May 23, 2023, 4:37am
It’s another Tuesday, and this means that the shelves are packed, once again, with exciting new offerings. Below, you’ll find brand-new fiction and intriguing translations of lesser-known novels; new collections of poetry; and a wide range of memoirs and conversation-starting nonfiction. I hope you’ll find something intriguing to pick up below!
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Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans
(Riverhead)
“Brandon Taylor’s third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature yet… Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognizable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book’s last page.”
–Harper’s Bazaar
Victor Luckerson, Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street
(Random House)
“A vital book… An ambitious chronicle of a racially motivated atrocity that still resonates today… [Victor Luckerson] brings his considerable journalistic sensibilities to this sweeping and intimate portrait of racial violence, empowerment, and social action.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Naoíse Mac Sweeney, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives
(Dutton)
“One by one [Mac Sweeney] takes on hoary old myths—about the character of the ancient world, the nature of the Crusades, or the superiority of European powers in imperial contests—explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past… [C]lever and thought-provoking.”
–The Guardian
Javier Marías, Tomás Nevinson (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)
(Knopf)
“Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on by the long, powerful swells of his prose, flawlessly translated by Margaret Jull Costa… This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one transposed into music by Philip Glass… A many-layered meditation on mortality and memory and free will and its opposite.”
–The Guardian
Stacey Abrams, Rogue Justice
(Doubleday Books)
“Former Georgia representative Abrams parlays her political knowledge into a complex and highly entertaining thriller… [S]tuffed with genuinely surprising twists… Political junkies and thriller fans alike will eagerly anticipate the next installment.”
–Publishers Weekly
D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The New Life
(Pegasus)
“Taylor expertly illuminates how early influences provided Orwell with a keen interest in the power of language and the language of power. The subtitle of Taylor’s authoritative account reflects newly available material but could just as accurately reflect the renewed life given to Orwell in our post-fact world.”
–Booklist
Guinevere Turner, When the World Didn’t End: A Memoir
(Crown Publishing Group)
“Guinevere Turner’s mesmerizing, devastating account of growing up in the Lyman Family cult is a coming-of-age story like no other. Rendered in astounding detail from her childhood journals, her story reads like a novel and deserves wide attention in an age of fringe groups going mainstream.”
–Jessica Bruder
David Remnick, Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music
(Knopf)
“[A] gathering of exceptionally vivid and melodic profiles of musicians late in life. Written over the past three decades, these are keenly observed, deeply felt, and judiciously detailed encounters of genuine communion mixing interviews, biography, and analysis, all lyrically and radiantly composed… There’s a bittersweet quality to Remnick’s perceptions of these legendary figures.”
–Booklist
Laura Kay, Wild Things
(Vintage)
“Laura Kay could teach a masterclass on the low-key, wholesome, slightly messy queer rom com… Wild Things is a friends-to-lovers romance, yes, but also a heartwarming exploration of found family… Recommended for fans of droll British humor, readers of In at the Deep End and Queenie, and watchers of Fleabag and Feel Good.”
–The Lesbrary
Carlos Fonseca, Austral (trans. Megan McDowell)
(FSG)
“The protagonists of this sweeping novel strive to piece together the past in all its cruelty to better understand themselves and whence they came. Austral juxtaposes beautifully the search for truth and the artistic process in a depiction that makes one indistinguishable from the other. With great sensitivity, Carlos Fonseca captures the sense of dislocation that comes to define anyone who has ever been displaced.”
–Alejandro Varela
Kwame Alexander, Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Recipes, Letters, and Remembrances
(Little Brown)
“Written with candor, warmth, and heart-wrenching grace, Why Fathers Cry at Night is nothing short of a marvel, animating humanity’s most important questions: What does it mean to grieve, to have the courage to surrender, to find a home in this tumultuous world, and to learn to love again? With radiance and poetic precision, Kwame Alexander’s words will remind you of art’s infinite sustenance.”
