March has already been a month of manias and mind-boggling political moments, and I feel, as perhaps everyone nodding to the madcap political moment does, like a broken record. Still, I’ll say something else I always say, as it is also true: that art is a beautiful bit of stability in the chaos, and there’s joy in remembering that no matter what happens in the headlines, there are still new books to look forward to each week.
And this week is no exception, with a wide selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to consider from beloved authors and promising new writers alike. I’ve selected a whopping twenty-five to consider, amongst which you’ll almost certainly find something intriguing and thought-provoking to add to your ever-more-towering book piles.
Pick up some—or many—of these scintillating new offerings, and, as always, be safe and well, Dear Reader. See you next week!
*
Kristen Arnett, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
(Riverhead)
“Serves up equal doses of humor and emotion….Arnett excels at striking a pitch-perfect tone of dark humor, delighting in irreverent jokes and descriptions while always probing at something deeper, something closer to the heart….A darkly comedic tale about ambition, unexpected forms of art, and queer desire, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is another brutally funny and surprisingly emotional novel from Kristen Arnett.”
–Shelf Awareness
Amy Shearn, Animal Instinct
(Putnam)
“Incisive, hot, and heartbreaking, this sizzling novel is as much about the emotional and physical acrobatics women go through to survive straight marriages as it is a siren call for women of all persuasions to forge lives on their own terms. Animal Instinct is the manifesto for self-love and liberation that we need this year.”
–Courtney Maum
Stuart Nadler, Rooms for Vanishing
(Dutton)
“Rooms for Vanishing is a phantasmagorical portrait of violence and time, a detailed and patient cosmology of ghosts. In it, Jewish history, the multiverse, human-made catastrophes, small moments of incandescent decency, vertiginous absurdity and naked longing all weave together….So this book: might it make the agonized future more bearable? I think it might. I wept, real tears, at least seven times reading this novel, and I intend to return to these pages often.”
–Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Diane Mehta, Happier Far: Essays
(University of Georgia Press)
“Diane Mehta’s…memoir…digs in deep and does so many things at once: following a path of self-encounter that begins with her Indian origins and ends up in a castle in Italy keeping anxious company with a baby bat. Rhythmic, syncopated, the prose has an astute lyric edge. Engaging hard memories as well as the absurdities of the lived day, Mehta scoops up details with a Nabokovian eye. These essays come at us from every angle and amount to a wholly original self-portrait.”
–Sven Birkerts
Lauren Christensen, Firstborn: A Memoir
(Penguin Press)
“Firstborn is the story of a loss so deep and acutely observed it left me winded. Like all stories of grief, it is a record of love, fierce and carefully tended. That love is profound; it suffuses every page of this beautiful, devastating book.”
–Katie Kitamura
Christine Wenc, Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire
(Running Press)
“Despite dozens of copycats, thousands of comedians, and an exhausting amount of late-night political commentary, The Onion stands alone as the strongest example of incendiary satire in America. Christine Wenc has provided us with a necessary and long overdue history of an enduring, influential gem.”
–Kliph Nesteroff
Patrycja Humienik, We Contain Landscapes
(Tin House)
“Patrycja Humienik picks up where the great Polish poets of the twentieth century left off, writing of exile, war, fragmented families, and grief for a ruined environment. And yet, her mind is utterly contemporary and new, searching and witty, always striving towards a politics of solidarity with the Other….introduces a gorgeous, determined, and vibrant new voice to American poetry, a voice that dances with, exults in, and blurs the boundaries of the lyric.”
–Aria Aber
Rosalie Moffett, Making a Living
(Milkweed)
“Rosalie Moffett’s poems, lucid and multi-textured, progress with a slyness that is also deeply sad. ‘Everyone is still alive, ‘ one poem informs us, and then qualifies it: ‘Everyone, within reason.’ Making a Living astutely explicates crisis—economic, bodily—and interrogates the contemporary moment with sharpness of metaphor and keenness of observation. These are poems—generative, alert, and complex—that make good on the promise of the book’s smart and fitting title.”
–Natalie Shapero
Yuko Tsushima, Wildcat Dome (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda)
(FSG)
“Enigmatic, elegant novel by one of modern Japan’s leading novelists….Part ghost story and part noir thriller, Tsushima’s narrative unfolds carefully, small details building even as Tsushima draws broad connections….A superb literary mystery that leaves readers, like the protagonists, constantly guessing.”
–Kirkus Regime
Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express
(Simon & Schuster/Summit Books)
“In exploring a little-remembered event in history, Emma Donoghue manages to hold a mirror up to a whole society, from its train porters to its members of parliament, and show that however much one tries to wrench life to conform to one’s will, everyone is vulnerable to its shocks. What an absorbing, panoramic, meticulously researched, lovingly peopled gem. A huge privilege to get an early glimpse!”
–Esi Edugyan
Xhenet Aliu, Everybody Says It’s Everything
(Random House)
“Everybody Says It’s Everything is a gut-punch of a novel, by turns tender and fierce, heartbreaking and hilarious. Albanian adoptees Drita and Pete hunger for belonging and purpose. Adrift, will they find themselves and their way back to each other? Against the backdrop of the Kosovo War, and set in Waterbury and in the Bronx, Xhenet Aliu deftly examines class, diaspora, loyalty, and family chosen and received. Powerful and deeply moving.”
