anti-Semitism of Mussolini’s Italy than his Jewish wife was, and it was he who persuaded her to emigrate to the U.S. With World War II, physics grew ever more inextricably linked to politics, and Fermi, who won the Nobel in 1938 for induced radioactivity (picking up the award on his way to Columbia University), could no longer practice “science for the sake of science.” In the U.S., though his Italian citizenship made him suspect, he was integral to the Manhattan Project and built the world’s first atomic-fission pile. Without getting too technical, the authors give readers enough science to appreciate Fermi’s achievements; while he was absorbed in the question of “could” nuclear physics be done, the world still wrestles with the “should“ of it. Laurie Greer
Say you’re a seasoned traveler who’s tired of guides that point you towards the same places every single time. To cure your ills, there’s no better book than Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton’s The Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders (Workman, $35), which comes replete with stories of incredible locations for the curious soul. Why not visit the Canadian Potato Museum, which prides itself on having “the largest exhibit of potato artifacts in the world”? The Child Eater of Bern, a five-hundredyear-old statue in Switzerland depicting a man munching on human babies, whose origin nobody knows? Or for the truly daring: The Gates of Hell, a hole in the ground in Turkmenistan that’s been burning constantly for forty years? It would not be exaggeration for me to say that these are only the tip of the iceberg; this book covers a lot of ground, and all of it will capture the imaginations of both the practical and the armchair traveler. But this is only the beginning. Readers will find more articles waiting on the official Atlas Obscura website, of which this volume represents merely a selection. Especially worth consideration for writers in need of ideas for stories: now, why has that hole in Turkmenistan been on fire for forty years running? Adam Wescott
The basic premise will be familiar to readers and movie-goers the world over: a band of disparate characters comes together, overcomes long odds to find common cause, and sets off on epic adventures to achieve greatness as a unified force. From The Lord of the Rings to The Magnificent Seven and The Guardians of the Galaxy, this trope has been used with great effect. The story Ben MacIntyre tells in Rogue Heroes (Crown, $28) is just such a tale but with an added enticement: it is all completely true. MacIntyre expertly charts a pulseraising narrative about the formation of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS), a now legendary special operations unit, during World War II. Filled with striking characters like SAS-founder David Stirling, a man once described as being “quite, quite irresponsible,” to Jock Lewes, Stirling’s second recruit and someone who struck his peers as resembling a warrior from a bygone era, the heroism and shortcomings of this group are as amazing and astonishing as those in any fictional thriller. On their very first mission, for example, SAS recruits had to parachute behind enemy lines, during a gale-force storm—with essentially zero parachuting experience. As SAS Sergeant Jim Almonds wrote, “reality beats fiction for sheer, cold, calculating courage. Films and books of adventure fall far short of the real thing.” Michael Triebwasser
People are living longer today, but the subject of aging has received relatively little literary attention. That paucity of what Canadian journalist and author Ian Brown calls “authentic” writing about aging inspired him to keep a diary beginning on his sixtieth birthday and continuing until his sixty-first. And thus was born Sixty (Experiment, $24.95), an unvarnished examination of his foibles and fantasies, failures and fulfillments. With a literary touch, humor, and charm, Brown meditates on gardening, marriage, uncooperative body parts, and how to measure one’s life and work. His story is particularly poignant when recounting the challenges of raising a severely disabled son, (the subject of his highly acclaimed first book, The Boy in the Moon). While it’s easy for those of us of a certain age to recoil at the thought of reading a book about getting older (who wants to go there?), Brown’s work is the perfect entry point. One discovers reading Sixty that there’s really nothing to fear about the topic! Lissa Muscatine Michael Kinsley, who turned sixty-five this year, is arguably too young to have written a book he’s calling a primer to growing old. But as he acknowledges in Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide (Tim Duggan, $18), Kinsley has been nothing if not precocious for a good part of his career. Besides, he got a head start on experiencing and thinking about ageing when, at forty-three, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. This is a thin, small book, but it’s filled with insight, wit, and Kinsley’s characteristic well-pitched prose. Bradley Graham
