Politics and Prose 2017 Holiday Newsletter by Politics & Prose Bookstore

2017

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Welcome to the 2017 Politics and Prose Holiday Newsletter! As always, we’re proud to present a selection of some of the year’s most impressive books. These include both the major award-winners in a range of genres and less visible literary gems we wouldn’t want you to miss. We hope you enjoy the catalog and we look forward to sharing more recommendations with you in our stores. Happy holidays to all!

The moral conundrum in this edgy, contemporary interpretation of Sophocles’s Antigone is how we balance fidelity to faith, family, and country. The novel’s central characters, who, like author Kamila Shamsie, are Londoners of Pakistani descent, are forced to contemplate unspeakable personal choices thanks to a series of events that entangle them through love, friendship, and jihad. Crisp prose, surprising twists of plot, and an ending that will send chills up your spine are among the reasons Home Fire (Riverhead, $26) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The seventh and best book yet from this talented young writer—and my favorite novel of the year.

Winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize, George Saunders’s amazing first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, $28), could easily be a play. There’s no narrator, no omniscient scene-setter, only voices. The narrative unfolds in the dual worlds of Washington, D.C., in February 1862 and in the timeless bardo, the Buddhist limbo, and the voices are both historical—contemporary witnesses and journalists, later historians—and imagined. Bridging these categories is eleven-year-old Willie, Lincoln’s third son. Recently dead of typhoid, he joins the spirits in their state of denial in Oak Hill Cemetery. Representing a wide range of American society, these artisans, slaves, soldiers, and ministers comment, confess, rave, and dispute, all the while strenuously avoiding the “d” word. They feel they still have business with this world, though they’re virtually powerless to influence it—a condition not new to all of them. When Willie’s father visits, as he actually did, he has a noticeable “vivifying effect” on the ghosts; in one of Saunders’s remarkable tours de force, the spirits crowd into the man’s consciousness in an effort to make him really see his son, as opposed to the remains in the “sick-box.” Only there, in the President’s body, does this diverse cast of characters begin to understand each other. Saunders’s portrait of Lincoln as a grieving father is poignant, and his visions of an afterlife, alternately glorious and monstrous, is worthy of the Book of Revelation.

Based on the lives of her mother and grandparents, Miss Burma (Grove, $26), by Charmaine Craig, is nothing short of stunning. Especially for readers unfamiliar with Burma, here is a tale of loss and love in a country too long neglected by the world. This novel begins in 1926 in a place still dominated by the British Empire. We meet Benny, Craig’s grandfather, and follow him as he endures a harsh childhood as a Jewish transplant first in Calcutta, India, and then in Rangoon, Burma. Surviving on his reputation as a pugilist, he eventually becomes an officer of His Majesty’s Customs Services. Through his official duties Benny meets Craig’s grandmother, Khin, a member of the long persecuted ethnic minority group known as the Karen. Their courtship and wedding is passionate and swift. They soon have their first child, Louisa, Craig’s mother, and other children quickly follow. What might have been a wonderful life for a happy family was forever altered by the advent of World War II and then years of civil war. What separates this book from others is its frank look at who and what survives under such perilous conditions. Love and identities are tested both physically and mentally, and the characters have more than a few surprising realizations. This is an epic story that uses the lens of one family to help explain modern Burma.

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) is a stunning novel. Stunning in its intelligence. Stunning in its compassion. Stunning in its lucidity and clear-eyed storytelling. As the story begins, a young man commits suicide and inadvertently sets his apartment on fire. When his young, pregnant wife learns of it, she is immediately taken under the wing of an elderly Catholic nun, Sister St. Savior, whose vocation is to tend to people undergoing tragedy. With her baby girl in tow, the young widow finds work in the convent laundry and she and her daughter become part of the sisters’ community. That child, Polly, aspires to a clerical vocation, but her idealism pales with her understanding of the religious life and she falls in love and gets married. That this short novel can span an entire generation with such unerring economy and power is truly a testament to McDermott’s skill. Like the best of her earlier books, The Ninth Hour is a literary treasure.

In Sing, Unburied, Sing (Simon & Schuster, $26) Jesmyn Ward takes magical realism and uses it as a device through which readers can hear the marginalized voices of the Mississippi Gulf coast. Our main character is thirteen-year-old Jojo, who is taken on a road trip with his drug-addicted mother, Leonie, when his father is released from prison. Both Jojo and Leonie become haunted by ghosts, Leonie by her brother’s, and Jojo by the spirt of a young boy, as the two travel across the South. Ward tells this story with beautiful prose and brings light into the darkness of the American past. We are shown how important it is to understand our personal histories and how they continue to affect our futures. Each character here is endearing in his or her own way. This book is compelling because of the way it merges the past with the present. While each character is flawed, Ward humanizes all of them and shows how compassion is necessary when learning about the lives of people we often shun or overlook. This is a great book for anyone who loves to read William Faulkner or Toni Morrison.

Contrary to what many believe, Richard Rothstein states boldly at the start of his book, segregated neighborhoods in the United States didn’t result mostly from individual prejudices, personal choices, or the actions of such private institutions as banks and real estate agencies. They were instead largely a consequence of public policy—of purposeful, systematic, forceful government action. In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright, $27.95), Rothstein describes how laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments promoted discriminatory patterns and the development of racially homogenous neighborhoods. The measures included explicit racial zoning, officially segregated public housing, redlining of mortgages, and conditioning of Federal Housing Administration subsidies for builders on no homes being sold to African Americans. Rothstein argues that as a nation, we have an obligation to remedy the lasting effects of this segregation and have paid an enormous price in the form of wide income disparities and other inequalities by allowing this injustice to fester.

Masha Gessen’s breathtaking history of Russia from the end of communism to today is a detailed analysis of what initially looked like a revolution but that, in the end, only brought the country full circle. Chronicling the shifts from glasnost and Gorbachev through Yeltsin and on to Putin’s efforts to re-establish a Greater Russia, The Future is History (Riverhead, $28) doesn’t recount a story of the iron curtain being torn apart and rewoven as much as it charts the condition of a patient with “a recurrent infection.” The disease is totalitarianism. Its toxins include terror and ideology, secrecy and repression. Those it afflicts suffer a host of symptoms, including constant anxiety and depression, both economic and emotional. These combine to turn ordinary individuals into the hollow, traumatized Homo Sovieticus, a creature too insecure to make demands. While this species seemed to die off with the Soviet Union, Gessen shows that, like Soviet-style totalitarianism itself, Sovieticus has survived. Her analysis puts this survival into the contexts of both political theory and psychoanalysis, showing first how totalitarianism took hold and continues to hold on, and then describing exactly how this repression breaks a society. While she invokes leading theorists such as Orwell and Arendt, Gessen grounds her account in the stories of seven people and their families. If her focus on a psychologist, a sociologist, a pioneering gay academic, a philosopher, and a Pussy Riot activist emphasize the social sciences, this is no accident. One of Gessen’s most striking points about the Soviet system is that it deliberately erased sociology and related disciplines, thus robbing people of the tools they needed to see, define, and understand themselves.

Manal al-Sharif’s journey in Saudi Arabia, as told in her memoir, Daring to Drive (Simon & Schuster, $26), is an extraordinary story of perseverance and transformation. Her book begins with al-Sharif’s arrest in the Saudi city of Khobar for driving while being a woman. As the events unfold, al-Sharif makes the danger she faced quite clear. A lone woman in the Saudi criminal justice system has few allies or resources, to say nothing of rights. She leaves us in suspense concerning the outcome of her trial in order to recount how she became a feminist activist. Al-Sharif endured poverty and abuse in Mecca. Over the years her burgeoning sense of self, especially as it was expressed through art and literature, was squashed under the heel of an ultraconservative Saudi interpretation of Islam. Amazingly, all was not lost. Slowly al-Sharif became an opponent of oppression. She got an education. She learned the skills needed to obtain a highly technical job in Saudi Aramco, the nationalized oil company. She learned how to drive. She became independent in a culture that effectively forces women into isolation. Finally, when all she had achieved was again threatened by a man reminding her of her place in Saudi culture, she began to fight back. Through this incredible memoir, alSharif illustrates that change is possible or, as she puts it, “the rain begins with a single drop.” Even in the desert, the rain will come.

Most biographies start with their subject’s ancestry, but Laura Dassow Walls introduces Henry David Thoreau (Chicago, $35) by way of a survey of New England’s geography. She explains the region’s kettle ponds, drumlins, and rocky promontories, and describes the ways of its indigenous peoples. These were Thoreau’s early fascinations, and they shaped his entire life. As she traces how his ideas about nature, social justice, and transcendentalism grew from and supported each other, Walls brilliantly puts Thoreau’s thinking about ecology, equality, and a “higher law” into the context of his time and shows how very much ahead of his time he was—to the point that editors censored his essays. Much of her remarkable portrait revises common assumptions about Thoreau. He was neither a recluse nor a misanthrope. He joined many groups, lectured frequently, and made lifelong, devoted friends, including Emerson and Horace Greeley, who acted as his literary agent. Living “deliberately” at Walden Pond did not mean living alone. Thoreau had constant visitors there and became part of an overlooked community of freed slaves, Irish immigrants, and the impoverished. He aligned himself with the marginalized ever after. Walls has done prodigious research for this deeply affecting book. She explains why good pencils were so hard to make in the nineteenth century, shows us step-by-step how Thoreau built his Walden house, takes us on his hiking and boating trips, and traces his evolving ideas. The result is a Thoreau you don’t just know more about, but a living, breathing, thinking person you feel you really know.

Amy Goldstein, a longtime Washington Post reporter, takes a deep dive into the community of Janesville, Wisconsin, describing in gripping and revealing detail what happens when economic disaster strikes a town. In the case of Janesville, it was the closing in late 2008 of what had been the oldest operating General Motors plant in the country. While Janesville: An American Story (Simon & Schuster, $27) is set in a single community, it also explores the larger realities of how Americans are trying to cope with job losses and financial hardships. It examines the shortfalls of re-training programs, the limitations of social services, and the political divisions and partisan rancor that can pull even the most established communities apart. These damaging effects aren’t always simple to trace or explain. But the power and disturbing impact of Goldstein’s book comes in its refusal to be satisfied with simplifications

A finalist for the National Book Award, Killers of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and The Birth of The FBI (Doubleday, $28.95), by David Grann, chronicles the mysterious deaths by gunshot and poison of members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma during the 1920s. As Grann tries to put the pieces of this mystery together, he uncovers a forgotten history. Though we are first led to believe that just one person, acting out of greed, is responsible for the entire rash of killings, Grann soon wonders if more people were behind these heinous acts. Because the details of these crimes were so peculiar, the case prompted a need for a federal agency, and the FBI was born. Did that help the Osage at all? Grann’s presentation of the evidence, the investigation, and the court proceedings is riveting. But it’s his account of the ongoing repercussions of the killings, his interviews with members of the impoverished Osage, and his depiction of Indigenous life in this country today, that reveal the truly shocking crime.

It’s hard to imagine any better qualified trio of acclaimed political scholars and journalists to explain the political mess we’re in and where we go from here: E.J. Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. Norm Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal and The Atlantic. And Thomas Mann is a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California in Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together in One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-YetDeported (St. Martin’s, $25.99), they trace the various elements that gave rise to the election of Donald Trump, then point to some possible ways ahead, striking a guardedly optimistic note. They contend that the protests and national soul-searching triggered by Trump’s presidency could lead eventually to an era of democratic renewal. But, they caution, this will take much work and depend on those opposed to Trump coming up with some unifying alternatives.

Contributors to this section include Bradley Graham, Laurie Greer, Morgan Harding, Mark LaFramboise, Lissa Muscatine, and Michael Triebwasser

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (Scribner, $28) captures a time and place on the verge of momentous change. Set in Brooklyn in the 1940s, the novel tells the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who has dropped out of Brooklyn College to contribute what she can to the American war effort. Unsatisfied with her job of inspecting and measuring machine parts, she attempts to enter the male-only world of deepsea diving. Manhattan Beach is rich and atmospheric, highlighting a period when gangs controlled the waterfront, jazz streamed from the doors of nightclubs, and the future for everyone was far from certain. Mark LaFramboise

Don’t forget, you can find our holiday picks available in P&P at The Wharf. Find our new bookstore by the waterside at 70 District Square SW. 5

Shaker Heights is a perfectly planned town full of people with seemingly perfectly planned lives, but when Mia and her daughter Pearl move in they start a series of little fires, small rebellions, that shake the community to its core. Celeste Ng brilliantly explores the nature of art, family, and identity in her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press, $27). The writing is beautifully elegant and layered, and you’ll find yourself immediately swept up in the lives of the characters. At the heart of the story are four mothers: one whose carefully planned family was nearly derailed by a high-risk pregnancy and who watches her youngest daughter so carefully that she forgets to show her love; one who leaves her child at a firehouse to save her life in a hopeless moment; one who longs for a child and fears her chance will be snatched away before she can experience the wonder of motherhood; and one who made a dangerous choice to raise her child on her terms. Whether you are a mother or a child, the story of these women and their families will stay with you long after you turn the last page. Tori O’Dea

Larry McMurtry has always been ambivalent about the success of the fiction in which he portrays the cowboy myth and the rugged Texas machismo that comes with it, but as you read the three novels collected in Thalia: A Texas Trilogy (Liveright, $29.95) you won’t be of two minds. Actually, upon learning that McMurtry wrote all these books in his twenties and that they were the very first three he wrote, you’ll be burning with envy. In Horseman, Pass By, McMurtry sets Lonnie Bannon with his love of his Granddad’s ranch and way of life against Hud, his step-brother, who is endlessly crude and cruel. At the center of Leaving Cheyenne are Gid, Johnny, and Molly, a rancher, his cowboy hand, and the woman they both love. They each take a turn telling the story of their unconventional lives in smalltown Texas. Finally, there’s The Last Picture Show, in which we see Thalia as a dead-end place. Of the three, this is perhaps the most darkly comic, as nearly every character engages in self-deception in order to eke out an existence in a town where every day is the same. Amid the fantastic and perhaps unbelievably melodramatic events, McMurtry finds a bottomless well of compassion for his characters. This is one time capsule was worth re-opening. Sharat Buddhavarapu

Described as an “illustrated novella,” and looking like a quirky coffee table book, A Field Guide to the North American Family (Knopf, $22), by Garth Risk Hallberg, is neither. This work, which Hallberg wrote before his 2015 New York epic, City on Fire, is an ingenious maze of a narrative based on the concept of the North American Family. Reminiscent of Lydia Davis’ seemingly quotidian pieces of pointed brilliance, Hallberg’s work is multi-layered, surprising, and deft. At one level the book uses a series of flash-fictions to recount the story of two families. At another, it’s an index of terms that readers can reference while reading the main plot—or savor for the wisdom they offer on their own. Then there are the photos. Each episode comes not only with its keywords but with a visual image. These are sometimes directly related to the text, like conventional illustrations, but often their relationship to the narrative is more elusive. Some pages look as if they’ve been torn from one scrapbook and pasted into this one, others look fresh and new. Grab this emotional map of North American family life and get ready to wander – it’s sure to be a warm, nostalgic trip. Justin Stephani

In Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean (Penguin, $27), Marina Willett’s husband, a famous-turned-infamous literary historian, has disappeared, seemingly a suicide case but maybe that’s just what he wants people to think. From this hook, the book’s tentacles spread into a kaleidoscopic series of investigations, as Marina double-checks her spouse’s leads to get to the bottom of a mysterious bit of H. P. Lovecraft apocrypha called “The Erotonomicon.” Cameos extend from Lovecraft to William Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, and more, becoming something like “The Savage Detectives of American weird fiction.” To follow this book’s incredible story, you don’t need to like, or even know, these figures, which are all fictionalized creations anyway, despite the author’s deep knowledge of their histories. La Farge critiques and parodies but does not romanticize these writers. He’s deeply attuned to how our human sympathies toward icons we learn about from afar can morph into blind obsession despite our best intentions. His narrative is a seamless combination of trickster humor and utter heartbreak, plumbing the depths to which people will go to forgive, embody, and take revenge upon their former idols, all while preserving their own reputation. The best writing lives inside you —even possesses you. The Night Ocean does just that. Jonathan Woollen

Lily Tuck, whose novel The News from Paraguay won the National Book Award in 2004, is one of our finest writers of novels-in-vignettes, and her latest, Sisters (Atlantic Monthly, $20), takes compression to extremes. Its “chapters” are often over in a page, a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, but they’re such vivid shards that you feel like you’re catching all the other pieces in a mosaic without having to see them spelled out. This is the story of a woman reflecting on her shaky marriage, whose trappings—her husband’s children, passions, and memories—all come courtesy of a prior spouse. Tuck centers on her narrator’s relationship with this other woman, who, though living across town, always seems to be in the air. What could turn spiteful in another writer’s hands comes off as gentle and empathetic in Tuck’s, as her lead character seizes on snatches of imagery (“a messy ponytail,” “did not wear rings”), to think through what her ostensible rival’s life must be like. Is it the narrator and not the man who links the two of them who truly understands this woman, she who sees that the bouillabaisse dinner he fondly remembers from France might have made her pregnant body sick? For such a short novel, Sisters is full of these kinds of insights, simply but inimitably framed. Jonathan Woollen

One of the most talked about books this autumn, and my favorite, was My Absolute Darling (Riverhead, $27), by Gabriel Tallent. Shocking and unsettling, at times difficult to read, the novel follows fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston, who feels more at home in nature than she does with her survivalist and damaged father, as she searches for freedom and fights for her soul. Roaming the woods one night, wondering if her father would be able to find her, she meets two lost teenage boys and guides them safely out. And that is the moment she starts questioning her home life. The way Tallent brings you steadily into Turtle’s mind makes you almost feel her pain. He manages to capture her deepest thoughts, her internal struggle, her will to survive. Obviously suffering from Stockholm syndrome, she debates with herself over whether to stay or leave, doubting her worth every step of the way. But she fights and she survives. She is the kind of girl, brave and determined, with whom readers are almost duty-bound to fall in love. Tallent grew up in Mendocino and spent a lot of time outside. His love for the region is evident in Turtle’s view of the place and Mendocino itself is a strong character in the book. This is Tallent’s debut novel. And what a remarkable debut it is! Marija Dimitrijevski

