Black Gatsby! Britney Spears! Geoff Dyer! Queer chaos! 25 new books out today.
June rolls on, and I come bearing tidings, as always, of exciting new books out today to consider. (One of these, the self-styled queer-chaotic anthology Be Gay, Do Crime actually came out last week; I missed it last week by mistake, so you’ll also find it below.)
Below, you’ll find twenty-five wide-ranging works in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including a new dystopian novel from Jess Walter; Kyra Davis Lurie’s Black American adaptation of The Great Gatsby (which, astute readers will know, had some unfortunate descriptions of Black characters); highly anticipated memoirs from Geoff Dyer and John Gluck, as well as fresh biographical takes on Elmore Leonard and A’Lelia Walker; Jeff Weiss on Britney Spears’ career; a look at the radical opportunities for exploring gender in nineteenth-century circuses; and much, much more.
Stay cool and stay safe, Dear Readers, and enjoy these new literary offerings!
*
Jess Walter, So Far Gone
(Harper)
“Like Station Eleven and The Handmaid’s Tale, this novel…feels both prescient and timely….Gritty survivalist stories, from bunkers to bar rooms, converge in this propulsive novel that glances backward to 2016 while signaling what dangers come to fruition when people relinquish human bonds in favor of ideological fervor….This work is a tremendous achievement…with an urgency that may make it one of the strongest realist but dystopian novels of the present era.”
–Library Journal
Kyra Davis Lurie, The Great Mann
(Crown)
“A fresh, exhilarating take on The Great Gatsby, The Great Mann is a pitch-perfect reinvention of a story you thought you already knew. Davis Lurie expertly dissects class, wealth, race, fame, and more, and in doing so, creates a classic of her own.”
–Allison Winn Scotch
Pip Adam, Audition
(Coffee House Press)
“Stunningly inventive….Virginia Woolf’s The Waves meeting a twenty-first-century version of Philip K. Dick….Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Geoff Dyer, Homework: A Memoir
(FSG)
“Reading Homework is like going for a long walk with a close friend, whose singular voice—inventive, absorbing, a little rakish, and wonderfully dry—will hold your interest for hours on end. Geoff Dyer is a profoundly intelligent memoirist. His childhood emerges from these pages as both his utterly distinctive experience and the shared history of a nation.”
–Merve Emre
Jonathan Gluck, An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope
(Harmony)
“An Exercise in Uncertainty has a powerful and restorative story to tell us. Gluck’s life of illness and survival is a vital primer for us all—a lesson in how to face and comprehend two of the basic facts that render us human: we die; but much more importantly, we live.”
–Richard Ford
C.M. Kushins, Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard
(Mariner Books)
“Meticulously researched, Cooler Than Cool gives Elmore Leonard fans…a fond gaze into the legendary crime novelist’s mind and motivations. C. M. Kushins makes exceptional and economical use of Leonard’s personal notes and preserved files…a memorable read…Detailing the subject’s growth from an unknown Detroit copywriter into a literary legend, Cooler Than Cool is a slicker than slick biography worthy of the top shelf.”
–Eddie B. Allen Jr.
Garrett Hongo, Ocean of Clouds: Poems
(Knopf)
“I consider [Hongo] one of our most important practitioners of latter-day Romanticism—and this makes him the kind of American poet determined to make linkages, to create a continuity and tradition for himself….Hongo has carefully imagined another kind of family dispersed across the globe, poets and fiction writers, but also artists of all kinds—jazz saxophonists, fresco painters, all those who try to serve what Wordsworth called ‘the beauty that was felt.'”
–Edward Hirsch
Marie Rutkoski, Ordinary Love
(Knopf)
“I loved this novel. I didn’t want to stop reading it for anything. Ordinary Love is a riveting portrait of a woman taking control of her life. A brilliant examination of queerness, friendship, motherhood, longing and ambition. It’s funny and moving and sexy. Above all, it’s a stunning love story.”
–J. Courtney Sullivan
Molly Llewellyn, Kristel Buckley, Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos
(Dzanc Books)
“A collection that is truly firing on all cylinders. The stories are propulsive, compelling, and incredibly enthralling. Immensely enjoyable. I couldn’t put it down.”
–Kristen Arnett
Harris Lahti, Foreclosure Gothic
(Astra House)
“Suspenseful and visionary, hypnotic and absurd, Foreclosure Gothic is a startling novel about the darkness of the American dream. Like Joy Williams and Fleur Jaeggy, Harris Lahti is an extraordinary prose stylist carefully attuned to violence and beauty in this major debut.”
–Patrick Cottrell
Susan Gubar, Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists
(Norton)
“Brava! I’m giving a standing ovation for Grand Finales, a buoyant and inspiring book about real life women who’ve found joy and fulfillment in their second and even third acts, proving that life is what we make of it, and that happiness is possible at any age….With Grand Finales, she’s given me exactly what I need right now: hope.”
–Meg Cabot
Jeff Weiss, Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly
(MCD)
“An exhilarating trip through the ups and downs of Britney Spears’s career….In colorful, entertaining detail, Weiss lucidly explains how the paparazzi capitalized on the chaos of Spears’s life to give the public the chaos they demanded….As much a thrilling chronicle of Spears’s life as it is a perceptive examination of celebrity culture, this captivates.”