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We go to religion to discover why we are born, why we die, why we suffer—and to find out if there’s anything after. The record of different approaches to these mysteries, from animism to myths to monotheism, is the ongoing quest Richard Holloway traces in his engaging A Little History of Religion (Yale, $25).The seventh in Yale’s series of brief overviews of complex subjects, this was inspired by E.H. Gombrich’s 1935 A Little History of the World and is designed for both adults and younger readers. Holloway’s focus on etymology, for instance, gives a solid introduction to terms like apocalypse, karma, and ecumenical, while also clearing these tenets of accumulated and misleading assumptions. As a former Bishop of Edinburgh who resigned after fourteen years of growing doubts, Holloway is familiar with both the allure and the elusiveness of spiritual fulfillment. “You don’t have to believe or accept any of this,” he says, “but if you want to understand religion, you have to get your mind into its way of thinking.” Religion’s way is artistic and interpretive; grounded in stories, symbols, and ritual, it deals in emotional truths. In Holloway’s even-handed treatment, each different faith is like one of the blind men describing an elephant in the Jain tale: they get at best an accurate, but incomplete picture of the whole. The problem isn’t the partial vision, but a faith’s failure to understand that it is partial, and Holloway laments religion’s tendency to make itself the “strange god” people worship instead of the divinity it claims to represent. But if some sects calcify, fresh ones keep rising, as if religion itself is caught in a cycle of death and rebirth, always hoping finally to get it right and reach Nirvana. Laurie Greer
Sitting, eating, walking, loving, relaxing— human enough behaviors with varying degrees of difficulty. Now, in this serenely packaged How to Live Boxed Set (Parallax Press, $49.75), mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s straight-forward advice for living in the present is even easier to access. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us to be still and to focus our attention on whatever act we are performing. Whether you are walking from your home to the metro, showing loving kindness for a friend, or simply listening to the sounds around you, stillness and openness will help you act with grace. Jenny Clines
When you think of warm and fuzzy holiday cheer, Jeanette Winterson is not the first author that comes to mind. But it turns out that the experimental British novelist, known for her explosive, fractured language (in such novels as Sexing the Cherry and The Passion) and her searing family memoir Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? has a doozy of a secret: she is a full-on Christmas devotee, bursting with affection for our idiosyncratic traditions and personalized rituals around the holidays. Christmas Days (Grove, $24) is a compilation of the holiday stories Winterson has been writing annually for the past twelve years and it delights in shattering expectations. It is positively cozy. Filled with recipes (Kathy Acker’s custard recipe!) and stories, it’s the Christmas book every person who eschews Hallmark has been waiting for. It glows with full-bodied, non-ironic joy. Liz Hottel
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When a group of philosophers was recently asked to name the most influential dead thinker, they selected David Hume (runners up: Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein). Selling points for this eighteenth-century Scottish historian and economist include his knack for delivering unsettling ideas—such as naturalism, which robbed the miraculous of its supernatural tenets—in such a genial mode that people hesitated to attack him as a heretic. Anthony Gottlieb, the former executive editor of The Economist, is another deft, congenial writer, and his long-awaited The Dream of Enlightenment (Liveright, $27.95) continues the fascinating exploration he began with his 2001 The Dream of Reason, which gave a fresh and refreshing account of the thought of the ancient Greeks. As he did with the ancients, Gottlieb treats the Enlightenment figures, starting with Descartes, like paintings that have become smudged and muddied by time and fingerprints. He strips away the patina of received ideas, and looks as directly as a historian of ideas can at what these men actually said (all men. As Gottlieb notes, this was only “The Age of Trying to be More Reasonable”). Often, what they first meant isn’t how later audiences have understood it. Was Descartes such a hard-core dualist? Gottlieb shows he wasn’t the “rampant subjectivist” he’s thought to be. And Hobbes—we know him for “nasty, brutish, and short,” but his first and abiding love was geometry. And so on, with Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and several French philosophes. Each of Gottlieb’s brief chapters is a masterpiece of brevity and lucidity. John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and while one of his goals with American Philosophy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) is to trace the origins of the country’s distinctive takes on transcendentalism and pragmatism, his book is decidedly not academic; rather, he writes to disprove his fear that “philosophy [is] no longer intensely personal.” Structured