Friendships seldom get the sustained literary treatment that romances do, but Claire Messud’s insightful novel The Burning Girl (W.W. Norton, $25.95) shows that these relationships strike as deep, stir as many emotions, and do as much to shape a person, for better or worse. They can have special force when formed early in life, and Messud’s protagonists, Julia and Cassie, are best friends from nursery school to roughly seventh grade. Narrating the friendship and its aftermath, Julia, the one who takes paths already there rather than striking out into untrodden territory—the one who sets limits—insists that she and Cassie are as close as sisters. Their two families never mesh, however, and Julia comes to realize that her notion of “home” is not Cassie’s. Much of Cassie’s home life is guesswork, and while Julia does that work, her version of Cassie is partly made up; at times Cassie seems like one of the characters Julia, an aspiring actress, inhabits on stage. Messud uses the inherently self-dramatizing period of adolescence as a lens to view more difficult questions of how well any two people can know each other, and she brilliantly demonstrates how the typical rites of passage—fantasizing about an alternative family, surviving junior high cliques—can suddenly yield “one of those events that that was little and big at the same time,” bringing about the kind of understanding that a person never forgets. Laurie Greer

Mohsin Hamid has consistently shown his genius for using literature to capture the tensions between Islam and the West that play out globally and in individual lives. His latest novel, Exit West (Riverhead, $26), is another example of his spare, elegant writing, and his fearlessness in treading on uncomfortable political ground. A love story at its core, the novel exposes disquieting truths about secular and fundamentalist interpretations of religion, culture, family, and community. Moments of magical realism provide an imaginative backdrop to the story, much of which takes place in a country never named and with doors that serve as metaphorical entry and exit points. A stunning novel. Lissa Muscatine

Winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, The Leavers (Algonquin, $25.95), by Lisa Ko, is an exploration of the lives of a family of Chinese immigrants. Polly, an undocumented immigrant, is rounded up in a raid on the nail salon where she works, gets caught up in the system, and eventually is repatriated to China. Her eleven-year-old son doesn’t know where she’s gone or what happened to her. She’s just gone. Fostering with a kind, intelligent couple (both are professors) in the suburbs, Deming has difficulty recovering from the trauma and confusion of his early life. The book is timely and the subject important, but the strength of the novel lies in the composition of the principal characters, showing the depth of their humanity, their worthiness of our empathy. Mark LaFramboise

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“History has failed us, but no matter.” When a writer opens her second novel with a sardonic statement like that, you hope that she’s up to the task of making it stick. Have no fear, Min Jin Lee is. Starting in the early 20th century, Pachinko (Grand Central, $27) chronicles the fortunes of a Korean family, first in a Korea under Japanese occupation, then as immigrants in Japan. The pachinko parlor that the family runs while in Japan is a perfect symbol of the kinds of hardships Korean immigrants in Japan face. The gambling establishment is their road to a better life. In fact, it’s the only such road. Perhaps this gives you the impression that the novel is only good as social commentary, its characters puppets. Actually, the reverse of is closer to the truth. It’s as if Lee started with the minutest details of her characters’ lives and the commentary grew out of it organically. When she observes how quickly Yangjin and Sunja have to get over Hoonie’s death, “At his burial, Yangjin and her daughter were inconsolable. The next morning, the young widow rose from her pallet and returned to work,” you feel the hardscrabble life of a Korean peasant all the more. One reviewer has aptly compared Lee to Thomas Mann. This is one book you can lose yourself in. Sharat Buddhavarapu

In the Midst of Winter (Atria, $28), by master storyteller Isabel Allende, begins on a cold and snowy day in Brooklyn. After a traffic accident brings them together, Richard Bowmaster and Evelyn Ortega discover they’re connected by a dark secret. This also involves Lucia Maraz, Richard’s tenant and colleague, who he turns to for help after the incident. Owing to circumstances, our three protagonists, plus one dog, find themselves becoming closer while going to extraordinary lengths to hide their secret. As Allende narrates their various pasts, it becomes clear that each of them faces a personal winter, living a life frozen in place. Richard is a professor who believes the great passions of his life have come and gone. He maintains strict order to keep his regrets under control. Lucia, despite the struggles and disappointments she endured in her native Chile, still searches for happiness in the unlikeliest of places. Evelyn is a refugee from the violence in Guatemala, where she was robbed of family and future. Together this trio discovers, as Albert Camus wrote, an “invincible summer” within that slowly melts the frost enshrouding their lives and opens them to renewed hope and love. This is a beautiful story that will see you through all the seasons to come. Michael Triebwasser

When asked, Haris Abadi describes himself as an Iraqi and an American. He means that he was born in Iraq but traded his first identity for American citizenship after working as an interpreter for the occupying American forces. Somewhere in the transaction, the two loyalties canceled each other out and Haris lost track of himself. As Dark at the Crossing (Knopf, 25.95) opens, Haris is in Antep, Turkey (“a city with two names and three meanings”), hoping to regain a sense of purpose by joining the struggle against the al-Assad regime in Syria. But the border is closed, and Elliot Ackerman’s powerful and poignant second novel follows his protagonist’s efforts to find a way across. As Haris faces the disappearance of his fixer; is betrayed, robbed, and beaten by a guide; and tours the Syrian ward of the local hospital, where both the dying and the dead are stashed in the morgue, his experiences give a close, yet panoramic view of the Syrian civil war and its regional fallout. At the same time, Haris’ recurrent flashbacks of the interrogations and searches he participated in with the Americans in Iraq reflect that he is also stuck at an internal psychological border. So, too, is Daphne, a Syrian refugee Haris befriends. Certain that her daughter is still alive, she wants to return to Aleppo and find her. Incredibly, though the conflict has left Daphne with nothing, she feels that “war can be a blessing… If you’re trapped, its destruction can free you.” Ackerman, a former Marine who served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and has covered Syria since 2013, is unflinching in his depiction of what war can do. Laurie Greer Two years after the magical Two Years, Eight Months, and TwentyEight Nights, set in Fairyland, Salman Rushdie is back with another, much more realistic novel. The Golden House (Random House, $28.99) begins on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when an uncrowned seventysomething king, who calls himself Nero Golden, arrives in New York from a faraway country. With his three motherless sons, Nero takes possession of the palace he would call his home. Having arrived under mysterious circumstances, the family also assumes new identities. They take Roman names, trying to reinvent themselves and keep their past hidden, all the while battling their own demons. The youngest son, D, is conflicted over his sexual identity; Apu longs to go back home; and Petya develops agoraphobia. The Goldens’ story is told by their neighbor, René, who becomes fascinated with the family and the various goings-on surrounding them. He gets pulled into their life of mystery, money, intrigue, drama, and crime. Then it all abruptly ends eight years later with the election of “The Joker” as president. Exploring the nature of good and evil and our capacity to change and adapt, Rushdie has loaded this novel with parallels between our world and the one the Goldens live in. “Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It’s the way of the world.” Marija Dimitrijevski

While no reproduction matches being in the presence of an ancient manuscript and experiencing “the weight, texture, uneven surface, indented ruling, thickness, smell, tactile quality’’ and sheer aura of a rare book, Christopher de Hamel says, his sumptuous Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (Penguin Press, $45) surely comes close. Anything lost in the rich, fullcolor images is made up in de Hamel’s spirited, illuminating text. One of the world’s top authorities on medieval manuscripts, de Hamel has frequented the world’s finest reading rooms. He’s a veteran of Sotheby’s and the former librarian of Cambridge’s Parker Library, home to the Gospels of St. Augustine. The first of the dozen meticulously presented manuscripts of this dream collection, the Gospels are the “oldest non-archeological artifact of any kind to have survived in England.” Mining these treasures for information about script, pigments, bindings, conservation techniques, and more, de Hamel turns palaeographic details into fascinating cultural narratives. Textual clues in the Codex Amiatinus reveal that “the oldest complete copy of the Latin bible,” housed in Florence, “was…made in England.” It looks like a suitcase and weighs 75 pounds. The Book of Kells, “the most famous book in the world,” is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, which prove that it was meant to be admired as a superlative art object rather than studied as a text. Among the other highlights of this timeline of books “characteristic of each century, from the sixth to the sixteenth,” are the Leiden Aratea, a Carolingian transcription of a classical astronomy treatise that commemorates 18 March, the medieval Christian anniversary of the day of creation; the literally shimmering late 12th-century Copenhagen Psalter; the 13th-century Carmina Burana, profane love lyrics with images so realistic de Hamel completed in fifteen moves the depicted layout of a chess game; and the oldest surviving manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, replete with the “mysteries of medieval publishing.” As de Hamel uses these works to trace wider historical arcs of politics, war, literacy, class, and the shift from religious to secular cultures, he gives us an incomparable lesson in how many ways there are to read a book. As the general editor of several Norton Anthologies and a pioneering Harvard MOOC professor, Martin Puchner practices both traditional and evolving ways of teaching literature. His interests in the past and future of writing are vividly presented in his wideranging and breezy The Written World (Random House, $32). While Puchner discusses canonical texts such as Gilgamesh and Don Quixote, this isn’t the usual “greatest hits” survey of world literature. Broadly defining foundational texts as those that “change the way we see the world and the way we act upon it,” Puchner shows how writing as varied as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, the Declaration of Independence, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and Soviet samizdat have been tantamount to creation stories (while Walcott’s post-colonial epic Omeros really is a creation story), allowing us to read the world in new ways. Often, these new narratives have coincided with new technologies, and Puchner is fascinating on the development of the physical means of transmitting literature, from the first scrolls and tablets to papyrus and parchment and on to paper, the codex, the printing press, and digital platforms—which in turn have reinvented scrolling and tablets. Puchner has a keen eye for historical patterns and ironies, and he has packed his larger themes with many gems. Alexander the Great conquered the world with a copy of Homer’s Iliad at his side—annotated by Aristotle. The Mayans, in a final desperate effort to save their language, recorded their culture’s sacred texts in the Popol Vuh—using the Roman alphabet. In the highly formal Japanese court immortalized in The Tale of Genji, people exchanged poems as routinely as we now send emails. And what will emerge as the defining literary genre of the digital age? Puchner has enthusiastically given us the beginning and middle of literature’s ongoing story. Section by Laurie Greer

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec embarks on his thirteenth case in Glass Houses (Minotaur, $28.99). The latest installment of Louise Penny’s award-winning mystery series is a wonderful example of a book that not only builds on and extends an established character but also stands alone as a satisfying narrative in itself. In the Montreal suburb of Three Pines, a mysterious, hooded figure dressed in black suddenly appears one day on the town commons. Motionless and silent, watching carefully, he seems like a dark conscience passing judgment on an unknown crime. When a murder soon follows, Inspector Gamache and his team of detectives must solve the crime while also concealing certain details in order to lure in bigger drug kingpins. Glass Houses is told from Gamache’s perspective nearly a year after the murder, and the truth is slowly revealed during a court case as pieces of the mystery come to light and the tension builds to a thrilling climax. Beautifully written, with smart and likable characters, and grounded in snowy and scenic Quebec, this is a mystery that even non-mystery readers will love. Keith Vient

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In John le Carré’s new novel, A Legacy of Spies (Viking, $28), his hero, Peter Guillam, former spymaster and erstwhile protegé to George Smiley, finds himself in the unfamiliar territory of post-Cold War England. Peter has been summoned out of his retirement on a farm in Brittany by descendants of his previous masters in the Circus. Their agenda? To make Peter answerable for his supposed crimes against the progeny of his late colleague and friend, Alec Leamas, who now accuses Peter of complicity in the death of his father. In a way, le Carré continues to litigate the moral complexity of the Cold War after the fact, but he now has one more tool in his literary arsenal: the distance afforded by time. And this allows him to tell a compelling story about the human casualties of the Cold War resulting from the choices we have to make in the name of duty and country. Bennard Fajardo

A longtime journalist with The Washington Post, David Ignatius has a knack for grounding his suspenseful novels in real national security challenges, at times uncannily anticipating actual scenarios before they unfold in the news. In his latest spy thriller, The Quantum Spy (W.W. Norton, $25.95), Ignatius delves into the high-stakes, high-tech world of computing. The story revolves around the race between the United States and China to develop a hyper-fast quantum computer capable of breaking any code, a competition equivalent to the race in the 20th century to develop an atomic bomb. As the book begins, CIA agents entrap a Chinese computer scientist, hoping to turn him into a spy for the United States, only to discover that China itself has been receiving precious intelligence from a secret source inside the CIA. An intense hunt for the suspected mole ensues, taking a number of surprising turns. An entertaining read that has the added benefit of teaching a bit about advanced computers. Bradley Graham

As Margaret Atwood says, “men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” But what if the opposite were true? Writing in the tradition of Atwood and Le Guin, Naomi Alderman imagines a present where young women around the world discover they have the power to shock others with a touch. Oppressive governments are overthrown overnight, the patriarchy is challenged and a new religion aims to create a feminist utopia. But as the novel’s heroines expand the range of their ambitions, they begin to realize the difficulty of their task: with every human on earth trained since birth to hurt each other, how do you uproot evil from the human condition without destroying civilization in the process? This is an angry, deeply pessimistic book, and I suspect Le Guin or even Atwood might have written a different ending. But at a time when those who abuse women for their own amusement are more visible than ever, The Power (Little Brown, $26) gives catharsis and a portrait of a world that in the end is no crueler or more violent than our own. Adam Wescott

In the world Louise Erdrich envisions in Future Home of the Living God (Harper, $28.99), nature appears to have reversed itself and evolution has gone haywire: cats and birds now come in often horrifying scale, and, most terrifying, women give birth to barely recognizable primitive creatures. Our narrator, Cedar Hawk Songmaker, is an Ojibwe raised by white parents in Minnesota, and she’s four months pregnant. The state has demanded that all pregnant women surrender themselves, and those who do not are hunted by officials and sent to prison-like hospitals. Cedar reunites with her Ojibwe birth family and lives on the reservation until even that gets too dangerous. Future Home of the Living God is an exciting page-turner, but it’s also a serious look at authoritarianism and the politics of reproduction. Mark LaFramboise

The Martian was quite literally a stellar debut, a smart sci-fi read that left no potato unturned in its quest to depict realistically the near-future of space travel. Marrying a convincing futuristic vision with compelling characters and a gripping narrative is a challenge for the genre, but Andy Weir does so effortlessly in this eagerly-awaited follow up. The titular city, Artemis (Crown, $27), is the only settlement on the moon, and its daily existence as a scientific hub and low gravity playground for the rich is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity. Readers would expect Weir’s science to be impeccable, and naturally it is, but he refuses to get swept up in grandiose depictions of his creation. Instead, it’s revealed piece-by-piece through the pragmatic eyes of “Jazz,” a lowly worker (and smuggler) whose hardscrabble life is far removed from the decadence of Artemis’s elite. When made an offer she can’t refuse, what begins as a classic crime caper unfurls into a conspiracy with wider implications for the entire city. As the plot races along, the details of lunar life firmly ground this novel; from the spacesuit design to the moon economy, Weir’s artfully crafted world feels like it’s only a quick rocket ride away. Jon Purves

John Crowley is a writer whose novels exist in that liminal world between myth and materiality, part lore, part fantasy, part dream. Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga, $28.99) is his first original novel in eight years, and it is a beautiful tapestry of a tale, a love letter to corvids and a fable-like look at human and crow history. It follows a crow called Dar Oakley through the centuries, from the Iron Age and early Europe, and into the postapocalyptic future. It is a novel written by a seasoned master, for it revolves around the central theme of death, humanity’s fear and obsession with it, and our belief that there must be something more beyond our end. It is a vast and dramatic novel, spanning thousands of years and thousands of human lives, best read slowly by the fire in the depth of winter, with an ear to crows’ cries. Anton Bogomazov

Large in scope, vision, and heart, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf, $28.95), Arundhati Roy’s second novel, unfolds in the thick of India’s ethnic, religious, and class tensions. But the politics, as you’d expect from a writer who has won as many awards for activism as for literary achievement, aren’t just background. Bhopal, Gujarat, and especially Kashmir, play major roles. In addition to the rich layering of stories within stories, the text includes newspaper accounts, witness testimony, police reports, and manifestos. Roy shows the fraught Kashmir situation from all sides, and it’s a harrowing picture of a place where “you can be killed for surviving,” and where the statue of a soldier “is a more truthful emblem of the times” when it’s been mutilated. Roy balances the unflinching look at brutality with a steadfast faith in love and a belief that people can change. Throughout the novel characters take new names, choose their genders, and build fresh lives where death had had dominion. The central figures gradually converge at the Jannat Guest House, located in a Muslim cemetery. There, “the souls of the present and the departed…mingle, like guests at the same party. It made life less definitive and death less conclusive.” Whether itemizing the hypocrisies of the global “political flea market” or seeing a released detainee as “a small, desperate, frightened figure, a traffic island on the crossroads to nowhere,” Roy’s prose is unfailingly apt and eloquent. She captures India’s—and humanity’s— beauty, misery, and everything in between. Laurie Greer

With stories “lurking” in his mind “like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp,” sixteenyear-old Cem feels he’s destined to be a writer. Instead, he studies geological engineering and becomes a developer. Nor is he even the ‘I” telling his story. These are just the first of many surprises in Orhan Pamuk’s beautifully constructed, shape-shifting novel. While a beguiling actress—The Red-Haired Woman (Knopf, $26.95) —seems to promise a romance, she’s the catalyst for a Freudian family romance that explores fathers and sons—what they owe each other, how well they can know each other, and the myriad ways they betray each other. Turkey is a country of “many fathers…the fatherland, Allah, the army, the mafia,” and Cem becomes obsessed with two others: the father Oedipus killed in the Greek myth and Rostam, the father who killed his son in the Persian Shahnameh. These mirror images reflect Turkey’s often uneasy position straddling East and West, but for Cem they prove “the inexorable bonds of myth and life.” With his own father by turns a political prisoner and a philanderer, Cem grew up largely fatherless. Later he finds a father-figure in the master well-digger he’s apprenticed to, but flees after an accident, not knowing for thirty years whether or not he was responsible for the Master’s death. Childless, Cem has killed off the father he might have become, even as he tempts fate by naming his business “Sohrab.” Along with his ingenious plays on these ancient plot motifs, Pamuk also delivers a panoramic view of Turkey from the 1970s to the present. Like the young Cem, who kept his eyes on the stars even as he plumbed the depths of the Earth, Pamuk’s novel is grounded in his country’s political and economic realities, but shimmers in its telling.

