The Best Books of 2025

Also Recommended

• 
  Sitting Bull’s War

  by Paul L. Hedren (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

  This chronicle of the Hunkpapa war chief Sitting Bull is told primarily from the perspectives of the Lakotas and the Northern Cheyennes who fought in the Great Sioux War of 1876, in which Army forces battled for control of the Black Hills. Hedren creates a vivid portrait of Sitting Bull by drawing on a vast array of sources, from interviews with Lakotas conducted by the military to twentieth-century accounts by survivors. Ultimately, the book is both a fine military history and an affecting study of the intertwined calamities that ended the Lakota way of life, including the decimation of the Northern Plains buffalo.

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• 
  Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever

  by Lamorna Ash (Bloomsbury Circus)

  Nonfiction

  In this reported memoir, the writer Lamorna Ash begins the story of her journey toward faith from a position of journalistic skepticism. Her inciting incident is learning about the conversion of two college acquaintances, a comedy duo, to the Anglican priesthood. She sets out to write an article on the comedians turned priests and discovers a book’s worth of material. “At twenty-six, I knew that miracles and religious experiences were not real,” Ash writes. “That churches were as useless and beautiful as dinosaur bones.” But she’s intrigued by a growing religiosity among young people in her native England, so she sets out to talk to her peers about faith. She uses religion as a prism to refract broader questions about culture—about conspiracism, psychosis, suffering. “The accelerative capacity of social media both makes the rest of the world, its untold number of voices, feel more in reach,” she writes, “and also leaves us feeling ever more atomised and isolated, craving the kind of physical community we might have once gotten through the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the church.”

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  Read more: “What Can Conversion Memoirs Tell Us?,” by Lauren Boersma Harris
• 
  Lightbreakers

  by Aja Gabel (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  In this thrilling work of speculative fiction, a quantum physicist is invited by a billionaire to participate in a secret project at a laboratory in Marfa, Texas. At first, the physicist’s wife, an artist, is excited to go along—her day job has lost its lustre. But, once in Marfa, the couple finds themselves drawn to former lovers. The physicist also learns that one reason he has been invited is because he suffered the loss of a child, and that the project involves transporting him into his memories. Though his prospective journey carries risks, he judges that the project may be worth it. The novel is a penetrating meditation on time and grief. “You never get over it,” one character notes. “There is only the day you turn the corner, when something new is born.”

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• 
  Before I Forget

  by Tory Henwood Hoen (St. Martin’s)

  Fiction

  Cricket Campbell, the protagonist of this novel, endured an unspeakable tragedy at her family’s summer house when she was sixteen—one that changed the trajectory of her life and fractured her relationship with her father, Arthur. Ten years later, Cricket returns to the house for the first time to become a full-time caregiver for Arthur, who has Alzheimer’s. As she steadily adjusts to her new role, and as Arthur’s dementia progresses, Cricket begins to notice something uncanny: Arthur has developed a keen, almost miraculous, ability to tap into the emotions of others, hers included. This quietly charming narrative asks readers to reconsider who is caring for whom, and to ponder the illimitability of human connection.

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• 
  Godstruck

  by Kelsey Osgood (Viking)

  Nonfiction

  Osgood, a journalist who began converting to Orthodox Judaism in her late twenties, surveys the landscape of religious conversion with light self-deprecation, conscious that the reading public may see religion and intellectual seriousness as incompatible. Her subjects—who, like Osgood, are earnest, funny, and articulate, if slightly eccentric—find their way to Mormonism, evangelical Christianity, Islam, Quakerism; one of them becomes a Catholic nun. The book sets out to defend these converts, and to broadly make the case for religious life, taking smooth detours into the writings of Tolstoy, Plath, and Augustine, and others who have wrestled with religion and its place in society. “I was a young person whose inner life had been—and still is, in so many ways—dominated by existential restlessness, and Judaism was a way to both validate that restlessness and channel it,” Osgood writes. With wry understatement, she adds, “I also happened to believe it was true.”

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  Read more: “What Can Conversion Memoirs Tell Us?,” by Lauren Boersma Harris
• 
  Little Red Barns

  by Will Potter (City Lights)

  Nonfiction

  This investigation of industrial agriculture in America marshals years of reporting to convey the grotesque realities of the country’s meat-production system: environmental destruction, public-health hazards, and animal abuse. (In one of the multitude of examples Potter summons, farm workers in Wyoming were found kicking piglets “like soccer balls.” In another, cows were killed via electric shocks and forklift stabs; their meat was eventually subject to the largest meat recall in U.S. history.) Potter also traces the rise of so-called ag-gag laws, legislation born of industry lobbying designed to criminalize the exposure of the inner workings of factory farms. Ultimately, he argues that questions of animal welfare and environmental protection writ large are bound together with questions of constitutional rights—and that fighting back begins by collectively bearing witness.

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• 
  Heiresses

  by Miranda Kaufmann (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

  Nine British women—including a Cabinet minister’s wife and Jane Austen’s Barbados-born aunt—who derived their fortunes through Caribbean slavery are the subjects of this rich history. Kaufmann maps the global journeys these women undertook as they sought to solidify their social positions. Some moved to England in order to receive an education or marry into the aristocracy; others journeyed to India, Macau, or Rome. Kaufmann pays close attention to the business acumen that they and their families brought to enterprises like sugar plantations and the transatlantic slave trade. Such a lens shows that the mobility of these women depended on the labor of those who were unfree.

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• 
  A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls

  by Adam Morgan (Atria)

  Nonfiction

  At the heart of this lively history is the editor Margaret C. Anderson, a radical lesbian who is perhaps best known for publishing, in a literary magazine she edited, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in serial form. In 1921, Anderson was prosecuted by the U.S. government—the novel was thought “obscene”—and though Morgan focusses much of his attention on her trial, he also takes in her childhood, in Indianapolis; her years in Chicago, New York, and Paris; and her association with prominent figures of her time, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the anarchist Emma Goldman. What becomes clear in his study is that, in the end, Anderson’s will to forge a new path was matched only by her disappointment in where it led.

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• 
  Estate

  by Cynthia Zarin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  The text of this slim, compressed novel is a letter written by Caroline—a New Yorker who will be familiar to readers of Zarin’s 2024 novel “Inverno”—to her paramour, a man who is also seeing two other women. A wry spin on an infatuated lover’s monologue, Caroline’s letter is a skein of free-associative thoughts—about her children, about the husband from whom she’s separated, about whatever springs to mind. It’s all in elliptical, finespun service to Caroline’s ambition: to understand “how I had become the person who might write such a letter, and behave in such a way, behavior of which I deeply disapproved.”

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• 
  I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

  by Hu Anyan, translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves (Astra House)

  Nonfiction

  This fascinating début memoir recounts its author’s career on the lower rungs of China’s consumer economy. Hu first worked during high school as a hotel waiter; later, he became a courier, a gas-station attendant, and a security guard, among fifteen other jobs. As Hu piled drudgery upon drudgery, he gathered a rich store of insight into the alienation and petty cruelties of working life. He also began to write. During the COVID pandemic, one of his essays, about his time on the night shift at a warehouse, took off online in China. His account reveals an author searching for his true self and finding it, amid unceasing toil, in the act of observation.

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• 
  A Love Story from the End of the World

  by Juhea Kim (Ecco)

  Fiction

  Set in the near future, these finely wrought stories examine lives and relationships amid climate change and technological innovation. Characters are at once accustomed to and unnerved by the measures that allow for their survival: a “biodome” that protects against perpetual sandstorms; ships that house humanity after the land has become unlivable. The stories portray characters of varying ages living across the world—a young woman coming of age on a reservation in Oregon, a South African boy who forms a rapport with an elephant—while examining human selfishness and finding gleaming moments of care and conviction, often prompted by an encounter with a nonhuman being. Humanness, Kim suggests, cannot be wrested from the natural world: when we lose the latter, we lose ourselves.

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• 
  Unabridged

  by Stefan Fatsis (Atlantic Monthly)

  Nonfiction

  In the late nineteen-­eighties, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary was on the Times best-seller list for a hundred and fifty-­five consecutive weeks. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. Like the rest of the analog world, legacy dictionaries have had to adapt or perish; “Unabridged” is a good-natured and sympathetic account of their struggle to survive. To prepare, Fatsis—a reporter whose work has appeared in a number of venues, including Slate and NPR—embedded in the offices of Merriam-­Webster. There, he played amateur lexicographer, digging up new candidates for inclusion and trying his hand at ­definitions, which, as he demonstrates, is more challenging than it looks. As Fatsis weaves his tale, he makes genial and informed digressions into controversies in the dictionary racket. “The dictionary projects permanence,” Fatsis concludes, “but the language is Jell-O, slippery and mutable and forever collapsing on itself.”

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  Read more: “Is the Dictionary Done For?,” by Louis Menand
• 
  Daring to Be Free

  by Sudhir Hazareesingh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This history reconstructs the extraordinary stories of “fugitive resisters” to examine the crucial role that captives played, over centuries, in dismantling the transatlantic slave trade. If abolition was impossible without decrees by Western governments, Hazareesingh argues, it was unthinkable without enslaved peoples’ own push for emancipation. Documenting diverse acts of rebellion from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, his book shows how guerrilla strategies—influenced by spiritual traditions and characterized by solidarity across social groups—were deployed from the earliest days of enslavement, and helped to shape ideological currents of autonomy and self-determination.

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• 
  The Second Estate

  by Ray D. Madoff (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

  The aristocrats of France’s ancien régime did not have to pay taxes. America’s modern-day plutocrats, this bracing book contends, enjoy a similar privilege. By eschewing salaries, lobbying Congress to gut the estate tax, and contriving elaborate writeoffs and work-arounds, the very rich have placed much of their wealth beyond the reach of the state. To finance America’s teetering Social Security system and to pay for programs such as Medicare, the federal government relies primarily on revenues collected from working people. The U.S. tax code is around seven thousand pages long; Madoff makes its failures gripping and accessible in a book that can be read, with as much pleasure as indignation, in an afternoon.

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• 
  Best Offer Wins

  by Marisa Kashino (Celadon)

  Fiction

  In this diabolical satirical thriller, a millennial woman resorts to extreme measures to secure the million-dollar house of her dreams. Margo, who works in P.R., and her husband, a government lawyer, have been outbid on eleven homes in the Washington, D.C., area, where they live. Determined to escape “real estate purgatory” through property ownership and start a family, Margo stalks a London-bound couple in the hope of snapping up their brick Colonial in a posh suburban neighborhood. Kashino, a former real-estate reporter, playfully charts the increasingly unhinged tactics Margo employs as she takes the art of negotiation to a frightening level.

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• 
  Matching Minds with Sondheim

  by Barry Joseph (Bloomsbury)

  Nonfiction

  Stephen Sondheim had a singular influence on musical theatre, creating such iconic works as “Company,” “A Little Night Music,” and “Sweeney Todd.” But he had an equally dazzling, little-known side talent that was mostly confined to his social circle: puzzles and games. Piecing together memoirs and archival material, Barry Joseph’s new book reveals the composer to be just as meticulous in creating an elaborate treasure hunt as he was in orchestrating a musical. Sondheim believed that constructing puzzles was “a minor form of a minor art,” but Joseph disagrees: the composer’s games deserve the same attention and respect as his music. In “Matching Minds,” Sondheim’s penchant for play is analyzed and celebrated, and, if you stick around, you may learn how to throw your very own game night.

