Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
By The New Yorker
The Best Books We Read This Week
All Books
Nonfiction
Fiction & Poetry
American Oasis
by Kyle Paoletta (Pantheon)
Nonfiction
For many Americans, the cities of the Southwest are beautiful but slightly terrifying vacation destinations. In this elegant book, Paoletta, who is from New Mexico, argues that these desert cities’ histories of survival make them ideal models for other American metropolises. Through a series of sensitive portraits of the region’s biggest cities—including Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas—Paoletta demonstrates how Southwesterners’ centuries of experience with extreme heat, water scarcity, and “stitching a complex social fabric” from groups of Native Americans, Hispanics, Anglos, and immigrants can impart lessons for other cities facing similar challenges.
From Our Pages
We Do Not Part
by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewonPaige Morris (Hogarth)
Fiction
In the latest work from the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a woman, Kyungha, must travel from Seoul to Jeju Island before the end of the day, in order to keep her friend’s pet bird from dying of thirst; during the journey, she navigates the perils of an increasingly ferocious blizzard and contemplates the different ways that people endure pain, as well as the ways that they make life bearable and forge on. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.
Before Elvis
by Preston Lauterbach (Grand Central)
Nonfiction
This book considers the influence on Elvis Presley of Black musicians, especially the gospel and R. & B. pioneers of the nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties. Drawing from both existing scholarship and firsthand reporting, Lauterbach highlights the artists who originated the songs and invented the techniques with which Presley captivated white audiences, such as Big Mama Thornton—the first singer of “Hound Dog”—and the jazz guitarist Calvin Newborn. The book also chronicles the injustices Black musical pioneers endured, including withheld copyright credits and royalties, and the racism of machine politicians like Memphis’s E. H. (Boss) Crump and the censor he hired, who was determined to ban any material that showed Black people in a positive light.
The Sirens’ Call
by Chris Hayes (Penguin Press)
Nonfiction
In the past fifteen years, an avalanche of literature has been published about how technology has ruined our attention spans. Hayes’s new book is perhaps the most sophisticated contribution to the genre. He openly acknowledges that technology panics—induced by everything from comic books to television—have a long history, but he argues that we are living in unprecedented times. Drawing on his own experience as an anchor at MSNBC, where he has observed thoughtful journalists debase themselves in their scramble to retain straying viewers, Hayes makes the case that “focus is harder and harder to sustain.” For this, he blames digital tools that capitalize on our psychological hardwiring; some things we pay attention to by choice, and others we simply find hard to ignore. “Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured,” Hayes writes. “The scale of transformation we’re experiencing is far more vast and more intimate than even the most panicked critics have understood.” And the painful twist is that the thing we really ought to focus on, climate change, “evades our attentional facilities.”
Read more: “What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?,” by Daniel ImmerwahrGoing Home
by Tom Lamont (Knopf)
Fiction
At the start of this brilliantly observed début novel, Téo, a traffic-laws instructor, is babysitting the two-year-old son of his childhood friend (and lifelong crush) Lia—not knowing that Lia, a single mother, will use the time to kill herself. When social workers dispatched after the incident deem the rules-abiding Téo to be one of the child’s “better bets,” he is tasked with serving as the boy’s caregiver until a permanent guardian can be found. A trio of unhelpful but well-meaning figures support him: his ailing father, their temple’s unpopular new rabbi, and a hedonistic friend. While teasing the reader with questions about the child’s paternity, Lamont’s story of a make-do family revels in the often comically porous borders of faith, home, and adulthood.
From Our Pages
The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant
by Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg (New York Review Books)
Fiction
This volume includes forty-four previously uncollected stories by Gallant—a master of the form, who published more than a hundred stories in The New Yorker. Painstakingly tracked down and assembled by Garth Risk Hallberg, the stories span Gallant’s writing life from 1944, when she was twenty-two, to 1987, and are full of her pointed wit, her acute observations, and her profound understanding of the desire, terror, and loneliness that drive us. Twenty-nine of the stories, including “Up North,” were first published in the magazine.
