Category: New Books

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‘Fair Play’ by Louise Hegarty

Readers of both classic mysteries and literary fiction will enjoy this intermingling of the two in Louise Hegarty’s first novel, Fair Play, an utterly fresh approach to the standard whodunit that adds emotional heft to playful pastiche … Hegerty skillfully manipulates the genre, calling attention to the reader’s expectations and subverting familiar tropes in the service of nuanced storytelling. Fair Play is a thoroughly satisfying and thought-provoking read. Read more

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Go to Mars, Never Die and Other Big Tech Pipe Dreams

Becker argues that Silicon Valley’s preoccupations have created their own kind of warped ethics. “The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more — to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, to justify nearly any action they might want to take — all in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come.” Read more

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The Russian Spies Who Lived Among Us — in New Jersey

What Shaun Walker’s fascinating and meticulously researched new book, “The Illegals,” makes clear is that these suburban moles weren’t Cold War leftovers but rather the continuation of a century-long Russian project for infiltrating Western society. The program began in 1922, when Lenin was still pacing the Kremlin corridors, and continues today under Vladimir Putin, who seldom met a Soviet relic he didn’t want to polish up. Walker, a reporter for The Guardian, has done the kind of deep archival spelunking and source-cultivating that makes editors nervous about expense accounts. He’s interviewed former illegals — spies who lived with fabricated identities as beautifully lacquered as a set of matryoshka dolls. These weren’t diplomatic spies with immunity; they were ghosts walking among us with American accents and, presumably, Sam’s Club memberships. Read more

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‘Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life’ by Dan Nadel

Robert Crumb is to comics what Louis Armsrong is to jazz, a revolutionary who pulled a maligned and misunderstood art form out of the shadows. In the forward to his new biography, “Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life,” Dan Nadel provides some context: “There is no ‘Maus,’ no ‘Persepolis,’ no ‘Fun Home,’ without [Crumb’s] taboo–breaking … formally inventive work.” Nadel’s gripping and essential book makes good on this claim; his biography is the story of how one highly flawed and preternaturally gifted man augured a revolution in comic book storytelling with his discomfiting, sexually frank, intensely personal oeuvre. Read more

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Before QAnon and the Deep State, There Was Iron Mountain

“Report From Iron Mountain” was soon revealed as a hoax. But it was so good a hoax, so deft and deadpan and precise in its aim, that nearly 60 years later, it retains a certain hold on the public consciousness. The story of this report — who conceived it, what they intended and why it endures, like toxic waste leaking from a metal drum — is the subject of “Ghosts of Iron Mountain,” an excellent new book by the British journalist Phil Tinline. His fast-paced account is often entertaining but never loses sight of where it is heading: toward a moment, our own, when conspiracists and crackpots have seized the levers of power. Read more

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‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’ is Stephen Graham Jones’ Horror Masterpiece

I said this is Stephen Graham Jones’ masterpiece because the prose is gorgeous and the plot is complex, engaging, and multilayered, but we have seen these elements from him before. Maybe I should say this is the novel in which Jones does all the things he does but even better than before. Basketball legend Michael Jordan had many legendary games; The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is Jones’ version of Jordan dropping 69 points against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Read it. Read more

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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Ichikawa’s provocative debut chronicles a disabled woman’s sexual awakening. Shaka, a Japanese woman who lives with myotubular myopathy, a genetic disease whose symptoms include difficulty breathing and muscle weakness, is independently wealthy thanks to an inheritance from her parents. She spends her days taking online university courses and writing pornographic stories for money, which she sends to food banks and shelters for homeless young girls. Read more

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Stories by Harper Lee to Appear for the First Time in a New Collection

The book, out on Oct. 21 from Harper, includes eight previously unreleased stories and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of her friend, the writer Truman Capote, a cornbread recipe and a letter to Oprah Winfrey. Read more

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