around the unexpected task of cataloging the library of William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), the book is at once Kaag’s own Dantesque journey through a dark period that includes the death of an alcoholic father, the end of a marriage, and a disillusion with academia, and a survey of philosophy as he works through Hocking’s tens of thousands of volumes. Though now merely a “nearly famous philosopher,” Hocking was renowned in his day, and counted among his friends William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and many others. As he comes upon their books, Kaag summarizes arguments, reads choice selections, and contextualizes the thoughts within the thinker’s life—and within his own. Immediate and urgent, these aren’t lessons but true discoveries, and Kaag goes from volume to volume, tradition to tradition, 19th-century American to German Romanticism, idealism to phenomenology, famous men to unfairly overlooked women, looking for the answer to James’s question, “Is life worth living?” Laurie Greer
Daniel Levitin is a distinguished neuroscientist and expert on cognitive science, and what he’s offering in A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (Dutton, $28) are some very helpful ways to sift through the growing barrage of information facing us day in and day out. How to tell fact from fiction. How to make sense of statistics. How to think critically about all the words and numbers coming at us nonstop. These are the challenges that Levitin addresses, and he provides some essential tools for navigating daily through the news and getting to the truth of matters. As he reminds us, we all would do well to heed that old maxim (often falsely attributed to Mark Twain): “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Bradley Graham
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Bob Dylan won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature—unprecedented, and richly deserved. The comprehensive The Lyrics: 1961 – 2012 (Simon & Schuster, $60) gives Dylan’s words on the page. But the lyrics only come alive in performance. And the newly released The Real Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert (Columbia, 2 CDs, $16.98) gives you glorious acoustic and electric performances (featuring the Band) of some of his best songs. There are mesmerizing versions of (then) newly written songs like “Visions of Johanna,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Ballad of a Thin Man” and many more.
Over the past year, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, Hamilton, has won a bevy of awards, sold out shows across the country, and dominated pop-culture like no other show in recent memory—or maybe ever. In Hamilton: The Revolution (Grand Central, $45), Miranda and theater critic Jeremy McCarter provide a detailed look into the show’s gestation from a single rap about the founding fathers to a full blown Broadway phenomena. The book includes detailed liner notes, deleted songs, photographs, interviews (including several with President Obama), and a guide to the show’s many hip hop references. The juicy behind the scenes details and anecdotes are sure to be catnip for theater nerds. But the insight into the multi-talented Miranda’s creative process is a fascinating read for both fans and newcomers alike. Tom Warren
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Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton has become a cultural phenomenon. The musical won 11 Tonys, a Grammy, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is about to explode with touring company productions in many cities. Brand new is The Hamilton Mixtape (Atlantic Records, $17.98), produced by Questlove and Black Thought of the Roots. The songs from Hamilton are newly sung and remixed by stars such as John Legend, Regina Spektor, Nas, Queen Latifah, and Kelly Clarkson. Interspersed are a few of the original song demos by Mr. Miranda himself.
Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (Spiegel & Grau, $28; paper, $17) intertwines two of author James McBride’s greatest passions and talents—writing and music—in this biography of legendary soul singer James Brown. To those of us who grew up listening to his music in the 1960s, James Brown was the Godfather of Soul and the musical father of Black Pride. He did his own version of the moonwalk in high-heeled boots! He did the splits in a suit! He had faux fainting spells! And his cape! Brown had, the author contends, as profound an influence on American social history as Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass. But much of his reputation and legacy became tangled up in unflattering impressions and tragic incidents from his life, too often leaving him marked and misinterpreted as more of a simple caricature than the complicated cultural icon and enormously talented artist he truly was. McBride, the 2013 National Book Award winner for fiction (The Good Lord Bird) tells Brown’s story, in one reviewer’s words, as “a furious ode.” Lissa Muscatine
2016 started with the last testament from one creative master—David Bowie’s Blackstar—and ended with the final words from another— Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker.
