Category: New Books

Posted on by

‘Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream’ by Megan Greenwell

Megan Greenwell was the editor in chief of Deadspin when it was acquired in 2019 by a Boston-based private equity firm. After three months of watching her new bosses make what seemed to her to be boneheaded decisions, she quit. Two months later, the staff followed her out the door. Within five years, the once popular online sports magazine known for its irreverent reporting had been sold to an obscure Maltese website.

Stunned by what she witnessed, the veteran journalist was determined to get to the bottom of a little understood, lightly regulated industry that owns hospitals, day care centers, supermarket chains, newspapers, commercial and residential real estate, and much more. The big names are Blackstone, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management, KKR and Cerberus Capital Management. But what, she wondered, do they actually do?

The result of her inquiry is “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” a deeply reported, briskly paced and highly disturbing account of how the private equity industry has “reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.” Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” So reads the 10th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Novels Inspired by Opinion Polls? They’re Here, and They’re Weird

Pick up a novel and suddenly you’re at the whim of the author’s imagination. Plot, characters, setting — you have no say in these matters. This is part of the appeal of fiction. Now, perhaps for the first time since Choose Your Own Adventure, Tom Comitta tweaks the equation in “People’s Choice Literature,” coming out from Columbia University Press on June 3. The hefty 584-page volume contains two distinct works: “The Most Wanted Novel” and “The Most Unwanted Novel,” each incorporating results of an opinion poll on the literary preferences of 1,045 readers from across the United States. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

‘Metallic Realms’ by Lincoln Michel

…a delightfully broad satire of many things: pulp sci-fi, literary fiction, writers’ groups, MFA programs, nerds™, Brooklyn thirtysomethings, and, most of all, the possibilities and pathologies of fandom culture. It is about the joy and necessity of artistic creation, the self-consuming doubt of struggling writers, the simultaneously symbiotic and parasitic relationship between art and fandom, and the musings of one extremely odd dude. It’s a hoot. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

‘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

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

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

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

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

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

‘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

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

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

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

‘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

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)