New Books Tuesday: Your weekly guide to what’s publishing today, fiction and nonfiction.
Every week, a new crop of great new books hit the shelves. If we could read them all, we would, but since time is finite and so is the human capacity for page-turning, here are a few of the ones we’ll be starting with. What are you reading this week?
FICTION
Chanelle Benz, The Gone Dead (Ecco)
In this debut novel from the author of the collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead, a 34-year-old woman, long estranged from her father, finds herself back in the Mississippi Delta in the home where he used to live—and where he mysteriously died. Now she must find out the truth about that death—and bring justice to the near-stranger who gave her life.
Natalia Ginzburg, tr. Frances Frenaye, The Dry Heart (New Directions)
One new two new translations of Ginzburg’s work out from New Directions this month, and fueled by the best kind of rage, this is a feminist thriller that begins—and ends—with the sentence “I shot him between the eyes.”
Kate Atkinson, Big Sky (Little, Brown)
If you love Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, I probably don’t have to tell you that there’s a new one, in which the private detective tries to get a little peace and quiet by the sea—to no avail.
Laura Mechling, How Could She (Viking)
The book that all the 30-something female media professionals you know in this city and elsewhere will be reading and relating to this week.
Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had (Doubleday)
The story of four daughters and their parents in Chicago—filled with secrets, sex, retorts, love, and loathing. In other words: plenty delicious.
NONFICTION
Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution (Random House)
If you too like to watch, you probably already know about Nussbaum—only the best television critic working today—and her book, a collection of new and previously published essays, which are mostly about TV and also our souls.
Tanisha C. Ford, Dressed in Dreams (St. Martin’s)
A memoir in clothes—specifically the clothes of the generation of millennial black women growing up in middle America, from the dashiki to “coochie cutters,” from bamboo earrings to hoodies—from a professor, fashionista and pop culture expert.
Philippe Petit, tr. Paul Auster, On the High Wire (New Directions)
Petit’s “poetic handbook” for wire-walking (and life) was written when he was just 23—here, it is translated and introduced by literary acrobat Paul Auster.
Lore Segal, The Journal I Did Not Keep (Melville House)
Lore Segal is a national treasure, brilliant, unsentimental, and wry; this volume, introduced by Catherine Lacey, is a massive and delightful compendium of six decades of her work, including uncollected writings, essays, and excerpts from novels and stories .