Bruuuuuce! The long-awaited memoir from the Boss has finally arrived, with a whirlwind tour of a life in rock and roll. In Born to Run (Simon & Schuster, $32.50) Bruce Springsteen takes us from his humble beginnings in working-class Freehold, New Jersey, all the way to the pinnacle of his superstar performance at the Super Bowl—and everything in between. Springsteen is not one to shy away from any subject, including his difficult, distant, and sometimes emotionally abusive relationship with his father; failed bands and a failed first marriage, and the deaths of fellow band members and close friends. But mostly, this memoir is about the music: the feeling in his hands of the first guitar he ever bought, those early live shows at run-down, seedy bars on the beaches of Asbury Park, the cutting of each album along the way and what the writing and recording process was like, and the meaning behind many of the characters and lyrics we have grown to love. The prose reads as if you are listening to a Bruce song, sitting in the front row at one of his legendary concerts. It’s a ride you’ll hope never ends. Check out the companion CD as well, which features some top tracks and previously unreleased early recordings. Keith Vient
Over the years, the legend of Brian Wilson’s personal struggles has threatened to overshadow the groundbreaking work he did with the Beach Boys. In I Am Brian Wilson (Da Capo, $26.99) the musician, with writer Ben Greenman, finally gets a chance to tell his story from his own perspective. In many ways, this book is an antidote to his earlier memoir, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, ghostwritten by Wilson’s domineering therapist Eugene Landy. In this update, Wilson freely admits that his memory is spotty, and the book often reads as Wilson’s attempt to make sense of his recollections, both good and bad. The narrative often succumbs to melancholy, as when Wilson reflects on his tyrannical father, his mental breakdown at age twenty-five, his struggles with drugs, his therapist Landy, and his own inadequacies as a father. However, Wilson also shares his musical inspirations, insights into his creative process, his joy at making music, and his artistic comeback in the 2000s. I Am Brian Wilson is ultimately a rewarding read, as the author invites us to help him comb through his life story and find the one thing that always came so easily to him in his music: harmony. Tom Warren
Stop in at the store and pick up copies of András’s recommendations, FAVORITE CDS OF 2016 and the 2016 HOLIDAY MUSIC GUIDE.
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After bottling lighting and infusing it into the Rodeo Drive retail brands of Nasty Gal and #Girlboss, Sophia Amoruso repeats this feat with Nasty Galaxy (Putnam, $37). Comprised, in part, of fashion + interior design, photography, recipes, and profiles on glam punk, riotgrrlll, womanist icons (Patti Smith, Tura Santana, Pam Grier, Siouxie Sioux), Nasty Galaxy thrives on free association as Amoruso charts a cosmology of kick-ass. Each of the twelve chapters, appended to a corresponding astrological sign, is heralded by the artwork of an iconic album cover, featuring artists such as Bauhaus, Betty Davis, and David Bowie. This luminous volume, swathed in a hot pink cloth cover, reads like a hypnotic Instragram feed, or an analog version of your favorite Tumblr/Pintrest board. Accordingly, its additional featured lists and assorted quotes pop like memes on the lustrous pages of its square folio, including one attributed to the oft black-clad rocker, Joan Jett—“I Don’t Look Good In Beige.” Immersed in defiant style and self-assuring swagger, Nasty Galaxy will lighten moods and brighten any room. Marc Powers
