Omar El Akkad! Ada Calhoun! Joni Mitchell! 26 new books out today.
What a February it has been, a February that has felt more like a year (or three) than a month, a February in which it seems as though every day has yielded new political emergencies and embarrassments and head-spinning paradigm shifts. It’s a month I will be happy to leave behind, as will many Americans and people across the globe, especially those waiting for aid they were promised that may never come, or those worried about a government’s records being looted by an unelected billionaire, or those affected by new-yet-old assaults on civil rights, or countless other travesties.
My own aid offering this week is simple, and is, unlike our government’s, yours for the taking. We need to focus on something else, anything else. And so here is a cornucopia of hotly anticipated new books out today in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, spanning the gamut from cozy to clever to calamitous to cowboy-apocalypse-as-metaphor-ical.
You’ll find it all below, including new fiction from Ada Calhoun, Thomas Kohnstamm, Kara Thompson Walker, Alex Higley, Curtis Sittenfeld, and many other literary lights to watch; a new translation from Wendy Chen of Li Qingzhao’s classic Chinese poems; and nonfiction from Omar El Akkad on the West’s failures, Paul Lisicky on Joni Mitchell, Alexander Clapp on the wild fate of our trash, Rachel Wagner on the gun-toting cowboy’s connection to America’s darkest mythologies, and more.
Stay safe in these tumultuous times, Dear Readers, and don’t let the tumult keep you from picking up some truly exciting new books.
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Ada Calhoun, Crush
(Viking)
“Crush marks Ada Calhoun’s arrival as a novelist, and what an incredibly explosive arrival it is. This book is a sumptuous exploration of how desire takes us over without a shred of moral hedging. A vertiginous—yet somehow also clarifying—novel that will grab you by your shoulders and shake you until you feel alive.”
–Isaac Fitzgerald
Kara Thompson Walker, The Strange Case of Jane O.
(Random House)
“In her brilliant and mesmerizing new novel, Karen Thompson Walker asks thrilling and vital questions about perception, memory, consciousness, and the limits of our known world. Elegant, propulsive, ingeniously structured, and intellectually rich, The Strange Case of Jane O. is both mind-bending and soul-altering. I loved it.”
–Jessamine Chan
Alex Higley, True Failure
(Coffee House Press)
“In True Failure, Higley’s characters struggle to reinvent themselves in the shadow of twenty-first century capitalism. Manic, obsessive, lovesick, they try to find meaning in a world that has abandoned and ignored them; Higley lets them blunder towards profundity in a story that is both harrowing and hilarious. Alex Higley is a thrilling new talent, a master of finding the uncanny in the prosaic, the comedy in misery…a moving, deftly executed, and wonderful surprise.”
–J. Robert Lennon
Paul Lisicky, Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell
(HarperOne)
“An astonishing exploration of what it means to lead an artist’s life—how to last, dig deep, change, to embrace one’s voice while in conversation with your heroes. There is no writer more attentive than Lisicky, and to see him turn his brilliance to Joni Mitchell is a thrilling wonder….This book exceeds all my extraordinarily high expectation—for its strangeness and honesty and beauty, and its ability to set the gossamer wings of song on the page. I loved it.”
–Elizabeth McCracken
Andrea Barrett, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction
(Norton)
“In her first book of essays, which are as keen and beautifully crafted as her stories, [Barrett] parses the challenges involved in writing literary historical fiction….With candid accounts of false starts and revision marathons, Barrett’s felicitous chronicle will intrigue and enlighten passionate readers and writers.”
–Booklist
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
(Knopf)
“I will read anything Omar El Akkad ever writes. This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon—from the beginning—blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide—a love born between the very peoples we have always colonized and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song.”
–Lidia Yuknavitch
Li Qingzhao, The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084 – 1151) (trans. Wendy Chen)
(FSG)
“Wendy Chen translates with a true poet’s sensitivity to language, metaphor, and image. Indeed, to bring Li Qingzhao’s poems to an English-speaking audience with such precision and obvious skill is a remarkable achievement. Here are poems as timeless as they are timely, as mysterious as they are rewarding.”
–Kristina Marie Darling
Sophie Madeline Dess, What You Make of Me
(Penguin Press)
“A brother and sister’s artistic rivalry intensifies when they fall for the same woman in Dess’s electrifying debut….Dess harnesses her characters’ feelings of sorrow and dread as their bond unravels, and she skillfully untangles the complexities of their all-consuming relationship while offering keen insights into the pressures they face as artists, both from others and from within. It’s a tour de force.”
–Publishers Weekly
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don’t Tell: Stories
(Random House)
“Witty….In one sparkling comedy of manners after another, [Curtis Sittenfeld] documents with a clear and affectionate eye how tiny prejudices and blind spots lead her protagonists astray. These stories entertain and unsettle in equal measure.”
–Publishers Weekly
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally
(Tiny Reparations Books)
“Impossibly funny whilst darkly probing, Fundamentally is the whole package: a raunchy, irreverent, touching, and daring debut with slicing commentary wrapped in bold, biting humor. It slyly and systematically rejects our swallowed concepts of heroes and who is correct, and posits instead the better question: what is right?.”
–Parini Shroff
Riley Black, When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance
(St. Martin’s Press)
“Black is a poet of prehistory, narrating the final moments of a gooey mosquito or the accidental, tree-bound voyage of a monkey with the detail of someone who was there and saw it all, millions of years ago….This is a book steeped with vegetal beauty, one that unfurls like a flower, blooming.”