Unfolding in both contemporary Istanbul and Oxford in the academic year 2001-02, Elif Shafak’s compelling Three Daughters of Eve (Bloomsbury, $27) examines a series of dualities—East and West, men and women, religious and secular—in order to discover a more harmonious “third path.” The protagonist, Peri, embodies this quest. Growing up in Turkey, she inhabited a limbo between her mother’s “defiant religion” and her father’s “defiant materialism,” and as a result has suffered bouts of paralyzing indecision— with tragic consequences. At Oxford she befriends two other young Muslim women, forming the trio of “the Sinner, the Believer, and the Confused.” All three fall under the spell of the charismatic and manipulative Professor Azur, whose “unorthodox” philosophy course seeks to understand God apart from religion. “Could God unite people, simply as an object of study?” The question is the heart of the book. It’s debated implicitly at the Istanbul dinner party the adult Peri attends and explicitly in the college scenes she recalls. It’s a debate that all Shafak’s characters live passionately. For Peri, it becomes a matter of life and death, and as Shafak deftly interweaves it in vivid scenes of homelessness, substance abuse, street crime, political corruption, rape, and terrorism, she shows that it means no less than that for nations. Section by Laurie Greer

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It’s been years since Bernard MacLaverty came out with a new novel, but it’s been well worth the wait. In Midwinter Break (W.W. Norton, $24.95) MacLaverty gives us an elderly Irish couple living in Scotland, who take a brief winter trip to Amsterdam. Over their forty-year marriage, Gerry and Stella have forged a deep understanding of each other, along with a mutual fondness and regard. They share habits, anecdotes, and history and have a son now living in Canada with his wife and child. But the book’s title hints at another, more serious, midwinter break: that of their marriage. Gerry is a retired architect with a serious drinking problem. Though he’s been trying to hide the full extent of it, Stella has had enough. Unbeknownst to Gerry, she’s arranged to visit a Dutch Beguinage, a house of lay religious women, where she imagines she might start a new chapter of her life, one filled with contemplation and purpose. With heartrending insight, MacLaverty explores how the intimacies in a long marriage can sometimes obscure its deep fault lines; in this case, the initial flaws go back to a personal trauma the couple experienced during the Troubles. MacLaverty’s writing is pitch perfect. He is one of Ireland’s greatest living writers and he’s at the top of his game in this novel. Amanda Holmes Duffy

Marcus Conway is at his kitchen table, listening to the church bell toll in his small Western Irish town of Lewisburgh. In some sense, that is the entirety of Mike McCormack’s 2017 Man Booker long-listed Solar Bones (Soho, $25). But told in the manner of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine’s book-in-the-span-of-anescalator-ride, it’s really about much more. Marcus’s mind cycles through a variety of episodes surrounding the night his young daughter has her big art opening, each piece testing his duties as a good family member, a good worker, and a good political citizen. Picking out where one piece ends and the next begins, however, is tricky and one of the greatest pleasures in this book. Yes, this novel is one sentence long, but this is no cause for intimidation. McCormack’s writing is so lucid, conversational, and well-paced that Solar Bones counts as one of this year’s (or any year’s) most unconventional pageturners. Nor does McCormack use his virtuosity as a mere gimmick; rather, it’s one with the underlying emotions of this book and this unforgettable character, Marcus, who wants to hold together everything he knows, the joys and the struggles both, for as long as he has left. Jonathan Woollen

When we meet Victor, an occasional and provocative radio commentator, he’s separated from his wife and lives in a tiny apartment. He’s struggling to write his book about “what’s wrong with Ireland,” but he’s more concerned with picking out a regular pub in his new neighborhood. With present circumstances constrained and the future a blank, Victor falls back on the past. He relives the moment he met his wife, a beautiful entrepreneur and TV chef, and recreates scenes from their marriage. But he also recalls the childhood bullying, the early death of his father, and being “molested” by the headmaster of his Christian Brothers school. As the memories unfold, it’s clear that Victor’s Smile (Viking, $25) isn’t happiness, but a denial that anything is amiss. His memories are similarly deceptive. His marriage seems so fantastic because much of it is fantasy and his darker recollections only hint at what really happened. As Victor argues with himself, tells himself stories, and at last has to listen to his own revelations, he seems not one character, but several: he’s the successful writer and loving husband he might have been as well as the angry and guilty victim he tries to hide and to hide from. Roddy Doyle here uses his tremendous skill with dialogue—as well as his irrepressible humor—to show the truly shattering psychological consequences of physical abuse, and how the damage continues even decades later. Laurie Greer

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Nearing eighty and ready to simplify things, Henry Dunbar, legendary titan of a global communications empire, cedes day-to-day control of his firm to his daughters, while insisting on retaining the corporate jet, the obsequious obedience of underlings, and other trappings of power. For once in his ruthless career, Dunbar has miscalculated. He soon finds himself drugged and virtually imprisoned in a Manchester sanitarium while his daughters set in motion a complicated deal that will net each of them roughly $1.4 billion. Yes, Dunbar (Hogarth, $25) is King Lear in Wall Street clothing. Edward St. Aubyn, author of the devastatingly dark and funny Melrose novels, joins the Hogarth Shakespeare series with a retelling of the great tragedy as social satire. St. Aubyn has a sure touch for depicting human depravity and he’s unsparing in tracking the Dunbars’ relentless quest for money and power. The two elder daughters, accomplished bullies in grade school, outdo even their father at lying, back-stabbing, and casual acts of torture. By contrast, their half-sister Florence has rejected a role in the family business, becoming instead an advocate for workers’ rights and environmental concerns. Her unwavering “enough” serves finally as a moral compass for her father who, after recovering from the forced hospitalization, the nights on the lam in the stormy Cumbrian wilds, the after-effects of an arsenal of drugs, and the terrifying visions of “all the people he had hurt…turning their wounds into weapons” against him, slowly comes to understand that “enough” and can let go of his mad pursuits. Laurie Greer

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Golden Hill (Scribner, $26), winner of the Costa Award, is the first novel by Francis Spufford, author of I May Be Some Time and other acclaimed narrative nonfictions. The year is 1746. Mr. Smith, a young, charming, and mysterious stranger from England, arrives at Lovell’s house on New York’s Golden Hill with a bill of exchange for the breathtaking sum of 1,000 pounds. That alone, aside from Smith’s refusal to disclose anything about himself—where he’s come from and what he’s planning to do with that kind of money in the colonies— creates an aura of mystery and intrigue. As rumors begin to circulate, you’re pulled into the story, eager for answers, along with Manhattan’s social elite. Finding an ally and a friend in the marvelous Septimus Oakeshott, secretary to the governor, Mr. Smith inveigles his way into that elite, attending their dinner parties and becoming a part of their lives. He even develops an interest in one of Lovell’s daughters, the quick-witted and sharp-tongued Tabatha. But then things start to fall apart, and he finds himself in trouble. Quick paced, with extraordinary dialog and wellcrafted characters, Spufford’s brilliant historical novel will make you turn the pages fast to find out what Mr. Smith is up to. The beauty of this novel is that you won’t find out until the very final pages. Marija Dimitrijevski

In Outline Rachel Cusk ingeniously introduced a narrator who left most of the first person out of the firstperson narration. Each chapter was a conversation transcribed in detail, but eliding the narrator’s contributions. We glimpsed Faye in the interstices of what others said to her, and, implicitly, in what she chose to relate. We learned she was a writer, recently divorced, the mother of two sons. In Transit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), the even more mesmerizing second volume of a projected trilogy, Faye is renovating a run-down house in London, teaching, still adjusting to being divorced, and still gathering stories. But many of these stories, when filtered through Faye’s consciousness, acquire an edgy tone. Some turn oddly violent as if Faye is a kind of poltergeist, channeling her inner turmoil and anger outward. Her neighbors get confrontational. Children at a dinner party end up in tears. A visit to a hair salon ends in a customer storming out, shattering glass as he goes. It’s an explosive, amazing, and deeply resonant novel. Look for the final installment, Kudos, soon! Laurie Greer

Rife with spies, false identities, and twisting loyalties, Nathan Englander’s compelling second novel is a taut psychological thriller. The narrative loops through Europe and the Middle East, recounting how a “Jewish-American boy from Long Island” became “an Israeli operative, living undercover in Paris,” until “a crime of political passion” ended his career with the Mossad and, effectively, his life. Now Prisoner Z, he’s lived for twelve years in a government black site near the Negev Desert, his existence known only to his guard and the General. The General, however, is confined even more severely than his prisoner. “A dead man so powerful he continues to live,” he’s been in a semi-conscious state since a stroke ten years before, his mind replaying the loop of war and revenge he spent his life caught up in. His memories and those of other characters include cameo appearances by Arafat, Abbas, and Olmert, and Englander’s fiction is also a portrait of fraught Israeli-Palestinian relations. His characters embody various shades of idealism, hope, anger, frustration, and cynicism about the elusive peace, and both sides love the country, celebrate its everyday joys, and lament the daily woes of living there. What’s the answer? The novel ends with the eponymous Dinner at the Center of the Earth (Knopf, $26.95), which takes place in the tunnels between Israel and Gaza. Dug in preparation for the next war, the tunnels on this occasion allow a pair of lovers—one a Palestinian and locked inside Gaza, the other Israeli and locked out of Gaza—to meet in the underground no-man’s land. Absurd, symbolic, a mere stunt, but it points to the essential connection between individuals, despite the politics. Laurie Greer In Forest Dark (Harper, $27.99), Nicole Krauss trains her fierce intelligence and keen eye on the story of two Americans in Israel. Jules Epstein is a man in transition, following the death of his parents and his recent divorce. He’s in Israel with the intention of finding worthy recipients of his philanthropy, but instead finds a transformative experience reimagining the life of King David. Nicole is a novelist who comes to Tel Aviv in hopes of relieving a debilitating writers-block. Meeting a literature professor, she’s told a story about the novelist Franz Kafka—notably, his life in Israel and a supposed trove of never published documents. Krauss creates through her characters the insecurities that rise from intense introspection, the dislocation of oneself in one’s environment, and the never-ending wonder of experience. Mark LaFramboise

Reality is hard to trust in the shimmering stories of Emily Fridlund’s Catapult (Sarabande, $16.95). A man refers to his wife only as A, as if she’s an indefinite article. Another man keeps his father in a state of quantum uncertainty by telling people he’s “gone” rather than dead, while a woman is advised that she’ll feel better if she says her ex died. Or could what seems elusive or contradictory be the characters’ ingenious way of keeping their balance? A couple divides their relationship’s emotional labor, one person taking on “bad behavior” and the other “guilt.” A woman loves her boyfriend for his “well-organized” heart—comforting, maybe, but hardly romantic. In one story, dolls are left at the curb with a “SAVE US” sign, in another they’re lined up in a driveway to be run over. Fridlund’s stories are also full of accidents, animals, divorces, and games. The games let people cope with all the rest, and the most powerful games are the mind games. Imagine yourself somewhere else, a girl tells her troubled brother, and you will be. It works. And so memories become dreams, and someone else’s dreams could be as accessible as “books on a shelf.” Waking life is no less fluid and shifting: a dog is taken for a bear and a child mistaken for a dog. “Trees grow woolly as beasts with snow.” And none of this is strange—it’s “just one of the ways the universe worked.” Laurie Greer

Carmen Maria Machado writes terrifying horror stories. She writes gorgeous meditations on nature, love, and art. She writes feminist allegory that would make Margaret Atwood proud and folktale adaptations that wouldn’t be out of place in the Brothers Grimm. And here’s the thing – she does it all at once. Every story in Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf, $16) is a mind-bending mix of ideas and influences, and every one of them feels brand new. The magic of fiction is to take what we know and make it new, and Machado works that magic repeatedly and seamlessly. Her stories are a pleasure to read, even when they make the hair stand on the back of your neck. It’s always the good kind of fear. Lily Meyer

Whether a compact three pages or an expansive fifty, each of the ten stories in Daniel Alarcón‘s accomplished second collection, The King is Always Above the People (Riverhead, $27) unfolds with the economy and power of a fable. Most take place in an anonymous “town,” “city,” or “capital” of an unnamed country, the setting conveyed in the broad strokes of a stage set. The dramas that play out are mainly political and familial. After a long period of stability—“autocracies are nothing if not stable”—an unsettling crime wave engulfs the nation. But people aren’t helpless. In “The Thousands” they build settlements from the detritus of their society, and will not be moved. Family dynamics prove more complicated. Brothers deny one another. A father apprentices his son to a blind beggar. Throughout, Alarcón explores the elusiveness of truth and identity. From the man mistaken for his brother so often he stops correcting people to the lawyer who snaps and is a “different person” each time his son visits the asylum, to the traveler whose “real work was pretending I wasn’t lonely,” these characters play a dizzying number of roles, pretending, acting, lying, conning, and not always sure themselves who they are. At bottom, what’s authentic is the compassion and care with which Alarcón depicts these people. For all his sure-footed literary technique, these are some of the most richly emotional stories around. Laurie Greer

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Kurt Vonnegut: Complete Stories (Seven Stories, $45) gathers in one volume all the short fiction written by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. This beautiful tome holds nearly 1,000 pages’ worth of short stories Vonnegut wrote from the 1940s to his death a decade ago, including five previously unpublished works. Featuring a foreword by Dave Eggers and section introductions by Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield, editors and long-time friends of Vonnegut, the book is organized thematically along the lines of Romance, War, Future, Science, and other broad topics. Vonnegut was prolific in many genres, and his work has inspired several generations of new writers, such as myself. His stories stand up through troubled times, and his morality and clear prose continue to resonate. Keith Vient

A prolific and dexterous author of both novels and shorter narratives, T. C. Boyle has won awards for literary excellence, nature writing, and, with the title piece of his ninth collection, been included among The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. These twelve stories give us a future rich with revolutionary technologies and rife with environmental challenges, but one also featuring conflicted characters who face many of the existential pitfalls familiar to us today. Thanks to The Relive Box (Ecco, $25.99), a father and daughter can re-watch a happy past while ignoring their crumbling, isolated present. In another piece an epic California drought brings an affluent neighborhood a deluge of greed and desperation, while for a couple considering a genetically designed child, their ambitions lead to the dilemma of keeping up with the Jones’s DNA. The stories, whether dark or light, reveal how we continually look to the marvels of new science to soothe the constant human ache. Bill Leggett

If these wide-ranging stories have a theme, it’s disillusionment. The characters have been let down by marriage, art, and the American Dream (which itself has suffered some damage). Searching for enlightenment, a young American man travels through India and Thailand; is that ringing in his ears a sign of transcendence or a symptom of dysentery? An Indian-American teenager pulls off an elaborate trick to avoid an arranged marriage— but loses the freedom she sought. Economic pressures cause an aspiring musician to choose between his family and his clavichord, while a poet resorts to embezzling to stay afloat. In Fresh Complaint (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), Jeffrey Eugenides’s first collection of short fiction, written between 1988 and 2017, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex traces the complicated downward path of high expectations and shows how ideals and even principles are warped by economic realities, time, and the weaknesses of the human body. These stories face some of the worst life has to offer ( “Dementia… sounds violent, invasive, like having a demon scooping out pieces of your brain”) and challenge the demons with compassion, intelligence, and many moments of sheer lyrical brilliance. Laurie Greer

Rollicking, poignant, and unforgettable, the short stories of James McBride’s Five-Carat Soul (Riverhead, $27) treat us to subjects ranging from Lincoln and Civil War soldiers to World War II, antique toy collectors, a boxer fighting for his judgment in the afterlife, and animals able to telecommunicate in a zoo, to a group of boys growing up and playing in a band in a poor neighborhood in Pennsylvania. You’ll want to read this book for the sheer breadth of characters and humanity. The voices are each unique, hilarious, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, and the plots are woven together along themes of racial history and cross-cultural contact. Like the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, McBride’s stories are imaginative and unpredictable, bursting with soul and a dark but playful humor. The title piece is a series of vignettes about the members of the Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band. The lives of these musicians, and the lives of the other residents of the Bottom, are tragic, messy, and often hilarious. Five-Carat Soul is a delightful and quick read that you won’t want to end. Keith Vient

From the assorted inks and fonts to the spacious pages, the gallery of vintage illustrations, the notes, the essays, the testaments by readers and scholars, and the stories, The Annotated African American Folktales (Liveright $39.95) is both beautifully presented and impeccably researched. Edited by eminent Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, and Maria Tatar, chair of the Program in Folklore and Mythology, both of whose detailed introductory essays could constitute a substantial book in themselves, the volume gathers close to two hundred tales. The editors build on the work of predecessors including Arthur Huff Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston, correct the distortions of popularizers like Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney, and extend the canon of African American folklore to embrace Caribbean and Latin American tales. The collection begins with its roots: four sections lay out African story-telling traditions, from trickster tales and the Anansi cycles, with their mischievous animal/human creature “who weaves webs of beautiful complexity and tells stories about the tangled webs we weave,” to today’s oral narratives. The editors follow Anansi and other foundational African motifs through the one-hundred-and-forty stories that follow, tracing a vital tradition as it changes and grows. Drawn from both songs and published texts, here are familiar figures like the Tar-Baby, Brer Rabbit, and John Henry; people who can fly, heal, and disappear; casts of heroes, preachers, and shape-shifters; and here also are their descendants in the work of contemporary writers like Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison.

Ten years ago at age eighty-four, the renowned poet and translator David Ferry embarked on an English version of Virgil’s Aeneid (Chicago, $35). Now complete, Ferry’s epic arrives already a major prize winner, as two excerpts from the then-work-in-progress appeared in Ferry’s Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, winner of the 2012 National Book Award for poetry. Ferry, perhaps our foremost authority on Latin verse, delivers further proof that great literature can thrive in a second language on every page of this elegant, nuanced masterpiece. Vivid and flexible, Ferry’s English conveys the stateliness as well as the passion of Virgil’s original. The story, too, with its long wars and their many socio-economic consequences, remains immediate. The Aeneid follows a determined band of Trojan survivors from their ruined city to a promised land that will eventually become the Roman Empire. First, though, these stateless refugees, led by Aeneas, must endure a dystopiannovel’s worth of storms, betrayals, bad decisions, and supernatural wrath. If their ultimate fate, by definition, cannot be in doubt, the voyagers’ individual fortunes are never certain. Caught between the conflicting priorities of mortals and the capricious forces they call gods, the Trojans struggle to do the right thing. They suffer both justly and unjustly. They behave nobly. They cheat. In an apt metaphor for the inescapable PTSD of war, they enslave those they defeat. Have things changed so much since 19 BCE? Laurie Greer

THE STORY’S NOT OVER...

You’re never too old to read Young Adult fiction! Find our top picks on page 21.