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  Read more: “Stephen Sondheim, Puzzle Maestro,” by Michael Schulman
• 
  Ninette’s War

  by John Jay (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

  In September, 1939, shortly before her twelfth birthday, Ninette Dreyfus, the youngest member of a Jewish Parisian banking family, started a diary. That diary, which she kept until 1951, forms the heart of this intimate portrait of the Holocaust in France. Documenting this history, as Jay notes, is a complex endeavor: unlike elsewhere in Europe, the persecution of Jews in France unfolded in “a gradual, uneven process,” with certain communities targeted as others were (temporarily) exempted. Jay, carefully substantiating Dreyfus’s account, brings clarity to a usually muddled story, shedding particular light on the French who collaborated to betray their Jewish compatriots.

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• 
  The Award

  by Matthew Pearl (Harper)

  Fiction

  David Trent, a struggling writer whose behavior steers this blackly comic thriller, exults upon learning that his new neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Pulitzer-winning novelist Silas Hale—“an echo,” he initially thinks, of “Henry David Thoreau living in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s backyard!” When it becomes clear that Silas has no interest in mentorship, though, David contrives to shore up his writerly status in other, increasingly reprehensible ways. Pearl revels in wickedness, presenting a literary world in which a successful writer’s haughtiness is both encouraged and rewarded. At the novel’s heart is an existential question put to David by his long-suffering girlfriend: “Was it better to be happy or to be a writer?”

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• 
  Looking For Tank Man

  by Ha Jin (Other Press)

  Fiction

  Near the start of Jin’s new novel, Pei Lulu, a young Chinese woman who, through enormous diligence, is studying abroad at Harvard, attends a local event for the visiting Chinese Premier. Most of the crowd is jubilant, waving miniature red flags, but one older woman stands apart. She holds a sign that denounces the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Chinese government killed protesters, including university students, who were railing against the state. The crowd hurl insults at the woman, accusing her of dredging up the past, but Lulu is shaken, and inspired to start researching a history she never thought to question before. What follows is a study of how the past we inherit is still ours to shape; Lulu, who learns that her family was involved with the events of 1989, slowly arrives at a new understanding not just of her country but of herself.

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  Read more: “A Student Chases the Shadows of Tiananmen,” by Han Zhang
• 
  Analog Days

  by Damion Searls (Coffee House)

  Fiction

  In this diaristic novella by a prolific translator of the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, a narrator records several weeks in the summer of 2016 spent exchanging stories with friends in New York, travelling to San Francisco, and nursing foot injuries. To chronicle their days, Searls’s characters use methods that the internet is gradually rendering obsolete—one friend starts a print-only blog, and another uses archival white pages to track down a shuttered recording studio. Often opening a day’s entry with news of mass shootings, police brutality, and Donald Trump’s political rise, the book’s central character examines contemporary life’s horrors and indignities, and the still emergent technology that is exposing him to it all.

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• 
  Bigger Than Fashion

  by Tyler Watamanuk (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

  This history of modern men’s streetwear—arguably arriving at the genre’s dénouement—consists of case studies detailing how a series of cool-kid T-shirt brands came to dominate the paychecks and birthday wish lists of generations of young people. Among the designers discussed are the household names Supreme and Stüssy and the luxury brands Off-White and Fear of God. Watamanuk’s reporting skews more commercial than cultural—major beats include failed sales projections that derail an acquisition and the anguished buyout of a soured partnership stake—as it charts the consequences of both products and people selling out.

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• 
  Peacemaker

  by Thant Myint-U (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In 1961, U Thant, a soft-spoken Burmese diplomat, became the first non-European to head the United Nations. His decade as Secretary-General would be a time of emergencies. During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union came dangerously close to nuclear catastrophe; across Africa and Asia, post-colonial states plunged into bloodshed. This biography, written by Thant’s grandson, focusses on his tireless efforts to defuse the conflicts of his era—above all, America’s disastrous adventure in Vietnam. Thant’s frustrated attempts to end that war tarnished his reputation in Washington and, this book suggests, may have helped deprive him of his rightful place in history. Leading the U.N., Thant once remarked, was “the loneliest job in the world.”

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• 
  Cursed Daughters

  by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday)

  Fiction

  Set in Lagos, this moody, engrossing novel braids together the stories of three women reared to believe that they are cursed because of a shared ancestor’s adultery. The novel opens with the suicide, by drowning, of one of the women, whose death is cast as the “inevitable consequence” of her forebear’s actions. Shortly after that woman’s funeral, her cousin gives birth to a daughter, who bears such a striking resemblance to the deceased that some in the family take her to be a reincarnation. As Braithwaite follows the protagonists’ attempts to avoid the fate of the generations of women who preceded them, she explores the possibility of personal freedom in a society that is still bound by tradition, prejudice, and superstition.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Razzle Dazzle 'Em

  by John Lahr (Lund Humphries)

  Nonfiction

  Lahr has written thirty-plus profiles for The New Yorker—of performers, playwrights, directors, comedians, and more. This volume collects thirteen of them from the past quarter century. With a joyful curiosity and a drive to understand the formative forces that inspire his subjects, Lahr explores the varied lives and minds of those he calls show people. The questions he asks himself in the process, as he writes in his introduction, include “What led these outstanding players to bet their life on their imagination?” and “What is the emotional price of talent?” Among those profiled are Mike Nichols, Viola Davis, and Emma Thompson.

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• 
  Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration

  by Matthew D.C. LarsenMark Letteney (California)

  Nonfiction

  This detailed study takes on the origins and meaning of incarceration, with a particular focus on the question of whether incarceration is a special affliction of the post-Enlightenment world, as Michel Foucault argued in his epoch-marking 1977 book, “Discipline and Punish.” Much of today’s prison-reform and abolitionist literature rests on this view, which casts incarceration as a distinctly modern cruelty. But, as the authors note, there were prisons throughout the ancient Mediterranean world—not just temporary holding cells for the condemned en route to execution but purpose-­built structures designed to house people for extended periods. In digging into tales of ancient imprisonment, the book does more than debunk Foucault’s thesis; it makes painfully clear the true continuities and discontinuities of our penal practices over the millennia. “The modern prison,” Larsen and Letteney write, “is not a new construction but an old and haunted house.”

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  Read more: “The Ancient Roots of Doing Time,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  Run the Song

  by Ben Ratliff (Graywolf)

  Nonfiction

  This book “is not about optimal music for running,” Ratliff notes at the start of his offbeat sportsman’s memoir, which was long-listed for the National Book Award. In tight chapters that blend criticism and reflection, Ratliff shows how running while listening can offer a unique mode of engagement not just with songs but with one’s own physicality; he observes that music’s “forward patterns, its implications, its potential, its intention, and even its desire” are echoed and enhanced in the running body. In this book, structured as a series of ideas for runs guided by musical experiences, Ratliff’s overarching aim is to show how meditating on the sport might help one learn to “live in present and future together.” Galcher Lustwerk’s “quiet dance tracks hold themselves elegantly” for a run of “respect but no ambition,” while a good run is like a Mal Waldron solo, a “weird, renewable, daily work of engrossed repetition.”

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• 
  Bog Queen

  by Anna North (Bloomsbury)

  Fiction

  In this ecologically inflected novel, Agnes, a forensic anthropologist, is asked to identify the body of a woman found in an English peat bog. Remarkably preserved, the body turns out to be more than two thousand years old. As Agnes tries to learn more about the woman’s death, she encounters obstacles from a company intent on peat extraction and a group of environmentalists occupying the site in protest. The novel alternates between Agnes’s life and that of the woman, a Celtic druid weighing an alliance with a Roman settlement; additional interludes are voiced by the moss that connects them. Agnes’s investigation sparks a new attention to the world around her, and the novel’s sensibility mirrors the peat organisms themselves, which, a character explains, are “interconnected not just across space, but across time.”

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• 
  The Running Ground

  by Nicholas Thompson (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  This affecting memoir is part ode to the pleasures of long-distance running, part study of a son’s relationship with his complicated father. For Thompson, a career editor who is now the C.E.O. of The Atlantic, running has provided many things—a sense of identity during an awkward adolescence, a reminder of his resilience following a cancer diagnosis, and a stage on which to prove himself, in middle age, as an élite athlete. It has also served as a way, he writes, to explore his origins: “Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.”

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• 
  Troublemaker

  by Carla Kaplan (Harper)

  Nonfiction

  The Mitford sisters, the six daughters of one of England’s most peculiar aristocratic families, had radically divergent lives—two became fascists, one became a communist, one became a model aristocrat, one wrote novels skewering the bourgeoisie, and one retreated into cultivated solitude. In this new biography, Kaplan, a­ professor of literature at Northeastern University, devotes her attention to the second-youngest sister, Jessica, called Decca, and to separating her crusading accomplishments from the sins of the flock. Decca, long sequestered alongside her sisters in childhood, was a self-identified socialist by the time she was fifteen, and later, in America, became a muckraking journalist, a member of the Communist Party, and a fierce activist. Kaplan closely follows her life’s twists and turns, showing how the qualities Decca cultivated during childhood—acid wit, poking playfulness, the blustery confidence of privilege—were enlisted to defend the powerless.

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  Read more: “The High-Born Rebel Who Took Up the Cause of the Commoner,” by Rachel Syme
• 
  The Diversity of Morals

  by Steven Lukes (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Philosophers and social scientists have often stood apart in their treatment of morality. Most philosophers tend to view the “moral” as a single, universal category, and most social scientists speak of diverse, culturally bound “moralities.” In this engaging book, Lukes uses the work of David Hume, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Adam Smith to bridge these traditions and address various relevant questions: Is morality distinctly human? What can mass atrocities teach us about it? How did we get from a tribal sense of “us versus them” to a vision of shared humanity? Though his answers are open-ended, the work is still satisfying; a final section, on present-day political polarization, demonstrates how shared understandings can be found even among the most ideologically opposed groups.

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• 
  Night People

  by Mark Ronson (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  In this exuberant memoir, an Oscar-winning songwriter looks back at his years as a d.j. in the nineteen-nineties. Born in London to wealthy Jewish parents, Ronson moved to New York at a young age with his mother and his stepfather, the guitarist Mick Jones. There, he developed a passion for music and the “candy-striped chaos” of clubs. With a mixer and turntables purchased by his mother, he played at prestigious venues on both coasts. He relates encounters with Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z as well as professional tips (“Thou shalt play a song only once”), and he touches upon more serious aspects of his work, such as the racial politics of a scene where many white d.j.s—including him—played music “created by Black people, for Black people.”

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• 
  Venetian Vespers

  by John Banville (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This coy, macabre novel recounts a trip to Venice taken by a middling English writer in the early twentieth century. His memories are presented as a defense against the “prurient and hysterical attention” that was heaped upon him after a series of “dark and tragic events”—set off by the disappearance of his wife, a wellborn American who vanished from the decrepit palazzo where the couple stayed during their honeymoon. Banville’s protagonist is a crafty case study in the human capacity for self-deception; as the character notes, “There are many things I may not be, but I think I can say that I am a gentleman, however modest my origins.”

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• 
  Television

  by Lauren Rothery (Ecco)

  Fiction

  Set in Los Angeles, this ruminative novel alternates in perspective between a blockbuster actor, his best friend and sometime lover, and an aspiring screenwriter. After decades in Hollywood, the actor has taken to drinking heavily and sleeping with a much younger woman. Then he decides to give away millions of dollars of his earnings in a lottery. As his best friend watches his apparent breakdown, she remembers their years of intimacy and the particular contours of their unusual love. The screenwriter’s connection to the other two is less clear; it seems that she may become the recipient of the actor’s money. In the novel’s examination of the actor’s choices, it considers questions of artistic and philanthropic legacy.