–Sabrina Imbler
Henry Jenkins, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America
(New York University Press)
“Impeccably researched; a significant and original contribution to our understanding of baby boom era childhood, and especially boyhood. One of Henry Jenkins’s greatest strengths is his ability to show concrete circuits of influence and exchange between childrearing experts and the popular fiction he analyzes….Jenkins demonstrates the dynamic and reciprocal relations between intellectual and popular culture.”
–Lynn Spigel
Carl Zimmer, Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
(Dutton)
“Another brilliant work from one of the very best science writers, Air-Borne will leave you agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us, and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late. It is a book about how much there is still left to know, and how frustrating it can be to turn knowledge into wisdom.”
–Ed Yong
Nicole Galland, Boy
(William Morrow)
“An astonishing work of imaginative empathy, buttressed by deep research and enriched by lively storytelling. In I, Iago, Galland takes one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic characters and creates a full life for him, sweeping the reader into the vibrant world of Venetian intrigue and carrying us, also, to the deep places of the human heart.”
–Geraldine Brooks
Michael Amherst, The Boyhood of Cain
(Riverhead)
“A beautiful and profound novel about a boy’s coming to consciousness as his family falls apart. Utterly compelling and quietly devastating, I read this book with my heart in my mouth and could not put it down.”
–Mary Costello
Christine Murphy, Notes on Surviving the Fire
(Knopf)
“A biting, savage, unflinching story of how the culture of sexual assault is systemically tolerated and tucked out of sight into the dark corners of ivory towers. Part campus satire, part murder mystery, and most importantly a tale of formidable survival, Notes on Surviving the Fire asks: who among us is a perpetrator, and how do we keep on living once we know? Christine Murphy writes with the nimbleness of a hunter.”
–Aube Rey Lescure
Maurizio Serra, Malaparte: A Biography (trans. Stephen Twilley)
(NYRB)
“A searching life, by diplomat and historian Serra, of Italy’s arguably most enigmatic writer….Malaparte defies easy categorization: Che Guevara and European neofascists alike read his political essays; American intelligence agents gave him a pass even as top Italian communists befriended him; and…briefly dazzled by Mao Zedong, he traveled to China…A rewarding essay in modern Italian intellectual history as embodied by one of its most curious figures.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Fritz Breithaupt, The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell
(Yale University Press)
“The Narrative Brain is a uniquely interdisciplinary exploration of the emotional rewards of narrative thinking. This witty, imaginative, and genre-crossing book changes everything we thought we knew about how stories satisfy their readers.”
–Lisa Zunshine
Rachel Wagner, Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah
(New York University Press)
“Rachel Wagner’s Cowboy Apocalypse packs a wallop. It is a rowdy and illuminating look at a profoundly vibrant mythology in America centered around guns, cowboys, and the end of the world. Part of its achievement is the way it ties this mythology to popular cultures, religious sensibilities, and political realities. Wagner expertly delivers an insightful, highly readable study of what is truly a frightening fixture in the American imagination.”
—Gary Laderman
Thomas Kohnstamm, Supersonic
(Counterpoint)
“A dazzling, expansive new vision of the West, Supersonic is both sweeping and intimate, spanning more than a hundred years on the land now known as Seattle and recasting westward expansion through the eyes of a vivid, indelible array of characters.”
–Maxim Loskutoff
Angelica Baker, When We Grow Up
(Flatiron)
“When We Grow Up is novel as anthropological investigation, a study of the class of people for whom adulthood begins at thirty. I laughed, I winced, and I saw much I recognized in Baker’s exploration of how the self is forged not only by the circumstances of our birth and family and education but by our peers and friends.”
–Rumaan Alam
Jane Tara, Tilda Is Visible
(Crown)
“This multi-layered book offers readers both genuine, frequent laughs and ideas for serious contemplation; it paves the way for new friendship goals and provides sparks to reignite the pursuit of lifetime passions….Suggested for solo introspection, a spirited and empowering book discussion experience, or anyone looking for a unique read sure to prompt a deep dive into the power of the mind.”
–Booklist
Alexander Clapp, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
(Little Brown)
“Journalist Clapp debuts with a rollicking deep dive into the absurdities and intricacies of the global trash trade… Clapp chronicles how, despite these nations having since banded together to end the toxic waste trade, it has continued to flourish under the guise of recycling… It’s a stirring and dogged investigation.”
–Publishers Weekly
Yoni Appelbaum, Stuck: How the Privileged and Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
(Random House)
“Americans have always treasured the joys of moving, but Yoni Appelbaum brilliantly shows how that freedom has been strangled by zoning laws, racism and the misuse of building codes….With verve and passion, Appelbaum champions a nation not only with more affordable housing but also with stronger communities and richer social connections. Stuck should provoke clearer thinking, more productive debate—and action.”
–E. J. Dionne, Jr.
Eoin Higgins, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left
(Bold Type Books)
“Higgins expertly, carefully, and devastatingly traces the career trajectory of two prominent and important journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Their decades-long journey from the world of blogging and alternative journalism into the snug patronage of billionaires is a story with profound and troubling implications for the future of journalism and unfettered thinking. Never pulling any punches but always hitting fairly, Higgins has written an important book.”
–Jeet Heer
Jack Fairweather, The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice
(Crown)
“Jack Fairweather, a brilliant researcher and compelling writer, tells the remarkable and inspiring story of German jurist Fritz Bauer. Both Jewish and gay, Bauer survived Hitler’s concentration camps and exile and returned to help remake his country, braving public opprobrium and personal danger to pursue the complicit and compel a national reckoning with his country’s crimes….A triumphant story.”
–Mark Bowden