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Six years after his passing, Alexander McQueen remains one of the world’s iconic designers. His revolutionary fashions were both shocking and impressive, from the “bumsters” of his debut 1993 collection to the bloody rendition of his Scottish heritage in the controversial Highland Rape show. Alexander McQueen: Unseen (Yale, $65), by Robert Fairer, brings us a little closer to McQueen’s earliest runway shows, which, dating to pre-social media years, were difficult to see. In this rich book of images, Fairer, a backstage photographer for Vogue, replicates the experience of each and every Alexander McQueen runway. He briefly describes the context, the atmosphere, the sounds, and the lights of each show, then transports us to a frontrow runway seat, telling us what it was like to actually be there and see McQueen’s work first-hand. The photographs are vibrant and expressive; with details from old film negatives, Fairer juxtaposes one picture against another, mimicking the action of the runway. He intersperses full-frontal fashion shots with varied angles and backstage views of the models laughing together with makeup smeared over their eyelids. This book is a gorgeous tribute to McQueen’s artistry and theatre and a perfect addition to any fashion lover’s bookshelf. Ashfia Khan
In their elegant folio, The Art of Movement (Black Dog & Leventhal, $50), photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory use agile lighting, premier color separation, and gorgeous blackand-white contrast to capture the graceful line and flow of dancers’ limbs, costumes, and torsos. Over the course of some three-hundred dazzling pages, these amazing photos are accompanied with insightful quotations on their principals—artists of such premier companies as The Royal Ballet, The Martha Graham Company, New York City Ballet, and Alvin Ailey, with solos by Misty Copeland, Robert Fairchild, Masha Dashkina Maddux, PeiJu Chien-Pott, and Lloyd Knight. The art of dance is an art of transcendence, and these images not only take bodies beyond their own immediate spaces, they fill space with a stunning suspension. These are dancers in an elemental state—appearing to be floating simultaneously in air and water. Anchored with choice design and weighted paper, The Art of Movement is a prime holiday selection for any dance enthusiast. Marc Powers The history of the Bolshoi is a history of juxtapositions: beauty, grace, incredible dancers and performances, gold leaf and red velvet get as much stage time as arson, abuse, personal grudges, and rivalries. In Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today (Liveright, $35), Simon Morrison, a Princeton professor of music and author of a profile of the Prokofievs, Lina and Serge, looks at all sides of this premier ballet company, from the building that houses it, its directors and managers, to its choreographers, composers, and dancers. He fully justifies the claim that ballet is “the most Russian of arts” (even if the first Moscow ballet was started by an Englishman). Morrison also studies the Bolshoi as a cultural institution, a diplomatic tool, and a symbol of national power and pride. Indeed, the Bolshoi’s backstage life is a microcosm of modern “grime and glitz” Russia, with politics and art inextricably linked. Anton Bogomazov
Game Worn: Baseball Treasures from the Game’s Greatest Heroes and Moments (Smithsonian Books, $34.95) brings baseball history to life through its iconic memorabilia. By Stephen Wong, a lifelong collector of baseball artifacts and the author of Smithsonian Baseball, and photographer Dave Grob, this collection of essays and photographs features one-of-a kind relics from throughout the 20th century, from Ty Cobb’s sharpened spikes to David Cone’s crisp and pristine game uniform, charting the evolving look and recalling the major moments of the game. Richly nostalgic and lovingly rendered, this book will bring baseball fans of all ages back to their youth. Go, team! Bill Leggett
are available in any denomination and can be used online or in the store.
