The biggest, most intricately ambitious little story you’ll read this year. Read more
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Category: New Books
Shaun Tan’s Curious Creatures are Just Looking for Companionship
Artist and author Shaun Tan creates semi-mechanical and animalesque beings that seem born of both the natural world and industrious humans. Whimsical, cerebral, socially aware, grotesque and cuddly, Tan’s artistic universe runs the emotional gamut. Read more
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A Cookbook for Surviving the End of the World
This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity’s survival. These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab. Read more
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‘The Singularities’ by John Banville
The Irish novelist John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project, an exercise in pleasure giving … But what drives Banville — and his relentless hunt for the ideal adjective and simile and cadence — is a desire to touch something elusive and not quite nameable while providing a parallel or overlapping commentary on that doomed but never pointless effort. Read more
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‘Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World’ by Irene Vallejo
Written in a lush and immersive style and shot through with sparkling turns of phrase, this is catnip for bibliophiles and ancient history buffs. Read more
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Baldwin Lee’s Extraordinary Pictures from the American South
A new book—the first-ever collection of Lee’s work—and a solo exhibition in New York make the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. Read more
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‘The English Understand Wool’ by Helen DeWitt
Part of a series of New Directions “storybooks” meant to be read in a single sitting, “The English Understand Wool” is a little gift to DeWitt’s (often ardent) readers and an inviting primer for readers new to her. DeWitt is one of our most ingenious writers, a master of the witty fable, and she pulls off her trick here through marvelous specificity of voice and a plot that hums like German machinery. Read more
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American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper
In his latest true-crime thriller, bestselling popular historian Stashower turns his attention to the so-called “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” aka the “Cleveland Torso Murderer,” a still-unidentified maniac seemingly responsible for a dozen or more murders in Depression-era Cleveland. The author’s focus falls on the investigative role played by Eliot Ness, who was named the city’s safety director after his success in Chicago as the charismatic leader of a mob-busting brigade. Read more
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What the Music You Love Says About You
This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it’s also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles to became Prince’s chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then create other No. 1 hits as one of the most successful female record producers of all time. Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers leads readers to musical self-awareness. She explains that we each possess a unique “listener profile” based on our brain’s natural response to seven key dimensions of any song. Are you someone who prefers lyrics or melody? Do you like music “above the neck” (intellectually stimulating), or “below the neck” (instinctual and rhythmic)? Whether your taste is esoteric or mainstream, Rogers guides readers to recognize their musical personality, and offers language to describe one’s own unique taste. Like most of us, Rogers is not a musician, but she shows that all of us can be musical–simply by being an active, passionate listener. Read more
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Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Melbourne Law School professor Giblin and Boing Boing cofounder Doctorow deliver a lucid and damning exposé of how big business captured the culture markets. Contending that anticompetitive practices are hollowing out the music, literature, video game, journalism, film, and TV industries, the authors untangle the complex web of contracts, regulations, and legal arguments deployed by corporations to maximize their profits and prevent new competitors from entering their markets … The book’s broad scope, expert policy recommendations, and flashes of wit (Disney executives are “cartoon villains” for refusing to honor science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster’s contracts) make it a must-read for anyone involved in these industries. Read more
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