Watson’s stories—those in the volumes published in his lifetime and the new ones—are wry, tender, darkly funny, and deeply idiosyncratic. Read more
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Category: New Books
‘The Heart in Winter’ by Kevin Barry
“The Heart in Winter” sees Barry once again attempting something new — and pulling it off with aplomb. His first novel to be set in America is both an Irish-flavored western fraught with danger and brutality and a love story filled with caustic humor and pathos. It wears its influences well — the raw flintiness of Cormac McCarthy, the dizzying exuberance of Flann O’Brien, the taut storytelling of Charles Portis — but Barry’s signature touches predominate and render the narrative propulsive and immersive. Read more
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‘Long Island Compromise’ by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
A great American Jewish novel whose brew of hilarity, heartbreak, and smarts recalls the best of Philip Roth. A triumph. Read more
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What Happened to the Well-Mannered Cat Burglar?
Though he sounds like a screenwriter’s invention, Arthur Barry was real. Life magazine called him “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived.” And, as Dean Jobb notes in his delectably entertaining new biography, “A Gentleman and a Thief,” Barry was a triple threat: “a bold impostor, a charming con artist and a master cat burglar rolled into one.” Read more
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‘Bear’ by Julia Phillips
In the beautiful and haunting latest from Phillips (Disappearing Earth), two 20-something sisters contend with economic precarity and their mother’s terminal illness on present-day San Juan Island, Wash. Read more
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The Authors of Summer’s Scariest Books Share Their Horror Picks
We asked nine of this summer’s buzziest horror writers to tell you about their new books and share their best recommendations for truly terrifying tales. Read more
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Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
In “When the Clock Broke,” John Ganz shows how a decade remembered as one of placid consensus was roiled by resentment, unrest and the rise of the radical right. Read more
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A Portrait of Japanese America, in the Shadow of the Camps
An essential new volume collects accounts of Japanese incarceration by patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics alike. Read more
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Poverty for Profit – How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor
Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. government aggressively pursued the privatization of many government functions under the theory that businesses would compete to deliver these services more cheaply and effectively than a bunch of lazy bureaucrats. The result is a lucrative and politically powerful set of industries that are fueled by government anti-poverty programs and thus depend on poverty for their business model. These entities often take advantage of the very people they ostensibly serve. Today, government contractors run state Medicaid programs, give job training to welfare recipients, and distribute food stamps. At the same time, badly designed anti-poverty policies have spawned an ecosystem of businesses that don’t contract directly with the government but depend on taking a cut of the benefits that poor Americans receive. I call these industries “Poverty Inc.” If anyone is winning the War on Poverty, it’s them. Read more
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Birds Aren’t Real: The Prank That Turned Misinformation on Its Head
Birds Aren’t Real delivers a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking in the century of QAnon. Beneath the collegiate humor, however, lies a profound grasp of conspiracism’s psychic appeal, and a valuable provocation. How to best fight false claims and conspiracies online is currently the subject of fierce debate among social and computer scientists, policymakers, even the Supreme Court. Read more
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