11 New Books We Recommend This Week
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Loading... - Kuntum Chua
- 03 Jun 2022
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June is Pride Month, so why not kick off your reading this week with a couple of relevant titles? James Kirchick’s “Secret City” explores the political and historical costs of closeted life in Washington, D.C., while Casey McQuiston’s Y.A. novel “I Kissed Shara Wheeler” tells the story of a queer teenage rebel investigating a popular girl’s disappearance. Also up: The account of a Reconstruction-era lynching in a small New York village, a look at Apple’s fate in the decade since Steve Jobs died, a study of the tense relationship between China and the West, and a frank and moving memoir by the actor Selma Blair. In fiction, we recommend new books by Ali Smith, Maggie Shipstead, Alexander Maksik and Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, along with new translations of a couple of classic novels by the great French writer Colette. Happy reading, everyone.
SECRET CITY: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, by James Kirchick. (Holt, $38.) “Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” Kirchick writes in this sprawling and enthralling history. Kirchick reveals copious blood on the hands of the powerful, who for decades regarded alternative desires or any association with them as a “contagious sexual aberrancy,” and cause for immediate banishment from mainstream society. He mourns the “possibilities thwarted” — the number of patriotic civil servants whose careers were cut short or never began. Our critic Alexandra Jacobs writes: “As an epic of a dark age, complex and shaded, ‘Secret City’ is rewarding in the extreme.”
COMPANION PIECE, by Ali Smith. (Pantheon, $28.) In Smith’s latest novel, an artist grappling with her father’s illness and the despair of lockdown receives a call from an acquaintance, who presents her with a strange conundrum plucked from a dream. From there, the book opens into an epoch-spanning story about freedom and restriction, with a 16th-century lock as a unifying motif. This artifact, Mohsin Hamid writes in his review, is “a fine description of this novel, itself a lock, crafted by a smith, that is, by A. Smith, demanding in the engagement it requires, and rewarding of that engagement, as one picks away at the words she has used to build it.”
THE CROCODILE BRIDE, by Ashleigh Bell Pedersen. (Hub City, $26.) In this moody debut novel, following four generations of a family on Louisiana’s Black Bayou, violence begets violence and ill deeds can take decades to clear. But Pedersen tempers the dread with the care and camaraderie some family members provide. “The brackish setting allows for anger, fear, love and despair to all be felt as one,” Fiona Mozley writes in her review. “And the author delicately handles the messy union between human culpability and generational damage.”
CHÉRI and THE END OF CHÉRI, by Colette. Translated by Rachel Careau. (Norton, $26.95.) At the time of her death, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was one of the most famous writers in the world, and this heartbreaking, astute pair of novels — about the affair between an aging courtesan and a much younger man — are among the best of her vast, impressive canon. Careau’s “meticulous and agile translation,” says our reviewer, Tash Aw, “brings to Anglophone readers some of Colette’s finest writing, rich in the sensuality for which she is widely known — but also in the sharpness of her social observations, so ahead of her time that they come across as radical even by contemporary standards. Above all, Careau captures the technicality of Colette’s prose. She manages shifts in mood and characterization as well as the complexity of Colette’s sentences — sometimes terse, sometimes richly metaphoric — and she does so in a way that feels at once faithful to the author’s era and utterly timeless.” Read More...