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• 
  Paradiso

  by Dante Alighieri, translated from the Italian by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)

  Poetry

  The poet Bang’s translation of the Divine Comedy—recently completed, after some twenty years, with the publication of Paradiso—isn’t a standard one. It’s closer to an improvisation, filled with references to movies and rock (and jazz) albums which veer far from the Italian and are meant to draw new readers by making Dante our contemporary. Bang calls her work—whose references include Led Zeppelin, Charles Mingus, and Cyndi Lauper—a “colloquial” version, and it can admittedly be jarring to hear Virgil sound like a slacker. Yet this may be something of the effect Dante sought in using the common language that he loved in part for the way it changed.

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  Read more: “Where Dante Guides Us,” by Claudia Roth Pierpont
• 
  The Tragedy of True Crime

  by John J. Lennon (Celadon)

  Nonfiction

  Weaving autobiography with investigation, this book by an incarcerated writer considers prisoners whose stories have been grist for sensationalized true-crime depictions of murder. After starting with his own appearance on the television documentary series “True Evil,” he goes on to offer a counterpoint to that kind of media, situating the men he writes about within the context of their own lives—not excusing their crimes but closely detailing the circumstances that produced them. Lennon asks whether “illuminating human darkness” has the effect of encouraging punitive attitudes about criminal justice. Ultimately, he argues that the answer depends on who is doing the illuminating.

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• 
  The Land in Winter

  by Andrew Miller (Europa)

  Fiction

  This delicately written, deeply psychological novel, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, follows two neighboring married couples through a brutal English winter in 1962. The husbands, a doctor and an underexperienced farmer, are often befuddled by their countryside existences. The wives, both pregnant, engage in a bizarre friendship that serves as the book’s dramatic engine. As the quartet’s secrets and longings come to light, so, too, do traumas of the Second World War and the restless, uncomfortable dynamics of a modern age in transition. Miller’s prose is gentle and luxurious, punctuated by striking imagery: snowflakes on the tongue are “stone-flavoured, the tips of the sky.” He delights in interior tensions, and in the wrenching interplay between his characters and their cruel surroundings.

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• 
  Flop Era

  by Lara Egger (Pittsburgh)

  Poetry

  “Are these feelings / faux fur or genuine leather?” asks one of the poems in this enchanting collection, which exhibits a keen attunement to the ways seduction can become destruction, language can become meaning, and delusion can become belief. Animated by an irreverent zaniness, Egger’s poetry fuses elements drawn from contemporary idiom and from lyric tradition to render a surreal world that interrogates existential questions about desire and grief. “Truthfully, / I’m an imposter, deathly afraid / of heights,” she writes. “One way to explain sorrow / is to assume / god never looks down.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Emperor of All Maladies

  by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  This expanded edition to Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work from 2010 includes four new chapters that elucidate the grand strides that have been made in cancer research and treatment since the book was first published—and emphasizes how far medicine has yet to go. The latest additions draw from material published in the magazine, including a piece on the promise and perils of early cancer screening.

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• 
  The Innocents of Florence

  by Joseph Luzzi (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  The Hospital of the Innocents, in Florence, was one of the first orphanages to be established in Europe. It began operations in 1445, with a bequest from the Florentine entrepreneur Francesco Datini, who had died without an heir. He was not, however, without children, as Luzzi points out: he impregnated at least two teen-age servants, one of whom, named Lucia, was enslaved. His second child—Lucia’s baby, a girl named Ginevra—was removed from her mother’s care, briefly placed in a foundling hospital, and then packed off to a wet nurse in the countryside. And the Hospital of Innocents, which accepted unwanted children through a grated window until the late nineteenth century, became a warehouse for such secrets. Luzzi’s slender and compelling book, with its accounts of forced pregnancy, family separation, and child labor, feels surprisingly and unsettlingly of the moment.

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  Read more: “The Grim Resonance of “The Innocents of Florence”,” by Jessica Winter
• 
  Embracing Exile

  by David Kraemer (Oxford University Press)

  Nonfiction

  Surveying twenty-five centuries of Jewish thinking on exile and diaspora, this polemic argues that land is less essential to Jewish survival than the faith itself, and that the Torah constitutes a “portable homeland.” Vaulting from Biblical narratives to Maimonides to the present, Kraemer, a scholar of rabbinic literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, brings together the (often contradictory) perspectives of a wide range of figures, including medieval philosophers, mystics, Hasidic theologians, and contemporary writers. Ultimately, reflecting on the refugee communities of our time, he offers the Jewish diaspora as a model of cultural endurance, reasoning that nation-states “separate peoples, and negate the other.” Or, put more simply, “Land only leads to death.”

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• 
  Splendid Liberators

  by Joe Jackson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  In this exhaustively researched history, Jackson contends that the Spanish-American War of 1898 shaped the United States into an imperialist power much like the “European empires it disparaged.” As their nation contemplated its global position, Americans increasingly felt that it was their divine right to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the world. The U.S. thus saw itself as a “savior” of Cuba and the Philippines, which had been controlled by Spain since 1521 and 1565, respectively. Jackson argues that this grandiose vision was used as a justification for brutality. “Death was the legacy” the war left behind, particularly in the Philippines, where more people perished in battle than “were killed or died of mistreatment during the three and a half centuries of Spanish rule.”

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• 
  Dante

  by Prue Shaw (Liveright)

  Poetry

  This radically abridged version of the great Italian poet Dante’s Divine Comedy features chunks of the poem (in Italian and in Shaw’s translation) set like jewels into a running commentary made up of narrative bridges, historical context, interpretation, and occasional witty asides. Though the momentum of Dante’s original rhyme scheme is undone, Shaw—a first-rate British Dante scholar—provides a momentum of her own. The book is an invitation to new readers that gets better as it goes along.

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  Read more: “Where Dante Guides Us,” by Claudia Roth Pierpont
• 
  The Season

  by Helen Garner (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  Garner, one of Australia’s best-known writers, is renowned for her unsparing novels and journalism. In recent years, she has published collections of essays and selections from her diaries, but her first stand-alone book in a decade is a surprising and moving  account of watching her grandson play Australian-rules football for the U-16 Flemington Colts—a “record,” as she puts it, “of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.” She watches the boys shove one another, and embrace one another, and yell; she notes their haircuts, the shape of their shoulders, and records their insults, grievances, their hopes and dreams. The book becomes a “little life-hymn” about boys and sports and feeling alive. “Here again tonight,” she writes at one point, “hanging over the rail, I see the softness in the faces of these boys, the slenderness, still, of their bodies. How lightly they leap towards the approaching ball, present their chests and bellies to it front-on!”

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  Read more: “Helen Garner’s Ode to Her Grandson and His Sport,” by Louisa Thomas
• 
  Two Paths to Prosperity

  by Avner GreifJoel MokyrGuido Tabellini (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  A thousand years ago, as Europeans waded through the Middle Ages, their Chinese contemporaries were living in a civilization that was among the most sophisticated in the world. So why, in the centuries that followed, did Europe become richer and more powerful than China? In their ambitious history, Greif, Mokyr (a winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics), and Tabellini suggest that cultural values and social organizations helped establish divergent paths. Confucianism held sway in China, where kinship groups managed local life. But in Europe, where family bonds were looser, strangers coöperated in organizations such as guilds and self-governing towns—institutions that gave rise to capable states, flourishing markets, and the Industrial Revolution.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Eleventh Hour

  by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

  Fiction

  In these five stories, Rushdie explores various forms and ideas of death, from the concrete (in one story, the end is delivered to many in the shape of a tsunami) to the supernatural (in another, a ghost seeks revenge) to the metaphysical (another culminates in the death of words). Before those final moments comes the panoply of life: “the explosion of heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising up from the floor below . . . the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree.” Not to mention humor. “Your gloom and doom will be the death of me,” one old man tells another. “This sentence struck them both as so funny that they laughed heartily, and then had to huff and puff for breath.” Two of the stories, including “In the South,” were first published in the magazine.

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• 
  The Insider

  by Gerald Howard (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  In a 1963 issue of Esquire, a tart article called “The Structure of the Literary Establishment” placed the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley near “The Hot Center” of power. Howard’s new biography zooms in on Cowley’s place at that center, and on the work he did to create a sense of a unified national canon. Cowley, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1898, was a great discoverer of talent—the writers he championed included Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey. He was also a canny industry operator—a man who knew how to play the different parts of the publishing machine in the interests of work he wanted to promote. His most cited act of heroism may have been his effort to revitalize the career of William Faulkner, who had slipped into obscurity, by publishing a fresh edition of his work in 1946. Less than a decade after that book appeared, Faulkner would receive a Nobel Prize; as he would put it, “I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay.”

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  Read more: “The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon,” by Kevin Lozano
• 
  The Salt Stones

  by Helen Whybrow (Milkweed Editions)

  Nonfiction

  Continuity and loss form the twin themes of this memoir, long-listed for the National Book Award, which recounts the author’s experience running a small family sheep farm in Vermont. Shepherding, Whybrow writes, is not so much a way of life as a “way of being,” encompassing both wandering and home, isolation and community, uncertainty and joy. Over the decades, Whybrow’s flock experiences great dramas—stillbirths, coyote attacks—but their connection to the landscape sustains them. Less fortunate are the humans in their orbit, among them Whybrow’s mother, who, afflicted with dementia, must leave her own home for an assisted-living facility. Whybrow is uniquely positioned to understand what humans have lost in severing their bond with nature, yet her message is more hopeful than bleak: healing, she writes, “is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Poems of Seamus Heaney

  by Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O'DonoghueRosie Lavan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Poetry

  Heaney, who died in 2013, contributed many poems to The New Yorker during his lifetime; “Black Walnuts” and “The Race,” which were previously unpublished, both débuted in the magazine in 2025. This volume collects the complete verse of the Nobel Laureate, whose work—contemplating memory and history, the Troubles, Irish literary tradition, and the warp and weft of the English language—is marked as much by its humanity as its musicality.

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• 
  The Age of Extraction

  by Tim Wu (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  A chilling spectre, of “a technologically armored wall between the haves and have-nots,” hangs over this incisive analysis of the major tech platforms and their impact on the broader economy. Wu traces the evolution of firms such as Google and Amazon from the nineteen-nineties, when they behaved largely like “public-spirited town squares,” to the twenty-tens, when they began to morph into the monopolistic “agents of wealth extraction” we know today. For Wu, the problem isn’t with the platforms, per se; it’s with the structures in which they dwell. In order to avoid worsening “the division and resentment that are the curse of our age,” he contends, we will need governmental interventions.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Languages of Home

  by John Edgar Wideman (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  A selection of essays and criticism written in the last fifty-plus years and published in anthologies and magazines as diverse as Vogue, Black American Fiction Forum, Callaloo, and The New Yorker, the volume includes Wideman’s inimitable and piercing insights on Black life and death in America, as seen through the prisms of history, literary analysis, personal narrative, and thoughts on such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Emmett Till, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Michael Jordan, Spike Lee, and Dennis Rodman. “It starts with single lives, and turns into many, many deaths, too many anonymous colored faces, faces with no words, words with no faces. I have no more information than anyone else, no clues to connect the dots, no dots except those I glean by imagining myself among the dead,” Wideman writes in “Witness: A Letter from France,” which, along with two other pieces in the book, appeared first in the magazine.