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Alfred Hitchcock’s life, his films, and the ways in which they intersect are well trodden territories. Peter Ackroyd’s Alfred Hitchcock (Nan A. Talese, $26.95) gives a chronological overview of Hitch’s life and his work. We are guided through the filmmaker’s upbringing in Dickensian London, through war-ravaged Britain, and taken to Hollywood. Ackroyd pays special attention to the director’s Catholicism, his macabre sense of humor, and his grueling work ethic. He also details and analyzes each of Hitchcock’s films. Ultimately, this comprehensive biography shows us just how hard it is to know Hitchcock, a man who directed his life’s story with the same control he wielded in his films. Tom Warren
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The moment the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, cameras converged off-field around Bill Murray, whose unwavering fandom of the tormented team heralded the end of their one-hundred-eightyear Billy Goat curse. In The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing (Random House, $26), Gavin Edwards uses The Ten Principles of Bill (my favorite being The Second: Surprise is golden; Randomness is lobster), to examine the endearing zen of this actor/comedian/ everyman. In addition to highlighting these principles, Edwards attempts to reconcile Murray’s mythic man with his true identity. In doing so, the author aptly assesses Caddyshack, Stripes, and Ghostbusters as developing an onscreen persona where “the wiseass slacker gets the girl,” while revealing Murray’s offscreen identity as an actor who “throws away the script, only to improvise the best scene in the movie.” Edwards also considers the phenomenon of random Bill Murray sightings at archeological digs, weddings, and, most dramatically, at red lights—when fingers cascade to cover the eyes of a waiting pedestrian, only to disappear and reveal our beloved clown who jokingly says, “No one will believe this happened.” Marc Powers
Let’s be honest: when a celebrity puts out a memoir it often seems nothing more than an easy way to cash in on their moment. I confess I wasn’t expecting that much from Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime (Spiegel & Grau, $28) outside of a few laughs. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Born a Crime is a revelation, and easily one of my favorite books of 2016. Noah tells his extraordinary story of growing up bi-racial in apartheid South Africa, and while there are gutbusting set pieces involving bad dates and cultural misunderstandings, the true heartbeat of this memoir is Noah’s complex and fiercely devoted mother who guides him through a childhood of painful—and sometimes violent— situations. Superstar editor Chris Jackson (Just Mercy, Between the World and Me) has worked his magic again—the prose here is raw and wrenchingly smart and it flows beautifully from one section to the next. Born a Crime is the book to take on a family vacation this year: pass it all around the cabin—everyone, from the pre-teen son to the family matriarch, will find something to connect to in this heartbreaking, hysterical, warm, and unforgettable book. Liz Hottel
Do you have a millennial child or grandchild? Check. Do you want to be the world’s coolest parent or grandparent this holiday season? Check. Carry this Book (Viking, $25) is your golden ticket and hands-down the quirkiest, winningest stocking stuffer of the year. Sprung from the effervescent imagination of Abbi Jacobson, one half of the feminist comedy super-duo behind the Comedy Central hit Broad City, Carry this Book is filled with beautiful, pen-streaked, handdrawn illustrations. Jacobson imagines what lies in the bags and pockets of the famous; here are her renderings of the things carried by historical figures ranging from Gandhi (a soccer ball and fake teeth) to Anna Wintour (Chipotle Burrito card, “extra guac always”). This is a sly and warm commentary on our new celebrity culture—on the things that truly make us all who we are, when social media isn’t watching. Liz Hottel The Best of the Harvard Lampoon: 140 Years of American Humor (Touchstone, $26) is the first anthology ever produced by the venerable humor magazine, which began in 1876. President Ulysses S. Grant is said to have been warned against reading the Lampoon as it would leave him “in stitches” and unable to lead the government. Since then, contributors to the magazine have gone on to write for The National Lampoon, The New Yorker, Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock and many other publications, movies, and TV shows. Included here are some very funny people, including B.J. Novak, Henry Beard, Andy Borowitz, George Plimpton, Conan O’Brien, John Updike, and Patricia Marx to name just a few. Mark LaFramboise