You’ve probably never seen a book like this before. Zahhak: The Legend of the Serpent King (Fantagraphics, $39.99) is a pop-up book that retells the Iranian myth of the monstrous tyrant Zahhak and his defeat by the noble youth Feraydun. The fantastic art featured within is courtesy of Guggenheim fellow Hamid Rahmanian, drawn from his work adapting the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings. But it’s the pop-up engineering, designed by Simon Arizpe, that makes this book dizzying. Not only do some sections literally erupt from the page, but others unfold as booklets to continue the story, complete with smaller pop-up designs within. Myths remain popular fodder for the imagination, from Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of Norse mythology this year to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Literary Universe. But with nations across the world (including our own) turning to fear and nationalism, our responsibility to move past Norse and Greek mythology and learn the stories of other countries—their similarities, and their differences—is more crucial than it’s ever been. Kids will love this book, but adults will learn something from it too. Adam Wescott

“Tell me about a complicated man. / Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost / when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, / and where he went, and who he met, the pain / he suffered in the storms at sea, and how / he worked to save his life and bring his man / back home.” In a graceful return to iambic pentameter, Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey (W.W. Norton, $39.95) is resonant and light footed, swift and lithe. It also happens to be the first, in all 432 years since Homer was first translated into English, by a woman. The volume itself is a luminous beauty, well spaced, readable, with a thorough glossary, hand-drawn maps, and an enthralling but unencumbered translator’s note that heroically balances the interests and prerogatives of both casual or first-time readers and scholars long engaged with the epic. It has never been a better time to pick up this foundational work! Lila Stiff

“I am a house swollen with the dead,” Danez Smith writes, and Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, $16), his powerful second book, might be read as one extended elegy for all the black victims of police shootings, lynchings, street violence, and HIV. Smith imagines not an afterlife but an alternative life for these lost boys. In many ways it’s a beautiful, redemptive, defiant vision, but it’s also heartbreaking and enraging— the fact remains that “we earned this paradise/ by a death we didn’t deserve.” Angry, passionate, and full of lines with the concision and urgency of protest slogans—“i was born a bull’s eye,” “history is what it is. it knows what it did,” “paradise is a world where everything /is sanctuary & nothing is a gun”—these poems are also expertly crafted lyrics. Smith’s formal skills range from the unvarnished prose poem, “dear white America,” to propulsive couplets and preacherly/rap rhythms and repetitions. One tour de force spills “blood” all over the page in a desperate effort to come to grips with all the real blood—including Smith’s— infected with HIV. In another, Smith turns to the demanding technical constraints of the crown of sonnets to channel his grief over the children he’ll never have, the children he can only “un”: “untuck them into bed, unkiss their lil wounds/ unteach them how to pray.” Don’t miss this one. Laurie Greer

Whereas (Graywolf, $16), Layli Long Soldier’s stunning debut, starts and ends with “grassesgrassesgrasses.“ Natural, abiding, and usually overlooked, these speak a truth unavailable to this poet in either her largely erased native Lakota or in the English that has so often betrayed Indigenous peoples. “Everything is in the language we use,” Long Soldier says, and pushes her foster tongue to reveal things it’s been used to repress. While broken treaties and the Trail of Tears are probably familiar, you “may not have heard about the Dakota 38,” who, in “the largest ‘legal’ mass execution in U.S. history,” were hanged for their part in the 1862 Sioux Uprising. The order came from Lincoln the same week he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This may or may not have been covered in the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans that Obama signed, with little fanfare and no Native leaders in attendance, before the brief statement was buried in the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act. Long Soldier alternates her courageous exhumation of history with stark glimpses of the toll these events have taken on real lives. Her formally innovative lyrics challenge margins and white space, making us see and feel the full impact of bullying, casual racism, and hate crimes. When Long Soldier follows a poem on her efforts to match the Lakota and English words for lost and the news of a friend’s beating, with a spare lyric about the birth of her daughter, the effect is sharp and poignant. Of the many urgent and important questions this incomparable book raises, perhaps the most emotionally devastating is the one that comes from Long Soldier’s “panic” at having to pass on a fractured heritage to her child. “What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces.” But she also knows “in the missing: power.” This is a book we’ve needed to a long, long time. Laurie Greer

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PICTURE BOOKS

After the Fall (Roaring Brook, $17.99) immortalized in an English nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty is put together again in Dan Santat’s new tale—physically, at least. But there are “some parts that couldn’t be healed with bandages and glue.” With a new fear of heights, poor Humpty can’t do some of his favorite things. When he finally does decide to climb his famous wall once again, he— nervously, slowly—rediscovers joy. Santat’s illustrations, which weave cartoonish humor with sober realism, communicate the egg’s emotions on the long, bumpy road to recovery. The book’s touching surprise ending is much more hopeful than the original nursery rhyme’s grim conclusion. Ages 4-7. Elli Bloomberg

At 7 AM, the crocodile’s alarm goes off. He slowly gets out of bed, brushes his teeth, chooses the perfect tie, eats his breakfast, and heads out the door. He’s a Professional Crocodile (Chronicle, $17.99) and he’s off to work with the other city dwellers, hurrying down sidewalks and cramming onto crowded trains. Giovanna Zoboli and Mariachiara Di Giorgio show humans and animals commuting in perfect (and perhaps oblivious) harmony in this wordless picture book that will leave onlookers hunting through the illustrations for hidden faces and familiar scenes that all lead to a chuckle-worthy ending. Ages 4-8. Allison Witten

NEVER TOO YOUNG TO START Even babies can be bookworms! It’s especially easy to nurture a child’s love of literature with these new offerings, whose rhythmic language and thoughtful illustrations highlight the warmth and play of childhood. Richard Jackson strikes a dreamy tone with his lyrical call-and-response in Snow Scene (Roaring Brook, $17.99), inviting children to play a wintry guessing game. Acrylics from Laura Vaccaro Seeger capture the sleepy sensation of a snowy day, then burst into thrilling spring color in this visual and auditory feast. When Baby Goes to Market (Candlewick, $16.99), meanwhile, he encounters a repast of a different sort: juicy oranges, sugary chin-chin biscuits, and vivid chili peppers. As Baby charms vendors into gifting him treats in Angela Brooksbank’s vibrantly illustrated marketplace, Atinuke’s verbal play creates a rich multi-sensory experience in this counting book. Ages 0-5. Amy Dickinson

When a young girl discovers a book “free to a good home” outside the library, she does not suspect that it carries the true magic of The Five Forms (Farrar Straus + Giroux, $17.99) of the martial arts. Once home, she ignores all warnings not to “attempt these forms without an experienced teacher” and plows right on through the book. Author/illustrator Barbara McClintock returns with a tale of magic filled with delightful details on every page. Kids will enjoy learning each move along the way and may discover even more than expected! Ages 4-8. Kasie Griffitts

Hours before the sun comes up, a young boy and his father get ready for the new day by the light of a bare bulb. They quietly make their way to a pond to catch something for dinner. In these moments, the boy learns subtle lessons from his father, who speaks of his childhood in Vietnam and the long-ago time when he fished in A Different Pond (Capstone, $15.95). With Thi Bui’s meditative illustrations, Bao Phi reflects on his own childhood in this gentle story of family, memory, and finding one’s place in a new world. Ages 6-9. Cristina Strunk

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ELEMENTARY FICTION When their plane crashes, Fred, Con, Lila, and Max must make their way through the Amazon jungle in order to find help. Each child assumes the role of The Explorer (Simon & Schuster, $16.99), moving determinedly ahead and wresting survival from a perilous environment. As they face challenges that range from eating a tarantula to caring for a sick friend, the children must draw upon strengths they never knew they had. Drawing inspiration from classic adventure stories, Katherine Rundell creates a captivating narrative within a richly detailed world. Ages 8-12. Liz Elfman Why are we here? What is our purpose? A young fox groundling, or human-animal hybrid, named Arthur asks these timehonored questions while living in an orphanage under the rule of the cruel and twisted Miss Carbuncle. With equal measures of sweetness and sorrow, The Wonderling (Candlewick, $21.99) follows our kindhearted hero as he escapes the orphanage with a new friend only to face a fresh set of dangers in a neighboring city. There, he learns of a nefarious plan that Miss Carbuncle has for the orphanage. Can Arthur find the courage to use his gifts to help the creatures he left behind? Mira Bartók’s first novel for young readers has a beautiful and rich narrative with a touch of mythology and Oliver Twist. Ages 9-13. Heidi Ashton Yoon Stella Rodriguez has a serious problem. After trying to set up a meeting with Carl Sagan at NASA headquarters, she attracts the attention of a black hole who follows her home. Larry (short for gravitational singularity, of course) will eat anything: dust bunnies, ugly sweaters, smelly hamsters, and, as Stella finds out, any memory about her father that makes her sad. Perhaps inevitably, Larry’s insatiable appetite eventually leads him to swallow up Stella herself. While learning about The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole (Dial, $16.99) the hard way, Stella must find her way back home and back to happiness. With quick wit and deep empathy, Michelle Cuevas takes readers on an adventure through space and time and shows that sometimes it’s okay to grieve— and, thankfully, that every black hole has a wormhole to the other side. Ages 10-12. Emily Griswold

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READ, SHARE, TALK: BOOKS TO INSPIRE Great stories provide unlimited opportunities for self-discovery and insight into the world around us. We invite you to extend your knowledge, discuss your reactions, and share the joy and strength you’ll find in these creative and culturally rich stories. Evan Turk’s vivid illustrations will have your feet stomping and arms swinging to the music as you follow a hero’s journey from Mississippi to Chicago in Michael Mahin’s Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters (Atheneum, $17.99). Now, look closely at the Statue of Liberty—especially Her Right Foot (Chronicle, $19.99): “She is going somewhere! She is on the move!” In his casual, conversational style, Dave Eggers takes readers on a journey from France to New York and introduces us to littleknown facts about this iconic symbol. Artist Shawn Harris uses cut paper and India ink to illustrate the story, drawing our attention to the details as Eggers asks us to pause, think, and discuss along the way. Husband-and-wife team Cynthia and Sanford Levinson offer a fresh perspective on the U.S. Constitution, highlighting complexities including bicameralism, gerrymandering, and emergency powers in Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights and the Flaws That Affect Us Today (Peachtree, $19.95). Jason Reynolds delivers a more personal perspective of what it means to live in the United States with his heart-pounding, emotional novel in verse. Reynolds tells the story of Will, mourning the loss of his brother as he struggles with unspoken rules: 1) no crying, 2) no snitching, and 3) revenge. Long Way Down (Atheneum, $17.99) challenges our preconceptions and leaves us with a sense of urgency to talk about what happens next. Whether it’s a picture book or novel, fiction or nonfiction, we hope that these stories ultimately inspire you to read, share, and talk. Enjoy! Various ages. Donna Wells

YOUNG ADULT FICTION

SCIENCE

For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, a lush estate garden. The secret to the garden’s Wild Beauty (Feiwel & Friends, $17.99) lies in the women themselves: each has the ability to conjure a particular kind of flower. But they pay a terrible price for these gifts: if they fall in love, their lovers vanish. Suddenly, a boy appears from the gardens without any memory of where he came from, marking a change in their fate. Anna-Marie McLemore has crafted an enchanting story about family, secrets, and the consequences of loving someone deeply. Rich with lore and gorgeous prose, this is magical realism at its finest. Ages 13-15. Emi London No good deed goes unpunished; or so seventeenyear-old Justyce McAllister learns one night after a brutal run-in with the police. In an effort to cope with the violent racism he’s experienced, Justyce begins writing a series of letters to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Through these letters, Justyce processes his experiences as a young black man in a predominantly white private school, as well as his anger at a system stacked against him. Nic Stone presents readers with a timely story in her debut novel Dear Martin (Crown, $17.99), and creates the groundwork for meaningful discussion on pain and forgiveness. Ages 13-15. Cristina Strunk Edgar Allen Poe’s poems and stories are appreciated for their strange darkness and quiet melancholy. In Poe (Candlewick, $22) Gareth Hinds uses the graphic novel format to vivify the eerie images evoked by Poe’s chilling, lyrical prose. The result is a rich and poetic visual accompaniment to Poe’s best-known work, including “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Raven.” Both long-time admirers and new fans of Poe and will appreciate Hinds’s signature watercolor-and-ink illustrations of these classics. Ages 13 and up. Liz Elfman

There is no need for “a spoonful of sugar” to entice the whole family to read Dr. Howard Bennett’s latest book. The Fantastic Body: What Makes You Tick & How You Get Sick (Rodale, $19.99) is a handy and engaging reference guide to all the body’s organs and systems. Well-designed diagrams and features like tips for the next check-up provide essential information in a clear and comprehensible format; fun facts, DIY project instructions, and, yes, gross stories promise to keep young readers’ interest piqued with each turn of the page. Bennett brings 30 years of experience as a pediatrician and the lucid writing we have come to expect from his popular columns in the Washington Post to this masterful guide. Ages 6-12. Mary Alice Garber

In the world of Kos, the wealthy use the poor to absolve themselves of guilt and sin. Seventeenyear-old Taj is an aki, or sin-eater, supporting his destitute family by ingesting the sins of the royal family. Beasts Made of Night (Razorbill, $17.99) that physically embody his clients’ depravity imbed in Taj’s mind and form tattoos on his body. When he unwittingly becomes entrenched in a conspiracy to destroy Kos, he must decide to fight injustice. Debut author Tochi Onyebuchi creates a unique fantasy with lush detail, Nigerian influences, and underlying themes of betrayal and loyalty. Complex characters, dark magic, and adventure are hallmarks of this spirited tale. Ages 14-18. Mary Alice Garber In an essential anthology about young indigenous women, editors Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale dispel the all-too-pervasive stereotypes that have cast dark shadows on native women. Through fervent and forthright poetry, essays, art, and interviews, #NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women (Annick, $19.95) represents the lives of past and present generations and encourages young women to set forth on new paths towards a just and equal future. Ages 14 and up. Mary Alice Garber

Do you know which animal has “one THOUSAND” bones? Or which animal has a bone that grows an inch every single day? Do you know which animal has the heaviest bone? If you don’t, fear not: Book of Bones: 10 Record-Breaking Animals (Phaidon, $19.95) is here to answer all the bony questions you didn’t know you had. With amazing animal facts and a built-in guessing game, Gabrielle Balkan has complied the best bone trivia from around the globe. With colorful, detailed, and textured illustrations by Sam Brewster, this scientific compendium is perfect for both the classroom and the home. Ages 7-11. Kasie Griffitts

HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY Fans of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel will find a new picture-book biography of its author irresistible. Sherri Duskey Rinker, author of the contemporary classic Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, uses her own signature style to pay homage to Virginia Lee Burton’s beloved literary creations, including Katy and the Big Snow and The Little House. John Rocco’s appealing illustrations meld with the text to create a loving tribute to the woman who turned her pen into a magical wand to create worlds full of what her sons loved best: Big Machines (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $17.99). Ages 5-8. Cristina Strunk Before She Was Harriet (Holiday House, $17.95), Araminta Ross was known by many names. The woman who would become Harriet Tubman could be identified in myriad ways throughout her life, from nicknames like Minty and Moses to more universal labels such as sister, daughter, suffragist, and freedom fighter. Lesa Cline-Ransome uses poetry to detail the extraordinary life of one of America’s greatest heroes. Coupled with beautifully detailed watercolor illustrations by James E. Ransome, Cline-Ransome’s verses highlight this former slave’s many accomplishments. Moving beyond Tubman’s work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, readers will revel in her lesser-known achievements as a Civil War spy and expedition leader and truly learn what this “wisp of a woman with the courage of a lion” accomplished. Ages 6-9. Kasie Griffitts As a child in Pakistan, human rights activist Malala Yousafzai dreamed of possessing a magic pencil. She could use its powers to lock the door against her brothers and rid the world of poverty. But upon encountering grave problems close to home—soldiers in her village and children unable to attend school—she discovered that a person doesn’t need magic to change the world. An inspiring autobiographical story from the world’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Malala’s Magic Pencil (Little, Brown, $17.99) shows that courage is its own wizardry. Watercolor illustrations from duo Kerascoët create a powerful sense of atmosphere, and gold overlay designs emphasize Malala’s hopes, emboldening readers to transform their own dreams for a better world into reality. Ages 6-9. Amy Dickinson Elwyn Brooks White was a nervous child, but he took solace in a pet mouse, his family’s farm, and the written word. Barbara Herkert’s A Boy, a Mouse, and a Spider (Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt, $18.99) follows the life of children’s author, journalist, and essayist E.B. White. Simple, lyrical prose traces White’s journey from a small boy beset with hay fever to a seasoned reporter and columnist who dreamed of adventurous mice. White’s passion for the natural world inspired stories in which small, thoughtful underdogs—rodents, pigs, spiders— were heroes. Lauren Castillo’s warm, adorable illustrations gently draw readers into E.B. White’s world. Ages 7-10. Elli Bloomberg

PERFORMING AND VISUAL ARTS, POETRY Amalia Hernández’s fierce determination led her on a journey from dancer to choreographer to founder of her own dance company, El Ballet Folklórico de México. Through her organization, Hernández mixed Mexican and indigenous traditions with ballet and modern dance to create something altogether new. Award-winning author/ illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh showcases Hernández’s unique choreography and style in Danza! (Abrams, $18.95), which will have young readers turning into young dancers in no time. Ages 7-10. Cristina Strunk To some, art may seem unnecessary. For James Castle, however, it was essential. Born in 1899 and never able to hear, speak, or read, he lived in a world of Silent Days, Silent Dreams (Arthur A. Levine, $21.99) as he endured abuse and neglect. He had no way to communicate anything of his experiences… except for art. Even when his teachers confiscated his drawing materials, Castle would use burnt matchsticks and other cast-off items to make images however and whenever he could. Allen Say employs some of Castle’s own artistic methods in his nuanced story of Castle’s life, told through the eyes of Castle’s nephew. The recognition Castle received later in life is a poignant conclusion to a story that will leave an indelible mark on those who read it. Ages 9-12. Janet Minichiello Look! What Do You See? An Art Puzzle Book of American & Chinese Songs (Viking, $18.99) is a book unlike any other. Artist and MacArthur Fellow Xu Bing has devised an ingenious “square word calligraphy,” written with modified traditional brush strokes, and used it to spell out the words to several familiar sing-along songs. Your mission, for “mystery solvers, puzzle masters, and cryptographers,” is to decipher the lyrics. The calligraphy sits on tan pages, reminiscent of aging silk scrolls, and gentle folk-art-inspired gouache paintings by Becca Stadtlander depict the subjects of each song. It would be wrong to give away the sly secret, but there is an answer key in the back, as well as instructions on how to write the calligraphy. Fans of Xu’s work can see his hanging sculpture, Monkeys Grasp the Moon, in the stairwell of the Sackler Gallery on the Mall. Ages 9 and up. András Goldinger

There’s no better present than a carefully selected book; some children’s tales stay with readers for a lifetime. For gift-giving inspiration, these volumes weave classic storytelling with art, history, novelty, and imagination. What is more a hallmark of childhood than the beloved Winnie-the-Pooh: Classic Gift Edition (E.P. Dutton, $16)? This replica of the first U.S. edition of A.A. Milne’s masterpiece from 1926 has Ernest H. Shepard’s beloved illustrations, maps, and more. In another nod to the past, Caldecott winners Phillip and Erin Stead have completed an unfinished Mark Twain manuscript. The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine (Doubleday, $24.99) delivers dreamy watercolors and a lively narrative filled with Twain’s signature wit. Homage is paid to another literary great in Pop-Up Shakespeare (Candlewick, $19.99), in which The Reduced Shakespeare Company and illustrator Jennie Maizels bring The Bard to life through the wonderful world of The Globe Theatre. For more page-popping surprises, open ABC Pop-Up (Candlewick, $29.99), which looks as though it walked straight off the shelves of an art museum gift shop. Courtney Watson McCarthy’s sleek designs will appeal to parents, collectors, and tiny hands alike. With Art Up Close: From Ancient to Modern (Princeton Architectural, $29.95) by Claire d’Harcourt, young learners discover works of art from 1300 BC to the twentieth century through interactive flaps and instructive close-ups. Delve further into history with Egyptomania (Laurence King, $27.99). Jam-packed with mummies, the gods, papyrus, and pyramids, this stunning edition from author Carole Saturno and illustrator Emma Giuliani is truly a museum in a book. For budding detectives, there’s Pierre the Maze Detective: The Mystery of the Empire Maze Tower (Laurence King, $19.99). Find hidden objects and stop an evil villain in Hiro Kamigaki and IC4DESIGN’s updated take on a Where’s Waldo?-esque puzzle, with dizzying and dream-like illustrations. Gather your little ones close for Jane Yolen’s retellings of fairy tales and folklore from Africa, Russia, South Korea, and elsewhere with Once There Was A Story: Tales From Around The World, Perfect For Sharing (Simon & Schuster, $19.99), enriched by Jane Dyer’s charismatic illustrations. Or, for some holiday cheer, cozy up to A Child’s Christmas in Wales (Holiday House, $14.95). The new gift edition of this classic Dylan Thomas tale, illustrated by Caldecott-winner Trina Schart Hyman, will surround you and yours with the warmth of Christmases long ago and far away. Various ages. Liz Elfman

For more of our favorites, pick up a copy of the 2017 Children and Teens Department Favorites newsletter!