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• 
  A Hollywood Ending

  by Yaron Weitzman (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  In 2018, the Los Angeles Lakers were reeling from a string of failed seasons. At the same time, LeBron James, of the Cleveland Cavaliers, was entering the later stages of his career and seeking to secure his legacy. What would happen if the two joined forces? This extensively reported account chronicles the at times turbulent, at times triumphant partnership between these two icons, who, in 2020, ultimately emerged from a COVID-shortened season as champions. Weitzman’s insights extend beyond the team’s road to victory to portray a group of players attempting to perform through an unprecedented pandemic while grappling with racial injustice.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  A Different Kind of Tension

  by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco)

  Fiction

  This collection of new and selected stories spans thirty-five years of Lethem’s career and is a testimony to his beguiling exploration of the possibilities of the short story. He writes in an introductory note, “The plot of this book is persistence in making myself available to a form I’d never claim to have mastered.” Yet mastery is evident in one story after another, such as “Procedure in Plain Air,” in which the concerns of a seemingly ordinary day for one of Lethem’s narrators—will he run into his ex-girlfriend at a local café, and does his coffee have a soapy aftertaste?—are overtaken by the disconcerting fact that two men in orange jumpsuits are digging a hole in the road right in front of him in which to imprison a third man. The piece, like several others here, first appeared in The New Yorker.

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• 
  On the Calculation of Volume (Book III)

  by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell (New Directions)

  Fiction

  “I no longer believe that I will suddenly wake up to a time that has returned to normal,” Tara Selter, the protagonist of the “On the Calculation of Volume” novels, writes. Balle’s strange, cerebral time-loop series, which became a cult hit first in Scandinavia and more recently in the U.S., follows Tara as she lives through an endlessly repeating November 18th, which she spends marvelling at ancient Roman artifacts and drifting from her husband, Thomas, who has remained in the ordinary time line. The third book, newly translated to English, begins with Tara meeting Henry Dale, a thirty-seven-year-old sociologist with a man bun who is also fixed to the same day. The pair spars at first, but Tara finds that she takes pleasure in arguing with Henry; she tells him that she is “glad to have found a playmate in the eighteenth of November.”

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  Read more: “Solvej Balle’s Novels Rewire the Time Loop,” by Katy Waldman
• 
  The Genius of Trees

  by Harriet Rix (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  The central argument of this wide-ranging treatise is that trees are ecosystem engineers par excellence, capable of influencing “water, air, earth, and fire” as well as the behavior of other organisms in their effort to create the conditions necessary for the trees’ survival. Using recent science, reports from field research, detours through evolutionary history, and sometimes surprising literary references, Rix reveals the myriad ways in which trees bend the natural world to their own ends, from seeding clouds with volatile organic compounds and mining minerals with their roots to wielding forest fires against their competitors and tempting animals (including dinosaurs, dodos, and humans) into spreading their seeds. In her telling, trees emerge as beings with “profound agency,” worthy of our continued attention, care, and respect.

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• 
  Palaver

  by Bryan Washington (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

  At the outset of this understated yet potent novel, a Jamaica-born woman travels from Houston, where she lives, to Tokyo, to visit her estranged adult son. After a dozen years in Japan, the son, an English teacher, has developed a surrogate family among the regulars at a local gay bar. Washington examines varying experiences of displacement, writing with tenderness about the tolls of emigration and exile, both cultural and familial. “The mother couldn’t help but wonder how little control she had over her life, and how little say everyone has in where they end up.” The text is enhanced by the inclusion of numerous black-and-white photographs of Tokyo.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  At Last

  by Marisa Silver (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  Silver’s novel follows the lives of two women, Helene and Evelyn, both widows, children of the Great Depression, complicated, strong-willed people, who differ on most subjects but are bound together when their children get married, in the early nineteen-seventies. Rivals for the love of their shared granddaughter, they engage and disengage, distrust and occasionally grudgingly accept each other. Silver stage-manages these encounters deftly, allowing the reader sharp glimpses of her characters’ interiority, as well as insight into why we all sometimes refuse to reveal ourselves and hold intimacy at arm’s length. One chapter, “Tiny Meaningless Things,” appeared first in the magazine.

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• 
  When Caesar Was King

  by David Margolick (Schocken)

  Nonfiction

  In mid-century America, no one quite knew what to make of television. Was it an appliance, a utility, or something else? Margolick’s biography of Sid Caesar is both a portrait of an unstable comic genius and a cultural history of a medium coming to life. Margolick writes in vibrant detail not only of Caesar's NBC shows of the nineteen-fifties but of the early-TV world around them: the risk-taking, then timid, network executives; the volatile changes in American tastes; and the artery-threatening New York delis where Caesar and his writers met for cheesecake and tiered corned-beef sandwiches. Margolick, an ideal cultural historian, is curious and loving enough to incorporate every telling detail, but too wary of nostalgia to slip into ballyhoo. He chronicles Caesar’s miseries as well as his triumphs, showing how he made the medium into something new and remarkable—until the medium unmade him.

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  Read more: “The Comic Genius Who Pushed Television Further Than It Could Go,” by David Denby
• 
  Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

  by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  This stylish, enigmatic novel follows a successful unnamed writer in the aftermath of a longtime affair with her aging lover, Xavier, during which she leaves an apartment in the city for a remote country house, exchanges e-mails with people from her past, and goes on meandering walks with friends. The book, Bennett’s third, reads at times as a portrait of the impossibility of relating to another person: the narrator’s relationship with Xavier, while movingly private and sweet, is depicted as a comedy of miserliness. The narrator finds it gets “tiresome” to spend fifty euros at the florist, where Xavier has set up a weekly account so that she can select her own arrangements; she hates when Xavier calls her “domestic,” but she’d hate it equally if he said the opposite. “I didn’t see why he had to say anything,” she says. Like Bennett’s previous two books, “Pond” and “Checkout 19,” “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” studies the turgid, relentless, and spectacular movements of a self-centered and hyper-attuned mind. Yet the book doesn’t lament frustrated intimacy so much as revel in the ungovernable force of one woman’s personal preference.

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  Read more: “Claire-Louise Bennett’s Misanthropic Breakup Novel,” by Lillian Fishman
• 
  The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)

  by Rabih Alameddine (Grove)

  Fiction

  As the title suggests, this sprawling tale centers on Raja, a man in his sixties who lives with his mother in Beirut, a city shaking with political and ecological turmoil. While the duo—both outsized personalities—navigate their cohabitation, Raja must weigh the responsibility he feels as a son against an opportunity to attend a writing residency in America. Raja’s energetic narration is relentlessly funny, even (or especially) when it’s turned to dark or disturbing events from his past. The story jumps back and forth through time and across continents, but Raja’s sensitive and ultimately optimistic point of view is a gripping anchor.

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• 
  Flashes of Brilliance

  by Anika Burgess (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In this lively history, Burgess, a photo editor and writer, traces the dawn of early photography, a period of restless ingenuity when, she writes, “innovations were sometimes misguided, occasionally obsessive, periodically dangerous, and perpetually fascinating.” She recounts feats both scientific and artistic, including Nadar’s shots taken from a giant hot-air balloon, and underwater images captured in cumbersome diving gear. Most striking are some of the hazards that early photographers encountered—in the nineteenth century, their work required handling cyanide fixatives and flash powder that was explosive enough to shatter windows and blow up houses.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Natural Order of Things

  by Donika Kelly (Graywolf Press)

  Poetry

  Kelly’s inquisitive, lyrical poems contemplate the phenomenon of connection: between lovers; between human, animal, earth, and cosmos; between past and present. Several poems—including “What I Might Sing,” which was published in the magazine—braid together memory, speech, and song to explore familial inheritance and the legacies of American history.

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• 
  We Did OK, Kid

  by Sir Anthony Hopkins (Summit)

  Nonfiction

  “I look at my life and remember that hapless little boy, and I think, How did all this happen?” This question animates Hopkins’s memoir, in which he recounts his path to becoming an actor. Hopkins was born in 1937, in the steel town of Port Talbot, Wales, to a family of bakers. (A silver cup bearing the legend “Arthur Richard Hopkins 1924, First Prize for Currant Buns” remains in his possession, to go with the Oscars he won for “The Father” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”) After an “explosive” encounter with Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet,” in boarding school, Hopkins went on to traffic back and forth between the grand realms of British classical theatre and the badlands of the movies. Much of Hopkins’s book, which seems to have been written without the aid of a ghostwriter, unfolds in stop-start rhythms, with some reckonings so curt that they approach the brink of Beckett: “No tears. No grief. Nothing. Too much agony.” Yet, for Hopkins devotees, that percussive tone—the hard, peremptory music of his speech—is precisely what marks him out.

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  Read more: “Anthony Hopkins’s Beckettian Memoir,” by Anthony Lane
• 
  Death and the Gardener

  by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (Liveright)

  Fiction

  In its story of a son keeping vigil as his father dies, this novel, translated from Bulgarian, charts the progression toward death with exquisite care. Around the narrative, Gospodinov weaves digressions, autofictional essays, and genial thought experiments. His narrator reaches toward a past stretching back beyond his own childhood, across several lost generations. The father was a great storyteller, a great smoker, and, above all, a great gardener. One of his last jobs before the fall of socialism in Bulgaria was gardening at a remote psychiatric clinic, where he also helped out with occupational therapy: “He tended the garden alongside the patients—the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts. They planted tomatoes, cabbages, peppers, flowers.” The novel measures not only the distance between the past and the present but also the distance between the lives of parents and those of their children. In the end, Gospodinov shows, a garden is no different from any parental inheritance: both blessing and burden.

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  Read more: “A Bulgarian Novelist Explores What Dies When Your Father Does,” by James Wood
• 
  The Mind Reels

  by Fredrik deBoer (Coffee House)

  Fiction

  This début novel chronicles a young woman’s unravelling with ethnographic detachment. Alice, a middling student at a state university in Oklahoma, drifts from adolescent confusion into sleepless paranoia. Her madness seeps into the everyday: a shower caddy’s arrangement becomes proof of conspiracy, and breakdown coexists with term papers, hookups, and trips to TJ Maxx. Avoiding romance and melodrama, deBoer writes in an affectless register that mirrors Alice’s dissociation. The novel’s power lies in its relentless banality—the mind churning while life’s machinery grinds on. During a halting recovery, Alice develops “deep intuitions” about her medications, which, she suspects, interact “like hot-tempered roommates in the shabby apartment of her brain.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Bread of Angels

  by Patti Smith (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir—perhaps Smith’s most intimate yet—places a welcome emphasis on the singer’s early childhood, including the impoverished period her family spent in the Patch: a “complex with a barracks feel,” in Philadelphia, that was filled with war-torn immigrant families. Here and elsewhere, Smith inhabited a “cruel yet magical reality,” in which she discovered both the weight of suffering and the promise of art. A chapter of the book, chronicling Smith’s arrival in New York City and the recording of “Horses,” was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Paper Girl

  by Beth Macy (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Many writers have tried to capture the growing divide between urban and rural communities in the United States. In 2018, Macy did this with “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America,” her examination of the opioid crisis, which later became a Hulu series. Now, Macy has returned to her home town of Urbana, Ohio, using it as a ground zero for understanding political radicalization. Macy excavates a topsy-turvy world where many people still believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election; she discovers that even her ex-boyfriend, who used to be liberal, is spouting conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants. Macy’s book certainly won’t solve our problem of polarization—she spends more time analyzing the causes of rural discontent than she does offering solutions—but she presents a stirring and muscular vision of compassion, in a time when it is too easy to become disillusioned with one’s political adversaries. It’s much harder, as Macy writes, to “scramble for hope fiercely, the way a farm girl wrestles a muddy sow.”