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A Recipe for Cooking (Morrow, $29.99) is Cal Peternell’s follow up to his 2014 book 12 Recipes. In the earlier book, Peternell teaches home cooks some basic recipes and techniques, while his newest takes these lessons to the next level. Organized by season, the meals presented here range from intimate dinners for two to banquets designed to feed a large crowd. Some of the recipes included: Savory Tart with Onions, Olive, and Anchovies; Shredded Zucchini Fritters with Basil Mayonnaise; Citrus Salad with Ginger, Cilantro, and Saffron-toasted Pistachios. With photographs and drawings, Peternell explains everything clearly and puts these tasty dishes within range of intrepid home cooks. Mark LaFramboise You’ve probably never heard of Julia Turshen, but you’ve mostly likely seen her work. After years of co-authoring and ghost writing cookbooks, she has finally come out with her own collection of recipes. In Small Victories (Chronicle, $35), Turshen shares cooking philosophy and kitchen strategies, doling out tips and techniques that make cooking easier, more successful, and more meaningful— here’s how to finish pasta in the sauce rather than in the water, and how to use herbs that are past their prime. This book lets you sample Turshen’s home repertoire; she gives you her aunt’s peerless chicken soup, her wife’s roasted sweet potatoes, and her own famous Caesar salad dressing. Each recipe also comes with a collection of spin-off ideas, using the ingredients in the dish at hand. This is the kind of cookbook that will be stained and spattered from use in a matter of months, perfect for both a new home cook and an old hand in need of fresh inspiration. Emily Riehl-Bedford
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Diana Henry stands in the pantheon of contemporary British food writers, along with the likes of Anna Jones, Nigel Slater, and Jamie Oliver In her newest book, Simple (Mitchell Beazley, $32.99), Henry offers up a collection of modest and yet flavorful recipes that you can make with what’s already in your kitchen. With sections like eggs, toasts, sausages and chops, the book focuses on getting an inspired and elegant dinner on the table quickly and without fuss. Henry also does that wonderful British thing of pulling flavors from around the world, as in her recipes for Burmese Chicken with Tart Chili Sauce, Turkish Pasta with Feta Yogurt and Dill, and Baked Sweet Potato with Chorizo, Mushrooms and Eggs. Simple is a book for anyone who relishes time in the kitchen and especially for those who have precious little of it to spend there. Emily Riehl-Bedford When Naomi Duguid (author of Burma) researches her cookbooks, she immerses herself, learning recipes in homes, at village stalls, even by campfires. In Taste of Persia (Artisan, $35), she travels through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan. There are chapters on simple salads, dumplings and stuffed vegetables, soups and stews, flatbreads, and perfumed rice dishes (paying special attention to the tasty crust!). Easy to prepare, many of these recipes are based on the staples of the region: saffron, pomegranate molasses, yogurt, mint oil, rose water, and plenty of fresh fruits and herbs. The book features many of Duguid’s photos plus insightful short sidebars on everything from Azeri picnics and Georgian wines to Yazidi and Assyrian culture. Above all, Duguid was met with open-hearted hospitality, and she extends this same generosity to us with this collection. András Goldinger
In the mold of his award-winning and bestselling How to Cook Everything, Mark Bittman’s newest print companion for home cooks is loaded with over 2,000 recipes that encompass every culinary category and cater to every skill set. How to Bake Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35) is the essential cookbook for food lovers. From the most straightforward and classic of cookies to pastry recipes that may be new even to accomplished bakers, Bittman is allinclusive, giving cooks the delicious, the tempting, the sinful. Recipes for sweet, decadent, and even savory provisions are staged and organized to be not only accessible to the home baker, but, simply, possible. Illustrated instructions help users practice and master various techniques, while tips for frosting, rolling, shaping, kneading, and drizzling will make your finished product the star of your next obligation, er, potluck. Keep this fabulous compendium for yourself to avoid being outshined, or gift it to multiply your chances for devouring luxurious treats. For the baker in your life, renowned chef and cookbook author Dorie Greenspan has whipped up her most appetizing and tempting collection yet: a book devoted to cookies. Packed with tried-and-true favorites as well as new enticements, Dorie’s Cookies (Rux Martin, $35) is the perfect way to practice your baking skills, master a new family favorite, and ruin your diet. There are recipes for everyday confections as well as chapters on brownies, bars, special treats for particular occasions, and “cocktail cookies”—more than enough to make this book your favorite kitchen companion. Whether you’re looking for a shortbread recipe, a way to make mini pies, or instructions for a deepfried delicacy, Dorie has you covered. Alongside ample recipes, Dorie also helps take the guesswork out of baking techniques with “The Perfect-Cookie Handbook.” Pages of tips and guidelines for a little TLC, plus a review of the proper and preferred gear, set this compilation apart and guarantee perfect treats.
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