Category: New Books

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How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy

Read investigative journalist Pishko’s carefully reported history, and you’ll appreciate how spot-on Jon Hamm’s evilly unlawful lawman Roy Tillman was in the 2023-24 season of the drama Fargo. One of Pishko’s archetypes is Arizona sheriff Mark Lamb, who proclaims to his constituents, “Sheriffs are the last line of defense in this country. We don’t work for anybody but you.” But that’s not really true: whether directly or not, and whether knowingly or not, he works for a network of extremist right-wing groups, most based in the West and grounded in the John Birch Society and its offshoots, “who all believed that the county sheriff was the only legitimate law enforcement.” Read more

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How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World

In the spirit of Progressive Era muckrakers, Michel, an investigative journalist and author of American Kleptocracy, reveals the shamelessness, venality, and moral turpitude of those who work to influence federal legislators and the public in order to advance antidemocratic foreign interests. Read more

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‘State of Paradise’ by Laura van den Berg

With exquisite prose, smart lines on every page, a building sense of growing strangeness tinged with dread, and surprises all the way to the end, State of Paradise might be van den Berg’s best novel so far — and that’s saying a lot. A narrative that constantly feels like its dancing on the border between fiction and nonfiction despite all the weirdness it contains, this book is at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don’t miss it. Read more

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‘Highway Thirteen’ by Fiona McFarlane

McFarlane is a master at just about everything: dialogue, setting, comic timing. One of her best stories, “Podcast,” is a spot-on send-up of a true-crime podcast, with its giddy silliness and flashes of compassion for the victims (McFarlane has said that these stories were partially inspired by a podcast she followed during the pandemic). But her biggest accomplishment is creating an empathic bond with people whose lives are touched by unexplainable violence. Read more

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‘The Heart in Winter’ by Kevin Barry

“The Heart in Winter” sees Barry once again attempting something new — and pulling it off with aplomb. His first novel to be set in America is both an Irish-flavored western fraught with danger and brutality and a love story filled with caustic humor and pathos. It wears its influences well — the raw flintiness of Cormac McCarthy, the dizzying exuberance of Flann O’Brien, the taut storytelling of Charles Portis — but Barry’s signature touches predominate and render the narrative propulsive and immersive. Read more

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