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  Read more: “The Muscular Compassion of “Paper Girl”,” by Grace Byron
• 
  Pick a Color

  by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown)

  Fiction

  “Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look at people all day.” So begins this coolly observant novel, by a noted short-story writer, which is narrated by the owner of a nail salon. The owner, a forty-one-year-old former boxer, claims to have no interest in other people. And yet she shows herself to be keenly attuned to the desires and anxieties of her clients and to the lives of her employees, four Southeast Asian women whose mischievous characterizations include identical haircuts and nametags. With dark humor and brief touches of tenderness, Thammavongsa’s tableau of working-class life casts stock elements—a damaged narrator, a workforce composed entirely of nonwhite women—in an alienating glow.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

  by Barbara Demick (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  In 2002, a Texas couple, Marsha and Al, adopted a two-year-old girl from China. They were told that the child, whom they named Esther, had been abandoned, and that her birth parents could not be found. Seven years later, Marsha learned from a news article that this story was false: Chinese authorities, seeking profits from the overseas adoption market, had abducted Esther. Her birth mother and an identical-twin sister, whose face Marsha recognized in an accompanying photograph, still hoped for her return. Demick recounts the history of Esther’s two families and illuminates an astonishing fact: many, if not most, official reports that Chinese adoptees had been abandoned by their birth parents were false. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  We Survived the Night

  by Julian Brave NoiseCat (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  In 1959, a newborn was discovered in a garbage incinerator outside St. Joseph’s Mission, an institution in British Columbia now notorious for the abuse and murder of Native children. The baby, as NoiseCat recounts in this riveting memoir, was his father. NoiseCat weaves the story of his father’s upbringing among the Secwépemc people with his own experiences straddling two worlds—his mother is white—to explore the multigenerational effects of trauma. Healing, if not wholeness, is found through acts of reclamation. NoiseCat suffuses his narrative with the playfulness and humor of folklore, refusing to give “colonial amnesia” the final say.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Life on a Little-Known Planet

  by Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown)

  Nonfiction

  This collection of essays offers an intimate portrait of the natural world and the people trying to rescue it. With clear-eyed urgency and a measure of tenderness, Kolbert chronicles the lives of people trying to hold on to what’s slipping away: an entomologist cataloguing disappearing caterpillar species, a member of the Eyak nation struggling to preserve her dying language. Most of the essays, including a profile of scientists trying to use artificial intelligence to communicate with whales, first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  Kant: A Revolution in Thinking

  by Marcus Willaschek, translated from the German by Peter Lewis (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

  This engaging new introduction to the philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that what made Kant revolutionary was his contention that to understand anything—science, justice, freedom, God—we first have to understand ourselves. Willaschek, one of the world’s leading authorities on Kant and the editor of the standard German edition of the philosopher’s works, writes, “Kant placed the human at the center of his thought like no other philosopher before him.” Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind. His theory presents a serious problem for any kind of religion or philosophy that claims to tell us about ultimate truths and eternal essences, such as God. Is it possible to live a meaningful existence in the absence of God and other absolute truths? This would become the central question for modern Western thought, and it was Kant who first posed it in all its complexity.

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  Read more: “Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us,” by Adam Kirsch
• 
  Ready for My Close-Up

  by David M. Lubin (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

  In the late nineteen-forties, Hollywood was in transition: the blacklist was demolishing careers, the studio system was imploding, and television was emptying movie theatres. The noir film “Sunset Boulevard,” which came out in 1950, reflected this destabilization. The film focusses on two Hollywood castoffs: an aging former star and a floundering screenwriter who becomes her kept man. This scrupulous account of the making of the film—initially conceived as a comedy starring Mae West—traces how it became “a history of Hollywood” that mocked “an entire industry on the edge of collapse or reinvention, depending on whom you asked.”

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• 
  The Eternal Forest

  by Elena Sheppard (St. Martin’s)

  Nonfiction

  On Christmas Eve in 1960, a woman named Rosita fled Castro’s revolution in Cuba, boarding a flight with her two daughters to what she assumed would be temporary exile in Miami. She lived for another sixty years, but never returned to the island. In this artfully rendered memoir, Sheppard, Rosita’s U.S.-born granddaughter, flits back and forth between the centuries, weaving Cuban history together with familial lore. She seeks to articulate her inherited sense of dislocation while grappling openly with the challenges of narrating a loss that was never entirely hers. “I have tried and failed at feeling what it was like to leave,” she writes.

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• 
  A Guardian and a Thief

  by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)

  Fiction

  Set in the near future, in a version of Kolkata afflicted by food scarcity and dramatic global warming, this adroitly plotted novel centers on the manager of a homeless shelter who isn’t above dipping into its donations to feed her young daughter and widower father. The three are days away from flying to the United States to join the woman’s husband, when a shelter resident sneaks into their home and absconds with their food and, inadvertently, their passports. A finalist for the National Book Award, Majumdar’s unstintingly graceful political novel has the grip of a nail-biter as the woman, the thief she must track down, and their fellow city dwellers take advantage of morality’s elastic borders in times of existential threat.

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• 
  Death in a Shallow Pond

  by David Edmonds (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

  Few among us would hesitate to wade into a pond to save a drowning child. Faced with more distant suffering, however, most people in wealthy societies are curiously immobile. From this observation—first made by the philosopher Peter Singer, in the nineteen-seventies—sprang the movement known as effective altruism, whose adherents seek out impartial ways to do the most good, perhaps most archetypally by funding cost-effective interventions that improve the lives of people in extreme poverty. As Edmonds traces the movement’s rise (it now wields significant influence in Silicon Valley and in philanthropy) and untangles critiques that have been levelled against it, he transforms moral inquiry into a high-stakes adventure.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Selected Letters of John Updike

  by John Updike, edited by James Schiff (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  This voluminous collection of Updike’s correspondence opens with a letter to his father, written in 1941, when he was nine, and closes with a postcard to a former college classmate, written in 2009, two days before he died, at seventy-six. In between is an epistolary account of much of Updike’s life, which follows him through childhood, college, his literary career, his relationship with this magazine, his two marriages, fatherhood, multiple affairs, and more. The result is an inadvertent self-portrait, written with wit and grace. Updike maintains a certain ebullient positivity, even in his darker moments. As he noted in one of his last letters, to an editor at this magazine, “The journey, as they say, with lung cancer is pretty much one-way, but with some loops in it, maybe. . . . As with life itself in its broad outlines, there is only submitting to it, and trying to be grateful for what—as much in my life does—warrants gratitude.” A selection of the letters appeared first in the magazine.

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• 
  The Ten Year Affair

  by Erin Somers (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  At the outset of this intoxicating novel, a married man and a married woman meet in a baby group, where they bond over their dislike of another of its members. They soon find that they have much more in common—including mutual attraction. For the next decade, the woman conjures a robust fantasy world in which she and the man have trysts in hotels and holiday together in Paris and Marrakech. In reality, the two of them resist acting upon their desires, and their families become friends (even forming a pandemic pod). As the woman nurses her rich imagined relationship, she reflects, “What was exalted occurred alongside the ordinary every moment, ceaselessly. But you couldn’t make it stay.”

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• 
  What a Time to Be Alive

  by Jade Chang (Ecco)

  Fiction

  In this timely and touching novel, Lola, a young, broke woman living in L.A., is catapulted to social-media fame after giving a eulogy for her best friend, who was killed in a skateboarding accident. Hoping to attain financial stability, she decides to capitalize on the online attention her speech receives by becoming a kind of spiritual influencer, spreading a message of “openness and transcendence and finding divinity in daily life.” She finds herself leading workshops and being celebrated by fans, some of whom tattoo her words on their bodies. Ragged with grief despite her success, Lola eventually wonders whether the messages of universal love she cynically espouses may serve as a balm for her, too.

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• 
  Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything

  by Alyson Stoner (St. Martin’s)

  Nonfiction

  Stoner, an all-purpose Disney supporting player who was never quite attached to a single part, first became known for a brief appearance in a Missy Elliott video, as a small white girl attempting hip-hop steps. A child star was born. In this dry, acidly observant memoir, Stoner (who uses they/them pronouns) writes movingly of being overwhelmed by the roles they played and the fictional families they were temporarily absorbed into. They reflect on the eating disorders that afflicted them—ways to hold off puberty while remaining sexually desirable in a culture that demands thinness and youth. Stoner ends the memoir proud of having emerged into saner adulthood; their astute observations are as much a canny exploration of youth celebrity as they are a testament to survival.

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  Read more: “What Do We Want from Our Child Stars?,” by Adam Gopnik
• 
  From Our Pages

  Vaim

  by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls (Transit)

  Fiction

  In this three-part, single-sentence novel, Fosse, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, explores the repercussions of one event: Jatgeir, a fisherman from a remote Norwegian village goes to the city and is approached by his first love, who married another man and moved away. She asks Jatgeir to take her back to the village and he does. That decision reverberates through his life, the life of his reclusive friend, and the life of the woman’s husband. These three men are “Vaim” ’s narrators, and their internal monologues move in a hypnotic way through time and in and out of memory. An excerpt from the novel appeared first in the magazine.

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• 
  Dinner with King Tut

  by Sam Kean (Little, Brown)

  Nonfiction

  In this sprightly tour of experimental archeology, whose enthusiasts are dedicated to “re-creating the lives of our ancestors,” professional archeologists and amateurs alike knap stone tools by hand, reconstruct the elaborate hairdos of ancient Roman women, and test Egyptian mummification methods on medical cadavers. Kean himself gets a tattoo hand-poked into his skin and applies medieval salves to his wounds. To Kean, these attempts to resurrect the past are a refreshing corrective to traditional archeology. The field, he writes, “needs to focus on what people in the past actually experienced—the moments that filled their days, and filled their lives.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Near Flesh

  by Katherine Dunn (MCD)

  Fiction

  In her lifetime, Dunn, who died in 2016, published three novels, the third of which—“Geek Love” (1989), the twisted, outrageous story of a family of freaks, bred to form a travelling-circus act—developed a large and fanatical following. The stories in this posthumous collection, many of them previously unpublished, have a similarly manic and gritty quality. The women in these narratives are almost all in precarious situations; they risk drowning, snake bites, violent husbands, amputation, and other undesirable fates. Despite the dark comedy of it all, Dunn’s affection for her characters is palpable. One of the stories in the collection, “The Resident Poet,” first appeared in the magazine.

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• 
  True Nature

  by Lance Richardson (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

  In the course of a long literary career, Matthiessen wrote thirty-three books, won two National Book Awards, co-founded The Paris Review, and travelled to places most writers would never dare to go. In this biography—the first of the author—we learn how a child of privilege, reared in the moneyed precincts and suburbs of the East Coast, became a writer who studied the marginalized: migrant farmworkers, working-class fishermen, Indigenous tribes, the animals harmed by humanity’s disregard for the natural world. Matthiessen’s travels could come at a cost, as he often neglected his family; later in life, he turned to Zen Buddhism, hoping to know not others but himself.

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  Read more: “Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself,” by Maggie Doherty
• 
  The Gods of New York

  by Jonathan Mahler (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  This chronicle of New York City covers four “convulsive and consequential” years in its history, 1986 through 1989, an era that included the AIDS and crack epidemics, rolling corruption scandals, rising crime, and a giddy Wall Street high on junk bonds. The book tracks activists, artists, politicians, and tycoons—Larry Kramer, Spike Lee, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump, among others—as they vie to make their marks, creating legacies still palpable today. Each chapter covers a single year, shifting between characters and story lines in a narrative as sprawling and multifaceted as the city itself.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Joyride

  by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  In her memoir, Orlean reflects on a lifetime as a writer, driven by the desire to teach readers “how much joy can be found in letting yourself be surprised.” In 2002, her book “The Orchid Thief” was adapted for the screen, in the form of Spike Jonze’s film “Adaptation.” A section of the memoir, in which she reflects on the process—and on the strange gifts her “impulse to say yes” in unexpected situations has brought—was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter

  by Peter Orner (Little, Brown)

  Fiction

  This chatty yet reflective novel explores the relationship between two real-life couples: Lou and Babs Rosenthal (the author’s grandparents) and Irv Kupcinet, a longtime gossip columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and his wife, Essee. After many years of close friendship, the couples became estranged following the unsolved murder, in 1963, of the Kupcinets’ daughter, Karyn, a Hollywood actress. As the narrator, a professor separated from his wife, obsessively researches the death, his investigation fuels his parenting and relationship woes and leads him into a thicket of conspiracy theories. Throughout, Orner weighs the slippery connections among family, identity, and history: “The truth is I’ve never been drawn to stories with answers. I’m lured to the ones where people, for whatever reason, don’t want an answer.”