642 Things to Write About (Chronicle, $16.95)

Postcard Protest Party Kit (Let’s Go Postal, $20)

Bibliophilia (Random House, $20)

#122 – A newly invented product that will change your life: Do you want to write, but don’t know where to begin? Chronicle Books has the solution! 642 Things to Write About is exactly what it claims to be. For more examples, see below: #540 – Write a song: One hundred and two more things to write/ Hurrah, hurrah/ One hundred and two more things to write/Hurrah! / So we’ll write one down with a verb and a noun and we’ll be the very best writers in town, hurrah! #277 – Bad bar pickup lines: Hey baby, if I had a book of 642 things to write about, I’d fill it with 642 odes to your butt. #305 – What does writer’s block feel like? Right now, it feels like a problem with 642 solutions. Leah Kenyon New Yorker Tote Bag (New York Puzzle Company, $35)

When is a postcard something more? When it’s inspiration is a love of literature and a flair for fine design, in equal measure. This is Bibliophilia, an elegant boxed set of 100 black and white postcards featuring lines from some of literature’s greatest works. Evan Robertson, the co-founder of the New York creative design firm Obvious State, was initially motivated by the underlined passages in his beloved, well-worn books to craft images that stylishly, often whimsically, express the sentiments behind those highlighted lines. The Bibliophilia project began as a broad series of 11x14 art prints, which have here been edited down to 50 mailboxready designs—2 of each, with 15 of these being exclusive to this set. Made in the USA. Chris Schoppa

Congress baby, there’s one little thing on my list: resist All the Trumpian tripe Congress cutie, and send me an impeachment tonight. Please dear, take out of that sack Any big donation from a super PAC I really do believe in you Won’t you work for democracy too? Congress baby, I’ve spent all year just hoping you’ll swing, left wing Ooh in 2018 Let’s me and you go paint that map blue

Book Pins (Ideal Bookshelf, $11.95)

And send me an impeachment tonight! Leah Kenyon Solmate Socks (Solmate, $20)

Sex and the City’s resident writer Carrie Bradshaw may have carried around the New Yorker magazine in her bag for 20 years, but this is what happens when the New Yorker becomes your bag. Well, in a sense... it’s a heavy canvas tote in ecru with black accents on the handles, down the middle and wrapping around the bottom. And that bottom is gussetted, meaning it will open flat making it easy to stack books, magazines or whatever you’re carrying about. One side features the iconic New Yorker logo embroidered in white (there is also a small handy outside pocket here) while the other sports a silk-screened New Yorker cartoon (either “French Army Knife” or “On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Dog”). At $35, it’s a steal and is far better than the free tote you receive with a New Yorker subscription. Just think what it will do for your street-cred. Chris Schoppa

Dear Dan,

I’m called to Narnia each year in fall,

My Solmates have a thing for feet. Not just my feet—they’ll wrap themselves around anyone’s hairy toes! How can I keep their warmth and affection all to myself?

Then Pemberley, to flirt with wealth and birth

Signed,

And overstay my welcome at the ball.

Seeking Out Constant Knitwear

My road goes ever on through Middle Earth, To King’s Cross Station in a flying car

Dear SOCK,

Towards Hogwarts School (not found on any map—

Where reading ends and frippery begins—

Solmate socks belong to anyone willing to shell out $20 for a pair. The sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be. C’mon, SOCK—Solmates are knit in Vermont using recycled cotton—isn’t that virtuous enough? Buy yours at Politics and Prose.

My souvenir? Ideal Bookshelf pins.

Dan

As Melville said, true places never are). Still, every place must have its tourist trap

Leah Kenyon

In the spring of 2011, Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of classics at Bard College, taught one of his most challenging students: his father, eighty-oneyear-old Jay Mendelsohn, a retired mathematician. Mendelsohn père, a man always bothered by things left half-done, joined the class to continue his long-interrupted study of the classics. He proved to be an uncompromising student, always ready to speak up, and also always ready to listen. He charmed his fellow students, making it a lively, indeed, unforgettable semester. His son’s engaging memoir, An Odyssey (Knopf, $26.95), includes many of the discussions from Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer, along with background on the epic, etymologies of key words, profiles of the characters, and an appreciation of Homer’s narrative strategies, including his use of ring composition, a series of stories that seem to wander but in fact know exactly where they are going. Mendelsohn himself employs such loops, intercutting the course’s linear progress through Homer’s poem with a series of memories, family stories, the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise he and his father took, and reflections on his father’s final months. An Odyssey is an illuminating work of literary criticism that makes Homer’s masterpiece not just admirable but truly urgent and exciting. Mendelsohn draws on Homer’s timeless insight into fathers and sons for his evolving understanding of his own father, a man who had always stumped him, and who, with Homer’s help, teaches Mendelsohn more than he expected. Laurie Greer

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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume epic, My Struggle, astonished us with its brutal candor and selfawareness. It primarily centered on the author’s painful relationship with his father. By contrast, Autumn (Penguin Press, $27) is a slender book with beautiful illustrations by Norwegian artist Vanessa Baird. It is the first in a projected quartet, and gives us Knausgaard as a tender father speaking to his unborn daughter about everyday objects. His descriptions run about two-anda-half pages in length, and flow in a seemingly random cascade, on subjects as diverse as doors, porpoises, vomit, and labia; buttons, apples, and chewing gum. “It is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this,” he writes, “showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.” In one piece he writes of a family photograph where everything about the lives has been stripped away so that what remains is “what we ourselves don’t see… that our lives are written in our faces and our bodies, but in a language so foreign we don’t even know it is a language.” Knausgaard’s perspective is compelling and razor sharp, and as in My Struggle, he makes the ordinary feel vivid again, and strange. Amanda Holmes Duffy

“How does one deliver an honest eulogy?” Sherman Alexie asks. And “how does one commemorate/ the ordinary?” The answer is to remember, confess, pray, rant, and ask more questions. Alexie does all these and more in You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (Little, Brown, $28) his powerful, poignant memoir of his mother, a woman so complex she’s “an entire tribe of contradictions.” Did she love him? Did he love her? He answers yes, but worries the questions through stories by turns angry, funny, and raw, and through a dazzling range of poems that include everything from ballads to rhymed couplets to a tour de force sequence of 52 haiku, each as perfect as the squares in the quilts his mother sewed to support the family. While his father steadily drank himself to death, Alexie’s mother was a recovering alcoholic who kept her family alive, if often hungry, in an unfinished HUD house on the Spokane Indian Reservation. She was honored by her tribe for her strength and generosity, yet she was often cruel to her children. With this jarring inconsistency at the heart of his brave, compassionate, book, Alexie traces a lineage of violence so powerful it can cause victims to become perpetrators. Laurie Greer

Ezra Pound is perhaps St. Elizabeths most famous inmate, held there from 1946 to 1958. Indicted for treason after his pro-fascist radio broadcasts from Italy, Pound was found unfit to stand trial. His insanity saved him from facing the death penalty, but even now, nearly sixty years after his release, he remains one of the 20th century’s great enigmas. To see exactly how “the pieces do not fit,” Daniel Swift’s engaging third book follows Pound through his thirteen years in what the poet called The Bughouse (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), but what sounds less like a hospital than like a writers retreat. If Pound was treated for a mental illness, the records have disappeared. In any case, doctors disagreed about a diagnosis. So was he really ill? Was he faking? Pound arrived with a collection of Confucius’ odes and a Chinese dictionary, and settled in to work, all the while entertaining a continual stream of writers, students, and “tourists.” Swift organizes his book around six of these pilgrims, giving us the great modernist as he was seen by Charles Olson, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Frederick Seidel. Each discussion is a nuanced blend of biography, literary criticism, history, and politics as Swift traces Pound’s appearances in his visitors’ poems, outlines evolving views of mental illness, and most of all deepens his examination of whether Pound should—or can—be judged on either solely literary or political grounds. Ultimately, Pound has it both ways: “you can call him the hero or the villain; both parts are his.” Early in The Dawn Watch (Penguin Press, $30), Maya Jasanoff‘s multifaceted and beautifully written biography of Joseph Conrad, the award-winning historian throws out the arresting proposition that “history is like therapy for the present: it makes it talk about its parents.” Heart of Darkness alone would qualify Conrad as one parent of the globalized 21st century, and Jasanoff views his life and writing through his main themes —nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, and immigration. Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was bound in the currents of history from the start. His parents were Polish nationalists fighting to free their homeland from Russia. They were sent to Ukraine for their efforts and both had died by the time Conrad was eleven. Virtually stateless and already distrustful of nationalism, Conrad went to sea. He loved sailing, and his many sea tales celebrate its special culture of “craft.” But he hated the crass steamship era that followed, and “instead of going into steam,” Jasanoff says, he “became a writer.” He wrote about his experiences as an exile and an immigrant, and Jasanoff brilliantly traces the genesis of his fiction, documenting the 1880s attacks on Britain by Fenian freedom fighters (who “wrote the script for modern terrorism”) that Conrad transformed into The Secret Agent; parallels Conrad’s outrage—indeed, his horror—at King Leopold’s Congo Free State with his depiction of it in Heart of Darkness (written in just seven weeks); and tracks the shift from British to American world dominance that Conrad captured in his most ambitious, and most prescient novel, Nostromo. “A tale of progress and its discontents,” the novel offered happy endings only to a steamship captain, a financier, and a railroad entrepreneur: “globalism’s three fates,” as Jasanoff memorably puts it. Section by Laurie Greer

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“Readers are not supposed to notice the structure,” advises acclaimed New Yorker staff writer John McPhee in Draft No. 4 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $25), his collection of essays on craft. “It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.” Counter-intuitively, perhaps, McPhee employs a variety of elaborate diagrams, charts, and in one case a doodle involving a turtle, a weasel, and a muskrat, to take a story from conception to a polished magazine piece that might run to as many as 80,000 words. So it comes as something of a relief to learn that this author of more than thirty books doesn’t always know what he is doing when he embarks on a new project. “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something —-anything —-as a first draft.” Or that he once found himself up against a deadline, sprawled on the floor “near tears in a catatonic swivit,” with but one sentence written. This slim, entertaining volume also offers reportage on reporting itself, including McPhee’s struggle to convince a reluctant Jackie Gleason to cooperate for a Time magazine profile in 1961, as well as “two highly germane anecdotes” involving food and the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn. McPhee is surprisingly funny in a wonky, droll, practical, grammarian sort of way. Is the plural of attorney general “attorneys general” or “attorney generals?” And what do you do with a bunch of attorney(s) general(s) and the ensuing apostrophe(s) when they possess objects (in the plural), such as, for example, cars? Mr. McPhee will make you care about the answer, regardless of whether it will ever figure in any sentence you may one day write. Susan Coll

I read everything that David Sedaris writes. And when I have finished his latest piece, I always miss his voice. That melancholy was even greater when I finished Theft by Finding, Diaries 1977-2002 (Little, Brown, $28). Sedaris says this is the first volume of his diaries, edited, to be sure, because the man writes every day of his life. Some of the entries are lengthy stories about the events of his day. Some are observations about his friends and family. Many, though, are short treats —funny or poignant or devastating bits from the world around him, written at the time he was experiencing them. I made a mistake when I read this book. I was so excited to have it, that I read the whole thing in just a couple of days. On a road trip with my mom, I read choice passages to her while she drove. It was a nice way to enjoy someone else’s diaries, but if I had it to do over again, I would have taken my time and savored each entry even more. Jenny Clines

In his remarkable tracing of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (W.W. Norton, $27.95), Stephen Greenblatt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Swerve, presents a history of the central creation story of Western culture and pays tribute to the power of story itself in shaping what it means to be human. Intended to explain the origins of life, the nature of good and evil, punishment, shame, gender roles, moral responsibility, and much else, Adam and Eve from the first have raised as many question as they’ve answered. St. Augustine struggled for decades to make a coherent orthodoxy out of a Biblical text riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, but refused to relinquish his faith in the material’s literal truth. Milton also had an “obsession” with the first couple, but understood them in a new way. Focusing on their relationship as domestic partners he wrote Paradise Lost as an investigation of marriage and companionship. Like Dürer, he made Adam and Eve real people, not symbols. For Greenblatt, whose chapters on these two artists are as beautiful and heartfelt as they are scholarly, the Renaissance marked the pinnacle of Adam and Eve’s cultural life. With the Age of Exploration new geological and ethnographic information began to surface that was “incompatible with belief in Adam and Eve,” until Darwin’s theories finally replaced Genesis as the pre-eminent creation story. Yet Greenblatt and many others continue to find a “peculiar satisfaction” in the 6th century BCE myth. As Greenblatt notes, “it was a breath that brought Adam to life, the breath of a storyteller,” and it’s storytellers—and critics—that keep him going. Laurie Greer

The aim of Garry Wills’s powerful little book, What the Qur’an Meant (Viking, $25), is to teach readers about the real Islam as it is laid out in the Qur’an. “Living with fear is corrosive,” Wills writes. “Ignorance is the natural ally of fear.” He finds beautiful parallels between various canonical writings, as well as some poignant differences. Many Hebrew prophets appear in the Qur’an, with Abraham figuring prominently as the rebuilder of the Kah-bah shrine in Mecca. In the Qur’an, Adam and Eve are both tempted together. But Eve is unnamed, as are all other women, with one exception: Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Qur’an considers Moses and Jesus to be the two most important prophets prior to Muhammad, who stresses peace between the three faiths as well as obedience to one God. It is Allah who works through all of them. Conversely, Jihad is found nowhere in the Qur’an and the word Shariah appears only once, in reference to Muhammad following Allah’s path. This is a scholarly but thoroughly absorbing book which will make an unusual gift for anyone seeking new ways to revive their faith over the holiday season. Amanda Holmes Duffy

Michael Allen was arrested at age 15, tried as an adult at 16 for attempted carjacking, sentenced to 13 years in prison, paroled after 11, and killed in a shooting two years later. Danielle Allen’s heartbreaking, enraging Cuz (Liveright, $24.99), the story of the cousin eight years her junior, is at one level a story about numbers—one of the nightmares from the nation’s mass incarceration. But it’s crucial to see it first as a story about lives and individual choices—about one family’s struggle to surmount those overwhelming numbers. Why did Michael die so young, and why do so many other African-American men meet the same end? It could have made a difference if Michael hadn’t been sentenced as an adult. If he hadn’t been caught in the early zeal for “three strikes you’re out” laws. If he’d been paroled where he could have pursued the firefighting he’d shown an aptitude for. But rules determined these things and they didn’t consider the individual’s best interests. Or what if Michael hadn’t fallen in love with someone violent? If his stepfather hadn’t been abusive? If his family had better understood his needs? If Michael hadn’t kept secrets? Allen relentlessly traces every strand of Michael’s fate, struggling to see how his life could have gone otherwise. There are glimpses of hope, and though she conveys Michael as bright, engaging, and no more or less fallible than anyone else, he’s ultimately crushed between the War on Drugs and the equally unforgiving “parastate” of the world’s largest illegal drug consumer. What’s the answer? Decriminalize drugs. Get rid of the invisibility that permits gangs to flourish and guns to pour into the streets. That keeps parents from knowing what their children fall prey to. Allen’s powerful book, as moving and compassionate as it is angry, reasoned, and courageous, makes it all a little more visible. Laurie Greer Chris Hayes’s popular first book five years ago, Twilight of the Elites, took America’s meritocracy to task for a failure of leadership that has resulted in our institutional dysfunction and crisis of authority. That argument seems more relevant today than ever. In A Colony in a Nation (W.W. Norton, $26.95), Hayes, host of a news and opinion show on MSNBC, expands the discussion of America’s widening inequality gap begun in his earlier work. He focuses this time on law and order, making a persuasive case that our criminal justice system treats whites and blacks very differently. With characteristic passion and intelligence, Hayes delivers a timely appeal for much greater social justice. “An eyeopening look,” said one online reviewer. “Scholarly yet engrossing,” said another. “A book for our time,” said a third. Bradley Graham

