A collection of six short stories about crimes both planned and accidental, the collision of dreams and reality, and the things people do for love. Read more
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Category: New Books
‘Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood’
Novelist and biographer Mann delivers a meticulous and humane reconsideration of one of America’s most sensationalized unsolved murders. Rather than dwell on the lurid mythology surrounding the 1947 killing of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated body was discovered in a vacant Los Angeles lot, Mann sets out to restore complexity and dignity to a woman long reduced to tabloid caricature. Drawing on extensive archival research and overlooked police files, he traces Short’s troubled upbringing in Massachusetts and her zigzag path to Los Angeles after dropping out of high school. Read more
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‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’ by Daniyal Mueenuddin
The story threads cohere into a profound and revelatory portrait of Pakistan’s class divisions. Propulsive and peopled with unforgettable characters, this is a masterpiece. Read more
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‘Midnight Somewhere’ by Johnny Compton
Readers who enjoy the imaginative yet unsettling horror of John Langan and Ananda Lima should bask in the uncanny visions of Compton’s haunting tales. It is a solid collection with no weak stories. Read more
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‘This Year: 365 Songs Annotated’ by John Darnielle
Too often, lyrics collections can be little more than keepsakes for fans, easily thrown together and presented without any context or new material. That was never going to be the case for Darnielle—the indie folk musician has always had a strong literary bent, as evidenced by his three well-received novels, Wolf in White Van (2014), Universal Harvester (2017), and Devil House (2022). His new book, which shares its title with one of his most well-known songs, is structured as a book of days, with a song for each one. He writes, “Some are accompanied by detailed explications, and some by autobiographical reflections; some get elliptical glosses and some get extended question marks.” The lyrics are brilliant; Darnielle is one of the best songwriters of his generation, and his words are achingly beautiful, sometimes angry and triumphant… Read more
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‘Languages of Home’ by John Edgar Wideman
Novelist, essayist, and critic Wideman delivers a profound, career-spanning collection of essays on literature, sports, and culture … Incisive and enthralling, the collection puts Wideman’s keen critical eye and cultural awareness on full display. The result is an essential chronicle of the American experience. Read more
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‘The History of Money’ by David McWilliams
Religion, technology, power, and the rise and fall of entire empires are tied up with economics and commerce in McWilliams’ excellent whistle-stop tour of the way money has shaped world history. Covering centuries of innovations—from an ancient baboon femur called the Ishango Bone, possibly used for accounting, to digital-age solutions like M-Pesa, a service in Africa that turns mobile-phone credit into money—it’s a blast of a book. Read more
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‘There Is No Antimemetics Division’ by qntm
Speculative fiction and the funkier corners of digital culture go together like chocolate and peanut butter—see Ryan North’s crowdsourced Machine of Death series or the novels based on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale for prime examples. Here, qntm (aka British author Sam Hughes) offers a legally sanitized but fantastically composed take on the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that blends horror and SF tropes with satire and literary experimentation. Read more
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‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat To) the Modern Dictionary’
While obviously appealing to word nerds and writers, Fatsis’s narrative is more broadly relevant to anyone who speaks, reads, and writes in American English. It provides a thorough, thoughtful history of dictionaries and the language they both shape and record, while championing the dictionary’s continued relevance in the 21st century. Lively, well-researched, and often entertaining, Unabridged is an essential resource for anyone interested in understanding how language evolves. Read more
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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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