–Vanessa Hua
Emily Feng, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China
(Crown)
“In 2022, China barred widely acclaimed journalist Emily Feng from re-entering the country, part of a crackdown on foreign reporters. Undeterred by the ban, Feng settled in Taiwan and has written warm, often searing portraits of ordinary Chinese buffeted by the all-consuming presence of the Communist Party in people’s lives. That theme makes this a must-read about today’s China.”
–Jane Perlez
Phil Hanley, Spellbound: My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith
(Holt)
“Candid, heartwarming….Through witty anecdotes and vulnerable confessions, the author’s stories demonstrate how dyslexia extends beyond difficulties with spelling and reading to challenges with mental health….Carried by Hanley’s sincere voice, the memoir remains lighthearted despite intense frustration and heartbreak.”
–Booklist
Jean Grae, In My Remaining Years
(Flatiron)
“As a proud day-one fan, I have always considered Jean to be one of my favorite creatives in hip-hop, turning out lyrics that sharpen your sense of the perfect imperfections of life. I couldn’t be happier to see her pivot into authorship. Personal history, the mystery of the self, the crazed whirl of the crazy modern world—all of it gets the Jean Grae treatment in these sledgehammer essays, which hold your hand while they invade your head.”
–Questlove
Marcy Dermansky, Hot Air
(Knopf)
“A] scorching satire of wacky relationships, iced with a juicy layer of saucy seduction….Dermansky distills a potent brew from the sad consequences of power disparities among people. No arena of domestic human emotions is safe from her biting wit and analysis. Mother-daughter, employer-worker, husband-wife, rich-poor conflicts: all get their moment in the spotlight. It’s a laugh-till-you cry experience.”
–Library Journal
Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback (trans. Polly Barton)
(Hogarth)
“Told from the perspective of a disabled woman who asserts her sexual autonomy unapologetically, Hunchback is a personal exploration of pleasure and an indictment of the ableism and sexism embedded in society. Hunchback might be considered radical by nondisabled readers because it honestly depicts the innermost thoughts and desires of a disabled woman, which speaks to the lack of disability representation in publishing….Insightful, humorous, and honest.”
–Alice Wong
Nicole Cuffy, O Sinners!
(One World)
“O Sinners! invites us to be fully and vigorously present for the rhapsodic truths of our lives, including the birth of animals, the death of loved ones, and the home-seeking that occupies our decades. Nicole Cuffy has opened a door into a world where mares and wolves live alongside grief and love and memory, each its own creature, each equally dreamlike and real.”
–Megha Majumdar
Paul Hawken, Carbon: The Book of Life
(Viking)
“Paul Hawken’s Carbon: The Book of Life has created what might be termed the first spiritual encyclopedia of the Earth highlighting and blue-printing the myriad umbilical connections between life and non-life, harmonizing to make life on this planet the mysterious wonder that it is. That he manages the tour de force…is nothing less than stunning…he’s pulled this off, poetically, balletically, and with intellectual rigor.”
–Peter Coyote
Noliwe Rooks, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children
(Pantheon)
“This indictment of the American educational system and how it has routinely failed children of color and those from lower social and economic classes offers fresh insights and alternative interpretations of long-held assumptions….[Rooks’s] readable and well-reasoned account makes an eloquent plea for new solutions.”
–Booklist
Dalton Conley, The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture
(Norton)
“In The Social Genome, Dalton Conley brilliantly deconstructs the myth of ‘nature versus nature.’ A social scientist working at the frontlines of the DNA revolution, Conley describes fascinating scientific discoveries about how our bodies and our relationships shape our lives—and also paints an intimate self-portrait of a son, husband, and father who is courageous enough to change his mind.”
–Kathryn Paige Harden
Kirsten Menger-Anderson, The Expert of Subtle Revisions
(Crown)
“Set in parallel historical eras, Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s fantastic novel of time-traveling mathematicians addresses the perilous line between brilliance and madness, the politics of hate, and the unsung women relegated to the shadows of history—all through a transporting story of love…and Wikipedia! If, like me, you become riled up over the difference between ‘accepted’ versus ‘chose’ or ‘killed’ versus ‘murdered’ then you too will absolutely love the brainy, vigilante spirit of The Expert of Subtle Revisions.”
–Daphne Kalotay
Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus
(Bloomsbury)
“A rich psychological drama and a triumph of a queer narrative….Weaves together the desires of two very different men: soldier and witch; loyalist and iconoclast. With mastery of voice, Pulley gives her narrator dry wit and complex desires, creating a character so recognizably human that he makes the ancient world feel close-by. I was enthralled from the first page to the last.”
–Elyse John
Arielle Zibrak (editor), Twelve Stories by American Women
(Penguin Classics)
“Zibrak curates a dozen short stories by women writers who have long been left out of American literary canon—most of them women of color—from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Zitkala-Ša.”
–The Millions
Clay Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
(Sribner)
“Risen’s feverish prose perfectly captures the chaos of McCarthyism, from the book bans to the power grabs to the lives forever altered in the scuffle….In examining this turbulent era from the vantage of our own charged moment, Risen goes beyond the spectacle to arrive at the gritty center. Frightening yet thoroughly affecting, Red Scare is propulsive history at its most striking.”
–Booklist
Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
(Riverhead)
“A spirited rebuttal to the canard that federal civil servants are nest-featherers up to no good….All the contributions…press the point that the government’s work is useful—and no one else but government workers are likely to do it. Compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.
–Kirkus Reviews