As Kevin Young says in Bunk (Graywolf, $30), and as everyone is now all too aware, we are living in a “golden age of the hoax: the supposed age of information.” But this book is much more than a treatise on the “fake news” in the subtitle. It covers centuries of fakery, cataloged with a sense for detail and implication that showcases Young’s literary gifts— he’s a poet and critic who currently serves as poetry editor for The New Yorker. His stylistic flair only adds to the meaning of the book: thorough historical treatments on the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, P. T. Barnum’s freak shows, and “caught on film” fairies all forecast some very evidently personal treatments of contemporary hoaxers like Lance Armstrong, JT LeRoy, and Rachel Dolezal. This is a maximalist approach that takes on some deeply provocative recurring threads: namely, how racial hierarchies creep up as the unspoken root of so many hoaxes, and what separates artifice that’s presented as fiction or satire from something that’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes, no matter how benign and inventive it might seem. This is the kind of mammoth book you might never get to the bottom of, and that’s why it already feels like a landmark that will be studied for years. Jonathan Woollen When I heard Toni Morrison was releasing a book with an introduction by Ta-Nehisi Coates this year, I was elated. The Origin of Others (Harvard, $22.95) gathers the Nobel laureate’s 2016 Norton lectures, in which Morrison discusses what it means to be considered the other in America. Focusing on race, she highlights how those who are not considered white must remain the “other” in order for racial hierarchies to stay intact. Realizing what this means comes by recognizing that we must deny parts of ourselves in order to make people we consider strangers to be just that —strangers. In order to analyze the many ways culture creates and reflects otherness, Morrison uses history, Southern literature, and personal anecdotes to illustrate her theory. Her lectures give an overview of many of her own novels, and readers will be inspired to read or reread them, along with those of the many writers Morrison presents. Morgan Harding

Scored for six voices, Revolution Song (W.W. Norton, $28.95) traces the evolution of the idea of freedom in America from the early 1700s to roughly 1830. Many of the nation’s historical landmarks are here: the Stamp Act, the Continental Congress, Valley Forge and the war’s major battles, but Russell Shorto isn’t retelling the story of the American Revolution. Rather, he uses events to show what his six protagonists made of them. George Washington is the most familiar of these figures, but Shorto portrays the complicated man behind the imposing Founding Father, showing us the aspiring officer’s overdeveloped sense of honor and his reputation among Native Americans as the “Town Destroyer.” Washington found “something charming in the sound” of bullets and was so fashion conscious that he designed the uniforms for the Virginia militia. His British counterpart, who began life as a Sackville then inherited a fortune from a family friend and became Lord George Germain, provides the base-line for “freedom”: it depended on lineage and loyalty to the king. For Abraham Yates, an Albany shoemaker turned lawyer, patriot, and anti-federalist, freedom meant casting off the shackles of class. By the time Yates was involved in writing the New York constitution, he had assimilated Enlightenment thinking and advocated equal rights for all. But “all” meant European men. Shorto’s interwoven narratives highlight how one person’s idea of liberty ignored that of others. The “cause of humanity” American patriots such as Yates proclaimed did not include free black men who’d bought themselves out of slavery, like Venture Smith, or Native Americans such as the Seneca leader Cornplanter, or “wayward” women like Margaret Coughlin, the daughter of a British officer who fell in love with Aaron Burr, was forced to marry an abusive English soldier, ran away, and supported herself with a series of affairs with wealthy men. These three complete Shorto’s dramatis personae, and their long-overdue stories are riveting and heartbreaking. Laurie Greer

The Oxford History of the United States series (to which magna opera such as McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty belong) marks its latest installment, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, $35). The volume begins with the funeral of Lincoln—compared to whom the presidents that follow are disappointing in all but their facial hair—and continues through the 1876 election. A Stanford historian of Native Americans and the American West, Richard White deftly dismantles the stock cutouts of lone robber barons that have long populated this “historical flyover country.” With lively prose, ambitious scope, and an all-too keen sense of irony, he gives us a vivid depiction of an age of contradictions. White considers Reconstruction and the Gilded Age to have “gestated together” on sublime post-Civil War ideals, both quickly scaled back “to the unforgiving metrics of recalcitrant reality.” With balanced, tenderly evoked portraits of the “uncommon men and women,” the dizzying spin of technological progress, political corruption, immigration, urbanization, Westward expansion, crusading causes, economic inequality, and high-minded hope, are brought to a pace at which we can make out the foundations of the similarly complex epoch we now inhabit. Lila Stiff

A rightfully monumental biography, Ron Chernow‘s Grant (Penguin Press, $40) is a finely crafted portrait of a complex man. Chernow, awarded the Pulitzer for his life of George Washington, details the life of the Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant by exploring the underbelly of military success. He starts by exposing Grant’s vulnerabilities, which figured in the future commander-in-chief’s memoirs as the modest ambitions of a young soldier at West Point. Suspecting he lacked the skill to succeed as a warrior, Grant was nonetheless determined to lead and command. He studied hard. Became a skilled equestrian, developed strong mapping skills, and eventually proved himself on the battlefield, despite skepticism from journalists and fellow soldiers who were aware of Grant’s struggle with alcoholism. Chernow also illuminates much about Grant’s staunch criticism of slavery, his resignation from the army, his newly formed political awakenings, and infamous financial problems. Later, as the eighteenth president, Grant emerges from the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination and his own scandals as “America’s most famous man” who, as Mark Twain notes, “saved the country from destruction.” Prepare to be deeply immersed in this account of an immortal American life. Bob Attardi

There is no shortage of Obama Administration alums writing books. The question is: Which are actually worth reading? One is Thanks, Obama (Ecco, $27.99) by David Litt, who became a presidential speechwriter at the ripe old age of twenty-four and now is somehow old enough to pen a memoir. He details his White House experience with humor, self-deprecation, and a healthy reverence for his boss and the causes the Obama Administration championed. Readers will especially enjoy his tales of being the go-to-guy for Obama’s funniest lines and most memorable comedic performances. The book offers a nice peek at life inside the White House and the ups and downs of crafting a message for a president – even one who reads, thinks, reflects, and tells the truth. Lissa Muscatine

As the official White House photographer, Pete Souza spent countless hours during eight years with President Barack Obama. He captured the famous Situation Room meeting in which Obama, surrounded by senior national security aides, monitored the raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. And he caught the president in many lighter times as well, whether with children, friends, or family members. In all, Souza took nearly two million photos. Obama: An Intimate Portrait (Little, Brown, $50) reproduces 300 of the most representative ones, documenting consequential moments of decision and official action alongside numerous less scripted occasions. The result is an historic photographic record of a landmark presidency and an intimate portrait of a man who occupied America’s most powerful office. Bradley Graham

Following the overwhelming response to his Between The World and Me, TaNehisi Coates has collected his major essays from and on the Obama years in We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (One World, $28). While many of us remember the original publication of pieces such as “A Case for Reparations” and “Fear of a White President,” Coates prefaces each one with what he calls his “notes,” explaining where he was in his life at the time of writing and telling us how he currently feels about his past work. These notes provide insight on how Coates went from being unemployed and struggling to support his wife and child to becoming the major writer and public intellectual he is today. Readers are rarely made privy to the backstories behind major articles, and that makes this book of essays unique. As someone who loves to read about writers and the writing process, I found Coates’ notes irresistible. And re-reading his previous articles reminded me why Coates is one of the greatest writers of our time. Morgan Harding

Senator Al Franken has graduated from being a comedian-turnedsenator to a senator who deftly uses humor as a political tool. His funny and serious new book, Al Franken Giant of the Senate (Twelve, $28), tells the story of his Minnesota roots, his 42-year marriage to his wife Franni, his journey from Saturday Night Live to a 312-vote U.S. Senate victory in 2008, and his hard-earned stripes as a member of Congress at a time of growing partisanship and public disillusionment about government. The end result is one of the most genuine and entertaining political memoirs to date. And as we look to 2020, let’s remember: Weirder things have happened in America than the election of a Jewish comedian to be president. Just sayin’. Lissa Muscatine

In this detailed history of the libertarian movement, Nancy MacLean fully justifies the lurid image of her title. Democracy in Chains (Viking, $28) chronicles a century or more of efforts by the radical right not simply to influence “who rules” but to overturn “the rules” of American government and save the wealthy minority from the “exploitative majority.” MacLean, a Duke professor of history and public policy, starts this “utterly chilling story of the intellectual origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today” in 1956 in Charlottesville, Virginia. At that point James McGill Buchanan, the Nobel economist at the center of her account, was establishing the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy at the University of Virginia. One of a number of ostensibly academic institutes and think-tanks, most funded by libertarian billionaires, the Center discouraged any open discussion of ideas and concentrated exclusively on turning “libertarian creed into a national counterrevolution.” MacLean tracks several campaigns that, while falling short of the ultimate goal, have nonetheless eroded trust in government institutions and have changed the way politics is done. Resisting the Brown decision, for instance, the state of Virginia pressed hard for the privatization of schools; one county closed its public schools for several years rather than comply with the order to integrate. But by reframing an issue of race as an issue of freedom of choice, the right opened a wider discussion of the government’s role in schools, and MacLean shows how libertarians have employed this “stealth” strategy with increasing success through the later twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Her closely-argued and passionate study loops back to John C. Calhoun and the Gilded Age for the seeds of Buchanan’s public choice theory, then shows, with the Flint water crisis, climate change denial, Scott Walker’s anti-union measures, increasing privatization of prisons, the anti-Obamacare movement, and much more, how effectively they’ve been sown. Laurie Greer

As Hillary Clinton’s longtime former speechwriter, I was worried about whether she could write a book with authenticity and self-reflection less than a year after her shocking defeat in the presidential election. But writing What Happened (Simon & Schuster, $30), she explains, became her therapy. The book forced her to reckon with her own mistakes as well as the external forces that contributed to one of the most bizarre and disastrous presidential campaigns in American history. It is her sixth book and in it she speaks with candor and a wry humor that the public rarely sees. Especially poignant is her masterful connecting of dots on the allegations of Russian intrusion into our electoral process. This is not selfserving; she clearly and persuasively alerts Americans to the very real dangers presented when hostile countries and political foes weaponize social media and technology to manipulate opinions and attitudes, and attempt to erode our democracy. The book is interesting, very funny, and covers really important stuff. Read it. Lissa Muscatine

Susan Bordo makes no pretense of journalistic objectivity in this excellent political book. Instead, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton (Melville House, $24.99) makes the case that external forces were part of what undid Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Bordo, a respected feminist academic and author of a previous biography of Anne Boleyn, blogged almost daily during the presidential race and turned her real time observations into this book. Most in her crosshairs are Bernie Sanders, James Comey, and the press. For those looking for a smart defense of Hillary in 2016, this is it. Lissa Muscatine

Just about anyone would find Shattered (Crown, $28)— Washington Post reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s fastmoving and detailed account of the trials and travails that beset the 2016 Clinton campaign—an interesting and compelling read. I’d be remiss if I didn’t single out two particular groups of people who would be especially intrigued: campaign wonks on either side of the political aisle, and fans of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. For liberals weary of re-experiencing any election-related trauma, have faith: Allen and Parnes, who previously authored the positive portrayal of Hillary Clinton in the biography HRC, depict both Clinton and her campaign staff sympathetically, trying as best they can to navigate the minefield that was the 2016 election. Even if you experienced last year as an avid news consumer and continue to be flabbergasted (and/or horrified) by the outcome, Shattered will help shed some light on what may have seemed unexplainable. A must-read read for news junkies everywhere. Isaac Stone

Before writing Devil’s Bargain (Penguin Press, $27) author Joshua Green labeled Steve Bannon “the most dangerous political operative in America.” Now, in his authoritative, readable new book, Green explains just how a bombastic right-wing political extremist bent on “disrupting” the status quo became the most influential strategist behind the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. Green looks at Bannon’s roots, political and cultural sensibilities, previous ventures (successful and not), and of course… follows the money. Bannon’s rise and his access to financiers who share his extreme views is a cautionary tale, and essential reading one year into the Trump presidency. Lissa Muscatine

Editor, biographer, and storyteller Michael Korda has a very particular set of skills, and they are all masterfully employed in Alone: Britain, Churchill and Dunkirk, Defeat into Victory (Liveright, $29.95). Merging history with memoir, Korda expertly weaves the events of May 1940 with the dramatic effect they had on his family. The rise of Winston Churchill, the German war machine marching across Europe, and the unprecedented, inspiring rescue of allied soldiers at Dunkirk are all here, humanized by the author’s own memories of his famous movieindustry family and his escape from London as a child. Compellingly and comprehensively written, peppered with pictures and maps, Korda’s book takes an immense, seminal, and now mythic event and makes it live again from both a global and a personal perspective. Bill Leggett.

The fifteenth book from acclaimed journalist Marvin Kalb, entitled The Year I Was Peter the Great (Brookings, $24.99), is a memoir focused on one tumultuous year, 1956. Kalb was then a twenty-six-yearold Russian-speaking graduate student assisting the American ambassador as a translator at the U.S embassy in Moscow. As Khrushchev’s shocking, yearlong campaign of de-Stalinization unfolded, Kalb was there as an eyewitness, meeting Russians of all types, assessing their attitudes and opinions, and watching them size up their American visitor too. This is a fascinating and highly entertaining story about a momentous year in Russian history—one especially relevant in the era of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Lissa Muscatine

Serious history buffs will appreciate the new perspective on the decline of the Roman Empire offered in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton, $35). While experts and armchair historians have spent years debating the human causes that contributed to the downfall of the great empire, Kyle Harper argues that it was brought to the brink of destruction by a larger, less manageable force: nature. He demonstrates that the Roman Empire was able to flourish due to an ideal climate, but when climate stability began to decay so did the fortunes of Rome. And while the Romans benefited from increased migration, travel, and trade, these factors also permitted the spread of a variety of deadly diseases. The author is clearly an expert in his field, and he makes a compelling case by drawing on modern developments in fields such as DNA sequencing, epidemiology, and climate science. As Harper lays out in his book, perhaps the Romans’ greatest mistake was holding on to the belief that they had “tamed the forces of wild nature.” These environmental factors, along with human error, helped to bring about the destruction of one of the greatest empire’s the world has ever seen. Alexis Jason-Mathews

The ten essays Oliver Sacks gathered for this volume shortly before his death might at first seem like a miscellany, the meanderings of an inexhaustibly curious man, interested in everything. But The River of Consciousness (Knopf, $27.95), covering such classic Sacks themes as perception and misperception, memory, time, creativity, and how the abnormal illuminates normality, is a remarkably tight and focused collection. In making this coherence out of many disparate fields— biology, history, biography, medicine, photography—the book mirrors the title essay’s discussion of William James’ theories that the seemingly continuous state of consciousness is composed of innumerable discrete moments. James, one of Sacks’ heroes, returns throughout this book, as do Darwin and Freud. Like Sacks, these thinkers embodied an admirable “spaciousness of mind,” and Sacks profiles not their celebrated achievements but their lesser-known accomplishments in areas outside their specialties. He lays out Freud’s early work in neurology and Darwin’s late work in botany, a field that was mostly descriptive before Darwin’s six books and seventy-plus papers transformed it into an evolutionary science. Sacks also picks up threads from his own prodigious writing, revisiting many of his earlier books to add new information, revise conclusions, and, most of all, to ask more questions. Laurie Greer

Dan Jones has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most captivating and lively historians, proving that well-researched historical narratives need not be dry and impenetrable. Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors (Viking, $30) is his best work to date. It has the advantage of dealing with a fascinating and often ill-used subject, but Jones elevates the Templars above conspiracy theory histories to uncover the fascinating history within, from their military campaigns, Outremer Crusader states, their financial acumen and extensive properties, to the knights’ eventual downfall. This volume is possibly the most comprehensive modern history of the Templars, told by an incredibly talented chronicler and interpreter of facts and sources. It is a must-have for any history bookshelf. Anton Bogomazov

By training and practice, Edward O. Wilson is one of the pre-eminent biologists of our time, and is perhaps unmatched in myrmecology, the study of ants. Luckily, Wilson has ranged far beyond his specialty, and as books like The Meaning of Human Existence show, Wilson is as much a philosopher as he is a scientist. He carries on this dual practice in his brilliant The Origins of Creativity (Liveright, $24.95), though he would say that science and philosophy are not parallel modes of inquiry, but exist along one continuum. This essential connection between the sciences and the humanities is the heart of the vision of a third Enlightenment that he outlines here. The two have always been linked, despite C.P. Snow’s diverging “two cultures,” forming parts of one mutually reinforcing coevolution, with language—the “supreme achievement, genetic in origin, cultural in its elaboration,” uniting them. Wilson’s own language is lucid, elegant, and irresistibly quotable: “the realm of science is everything possible in the universe, the realm of the humanities is everything conceivable to the human mind,” he says. And by utilizing these capacities to their fullest, we as a species can accomplish much, including solving the mystery of human consciousness and discovering “why we exist.” As apt to draw examples from film, literature, and music as he is from the natural world, Wilson, who has collaborated with the poet Robert Hass on The Poetic Species, is perhaps his own best example of the kind of wide-ranging, ever-inquiring mind he describes. Laurie Greer

Patti Smith is a collector of dreams and dream-like moments. Her Paris is “grainy bits of film swirl” spliced with her memories of earlier visits. Smith turns these images into guiding spirits and follows where they lead, making art—writing and photographs—along the way. Devotion (Yale, $18) is both a map and an artifact of this creative journey. It opens with a pilgrimage to Camus’s house, Simone Weil’s grave, and Modiano’s Paris streets that could be one more stop on the M Train. But rather than an end in itself, this essay is a staging ground for the “alchemy” that transforms random details of daily life—the color of the sky, the program on TV—into a work of fiction. “Devotion,” the book’s centerpiece, is a modern fairy tale about art and identity, love and autonomy. Both hauntingly lovely and slightly disturbing, as fairy tales are, it follows sixteen-year-old Eugenia as she pursues her passion for figure skating. This is an art whose very means are ephemeral, yet for Eugenia, who has lost her parents, her aunt, and her lover, it’s a reliable solace and a lasting inspiration, just as, for Smith, “the decisive power of a singular work” is always an irresistible “call to action” to make something herself. Laurie Greer

In Tell Me How It Ends (Coffee House, $12.95) Valeria Luiselli gives an eye-opening account of her experience as a translator for an organization that seeks to help immigrant children during the 2014 American Immigration Crisis. As our world and our sociopolitical landscape continue to be shaped by immigration, Luiselli has given us a gift by writing a book which we can use as a tool to view the ongoing crisis through the eyes of someone personally committed to the cause. Combining anecdotal evidence with facts and figures, she crafts what is likely to be a definitive document of our current political climate. This slim volume powerfully conveys more emotion than its actual size suggests and is an indictment against the governments responsible for the crisis. Unlike Luiselli, they continually fail to show empathy for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Bennard Fajardo

Chris Ware’s new collection, Monograph by Chris Ware (Rizzoli, $60), assembles countless strips, pages, magazine covers, sculptures, photographs, and other things into a thorough and astoundingly generous retrospective of the artist’s career. It comes replete with commentary written by Ware himself, who charts his path from RAW to Jimmy Corrigan to Building Stories and beyond. Reading this book is like touring the interior of a vast and seemingly impossible mechanism carved from space metal, while your tour guide chats amiably and bemoans the lack of carpets. There are also individual booklets within the book that you can flip through, and several of his New Yorker covers depicted in their full glory. For any fan of the cartoonist, this is probably the single best purchase you could make this holiday, a blueprint for everything Ware has done over the past few decades. But for artists, this is something even better: Chris Ware opens the door backstage, shows you how he performs the magic tricks, and then gives you a chance to do it yourself. Adam Wescott

Rothko: The Color Field Paintings (Chronicle, $40) is a tribute to one of the greatest periods by a single painter in art history. Mark Rothko (1903-1970), one of the leading Abstract Expressionists, pioneered the large, flat fields of solid color that Clement Greenberg dubbed “color field painting.” He worked his way toward them throughout the 1940s, and by 1949 had “arrived,” as his son, Christopher Rothko, says in the Foreword. The artist pursued color fields for the rest of his life, arranging two, three, and four color rectangles in dramatic and shimmering patterns that establish kinetic relationships between the viewer and the canvas. Presenting fifty of Rothko’s iconic paintings in chronological order, this book allows you to watch the artist develop his style and discover what the colors and rectangles could do; you can see the shades deepen, and darken. The volume also allows you to savor the full, luminous power of each composition, giving you the images one by one, with plenty of white space for the colors to breathe. Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides a commentary on Rothko’s legacy. Bennard Fajardo The Art Museum, by the editors of Phaidon Press ($59.95), brings together an astonishing cross-section of work from around the globe and throughout time, reproduced in over 1,600 beautiful color images. The reader can jump from virtual room to virtual room by flipping the pages, or stay in one place for a comprehensive study. This book is perfect for an art lover, a person who wants to learn about art, or someone who loves art but whose feet just can’t take the Smithsonian anymore. A single book doesn’t get more entertaining or informative than this, and finally there is no crowd standing in front of what you want to see. Bill Leggett.