Another Man in the Street
by Caryl Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Fiction
This finespun and structurally intrepid novel follows a West Indian man, set on becoming a journalist, who immigrates to London in the nineteen-sixties. As the novel skips around in time—touching down, among other moments, just before the Second World War and in Thatcher’s era—it tells the stories of the immigrant and of two people he meets in London. One is a white Englishwoman who becomes his longtime partner and must, in the run-up to the millennium, reckon with obscured parts of his life. As the three grapple with various dislocations, they weigh the notion that they “must draw a veil across the past and never again attempt to peer behind it.”
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Last Week’s Picks
Rosarita
by Anita Desai (Scribner)
Fiction
In this hushed, exacting novel, a woman from Delhi resettles in San Miguel de Allende, where she is forced to reckon with her past by an older stranger who claims to have known her late mother. The story follows the transplant as she skeptically trails her mysterious new guide across the supposed sites of her mother’s youth in a foreign land. Throughout their journey, the past’s influence on the present grows ever more pervasive, and the woman’s failure to escape her upbringing emerges as a failure to truly know it. The more she discovers of her mother’s life, the more haunting its opacity becomes.
Embers of the Hands
by Eleanor Barraclough (Norton)
Nonfiction
This lively history of the Viking Age—which lasted from roughly 750 to 1100 C.E.—moves beyond tales of seafaring warriors to capture everyday people: women, children, merchants, healers, walrus hunters. Given the scant evidence of these histories in the written record, Barraclough seeks them instead in archeological artifacts, from a rune stick found in the rubble of a tavern in Norway reading “GYDA SAYS THAT YOU SHOULD GO HOME” to an amber figurine of a swaddled baby found in Denmark. If each individual artifact reveals relatively little, the enormous array Barraclough assembles—from Scandinavia, Western Europe, Newfoundland, and trading posts as far east as present-day Russia—adds depth to the traditional portrait of Viking culture.
Previous Picks
Aflame
by Pico Iyer (Riverhead)
Nonfiction
For more than three decades, Iyer, an essayist and a novelist, has spent several weeks a year at a silent retreat in a monastery in Big Sur, California. In this spare, delicately woven memoir, he combines portraits of the people he has encountered during his stays with crystalline descriptions of the natural setting and philosophical ruminations on the purposes of retreat. If Iyer’s ultimate goal is to illuminate a certain state of feeling—the incendiary sense of being alive hinted at in the title—his focus radiates outward: “It’s writing about the external world that feels most interior,” he tells a fellow silence-seeker. The result is a powerful work of observation in which deep truths seem to arise almost by accident.
Mood Machine
by Liz Pelly (Atria)
Nonfiction
Pelly’s book is a comprehensive look at how Spotify, the largest streaming platform in the world, profoundly changed how we listen and what we listen to. Founded in Sweden in 2006, the company quickly distinguished itself from other file-sharing services and music marketplaces by tracking the listening habits of its users, allowing it to anticipate what they might want to hear and when. Spotify began curating career-making playlists and feeding them to subscribers. Pelly sympathizes with artists who must contend with superstars like Adele and Coldplay for slots in these lineups, but her greatest concerns are for the listeners. For Pelly, it’s a problem less of taste than of autonomy—the freedom to exercise our own judgment, as we often did when encountering something new while listening to the radio or watching MTV. Spotify’s ingenuity in serving us what we like may keep us from what we love.
Read more: “Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?,” by Hua HsuPlayworld
by Adam Ross (Knopf)
Fiction
Griffin, the teen-age protagonist of this engrossing coming-of-age novel, set on the Upper West Side in the early nineteen-eighties, is living an unusual childhood: an actor in a hit TV show, with parents in the performing arts, he longs to do normal-person things, like fall in love with someone his own age. But Naomi, a thirtysomething friend of his parents’, has other ideas for him, as does his abusive high-school wrestling coach. Onscreen, Griffin plays a superhero; if he has a superpower in real life, it is detachment. Things come to a head one fateful summer as, amid personal and family tumult, the maturing Griffin begins to inhabit his most important role: himself.
