Category: New Books

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Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It

Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. “Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Read more

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‘Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark’

[Frances] Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam – and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject … A brilliant book … There is an uncanny closeness between biographer and subject at play here, and I find myself wondering whether Wilson didn’t feel at times as if her manuscript wasn’t a form of automatic writing. Read more

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‘Coffin Moon’ by Keith Rosson

Rosson, who put a fresh spin on the zombie apocalypse trope in the Fever House duology, is equally creative with vampires in this brilliant horror novel set in 1970s Oregon … Rosson expertly balances action and character development to craft an edge of the seat thrill ride. Readers will be hooked. Read more

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Samanta Schweblin’s ‘Good and Evil and Other Stories’

Samanta Schweblin is the master of dread. Her stories are part of the growing literary movement that mixes psychological and social realism with touches of horror and suspense; releases such as 2014’s Fever Dream have enchanted and haunted readers. This new collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, will pull in readers and leave them, shivering, in the dark. Read more

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The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America

Alongside H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Nikola Tesla’s claim to have intercepted an extraterrestrial communication, Lowell’s fantastical lectures depicting “the pathos and heroism of this great civilization fighting to survive” sparked a Mars craze, which included comics, a new dance (“A Signal from Mars”), and claims from some individuals to have visited the Red Planet as “disembodied souls.” Baron astutely examines the societal shifts that account for the Martian fixation, among them the rise of a yellow press that craved sensationalistic stories, a new wave of exploration and invention (the Wright brothers’ flights; expeditions to the North Pole), and divisive earthbound struggles like the Spanish-American War that rendered Mars—an imagined “Planet of Peace”—as a symbol of hope. While Baron points to the dangers of conspiracy theories and bunk science, he also presents the saga as one of infectious optimism that inspired subsequent generations of science fiction writers and scientists. It’s an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe. Read more

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‘Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler’

Morris situates Butler’s career amid salient historical events and social movements, and she underscores the deep research that fueled Butler’s imagination, from reading slave narratives in Baltimore archives to studying precolonial West African, Nubian, and Igbo languages and cultures. Butler’s fictions—which Morris reads perceptively—convey cautionary tales warning against fascism, gender-based violence, and the consequences of global warming. All, Morris asserts, are driven by the question: What does it mean to be human? Read more

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‘Vera, or Faith’ by Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart is one of the best comedians in literature today, and like all the great ones, his humor elucidates as much as it amuses. That’s especially true of Vera, or Faith, a richly imagined tale of a unique family in an America that is succumbing all too willingly to technology’s intrusions and the threat of oppression. Read more

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‘The CIA Book Club’ by Charlie English

Today, when “subversive” is the standard accolade for a campus poet, English’s book is a bracing reminder that, not so long ago, forbidden literature really could help tip the balance of history. He persuasively argues that the ferment in Poland, fueled in part by Minden’s cultural contraband, was a catalyst for the chain reaction that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of other Eastern Bloc governments. “Soft power” wasn’t so soft. Read more

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