–Adrienne Brodeur
Debra Magpie Earling, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
(Milkweed Editions)
“[In The Lost Journals of Sacajewea] the suffering—and bold, ingenious agency—of women held as captives by both Native and Euro-Americans is rendered with special vividness… A profoundly moving imagining of the impressions and contributions of a major historical figure.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Holly Mitchell, Mare’s Nest
(Sarabande Books)
“Full of both ache and praise, Mare’s Nest is a calling, a conjuring, a blessed airborne gallop embodying all the love and complications of home. This collection stuns, stunts, envelops, rises, and arrives trailing with shelled green beans, the gulping of creek water and the pregnant sigh and heat of longing, searching, finding exactly who we are and where we belong.”
–Ellen Hagan
Jennifer Neal, Notes on Her Color
(Catapult)
“A haunting coming-of-age story, a melodic love letter to the language of music and a fierce, dark, rage-filled upbraiding of patriarchal violence… A fascinating commentary on race, power, invisibility and desire.”
–Bookpage
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson)
(Liveright Publishing)
“A beguilingly slippery tale by Brazil’s greatest proto-modernist writer… In this readable [new] translation… Machado proves himself a gifted portraitist of flawed human characters who harbor psychological depths.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Kay Redfield Jamison, Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind
(Knopf)
“A humane, elegantly written contribution to the literature of trauma and care… Jamison opens with a graceful portrait of Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the medical pioneer recognized by American doctors a century later as ‘the most influential physician in history’…[and] moves on to a consideration of the ancient connections of healing, ritual, and magic, some of which come into play in modern therapy.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Amanda Gunn, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body
(Copper Canyon Press)
“Gunn’s formal decisions enable a reader to feel and think with and through her… While embodiment is a through-line, her poems explore (and interweave) subjects that include race, gender, sexuality, history, nationhood, family, illness, cognition, pleasure, and shame. Gunn’s is a poetics both carefully studied and wildly intuitive, a language of both pyrotechnics and searing flame.”
–Dora Malech
Rachel Louise Snyder, Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir
(Bloomsbury)
“[A] gripping memoir… Snyder’s curiosity is matched by her own resilience; writing stories about survivors parallels her own story of overcoming trauma and finding grace.”
–Washington Post
Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good
(Dial Press)
“What if women finally found freedom—because we gave it to ourselves? Elise Loehnen brilliantly reframes our toxic cultural programming and helps us to see that what we thought were our sins are actually our greatest virtues. This book is the gift we have all been waiting for.”
–Lori Gottlieb
Elliot Ackerman, Halcyon
(Knopf)
“A thoughtful and fascinating thought experiment, one that explores mortality, fate, and the malleability of historical memory.”
–Booklist
Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
(WW Norton)
“[Melissa L. Sevigny is] a spellbinding writer of informed and ardent attentiveness, wit, and empathy… A breath-catching, enlightening, and significant work of scientific, environmental, and women’s history.”
–Booklist
Bronwyn Fischer, The Adult
(Algonquin Books)
“A powerful, queer coming-of-age story about a young woman in the throes of first love… This gripping novel has the distinct pang of nostalgia mixed with the discomfort of growing up—a bittersweet but delicious experience.”
–Buzzfeed
Todd Brewster, American Childhood: A Photographic History
(Scribner)
“Visually enchanting, offering glimpses into the passion, play, banality, and trauma of childhood.”
–Booklist
Johanna Hedva, Your Love Is Not Good
(And Other Stories)
“Your Love Is Not Good is a whirlwind, and a mural, and a mirror—Hedva’s prose is incisive and empathetic, wholly comedic and deeply poignant. This story about the life of our ideas, the trajectory of our dreams, and the burden of our loves is wildly moving and entirely original… [H]onest and enrapturing.”
–Bryan Washington
Ivy Pochoda, Sing Her Down
(MCD)
“A gritty thriller with a fiery heart, Sing Her Down is a pulse-pounding western with a devastating message about the oft-forgotten explosions made by women the world tries hard not to see.”
–Shelf Awareness