Some weeks in the books world, a headliner or emergent theme happily suggests itself right away. This is not one of those weeks.
Below, you'll find quite a variety: memoir, comics journalism and speculative fiction, horror and humor, in climates as disparate as Polynesia and Antarctica. If there is one thread holding them all together — besides the fact they're all worth a read, each in their own way — the main organizing principle may well be how much competition they had to shoulder aside to get here.
This week truly is a bumper harvest out of the publishing industry, so even if none of the books here catches your fancy, you may as well head down to your local library anyway. Disgruntled readers will find a bevy of other new books besting these picks. As that classic saw goes, don't be grouchy, get gruntled! At least, I think that's how it goes.
Joyride, by Susan Orlean
"I think the lack of knowledge is a superpower. It brings for me this voraciousness to learn, to gobble up this world that I'm plunging into," Orlean told NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, reflecting on how she prefers to approach every new story. In her latest effort, the journalist responsible for The Library Book, The Orchid Thief and the biography of a canine silent film star has brought the same unabashed curiosity to bear on a more personal subject: herself. This memoir offers a window onto a delightfully eventful writing life and how it got to be that way.
A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar
Majumdar's second novel, like her first – A Burning, is no cakewalk. But then, a future blighted by climate change doesn't figure to be one either. This slim and grim portrait of near-future Kolkata, India, stages a frantic dance between its two principals: a woman scrabbling to see her family to safety, some place less beset by natural disaster, and the thief who stole her family's very means of escape, more from desperation than malice. The novel has earned the Indian-born, U.S.-based author a spot on this year's National Book Award shortlist, with winners to be announced next month.
The Once and Future Riot, by Joe Sacco
Sacco is a journalist who shares the fruits of his investigations not in tidy blocks of text but in panels and pictures. For years he was all but a genre unto himself, his name practically a byword for comics journalism. The field is more crowded these days, much to his credit and readers' benefit, but Sacco remains a singular communicator. In his latest book, Sacco is interested in riots, those flash floods of mob violence that can upend history or end in casualties, often both. What drives these unpredictable events, and why do they erupt when they do, where they do?
Minor Black Figures, by Brandon Taylor
Not too long after Taylor's dramatic metamorphosis, from biochemistry graduate student to professional fiction writer, he noticed that a second, less comfortable transformation was underway. "When I sold my book, I felt myself immediately become a commodity," he recalled on NPR's It's Been a Minute in 2023. The messy details were no longer as useful as the biographical bullet points that could help sell his book. "I felt myself being folded up into categories that didn't make sense for me or my art," he said. These anxieties resurface in his latest novel, which stars a young black artist whose crisis of confidence helps set its story of friendship and love in motion.
The Wayfinder, by Adam Johnson
To this point, Johnson's back catalog hasn't demanded much real estate on the bookshelf — just four books across the past quarter-century. Of course, one of those books, Fortune Smiles, won a National Book Award. Another won a Pulitzer Prize: The Orphan Master's Son, a harrowing depiction of life inside North Korea born of research and his travels there. The Wayfinder, his first novel since that 2012 effort, makes clear that the intervening years have done nothing to dim his considerable ambition, with a sweeping epic set during the Tongan Empire, in the South Pacific of the Middle Ages.
The Unveiling, by Quan Barry
Honestly, it's a wonder people still willingly get on cruise ships. Between the Titanic, Gilligan's Island and other notable real and imagined catastrophes, you'd think the things would have followed zeppelins and pennyfarthings into penitential obscurity long ago. But no: Here's Striker, hero of Barry's latest novel, aboard one of these waterbound Hindenburgs on her way to Antarctica, with the idea of scouting film locations. Of course neither she nor her cruisemates should count on an uneventful ride right to their destination, in this peculiar skein of race, psychological horror and social satire.
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