Women Artists in Paris: 18501900 (Yale, $65) edited by Laurence Madeline, former curator at the Musée d’Orsay, is a must-own for art lovers, historians, and feminists alike. This stunning exhibition catalogue presents over eighty paintings by thirtyseven different artists. Paris in the late nineteenth century was considered the place for artists to train, and people came from around the world to develop their technique. This catalogue is a testament to the exceptional and varied work produced by the women who journeyed to Paris to pursue their artistic ambitions. These artists fought to achieve recognition at a time when artistic talent and creative genius were thought to be reserved for men, all the while also trying to adhere to the social norms that governed the lives of respectable women. They persevered in the face of rejection and condescension, and created masterful works of art in the process. The scholarly essays that open the book are fascinating and well worth the read, but the catalog of full-page color reproductions that follow are what readers will find irresistible. Here you will encounter works by household names like Mary Cassatt alongside those by artists still waiting to achieve the widespread public recognition they are due, such as Marie Bashkirtseff and Cecilia Beaux. Alexis Jason-Mathews

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was the son and grandson of sculptors, but when he went to school he studied engineering. Later, committing himself to art, he chose painting, like his mother. It took a few years before he accepted his fate and turned to sculpture. This brief period of indecision is the single moment of angst in the life of one of the twentieth century’s most joyful and original modern artists. Inheriting his father’s dexterity as well as his “playful, lively, fantastic” tendencies, Calder (Knopf, $55) dedicated his life to animating the inanimate. In Jed Perl’s lively, affectionate, and thorough account to 1940, Calder’s life was pretty much on track from the start. With the avant-garde “always part” of it, he grew up in the artistic circles of both France and the U.S., a peripatetic life he continued. He was an incorrigible punster (see his work A Merry Can Ballet) and everything he did was infused with humor. Perl traces Calder’s jeux d’esprit from the early portraits and objects he made by bending wire, works that “suggested rapidly executed line drawings leaping into the third dimension,” to the elaborate Cirque Calder that was meant to be performed, not just looked at, and on to his abstractions, which were also a “menagerie…of unexpected forms” in motion, and which Perl, in the spirit of his subject, describes as “motions galumphing, jagged, swishy, swirly.” As playful as they were serious, these mobiles (named by Duchamp) and stabiles (so-called by Jean Arp) revolutionized sculpture, taking a stationary form, making it move, and creating new relationships between the viewer and the art. Perl is tireless in tracing Calder’s influences, which included Miró, Klee, Hélion, Saul Steinberg, Mondrian, Edgar Varèse, Martha Graham, and Malcolm Cowley. All were his friends, and Perl’s engaging, scholarly, and buoyant biography—and its 400plus photos—makes it easy to see why. Laurie Greer

Projects (Abrams, $85) chronicles forty-four Andy Goldsworthy installations around the world, as they change and evolve with their environments. This book, a companion volume to Goldsworthy’s Ephemeral Works, includes stunning photographs, site maps, and an extensive interview. You’ll find his usual cones and labyrinths made of wood and stone, but unlike his “ephemeral” works, whose construction marked an endpoint, these pieces began life only when Goldsworthy finished them, for they evolve as they are weathered by the seasons. Goldsworthy documents, for example, walls covered in porcelain clay, as they dry, crack and tear away, and enormous slate chambers, enclosing wind-fallen branches, which gradually transform as moss and fungi cover them. He repaves an ancient forest track with rectangular stones and cuts a new path across an Ohio estate, always maintaining 950 feet above sea level. An igloo of woven branches sits inside a pit, accessed through a doorway via steps in a terraced wall. A flowing line of fallen cypress weaves through eucalyptus trees, which overtake a California landscape. But whatever he does in these installations, Goldsworthy invites us to experience nature freshly. This gorgeous, glossy volume will make an extraordinary gift for the art or nature lover in your life. Amanda Holmes Duffy Among the few things known about Vivian Maier: she was a great photographer. She worked as a nanny. She was born in New York, lived in France from age six to twelve, grew up in a splintered family, spent the last fifty years of her life in Chicago, and left tens of thousands of photos, negatives, slides, and undeveloped rolls of film in storage. Once these surfaced after being auctioned off, their new owners began the myth-making that Pamela Bannos, a professor of photography, both charts and refutes. Her Vivian Maier (Chicago, $35) is a kind of Emily Dickinson of photography; while she roamed the streets relentlessly, she let no one in. Her neighbors thought she was homeless because she spent so much time on a park bench. In lieu of friends to interview, Bannos turned to the photos for clues to Maier’s life. She has studied seemingly every image Maier recorded, and follows in her footsteps from Maier’s first forays with a camera in the early 1950s, in France, through her development as a prodigious street photographer in New York and Chicago, and her travels through Europe, South America, and Asia. Looking at what Maier looked at, Bannos reads these images beautifully, giving insight about Maier’s brilliant sense of composition, her experiments, and her ever-evolving technique. She identifies the cameras Maier used, points out angles, notes lighting and shadows, and traces recurrent themes. She brings the pictures to life so vividly, and is so convincing about what was in Maier’s mind at the moment she framed each shot, that this eloquent photographic interpretation itself becomes a masterful biography of Maier not as an eccentric but as a true artist and an uncommonly independent woman. Laurie Greer

The ne plus ultra of Vermeer art books, Vermeer in Detail (Abrams, $65) is a conclusive cataloguing of all thirty-two paintings by the master, accompanied by 170 extremely intimate—often full page— magnifications. Satisfyingly, in this one volume is everything the eye can take in from a Vermeer painting, elucidated by a thorough presentation of all the documentation and research we do have about the dismayingly mysterious, historically unreachable Johannes Vermeer. And yet this canonical volume’s greatest asset is the lightness with which author Gary Schwartz wears his learning. An American art historian residing in the Netherlands, Schwartz delivers prose unencumbered by any scholastic staidness or over-certainty, taking an intelligent but lightsome tone wholly befitting Vermeer’s oeuvre (“Dear Reader: it’s every Vermeer scholar for himself on this one,” he avers at one point). The manner in which Schwartz groups his chosen details into chapters is itself a revelation, providing fascinating insight into life in 17th- century Delft, as well as into Vermeer’s technical genius, yet nowhere detracting from the sheer awe of viewing the Old Master at such microscopic proximity. Lila Stiff

A fascinating exercise and assay, Traces of Vermeer (Oxford, $34.95) serves as an elucidating technical accompaniment to the broader scope of Vermeer in Detail. Jane Jelley is, first and foremost, a painter. But she has become something of a reconstructive art historian through her engagement with Vermeer and his artistic process. Vermeer’s startling command of light, the snapshot-like quality of his 17th century masterworks, has long baffled even his greatest admirers. It would seem he used a camera obscura as an optic aide, but how exactly Vermeer might have used it—and whether its use in some way detracts from his genius—has been highly controversial. Jelley brings a vast knowledge, and, more importantly, practice, of traditional painting techniques to this discussion: grinding one’s own pigment, preparing canvases, long apprenticeships, third glazes. Through trials in the studio, she proposes a novel suggestion as to how exactly Vermeer could have used a camera obscura lens to arrive at his compositions, plot them onto canvas, and then prepare and layer paint to create his unparalleled works. The process, she maintains, would only further elevate Vermeer’s genius. Jelley’s engaging prose is a boon to both scholars and casual art appreciators. Lila Stiff

Kelli Anderson is a graphic designer whose works on paper don’t stay flat on a table. Previously she’s made, among other things, a paper record player and a paper camera. Her newest project, This Book Is a Planetarium (Chronicle, $40), is not so much a pop-up book as it is a book of pop-up mechanisms. In addition to being a planetarium that can project the autumn night sky on your ceiling, it’s also a decoder ring to encrypt secret messages, a spiralgraph to create unique designs, a smart phone speaker, a perpetual calendar, and a paper lyre. Each contraption is accompanied by easy-to-understand explanations of why and how they work. In addition to its contents, the book itself is a stunningly engineered object and beautiful, too. As you open each page, the colors pop at the same time the gadget unfurls. The sturdy cardboard construction will hold up well to repeated use and two elastic bands are cleverly positioned to hold the book open when investigating each device. Get ready to be amazed and delighted. Suzanne Morgan

Sir Isaac Newton famously discovered that an object at rest or in motion will remain in that state unless acted upon by an outside force. Before Scott Kelly “slipped the surly bonds of earth” as an astronaut, this Newtonian law played out in a serendipitous fashion in his early life. As he describes in his tremendous Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery (Knopf, $29.95), he was on a trajectory to nowhere in particular. Growing up in New Jersey, Kelly was a lackluster student. He drifted and daydreamed all the way to college but hadn’t settled on a direction. During his freshman year the outside force arrived in the form of The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Never having been much of a reader, Kelly uncharacteristically devoured this book, finding inspiration in the tale of those early test pilots and astronauts. As a result, Kelly altered the course of his life and after years of struggle he proved he had the right stuff. The highlight of his memoir is his chronicle of his year aboard the International Space Station. Kelly vividly portrays not only the important work being done on the ISS but also daily life for a human floating in orbit. A moving, funny, and uplifting story, this is the closest you will get to experiencing the final frontier without strapping yourself to a rocket. Michael Triebwasser

Do you ever find yourself looking at the starry sky and wondering how it all came to be, asking what is a universe and what is our place in it? Do you wish you knew more but are just too busy with your everyday life to start exploring and looking for answers? Well, then, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (W.W. Norton, $18.95), is just what you need. And even though Tyson starts with the premise that “the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you,” he will try to explain. There’s no reason to feel intimidated; I’m sure you remember learning about Einstein’s E=mc² and Sir Isaac Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, and that’s all you need to start reading this book. How it all begun, the Big Bang and the expansion of the cosmos, dark matter and black holes, everything is explained in clear and understandable language with short chapters that you can read whenever you find a spare minute. You will learn that the observable universe may contain a hundred billion galaxies, bright and beautiful and packed with stars, and that “we are stardust brought to life then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.” Marija Dimitrijevski

Adding his voice to other compelling critiques of present-day technology, Franklin Foer passionately and deftly goes after Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple for threatening our culture and individuality. He warns that these technology giants are doing nothing less than “reordering the production and consumption of knowledge” and becoming “the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known.” In World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (Penguin Press, $27), Foer recounts the rise of the biggest tech players and examines how their vast efforts at data profiling and media control have come to influence much of what we do and think. To illustrate the difficulties of maintaining a cultural institution in the digital age, Foer writes as well about his own ill-fated experience at the New Republic, where he clashed with a new owner whose wealth derived from Facebook stock and who sought to turn what had been a little magazine into an engine of considerable social media traffic. Foer also offers some prescriptions, both large and small, for lessening the dangers he perceives. Bradley Graham

Gamergate is one of the darkest chapters in the history of the internet. It began in 2014 when independent video-game developer Zoe Quinn, who had recently ended an abusive relationship with a tech-savvy man, was deluged by a tidal wave of hatred. Her attacker made false allegations about Quinn online, knowing he would spark a backlash. In her extraordinary Crash Override (PublicAffairs, $27), Quinn chronicles her experience—and the details are shocking. Gamergate compromised all facets of her online persona. Professional opportunities evaporated. The mounting threats endangered not only Quinn but anyone she was in contact with. Against these incredible odds, Quinn persevered. She fought back, organizing a movement dedicated to fighting online hate. While I called Gamergate “history,” Quinn shows that it’s not. It is now. It is here. It is going on every day. She illustrates the toxicity people from marginalized communities face daily on the internet, and often from those they turn to for help. This insightful and inspiring book is a clarion call for widespread action that all internet users should heed. Michael Triebwasser

A self-taught computer programmer and one of the few women in the industry, Ellen Ullman wrote code from the 1970s to the 1990s. Then, to redeem the human from the machine, she wrote a pair of brilliant novels and the sharply observed, engaging, and very smart essays gathered here. Life in Code (MCD, $27) both evaluates the promise and reality of the internet and looks back at important moments —Y2k, the dotcom boom and bust, several generations of hard- and software—that brought us to where we are today. Ullman is a deeply informed, witty, and often passionate writer. Unlike most of her colleagues, she never aspired to change the world with technology, though she believes the web should be more than a platform for shopping, advertising, and surveillance. Also unlike the young white and Asian men who still define “the closed society where code gets written,” Ullman craves human contact. Conversation. Openness. She wants to “stick a needle into the shiny bubble of the technical world’s received wisdom,” and remind it of messy human emotions, bodies, and stories. By putting her insights about technology into the context of difficult bosses, gentrification, marriage, cats, and dinner parties (how would a programmer translate social cues and multiple forks for a robot?), she vividly reminds us that even today, as more and more people adopt the 24/7-online habits of alienated tech geeks, “technology is not the driver of change, what drives technology is human desire.” People are still in charge. Laurie Greer

The future is almost upon us! In their new book, Soonish (Penguin Press, $30), husband-and- wife team Zach and Kelly Weinersmith focus on ten areas of emerging technology in which we will see the next big developments. From deep space exploration to the 3-D printing of human organs, the Weinersmiths take us on a tour of what is on the horizon. This is pop science at its best. Kelly, an adjunct faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice University, makes the details clear and fascinating, while Zach, the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, ensures that the illustrations and comics sparkle and delight. You’ll learn what’s holding us back from asteroid mining, for example, and all the new ways scientists think they can make it happen. Some visions are closer to fruition than others. The giant space elevator that would take people directly into orbit is farther away than augmented reality, for instance. So close is augmented reality that its chapter had to be updated before the book went to press due to recent technological advances in just the last year, including the Pokémon Go phenomenon. This is a fun and informative read, and will make you the smartest futurist of the new year! Keith Vient

In their second, stunning, collaboration, award-winning geographer James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, former senior design editor for National Geographic, use big data to show us worlds we’ve never been able to see before. Where the Animals Go (W.W. Norton, $39.95) charts the creatures of land, sea, and air using the information generated by a wide range of new technologies, from GPS to DNA “barcoding,” DTAGs (digital sound recording tags) to fluorescent nanoparticles. Tailoring the technology to fit the environment and the creature, scientists have followed elephants and zebras over more ground than these creatures were thought to cover, tracked a wolf across the Alps from Ljubljana to Verona by way of Austria, sent drones to count orangutans on Sumatra by tabulating their nests in the trees, and traced seals under the Southern Ocean, a project that also yielded data on sea salinity and temperature—essential for research on climate change. Cheshire and Uberti have collected stories about the animals along with the data, and use both for the dozens of detailed, full-color maps that form the heart of their book. Just as technology is revising assumptions about many animals’ range, feeding habits, and other behavior, and giving conservationists evidence for new policies concerning wildlife, it’s also fostering these beautiful visualizations. Watch the spirals of a griffon vulture catching a thermal, or the flight of goldenwinged warblers staying just ahead of a tornado, or measure the depth a whale dives when exposed to the noise of a submarine, and you come close to understanding what it’s like to be an animal on Earth today. Laurie Greer

Jellyfish are among the oldest creatures on the planet, yet not much is known about them. Three hundred species have been named, but twice that are thought to exist. They range in size from a millimeter to more than six feet, live for hours or years. Most sting, and one kind can kill a person in less than three minutes. Collecting in massive “blooms,” they literally stop ship traffic and frequently clog intake valves and shut down power plants. And they are “heartbreakingly beautiful.” Juli Berwald, a one-time science textbook writer, became smitten with jellyfish while diving in Israel in 1987. She didn’t plan to pursue them around the world, but she has, and Spineless (Riverhead, $27) is both the story of what Berwald has learned about jellyfish and the story of how the jellyfish made her a scientist. A wife and mother of two, Berwald found in jellyfish “the intellectual playground …[she] craved,” but scheduled reporting and diving trips around the family’s needs. She nonetheless met with marine researchers in Europe, Japan, and throughout the U.S., and her book examines all facets of jellyfish physiology, from how the animals swim—pulling water, not pushing it, and moving deliberately, not drifting—to how they sting, how they use bioluminescence to communicate, how one species appears every thirty years, like a marine locust, and how another type reverses stages of its life cycle, as if it finds time as fluid as water. Berwald’s driving question is whether jellyfish thrive or suffer in warmer, more acidic seas, and as she presents the conflicting evidence, her book expands into an urgent and illuminating look at the ocean as a complex eco-system beset by climate change. Laurie Greer