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• 
  Trying

  by Chloé Caldwell (Graywolf)

  Nonfiction

  In this electrically candid memoir about attempting to get pregnant without I.V.F., Caldwell writes, “Supposedly the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over but expect different results, but isn’t that precisely what trying to get pregnant and failing is?” Caldwell, an essay writer and teacher, manages to be funny while handling tender subjects, such as infertility and the discovery that her husband has an extramarital sex addiction. “I knew something was wrong,” she recounts. “I thought it was perhaps blocked fallopian tubes, and it ended up being sex workers in Geneva.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Original Sin

  by Jake TapperAlex Thompson (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  Democrats have debated why they failed to stop Donald Trump from winning a second term. In this urgently reported book, Tapper and Thompson lay the blame with Joe Biden and his advisers—who, they argue, covered up the President’s cognitive decline. The authors take readers backstage at a fund-raiser where attendees were stunned by Biden’s confusion and speak to Party insiders who believe that his reluctance to withdraw cost Kamala Harris the race. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Deep House

  by Jeremy Atherton Lin (Little, Brown)

  Nonfiction

  The latest book from the author of “Gay Bar” tells a sensualist’s history of love, immigration, and the varied border crossings involved in same-sex love. It begins with Atherton Lin’s own romance, with a weedy young Brit known as Famous. At the time, the Defense of Marriage Act restricted legal benefits and protections—including immigration pathways—to heterosexual couples, and Famous ends up living with Atherton Lin in San Francisco illegally. “So began our undocumented life,” Atherton Lin writes—a closet of another sort. His narrative is heavy with the ghosts of other, past lovers whose relationships were made precarious by the legal apparatuses that “validate interpersonal relationships, govern sexual identity and decree citizenship.” Atherton Lin’s method, embedding memoir with cultural history, discloses how fickle and self-interested institutional memory can be. Who’s to say what machinations and which lives from the past will be codified as meaningful precedent, what ordinary triumph or injustice? Much will be overlooked, the book argues, but much can be reclaimed. The effect is discursive yet rigorous, seeking to better know the lives of those seeking love, health care, a family, a good fuck, an O.K. fuck, a better night, a place to work, somewhere to sleep, a life, and whatever else the record won’t show.

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  Read more: “A Sensualist’s History of Gay Marriage and Immigration,” by Lauren Michele Jackson
• 
  This Kind of Trouble

  by Tochi Eze (Tiny Reparations)

  Fiction

  The two main settings of this layered début novel are Lagos in 2005 and Umumilo, a small village in Nigeria’s southeast, in 1905. The first plotline follows Benjamin and Margaret, who reconnect after a brief marriage in their youth. The second focusses on the couple’s grandparents, who lived in Umumilo when it faced the arrival of British colonizers. When Benjamin and Margaret first married, they did so despite the objections of Umumilo villagers, who described unpaid debts on both sides: Margaret’s grandfather had committed an unpardonable crime, and Benjamin’s grandmother helped him. While the novel examines clashes between diverging approaches to justice, honor, and community, its looping chronology illustrates the inescapable ripples of national and family histories.

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• 
  The Unbroken Coast

  by Nalini Jones (Knopf)

  Fiction

  In this début novel, a former history professor in Mumbai encounters a mother and her sick baby at a shrine of the Virgin Mary in 1978—a chance meeting that binds the two families together for nearly thirty years. As the professor navigates retirement, the baby grows into a rambunctious child who rebels against the traditions of her fishing community. Jones, nodding to events like the 1992 Bombay riots, sets the story at a time when the city was contending with religious tension and tumultuous change—historical forces with which the characters reckon as they try to shape their own fates.

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• 
  If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

  by Eliezer YudkowskyNate Soares (Little, Brown)

  Nonfiction

  This controversial best-selling manifesto argues that the creation of artificial superintelligence (or A.S.I.) would lead to human extinction. Beginning with a primer on how A.I. systems work, the book examines the often counterintuitive ways in which intelligent beings realize their goals. These behaviors, Yudkowsky and Soares write, suggest not only that we are incapable of controlling A.S.I. but that such a system would inevitably conclude that it should extinguish our species. The authors point to a slew of engineering projects gone wrong—from nuclear meltdowns to the adoption of leaded gasoline—to show how complex systems and profit-seeking can breed disaster. But here, unlike in those cases, “humanity only gets one shot.”

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• 
  The Improbable Victoria Woodhull

  by Eden Collinsworth (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

  The subject of this sharply drawn biography was not just a noted suffragist but also the first woman to run for President in the U.S., the first woman to open a brokerage firm on Wall Street, and the first woman to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Collinsworth’s propulsive narrative traces Woodhull’s path from performing as a child “clairvoyant” to serving as a spiritual adviser to Cornelius Vanderbilt and then as a newspaper publisher. Notoriety trailed Woodhull through her life, but, rather than sensationalizing her scandals, Collinsworth highlights Woodhull’s flair for reinvention, and her drive to set the terms by which she would be remembered.

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• 
  The Four Spent the Day Together

  by Chris Kraus (Scribner)

  Fiction

  Kraus’s début novel, “I Love Dick,” was an epistolary memoir of erotic obsession that redefined the form. In “The Four Spent the Day Together,” her new true-crime novel, she turns another genre on its head. The book, which is inspired by her own research into a grisly murder allegedly committed by three teen-agers in northern Minnesota, begins with a family leaving the Bronx for what they hope is a better life. The story ends with a man’s senseless death in a community ravaged by meth addiction. But most of it is devoted to the deteriorating relationship of a married couple, Catt Greene and Paul Garcia—avatars for Kraus and her second husband. Catt is a literary celebrity; her star rises, while Paul, an alcoholic, spirals into relapse. Kraus narrates his descent in devastating, almost obscene detail, interrogating the nature of rehabilitation and repair.

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  Read more: “Chris Kraus Reinvents the True-Crime Novel,” by Jennifer Wilson
• 
  Muscle Man

  by Jordan Castro (Catapult)

  Fiction

  This mysterious, occasionally nightmarish campus novel follows a professor of literature during a single, eventful day during which he commits petty theft, attends a departmental meeting, and—most thrillingly to him—goes to the gym. The book’s uncomfortably tight lens on the professor’s interior life reveals it to consist largely of resentment for his co-workers and a strong desire to exercise. Throughout the day, as the professor’s thoughts cascade from Dostoyevsky to YouTube fitness influencers, nearly every one of Castro’s acerbic, unfiltered paragraphs contains a bristling insight about literature, weight lifting, or academic politics.

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• 
  The Einstein of Sex

  by Daniel Brook (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In 1896, the Berlin-based Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld published a pamphlet with the startling thesis that sexual orientation is inborn and exists on a continuum. As Brook shows in this elegant, timely biography, the pamphlet caused a sensation, as did Hirschfeld’s later works on the “relativity” of gender and the social construction of race. If Hirschfeld’s pioneering research remains understudied today, the reason, Brook forcefully argues, isn’t simply that the Nazis burned his books and medical files (in which various Nazi leaders appeared); it’s that contemporaries who had once been allies, including Sigmund Freud, “went silent on him,” fearing that their own causes would be discredited by association.

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• 
  Good Things

  by Samin Nosrat (Random House)

  Nonfiction

  In her 2017 cookbook, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” Nosrat promised to teach readers the four “elements of good cooking,” thus liberating them from the tyranny of recipes. Her follow-up, “Good Things,” reflects a shift in her perspective on the form—and a dramatic reëvaluation of what she wants out of life in general. “Good Things” is full of dishes that are delicious and often simple; some aren’t written as recipes at all. (Suggesting readers fry a slice of bread in olive oil becomes absurd if you begin, “One slice bread. Two tablespoons olive oil.”) Nosrat, a recovering perfectionist, urges amateur chefs to go easy on themselves and to prioritize fostering human connection over producing an immaculate meal. Her signature warmth and unerring culinary instincts are on display throughout, along with more than a dash of the personal: the recipes are interspersed with advice, confessions, and stories about her dog.

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  Read more: “How Samin Nosrat Learned to Love the Recipe,” by Dan Kois
• 
  Stan and Gus

  by Henry Wiencek (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  This engaging account of the Gilded Age is focussed on the collaboration and the colorful personal lives of two men who helped define the era’s aesthetic: the architect Stanford White, whose designs included the second Madison Square Garden, and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose innovative works included a bronze relief of the Civil War colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his all-Black regiment. Wiencek compares White’s bon-vivant life style with Saint-Gaudens’s “monkish poverty.” He also documents their erotic interest in men (both were probably bisexual) and their marital infidelities: Saint-Gaudens maintained a secret second family, and White allegedly assaulted a teen-age model, whose abusive husband shot him dead in the Garden’s rooftop theatre.

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• 
  Information Age

  by Cora Lewis (Joyland Editions)

  Fiction

  Observations, snippets of dialogue, and wry anecdotes make up this laconic novel, which focusses on the life of a young woman in New York. The woman works as a reporter for a news website, where she covers such subjects as “the celebrity candidate” and “the ‘unusual animal ’ beat,” and is trailed by doubts about the journalistic enterprise. As she wonders whether she is a “hack” or is simply subject to “a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information,” the novel becomes a subtle meditation on the difference between what can and cannot be communicated, ultimately suggesting that intimate moments are the most difficult to capture and convey.

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• 
  Heart the Lover

  by Lily King (Grove)

  Fiction

  The relationship between Jordan, the narrator of this affecting novel, and Yash, the man she falls in love with in college, is complicated from the start. (Before they get together, she dates his best friend.) King’s book is broken into three parts: in the first, the two fall in love and travel; in the second, Jordan is married to someone else; in the last, they navigate grief and illness. As the novel encompasses their relationship, from start to finish, it questions whether a person can inhabit any moment other than the present. Jordan thinks, at one point, “Maybe it’s true what the philosopher said, that the past and the future don’t exist, that this is the only moment we ever have, this moment right now and this moment and this—”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Startlement

  by Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions)

  Poetry

  This volume of new and selected poems by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States lucidly illuminates moments of beauty and peculiarity, intimacy and loneliness, experienced in the natural world and in the course of everyday living. Several entries originally appeared in the magazine, including “The End of Poetry”: “ . . . enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, / I am asking you to touch me.”

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• 
  On Antisemitism

  by Mark Mazower (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

  One of the many virtues of Mazower’s excellent and timely book is his effort to restore historical context to a word that has become a generic term of condemnation. In one popular view, antisemitism is unique, permanent, and unchanging: non-Jews have always hated Jews and always will. Mazower, a scrupulous historian, disagrees. Antisemitism is far from new, he observes, but the nature of this hostility has changed radically over time. “The concept, which derives its very name from a discredited racial theory, is routinely applied to everything from prejudices and stereotypes to feelings, attitudes, and forms of legislation,” Mazower writes, “not to mention acts of violence ranging from petty abuse to massacre and genocide.” In this lucid survey, Mazower shows that the history of anti-Jewish sentiment is a story of varied accusations, hatreds, and fears—as entangled with the rise of modernity as it is with our present politics.