–Publishers Weekly
Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life
(Beacon Press)
“Griest’s rigorous and fascinating research both proves and enacts her book’s thesis: a life devoted to art is not only possible but a ringing answer to the powers that attempt to thwart such lives and work. A deep, moving, radical book that I want to press into the hands of every young artist.”
–Melissa Febos
Megan Hunter, Days of Light
(Grove Press)
“Reminiscent of Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield….Hunter demonstrates her versatility as a writer. Days of Light navigates hefty themes—class, queer love, the search for transcendence—with ease. Stippled with gorgeous images (a kiss “like a dusting of flour”, a moment “a thread caught on brambles”), this is a tale of female emancipation that would have made Woolf proud.”
–Miriam Balaneseu
Pirkko Saiso, Backlight (trans. Mia Spangenberg)
(Two Lines Press)
“Getting a child narrator right is no easy task, and Saisio executes it perfectly by painting the girl as a magnetic mix of precocious maturity and naive innocence, holding the potential for some surprisingly deep insights as well as silly hijinks. Humor…is a significant feature of the narrative, adding refreshing levity in between the heavy emotional punches.”
–Areeb Ahmad
Amerie, This Is Not a Ghost Story
(William Morrow)
“A compelling, thoughtful, and often funny meditation on identity, race, class, fame, and the afterlife. This bold debut novel offers a fresh and exciting take on twenty-first-century America. Amerie’s singular voice shines like a beacon on a sea of sameness. Highly recommended!”
–Ace Atkins
A’Lelia Bundles, Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance
(Scribner)
“From her humble beginnings in St. Louis to her reign as the doyenne of the Harlem Renaissance, Bundles’s sparkling storytelling brings A’Lelia Walker out from the shadow cast by her mother, Madam CJ Walker. Bundles illuminates the life of one of the most fascinating women of the early twentieth century with the style and elegance worthy of the subject and adds an essential piece to the history of the Harlem Renaissance.”
–Tiffany M. Gill
Sara Kehaulani Goo, Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai’i
(Flatiron Books)
“In her riveting memoir, Kuleana, journalist Sara Kehaulani Goo tells us more about the difficult past of one of the most beautiful places on earth than any history book can conjure. In it, a Native Hawaiian family struggles to reclaim the ancestral lands that colonization, tourism, and rampant development threaten to overrun. A veteran reporter, Sara…spool[s] an engrossing narrative that informs as much as it engages…chilling and inspirational.”
–Marie Arana
Betsy Golden Kellem, Jumping Through Circus: Performing Gender in the Nineteenth Century Circus
(Feminist Press)
“This landmark book carves out new possibilities for what words like circus and women could possibly signify. The death-defying act that Jumping Through Hoops performs is reaching back to rewrite our understanding of culture and gender in our own times. A must-read.”
–Caroline HaGood
Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope
(Simon & Schuster/Summit Books)
“Rob Franklin’s debut novel, Great Black Hope, is a masterpiece—at once fresh and original while delighting the reader with hints of Franzen, McInerney, Baldwin. The specificity of the language is like fine lacework, a beauty to behold. This novel—a whodunit, a coming-of-age, a New York novel—heralds the arrival of a rarefied talent. Wow wow wow.”
–Elin Hilderbrand
Emily Itami, Kakigori Summer
(Mariner Books)
“Itami (Fault Lines) serves up an inviting and wistful tale of three sisters who reunite during a crisis… Itami strikes just the right chord, showing how the sisters indulge their nostalgia for happier times even as they attempt to reckon with their painful memories. Readers are in for a treat.”
–Publishers Weekly
Alec Nevala-Lee, Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs
(Norton)
“Collisions is a wonderful book, a chance for readers to get to know one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, who was also a great inventor. Luis Alvarez was a friend of mine; I know he’d be delighted to see his adventurous life—flying the Hiroshima mission, X-raying the pyramids, discovering the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs—so well and warmly told. Outstanding!”
–Caroline Fraser
Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains
(Washington Square Press)
“Neurologist Anand artfully stitches together memoir, medical history, neuroscience, and glimpses of people with neurological diseases to introduce readers to different types of wounded brains….The book excels in Anand’s ruminations on the art of clinical medicine and her insights into the physician experience. She startlingly confesses, ‘To become a doctor, I was becoming less of a human being.’ Fully charged…an undeniable grace and humanity permeate these pages.”
–Booklist
Tim Bouverie, Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World
(Crown)
“Tim Bouverie has done a remarkable thing: He has found a novel and illuminating way to tell the story of World War II, and in so doing he has given us an important and timely study of the centrality and the complexity of alliances.”
–Jon Meacham
Megan Greenwell, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
(Dey Street Books)
“An absolutely riveting tour of the American economic system, told through the lives of four people whose jobs were swallowed by the beast we call private equity. Greenwell has single-handedly exposed the hidden economic machine that increasingly runs—and ruins—our lives. This bombshell of a book is indispensable to understand the economic forces running roughshod over America today.”
–Christopher Leonard