Wolves occupy a special place in the hearts of Americans, commanding admiration for their beauty and respect for their fierce predatory skills. Although these animals are inextricably linked to the rugged identity of the West, Nate Blakeslee shows that the reality of humanwolf coexistence is complicated and uneasy. With the immediacy of a novel, American Wolf (Crown, $28) tracks “0-Six,” a charismatic alpha female descended from a pack reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995 (before which wolves had been hunted to near extinction). As she raises her cubs and faces down other wolves, 0-Six’s journey is depicted in meticulous and essential detail, providing the hook to a wider depiction of life in the northern Rockies. People feature prominently, including the watchers who track the wolf packs, the environmentalists who fought for their reintroduction, the ranchers losing livestock, and the hunters who resent the loss of elk, the wolves’ primary prey. Blakeslee is scrupulously fair in presenting the perspective of all those whose livelihoods are affected, and readers shouldn’t approach this expecting a “good guys, bad guys” narrative. Whatever conclusions you may reach, however, what stands out is the author’s esteem for an ancient species under pressure in the modern era. Jon Purves

Cetaceans: we think of them as “smart,” but what does that mean in creatures so different from us? Their environment is under the sea, their bodies are adapted for swimming, yet, like us, they are mammals with complex brains. If you’ve ever wondered what use a whale, dolphin, or porpoise makes of that brain, Deep Thinkers: Inside the Minds of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises (Chicago, $35), edited by Georgetown professor Janet Mann, will give you some insight. As an overview of cetacean research, Mann and her contributors, who each bring their own expertise in marine mammal research, go from brain structure to cognition, communication, society, and culture, giving examples of the animals forming social groups, using tools, and hunting cooperatively. Each chapter is broken down into two- or three-page topics interspersed with graphics and vivid photographs of animals—alone, in groups, or interacting with humans. This clearly written and thoughtfully organized book makes it easy to understand the cetaceans’ place in what has become our world, filled with the threats to their existence, such as pollution, that we caused, but also changes we can make to maintain their presence in the seas. Suzanne Morgan

“Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without them,” write Diane Cook and Len Jenshel. Supported by a National Geographic Society grant, the husband- and-wife team spent two years traveling the world creating portraits of Wise Trees (Abrams, $40). The result is a breathtaking photographic monument to more than fifty ancient, majestic specimens. There are those whose rooted presence has made deeply influential marks upon human culture: Siddhartha’s Bodhi, Isaac Newton’s apple tree, and the Derby Boab brought by aboriginal peoples from Africa to Australia some 1,500 years ago. Others quietly bear witness to horrific chapters of human history: the Hiroshima bonsai and Nagasaki survivor trees, a Southern Live Oak that served as Texan gallows, and a massive Monkeypod against which children were beaten to death in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Still other specimens exhibit inspiring impassiveness to human concerns and epochs: the California Redwoods, the “Tomb Raider” strangler fig of Angkor Wat, and the Magna Carta yew thought to predate the birth of Christ. And then there are those bewildering beauties made fragile by human interference: a vandalized California Sequoia, and “Pando,” the eighty thousand year old clonal colony of aspen trunks in Fishlake Forest, Utah. Lila Stiff

Following his award-winning profiles of Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson continues his exploration of creative genius with this in-depth and insightful study of Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, $35), the great Italian painter, architect, and engineer. Isaacson keeps da Vinci in a dual focus, portraying him as both a great artist and a man of science and technology; in vivid tableaux, he shows us the quintessential Renaissance man in the act of dissecting cadavers to learn about human physiology, observing water and wind, and pursuing any and all ways to better understand his world. Isaacson also chronicles how da Vinci, because he was born out of wedlock, was prevented from attending Latin school, which spared him from the need to conform to many of his era’s social exigencies. Using the great treasure of da Vinci’s Notebooks, Isaacson mines the master’s work itself for insight into various periods of his subject’s life, analyzing paintings for both the history they convey and the invaluable glimpses they offer into da Vinci’s artistic techniques. The book is generous with illustrations, illuminating not just Isaacson’s portrait but also serving as an immediate reference to Leonardo’s brilliance. Mark LaFramboise

At last, the secrets of palak chaat are revealed! The crispy fried spinach with tomato, onion, tamarind, and yogurt has a fanatical following at Rasika (and Rasika West End). Restaurateur Ashok Bajaj (Bombay Room) opened Rasika in late 2005, and brought chef Vikram Sunderam from London to create its innovative dishes. It instantly became a D.C. sensation. In Rasika: Flavors of India (Ecco, $34.99), written with David Hagedorn, they invite you into the kitchen and share the thorough grounding (and the professional secrets) that will help you cook these delicious dishes. Yes, you will shop for ingredients which cannot be substituted for (example: curry leaves and Kashmiri chiles); you will spend time making the foundational pastes and sauces to freeze (ginger-garlic; caramelized onions; kadi and korma); and have a restaurant-worthy mise-en-place. But then you’re ready to cook a long list of tantalizing appetizers; vegetable and rice dishes; fish and seafood; meats and poultry; and plenty of dals, naans and parathas, chutneys and desserts. Chef Sunderam even shows you how to configure your grill to make a good tandoori oven—and how to make easy microwave basmati rice. The best part is you can always go to Rasika to see how far you’ve come with your at-home lessons! András Goldinger

In a world of ever-expanding ethnic cuisine frontiers, specialty diets, and foodie trends, Deb Perelman’s “Smitten Kitchen” is as close as modern American cookery gets to a universal. Perelman is a homecooking everywoman with indefatigable rigor, irrepressible enthusiasm, a tiny Manhattan kitchen, and great wit. Her massively popular blog and one previous cookbook boast an incredibly deep bench of cult-status recipes. Her Butternut Squash Galette is the millennial Chicken Marbella. And now, Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy Favorites (Knopf, $35) follows the birth of Perelman’s second child and a busy season of life, and is Exhibit A of Perelman’s appealing approach to “everyday”: never over-precious, but never, ever, simply rote. You’ll find street-cart style chicken and rice, dry-rub sweet potato steaks, a sushi cobb salad, polenta-baked eggs, and a number of other mains, vegetarian or no, that are eminently scalable. There is a whole passel of inspired sturdy salads that are just as easily served at a dinner party as they are taken to work every day for lunch. And of course, confident, cheeky desserts: caramelized plum tartlets, “bake sale winning-est gooey oat bars,” chocolate pecan slab pie. Lila Stiff

Most cookbooks are built to inspire you, to entertain you, to make you think more creatively about the choices you make in the kitchen. But Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (Simon & Schuster, $35) is a culinary game-changer: it single-handedly transformed the way I think about food and the equations of the meals I create and eat. Samin Nosrat, an accomplished cooking teacher and now a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, breaks down the essential elements of flavor into these four necessary components, and the entire book is an examination of the ways they complement and compound each other. The recipes included are included are thoughtful and seemingly simple, but yield rich, complex results. The Kuku Sabzi, the Persian Herb and Greens Frittata, has already become a weeknight favorite in our house. Liz Hottel

Have you started planning for your holiday feast yet? There’s really no reason to stress about it because Jamie has got you covered; he’s thought of everything, from prepping to cooking to serving. He’s assembled a list of things you’ll need to make the magic happen, along with useful tips, cooking charts, times, and even a calorie count. Jamie Oliver’s Christmas Cookbook (Flatiron, $35) is just in time to take the stress out of the holidays and get you in the mood for fiddling around in the kitchen. Oliver has included all the classics and then some. No turkey, no problem—how about roast goose or beef, meatloaf or rack of lamb, or, if you’re feeling adventurous, why not Salmon En Croûte? Not only that, he presents some delicious choices for vegans and vegetarians and a whole chapter dedicated to leftovers and how to make them into scrumptious meals. He didn’t, of course, forget about those of us with a sweet tooth. Just looking at the pictures of Pavlova, Tiramisù and Jaffa Cake, to name a few of my favorites, will make you want to roll up your sleeves and get busy baking. This cookbook has everything you need for the best Christmas ever—and makes a perfect gift itself. Marija Dimitrijevski

Nothing conjures up sweet memories of childhood quite like our favorite treats. Crunchy and creamy Oreos with a tall glass of cold milk; a warm, flaky Pop Tart in the morning; or mom’s perfectly baked, gooey chocolate chip cookies straight from the oven. Little Debbie, Hostess, and Mars Bar take us back to the simplicity of the school cafeteria and remind us of afternoon homework snacks. Hungry yet? Lucky for us, one of America’s Best Pastry Chefs, Stella Parks gives us Bravetart: Iconic American Desserts (W.W. Norton, $35) so that we can recreate our favorite juvenile munchies in grown-up fashion. We begin with ways to mix up baking staples: fun and creative twists on snickerdoodles and yellow cake and an easy way to make s’mores one hundred percent from scratch. Parks leads us on with easy-to-follow recipes for, of course, cookies and pies, but also doughnuts, ice cream, and breakfast bakes. And one must not forget the beloved brands that we can finally recreate! Fig Newtons, Fudge Stripes, Animal Crackers, and even Magic Shell and Girl Scout Cookies. Full-color finished product photographs and pages of troubleshooting tips make this unique cookbook a dream to use, while stories, articles, and vintage advertisements make it a perfect gift that the sweet tooth in your family will refer to over and over again. Allison Witten

The most anticipated cookbook of the year had its U.S. publishing date in October and, rightfully so, became an instant hit. Yotam Ottolenghi, known for the savory and vegetarian dishes we loved in Jerusalem and Plenty, actually started as a pastry chef. Together with his long-time collaborator Helen Goh he has created nothing short of a love letter to desserts, with the name so fitting and inviting that you can’t help but pick up this book the minute you see it. Sweet (Ten Speed, $35) is a celebration of everything sweet, from cookies and biscuits to cakes and pies, there’s something here for everyone’s taste. The recipes are clear and guide you through the whole process with helpful tips and tricks. Special attention was given to ensuring that all the ingredients can easily be found and used. But make no mistake: everything is Ottolenghified – there’s a boldness to it, some unpredictable ingredient, like a rose petal, star anise or orange blossom— and the results are just marvelous. And the photos, oh my, just look at the Frozen Espresso Parfait! When I got my copy of the book I spent an hour just looking at the photos, they are the feast for the eyes! Marija Dimitrijevski

Jim Lahey is known for his revolutionary “no-knead” breads—slow-rising with natural leavening, baked in a very hot oven in a covered pot—which result in crackling, crusty loaves with a tender, airy interior. They are at the center of his recipes in The Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook (W.W. Norton, $35), written with his wife, Maya Joseph. At the Bakery, he complements the breads with breakfast and lunch dishes, “Italian-ish,” with one or two ingredients being the stars. There are chapters on the masterful breads, pizzas, morning pastries; slow-cooking and roasting; and delicious sandwiches and condiments (quick pickles, and fermented “original mustard” and hot pepper sauce). The sequential, how-to photos are very helpful—you will never get lost in the mixing, rising, folding, and assembling. And basic recipes can make a variety of breads. For example, the brioche can turn into buns, a chocolate-swirl loaf, or bomboloni (doughnuts). Finally, in the dolci section, bake a beautiful panetonne (did you know you hang a freshly-baked one upside down to keep it from collapsing?). I’ve already made the olive-oil cake with orange zest (delicious!); I’m already feeding my starters—in short, I’ve never been so excited to begin baking! András Goldinger

No one has transformed the way Americans think about food—its place in our individual and collective lives, and as a conveyer of our values— than Alice Waters. The founder of iconic Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, and the driving force behind the Edible Schoolyard program that has introduced tens of thousands of schoolchildren across America to the art of growing and cooking food, Waters has now written her long-awaited memoir. In Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook (Clarkson Potter, $27) she describes her roots in New Jersey, her coming of age during the political tumult of the 1960s, and her ongoing crusade to make locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, and “slow food” the mainstays of a new American cuisine. Throw in a few spicy love affairs, her passion for books, and a life spent intersecting with presidents and movie moguls, and you’ve got a book that is a satisfying and delicious full-course meal. Lissa Muscatine

Joan Nathan’s King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World (Knopf, $35) has recipes but it is not a cookbook—it is a travelogue, an ethnography, and a groundbreaking food history that deserves its place on the shelf next to The Joy of Cooking and The Silver Spoon. Nathan’s far-ranging recipes highlight the extraordinary depth, diversity, and innovation of Jewish cooking as it adapted to local ingredients, climates, and traditions. From hand-rolled couscous inspired by a visit to Mejlaw, a tiny village in northwest Morocco, to a Siberian recipe for Chremsel, a Matzo Pancake Casserole, to a Roman Pomodori a Mezzo, every recipe includes a beautiful micro-history of its origins and mutations told in Nathan’s loving, informed voice. Liz Hottel.

Beer lovers unite in this truly unique volume that celebrates the vibrant and exciting culture of beer drinkers around the world. “A globetrotting journey through the world of beer,” Atlas of Beer (National Geographic, $40) collects maps, timelines, historic and modern photographs, and a seemingly endless parade of facts and anecdotes that dive deep into the process of making, tasting, and appreciating beer. Authors, professors, and passionate beer lovers Nancy Hoalst-Pullen and Mark W. Patterson have conveniently organized information by continent, presenting the ingredients, rituals, and lifestyles throughout each region that revolve around the crisp flavor of fermented hops. Everything you ever wanted to know about Oktoberfest, Trappist ales, home brewing trends, the IPA hype, and even which glass you’re supposed to drink from can be found between these covers. Perfect for the beer drinker or geography and history buff in your life, Atlas of Beer will encourage them to raise their glass to the vibrant, rich, and rapidly growing community of beer! Allison Witten

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It’s been more than half a century since The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—the last time John Ford put John Wayne in a cowboy hat onscreen. By now, that screen moment has become part of a strain of nearly legendary American iconography: at one time, this is what it meant to be a prime American man, for better or worse. Nancy Schoenberger’s book, a brilliant double portrait of Wayne and Ford (Nan A. Talese, $27.95) and the movies they made together, wipes the grease off that image to reveal values more nuanced than generally assumed. She illuminates how men with such performative love for the mid-century patriotism as these two could create movies as conflicted about blinkered American militarism as Fort Apache. How they maintained personas that place male prowess so consistently front-and-center and could also give us loving portraits of camaraderie among “feminized” men, whose collective bluster naturally complements delicate underlying virtues. It’s telling that Schoenberger highlights the history of female writers who find what sets Wayne and Ford apart, from Joan Didion to Molly Haskell to the author herself. With a gentle force that matches her subjects’, she separates them from ossified tradition and demonstrates a new way of writing them into an ever-changing American story. Jonathan Woollen

Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies (Quirk, $29.99) is a unique and illuminating document of some of film history’s greatest movies, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to George Miller’s Fury Road. Andrew DeGraff has painted maps of thirty-five iconic films, including the routes taken by major characters, so one can now follow the path taken by Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest or visualize the hallways of the Overlook Hotel that Jack Torrance navigates in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. One of the most important aspects in a movie is its sense of place and geography which is why Cinemaps is a compelling and fun read: it makes the reader aware of the intricate mapping that goes into the main characters’ journeys within the films. The book also includes essays from film critic A.D. Jameson that examine the cultural importance of each film and explores why all of the thirty-five featured movies here, in their own ways, have solidly imprinted themselves in the collective imagination of everyone who has seen them. Bennard Fajardo

Podcast fans rejoice! The first collection of excerpts from one of the world’s most popular podcasts is here! In Waiting for the Punch (Flatiron, $27.99), Marc Maron and his producer Brendan McDonald bring us highlights from their podcast, “WTF with Marc Maron.” Maron is equal parts empathy and bitterness, introspection and derision. The honest approach he brings to interviewing encourages open dialogue, not canned Q&A. That authenticity makes this greatest-hits book a treasure trove of insight, and at over 800 episodes, there are loads of interviews to choose from. Arranged by theme— parenting, mental health, success, failure, addiction, to name a few— there is something in here for anyone looking to read hard-earned and frequently humorous lessons from some the world’s wisest personalities and most entertaining celebrities. Jenny Clines

Stop in at the store and pick up copies of András’ recommendations, FAVORITE CDs OF 2017 and the 2017 HOLIDAY MUSIC GUIDE.

“Nothing great can be achieved in art without enthusiasm.” That is one of the many insights in Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians (Chicago, $18) “revisited” by cellist Steven Isserlis. It is an ideal gift for all music lovers and students—whether adult concert goers or Suzuki beginners. Mr. Isserlis is a world-renowned cellist, and has also written books about composers for children. He calls Schumann a “genius…far ahead of his time” both as a composer and as an educator. In Advice to Young Musicians (first published in 1850), Schumann’s “poetic words of wisdom” are retranslated, and arranged into four themes by Isserlis, who adds his own explanations and witty updates for a modern age. Isserlis ends with a chapter of his own “bits of advice.” I’ll end with words from Isserlis, then Schumann: “…vow never to lose your love for the music itself.” And “relieve the severity of your musical studies by reading poetry. Take lots of walks!” András Goldinger

The photographs collected by Scott Crawford in Spoke: Images and Stories from the 1980s Washington D.C. Punk Scene (Akashic, $24.95) are so vivid and personal, you can almost smell the sweat and stink of Steven Isserlis released two wonderful, the all-ages basement shows and you can definitely hear the pound and very different CDs this year: of the punk rock reverberating off On THE CELLO IN WARTIME (BIS) the walls. Crawford continues his On HAYDN & C.P.E. BACH: Cello investigations into the crucial story Concertos (Hyperion) of music and dissent he began in his documentary Salad Days through oral histories, ephemera, and photographs from many different on-the-ground sources. This album features histories of Fugazi, Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, Bad Brains, and many other D.C. bands that revolutionized the narrative of punk in this country. A radical coffee-table book, this is the only possible holiday present for punk rockers of any age. Liz Hottel

Bob Dylan’s new TROUBLE NO MORE: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979 – 1981 (Columbia, 2 CDs) features impassioned live performances from his “born again” period. Now that Bob Dylan is officially a Nobel laureate and has accepted his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, a new book by Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas arrives and opens a dialogue on the relevance of Dylan’s artistry, classical literary references, and his importance to “the great American song traditions.” In Why Bob Dylan Matters (Dey Street, $24.99) Professor Thomas expands on the basic outline of his freshman seminar class and adds his own personal and cultural connections to the songs. In one example he traces the cultural significance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and concludes with the urgency of its questions. The answers are timeless. Dylan often borrowed folk melodies and created something new out of them. From the early influences of Woody Guthrie to the ancient classical poets, and including Dante, Machiavelli, Gogol, Balzac, Maupassant, Hugo, Dickens, and Melville, Thomas looks at how Dylan’s songs borrow and steal from a wide range of literary and song traditions and transform them all into the phenomenon folks simply refer to as “Dylan.” Bob Attardi

Stop in at the store and pick up copies of András’ recommendations, FAVORITE CDs OF 2017 and the 2017 HOLIDAY MUSIC GUIDE. The Politics and Prose Bookstore Holiday Newsletter is edited by Laurie Greer