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  Read more: “The Uses and Abuses of “Antisemitism”,” by Ian Buruma
• 
  No Sense in Wishing

  by Lawrence Burney (Atria)

  Nonfiction

  “Though they do take place, happy endings are not common in the human experience,” Burney, a music critic, writes—and yet this earnest and engaging essay collection winds its way to such an ending. Burney grew up working class in Baltimore, endured his father’s fits of rage, pulled shifts at soul-crushing jobs to support his daughter, and lost sight in one eye from injuries in a car accident. But, as the book relates, his love of Black music from his home town and elsewhere pulled him through. At a concert by the New York rapper MIKE, the author finds himself “thankful for being alive” at a time when Black musicians outside the mainstream “can thrive.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Shadow of the Mammoth

  by Fabio Morábito, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer (Other Press)

  Fiction

  In this collection of eighteen stories, Morábito marries his unencumbered prose to his eye for the absurd, casting even the most unassuming characters and situations in new, unpredictable lights. A man who’s renting out his house for the summer develops a fixation on the family staying there. Two neighbors, a young man and an older woman, meet across the garbage shaft that runs between their apartments, and though they only speak when they’re at their respective chutes, they build a friendship that proves revelatory. One story from this book, about a landscaper’s obsession with airport grass, first appeared on newyorker.com, as part of the annual Flash Fiction series.

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• 
  Swallows

  by Natsuo Kirino, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (Knopf)

  Fiction

  This acerbic novel explores the ramifications of a controversial topic in Japan: surrogacy. (Although the practice is legal there, it is widely regarded with skepticism.) Riki, the protagonist, is a twenty-nine-year-old woman from the countryside who is struggling financially in Tokyo. Desperate for stability, she decides to become a surrogate for a rich, artistic couple. But she quickly starts to resent the wife’s desire to control Riki’s body, and she is wary of the husband’s attempts to show feminist solidarity. As Riki navigates conception and pregnancy under the couple’s gaze, she comes to feel that even their good intentions and a substantial paycheck can’t alleviate a sense of exploitation. As she tells the couple, “I just don’t want to be treated like a machine.”

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• 
  The Martians

  by David Baron (Liveright)

  Nonfiction

  In a series of lectures at the turn of the twentieth century, Percival Lowell, an amateur astronomer, claimed that lines on the surface of Mars were proof of a highly sophisticated irrigation system, one suggestive of “a mind of no mean order.” He made his case with such “seeming logic” and “disarming humility,” the journalist David Baron writes in his new book, that, had Baron attended Lowell’s lectures, he could imagine himself having been “swept along.” And many were. Baron retells the spread of Lowell’s theory, demonstrating how fantastical beliefs gained purchase in a pre-Facebook age, thanks not only to print media but to social institutions such as churches and women’s clubs, allowing an outlandish idea to metastasize slowly, gaining credibility and respectability over time. This dynamic remains highly recognizable, as does the sense of epistemological confusion that Baron describes as pervading the period, one in which it was difficult to “separate insight from delusion, to identify who were the geniuses and who were the cranks.”

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  Read more: “The Long History of Life on Mars,” by Jon Allsop
• 
  From Our Pages

  Tomorrow Is Yesterday

  by Hussein AghaRobert Malley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

  In this book, two veteran negotiators tell the story of how hope for a peace process in Israel-Palestine fell apart. They draw on their extensive personal experience working with Palestinian leaders and U.S. Presidents. They argue, among other things, that the two-state solution has become a lie—widely embraced only once it became unrealistic. Once seen as a possible end to the conflict, it exists today as a “dangerous gimmick,” designed to distract from the West’s moral cowardice. An excerpt appeared on newyorker.com.

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• 
  Cryptic

  by Garry J. Shaw (Yale)

  Nonfiction

  Language’s ability both to reveal and to conceal is at the heart of this engrossing history of medieval encoded and encrypted manuscripts. Shaw outlines various motivations for engaging in “performative secrecy” in the creation of a text, from a desire to prevent powerful forms of knowledge (such as alchemy or medicine) from falling into the wrong hands to a simple love of intellectual puzzles. Some texts claiming divine inspiration, such as John Dee’s celestial script and Hildegard of Bingen’s “Unknown Tongue,” are perhaps purposefully indecipherable. Shaw also considers the mysterious Voynich manuscript, from the fifteenth century, which has never been decoded and which some contend is a hoax with no decryptable meaning.

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• 
  Breakneck

  by Dan Wang (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In recent decades, as China has laid down vast networks of high-speed rail and thrown up shimmering cities, Americans have developed a deepening sense that their own country struggles to get things done. In this ambitious account, Wang, a technology analyst with a journalist’s eye for color, uses studies of Chinese innovation to show how the two countries’ diverging paths and pathologies can be traced to their political cultures. Chinese leaders tend to be engineers who are capable of grand projects but liable to run roughshod over individual rights. The U.S., on the other hand, has become a society of lawyers, better at miring public infrastructure in proceduralism than at creating it. China’s example can remind Americans to treasure their country’s pluralism, Wang suggests, while also teaching them something about how to build.

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Good and Evil

  by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Knopf)

  Fiction

  The Argentine writer Schweblin’s fifth book to be published in English, this story collection explores moments of danger, moments when the worst looms and it’s up to the characters—who, for the most part, are living seemingly ordinary lives—to decide whether to accept or actively try to avert it. In “A Visit from the Chief,” which first appeared in the magazine, the protagonist offers help and shelter to an older woman who has dementia, only to be punished for her kindness by a visitor the dementia patient summons to her apartment. It’s possible, though, that this punishment is exactly what the protagonist needs to shake her out of her depressed complacency. Schweblin, a master of the uncanny, keeps us in this kind of ever-shifting gray area between the two poles of her title.

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• 
  God and Sex

  by Jon Raymond (Simon & Schuster)

  Fiction

  In this lush novel, which reconsiders the meaning of an “act of God,” a moderately successful writer of New Age nonfiction decides to focus his next treatise on trees. As he conducts research, he insinuates himself into the lives of an ecology professor and his wife, soon beginning an affair with the latter. The writer and the professor’s wife (whose dalliances Raymond renders through a series of rather explicit coital vignettes) discover that they may have a transcendent connection, but then a forest fire seems to take the wife’s life. In the wake of catastrophe, the writer’s ambiguous relationship to God begins to reveal itself.

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• 
  Threads of Empire

  by Dorothy Armstrong (St. Martin’s)

  Nonfiction

  Carpets are “some of the world’s greatest symbols of authority and control,” Armstrong, a scholar of material culture, argues in this vivid history. She makes her case through profiles of twelve noteworthy specimens, including one frozen in the tomb of a Scythian chieftain; one photographed under the feet of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference, in 1945; and one crafted into a coat for a feudal Japanese warlord. The stories are fraught with violence and colonialism: Persian rugs, for instance, gained their glittering reputation in part from Victorian-era racial hierarchies. But Armstrong draws attention to the carpets’ original weavers, often female and illiterate, whose artistry remains a source of awe.

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• 
  Mother Mary Comes to Me

  by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

  This memoir revolves around Roy’s mother, Mary, whom she calls her “most enthralling subject” and her “gangster.” In addition to rearing Arundhati and her older brother alone, Mary founded an enduring educational establishment and was so persistent an activist that a landmark legal ruling bears her name. Roy recalls her mother’s hypercritical gaze as an act both of creation and of demolition. “It felt as though she had cut me out—cut my shape out—of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up,” she writes. The memoir crystallizes a theme that runs through Roy’s work: how politics and social order shape, and often warp, our capacities for love and empathy. Written after Mary’s death, in 2022, following years of illness, it also captures the brutal transfer of power which comes when a child becomes a caretaker. Above all, it reveals the shape of a relationship: from the moment Roy could walk, she was marching in step with a formidable rebel.

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  Read more: “What to Make of the Mother Who Made You,” by Rebecca Mead
• 
  Dark Renaissance

  by Stephen Greenblatt (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  In the past century or so, the rackety reputation of the transgressive Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe has become cacophonous again, amplified by claims that he spied for his country, that he and his work exult in a flourish of gayness, and that his death (at twenty-nine) might have been ordered by Elizabeth I. Greenblatt, a scholar at Harvard and the author of several books about Shakespeare, provides an account of the dramatist’s life that is rife with circumstantial evidence pertinent to these open questions, and rewardingly so—if anyone’s story tugs and bullies us back into the past, it has to be Marlowe’s. At the same time that Greenblatt touts Marlowe’s genius, he proposes taking the playwright as a product of his time. It was natural and perhaps inevitable, he contends, that the era’s educational emphasis (for the lucky few) on classical rhetoric, its political paranoia, its blazing persecutions, and its emerging theatres would exude somebody like him.

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  Read more: “Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble,” by Anthony Lane
• 
  Hollywood High

  by Bruce Handy (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  When Mickey Rooney first appeared onscreen as the “teener” Andy Hardy, in 1937, it was, as Handy makes clear in this lively cultural history, something new, both in cinema (which had hitherto recognized children and adults but nothing in between) and in the Zeitgeist. In the following decades, as adolescents emerged as a distinct demographic, with plenty of free time and pocket money, the teen movie grew into its own genre, helping drive a shift away from what Handy calls “adult-centrism” in American society. Handy traces the genre into the twenty-first century, showing how such films as “The Hunger Games” speak to the same sentiment as did “Rebel Without a Cause” and “The Breakfast Club”: that, as a contemporary fan of “Rebel” put it, “something in us” was “being sat on by conventions and held down.”

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Here Comes the Sun

  by Bill McKibben (Norton)

  Nonfiction

  As temperatures across the globe rise, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, solar capacity is increasing at an exponential rate. In this expansive survey of solar power, McKibben, who writes about climate for The New Yorker, takes stock of the industry’s recent explosive growth—and its implications for us all. “Even as we teeter on the brink of renewed fascism, we’re also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history,” he writes. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

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• 
  The Old Man by the Sea

  by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa)

  Fiction

  “All my life I have done everything, literally everything, to satisfy this mad desire for story,” the eighty-two-year-old narrator of this slim, playful novel, writes. In his dotage, he has rented a house in an Italian beach town and spends his days filling his notebook and reëvaluating his relationships with the women in his life—in particular, with his mother and his numerous exes. Droll and deadpan, Starnone’s novel offers an accounting of the tolls and the consolations of lifelong artistic pursuit. “Everything is falling apart: my body, the world, heaven, earth,” the narrator observes. “Only the exercise of writing remains.”

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• 
  Augustine the African

  by Catherine Conybeare (Liveright)

  Nonfiction

  This biography of St. Augustine casts the philosopher not only as a theologian who profoundly shaped Christian orthodoxy but also as a person indelibly marked by his status as an African in the Roman Empire. Born to an Amazigh mother and a Roman father, Augustine lived from 354 C.E. to 430 C.E., a uniquely turbulent time in the early history of Christianity, with the faith shifting from the margins of the pagan world to the center of the Empire. Conybeare, a classics scholar, intertwines learned exegesis with examples of Augustine’s human idiosyncrasies, offering illuminating analyses of the philosopher’s seminal texts and ideas—including his theory of original sin—and of the role that his heritage played in his self-conception.

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• 
  Dusk

  by Robbie Arnott (Astra House)

  Fiction

  At the outset of this meditative novel, a pair of out-of-work twins who are haunted by their parents’ histories as thieves and killers decide to go on a hunt for a puma that is terrorizing farmers and livestock in the highlands of Tasmania. As they traverse a ghostly landscape of snow, mist, and fossils, they confront questions of morality and belonging. Even as they find their parents’ reputation inescapable, they survive in large part because of practical knowledge inherited from them. As the novel progresses, the twins’ search for the animal becomes a pursuit of not just a generous bounty but also a restoration to order.

