Ocean Vuong Copper Canyon Press ($16) by J.G. McClure “In the body, where everything has a price, / I was a beggar.” So begins Ocean Vuong’s brilliant full-length debut, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In it, Vuong shows himself to be a master of the lyric moment. With an expert blend of the tender and […]
Jane Gleeson-White W. W. Norton & Company ($26.95) by Robert M Keefe One could begin with a simple question: “What is the goal of a business?” Perhaps one response would be, “To make money.” That sounds bizarre though, akin to saying the goal of an education is to get A's. Money and good grades are […]
Richard Beck PublicAffairs ($26.99) by Spencer Dew We live in a terrifying world, shielding ourselves as best we can with fantasies that we insist, against all evidence, are true. For some, this means constructing a Manichean cosmos, a battleground between moral absolutes. For others, it means desperately clinging to a self-centered Enlightenment worldview that privileges […]
Pamela Erens Tin House Books ($15.95) by Lori Feathers In her new novel Eleven Hours, Pamela Erens unpacks the fearful anticipations of becoming a mother and the painful process of losing one. The story centers around two pregnant thirty-year-olds: Lore, a single elementary school worker who enters a New York City hospital, alone, to deliver […]
Raghu Karnad W.W. Norton & Co. ($16.95) by Mukund Belliappa For some years during the Second World War, my paternal grandfather, a mid-level employee of the Survey of India, worked in Baghdad. This anomaly—to the best of my knowledge, he never left South India for the rest of his life—had awakened little wonder in me, […]
The Dark Artifices: Book One Cassandra Clare Margaret K. McElderry Books ($24.99) by Jessica Port Lady Midnight, first in a new series of Shadowhunters novels by Cassandra Clare, takes everything exciting about her previous novels and amplifies it. It has a great cast, an enthralling plot, witty humor, romance, mystery, and plot twists that will […]
Twenty Ways To Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty Ben Ratliff Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ($26) by Dylan Hicks Those who came to love music as adolescent record buyers of the last century often claim that scarcity, limited means, and the nearly sexual anticipation resulting from those factors heightened their pleasure and engagement in […]
Ellen Kombiyil The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective ($16.99) by Samantak Bhadra A normal day in a normal person’s life is extremely normal. There are no blips of exuberance or spontaneous spurts of sadness. Every action, every thought and every morsel of imagination is defined, eventually, by boundaries of different shades. The shades change, the distances […]
Elizabeth Strout Random House ($26) by Emily Myers For better or for worse, every person is connected to a family. This family may come in many forms and levels of functionality, but, as Elizabeth Strout writes, “No one in this world comes from nothing.” We each have people. We each have a story. That’s what […]
Jason Mark Island Press ($28) by Eliza Murphy Is the wild relevant? Given the evidence of humanity’s presence in layers of ice, tree bark, whale blubber, the night sky and the atmosphere, have we extinguished the wild while domesticating the planet with pollutants and surveillance systems? Despite (or perhaps because of) the far-reaching extent of […]