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• 
  Changeover

  by Giri Nathan (Gallery)

  Nonfiction

  This lively new book follows the young tennis champions Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner through the 2024 tennis season, in which they respectively won four and eight tournaments. Large swaths of “Changeover” recount the action of specific matches that many fans have probably already watched—these aren’t the book’s draw. Rather, Nathan excels as a kind of insider-outsider who’s tracking not just the matches but how the narratives around them take shape. He sees Sinner at the airport, soon after the announcement that he tested positive for banned substances. In the olden days, a journalist might have pressed Sinner, hopeful of getting that first quote. Nathan says hi but decides to tiptoe around it, since this would be the last quasi-normal moment Sinner would have before “hurtling in earnest into a hellfire of scrutiny.” He’s more interested in observing him in the wild, eating pizza and enjoying a celebratory Coke Zero—a rare indulgence for a high-performing athlete.

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  Read more: “The Budding Rivalry of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner,” by Hua Hsu
• 
  Twelve Churches

  by Fergus Butler-Gallie (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

  This collection of portraits of twelve churches offers an ambitious retelling of Christianity’s evolution. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem illustrates the paradoxical nature of a religion that twins life and death, peace and violence, prosperity and poverty; the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, illuminates Christianity’s “complicated dance with secular power”; the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama, affords a glimpse of how “time and justice are inherently linked” in Christian thought. A wide-ranging final chapter, centered on a megachurch in Nigeria, hidden churches in China, and churches that provide virtual services, explores how hope for the future, especially as articulated in the Book of Revelation, remains fundamental to Christianity’s appeal.

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• 
  World Pacific

  by Peter Mann (Harper)

  Fiction

  Set at the beginning of the Second World War, this bracing and erudite novel weaves together three ostensibly unrelated plots. In one, an adventure writer who has been marooned pens a series of raunchy dispatches—at one point comparing a typhoon to “Satan’s anus”—addressed to his fan club. In another, the daughter of an illustrious German novelist writes letters to her twin brother, who is in a coma after attempting suicide. Meanwhile, a British spy keeping tabs on Nazi sympathizers in California uncovers an espionage plot. As Mann intertwines these stories, his jaunty sentences combine propulsive humor with international intrigue.

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• 
  Women, Seated

  by Zhang Yueran, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (Riverhead)

  Fiction

  In this tense, spare novel of class, cruelty, and redemption, a woman working as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family in Beijing abruptly finds herself responsible for her employers’ young son when his father is detained by the authorities and his mother goes into hiding. Unfolding in the days just after the father’s arrest, Zhang’s novel travels back and forth through time to reveal its protagonist’s path to domestic work, and the ways in which wealth and power have warped her employers’ most intimate experiences. Part of the injustice of working as a nanny, she reflects, is that its borrowed luxuries mold you “into a particular shape, but this only makes you look ridiculous when you’re back to your own existence.”

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• 
  My Childhood in Pieces

  by Edward Hirsch (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

  This pithy, poignant memoir by an award-winning American poet immortalizes a bygone world in a colorful mosaic of vignettes, jokes, and reflections. The Jewish community of Hirsch’s mid-century youth is vividly evoked in characters including his father, a would-be gangster with a penchant for enigmatic mottoes like “Blood ain’t pee”; his tough, “Old Testament” mother; and a boisterous host of wily, wisecracking grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, neighbors, and friends. Though cut with loss, the book has a madcap spirit; reading it feels like hearing family stories volleyed across a dinner table where even the ghosts are chiming in with their own versions of events.

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• 
  Everything Evolves

  by Mark Vellend (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  A New New Me

  by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead)

  Fiction

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

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

  by Dan Fesperman (Knopf)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Positive Obsession

  by Susana M. Morris (Amistad)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Baldwin

  by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Ian Kumekawa (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Culpability

  by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  To Lose a War

  by Jon Lee Anderson (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Lili Is Crying

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Shade

  by Sam Bloch (Random House)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  King of Kings

  by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Robin Givhan (Crown)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  A Day Like Any Other

  by Nathan Kernan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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

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

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  A Flower Traveled in My Blood

  by Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  Putting Myself Together

  by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Blessings and Disasters

  by Alexis Okeowo (Henry Holt)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Broken King

  by Michael Thomas (Grove)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Clint

  by Shawn Levy (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Inventing the Renaissance

  by Ada Palmer (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Margaret A. Brucia (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Total Defense

  by Andrew Preston (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The World at First Light

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

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Mission

  by Tim Weiner (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Leila Mottley (Knopf)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Place of Tides

  by James Rebanks (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Wild Thing

  by Sue Prideaux (Norton)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Heather Clark (Pantheon)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Whiskerology

  by Sarah Gold McBride (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Ekow Eshun (Harper)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Long Distance

  by Aysegül Savas (Bloomsbury)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Theater Kid

  by Jeffrey Seller (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Invention of Design

  by Maggie Gram (Basic)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Homework

  by Geoff Dyer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  The Aviator and the Showman

  by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Viking)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Compound

  by Aisling Rawle (Random House)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  How We Grow Up

  by Matt Richtel (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

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

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  Read more: “Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives?,” by Molly Fischer
• 
  The Doorman

  by Chris Pavone (MCD)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Cooler Than Cool

  by C. M. Kushins (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Hal Ebbott (Riverhead)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Hunter

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Mafalda

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

  Fiction

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

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

  by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  We Are Eating the Earth

  by Michael Grunwald (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Dana A. Williams (Amistad)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The House on Buzzards Bay

  by Dwyer Murphy (Viking)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  How to Feed the World

  by Vaclav Smil (Viking)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Maria Reva (Doubleday)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Second Coming

  by Carter Sherman (Gallery)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Tim Minshall (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Murderland

  by Caroline Fraser (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Nimbus

  by Robert P. Baird (Holt)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Apple in China

  by Patrick McGee (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Rosa Mistika

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Spent

  by Alison Bechdel (Mariner)

  Fiction

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

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

  by Lizzie Wade (Harper)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Book of Records

  by Madeleine Thien (Norton)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg

  by Kenneth Turan (Yale)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Jill Bialosky (Washington Square)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Eminent Jews

  by David Denby (Holt)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Unforgiving Places

  by Jens Ludwig (Chicago)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  The Very Heart of It

  by Thomas Mallon (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Marketcrafters

  by Chris Hughes (Avid Reader)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Heart, Be at Peace

  by Donal Ryan (Viking)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Haves and Have-Yachts

  by Evan Osnos (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Spinach King

  by John Seabrook (Norton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Children of Radium

  by Joe Dunthorne (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Antimemetics

  by Nadia Asparouhova (The Dark Forest Collective)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Tash Aw (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  When It All Burns

  by Jordan Thomas (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Autocorrect

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Words of Dr. L

  by Karen E. Bender (Counterpoint)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Emperor of Gladness

  by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love

  by Philip Hoare (Pegasus)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Shamanism

  by Manvir Singh (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Director

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

  Fiction

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

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

  by Jennie Erin Smith (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Who Knew

  by Barry Diller (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

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

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

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

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Adelaide Faith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Thinking Machine

  by Stephen Witt (Viking)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  In Covid’s Wake

  by Stephen MacedoFrances Lee (Princeton)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Sarah Bilston (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Other Worlds

  by André Alexis (FSG Originals)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Ghosts of Iron Mountain

  by Phil Tinline (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  I Regret Almost Everything

  by Keith McNally (Gallery)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Andrew Porter (Knopf)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Turning to Birds

  by Lili Taylor (Crown)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  America, América

  by Greg Grandin (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

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

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

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Float Test

  by Lynn Steger Strong (Mariner)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Your Steps on the Stairs

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  A Fractured Liberation

  by Kornel Chang (Belknap)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  Capitalism and Its Critics

  by John Cassidy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Careless People

  by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Lincoln’s Peace

  by Michael Vorenberg (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Dan Nadel (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Mỹ Documents

  by Kevin Nguyen (One World)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  dd’s Umbrella

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Second Life

  by Amanda Hess (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Jay Winik (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Robert W. Snyder (Three Hills)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Maverick’s Museum

  by Blake Gopnik (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Sister, Sinner

  by Claire Hoffman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Franklin Stove

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

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Hunchback

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Darkenbloom

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

  Fiction

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

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

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

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Tilt

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Atomic Dreams

  by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (Algonquin)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Eric Puchner (Doubleday)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  In Praise of Floods

  by James C. Scott (Yale)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Richard Parker (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Taking Manhattan

  by Russell Shorto (Norton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Goddess Complex

  by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Containment

  by Michelle Adams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Mornings Without Mii

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

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Miracles and Wonder

  by Elaine Pagels (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Jeff Hobbs (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  What You Make of Me

  by Sophie Madeline Dess (Penguin Press)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  No Fault

  by Haley Mlotek (Viking)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Herman Pontzer (Avery)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Andrea Barrett (Norton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Original Sins

  by Eve L. Ewing (One World)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Notes on Surviving the Fire

  by Christine Murphy (Knopf)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Immaculate Forms

  by Helen King (Basic)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Graydon Carter (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Sarah E. Bond (Yale)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Lower than the Angels

  by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Viking)

  Nonfiction

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

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

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

  Poetry

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

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• 
  Red Scare

  by Clay Risen (Scribner)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Michael Amherst (Riverhead)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Rot

  by Padraic X. Scanlan (Basic)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  Dream Count

  by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Moral Circle

  by Jeff Sebo (Norton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  A Matter of Complexion

  by Tess Chakkalakal (St. Martin’s)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Homes for Living

  by Jonathan Tarleton (Beacon)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Michelle de Kretser (Catapult)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Jesus Wept

  by Philip Shenon (Knopf)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Ruth Franklin (Yale)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  A Gorgeous Excitement

  by Cynthia Weiner (Crown)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Ends of the Earth

  by Neil Shubin (Dutton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Stone Yard Devotional

  by Charlotte Wood (Riverhead)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Cold Kitchen

  by Caroline Eden (Bloomsbury)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Love and Need

  by Adam Plunkett (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Canisia Lubrin (Soft Skull)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Victorian Psycho

  by Virginia Feito (Liveright)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Land Power

  by Michael Albertus (Basic)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Helen of Troy, 1993

  by Maria Zoccola (Scribner)

  Poetry

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

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• 
  After Lives

  by Megan Marshall (Mariner)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Riveter

  by Jack Wang (HarperVia)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  The Secret History of the Rape Kit

  by Pagan Kennedy (Vintage)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Dissenters

  by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  New and Collected Hell

  by Shane McCrae (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Poetry

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

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

  by Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia Global Reports)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Somewhere Toward Freedom

  by Bennett Parten (Simon & Schuster)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Maggie Su (Harper)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Everything Must Go

  by Dorian Lynskey (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Imani Perry (Ecco)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Make Your Own Job

  by Erik Baker (Harvard)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by John Dufresne (Norton)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Vanishing Point

  by Paul Theroux (Mariner)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  American Laughter, American Fury

  by Eran A. Zelnik (Hopkins)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Open Socrates

  by Agnes Callard (Norton)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Betty Shamieh (Avid Reader)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Gliff

  by Ali Smith (Penguin)

  Fiction

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

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

  by Kyle Paoletta (Pantheon)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  We Do Not Part

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Before Elvis

  by Preston Lauterbach (Grand Central)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  The Sirens’ Call

  by Chris Hayes (Penguin Press)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Tom Lamont (Knopf)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  From Our Pages

  The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

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

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Another Man in the Street

  by Caryl Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Rosarita

  by Anita Desai (Scribner)

  Fiction

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

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• 
  Embers of the Hands

  by Eleanor Barraclough (Norton)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Aflame

  by Pico Iyer (Riverhead)

  Nonfiction

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

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• 
  Mood Machine

  by Liz Pelly (Atria)

  Nonfiction

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

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

  by Adam Ross (Knopf)

  Fiction

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

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