by Gay Talese
Gay Talese (High Notes), a pioneer of literary journalism, has long been beguiled by character, as he has proven across decades of writing. Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener is a three-part this-and-that victory lap showcasing Talese's worthwhile specialty: writing about unsung people. The book's title is a reference to "Bartleby, the Scrivener," what he calls Herman Melville's "great short story about a nobody," and Talese borrows Melville's subtitle, "A Story of Wall Street," for the first
Read More »
by Scott Shane
In Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland, Scott Shane (Objective Troy; Dismantling Utopia) tells the story of the man who led hundreds along the underground railroad and the first--in a letter published in 1842--to call it by that name in print. (The letter "marked a signal moment in the history of both the American battle against slavery and the American language.") Thomas Smallwood, born into slavery in Maryland, was in the rare position of being able to purchase
Read More »
by Jen Ferguson
Three teens fight the capitalist agenda, grieve a missing Indigenous girl, and navigate friendship while slinging jokes and pizzas in the incisive, intimately told Those Pink Mountain Nights by Jen Ferguson (The Summer of Bitter and Sweet).
While working at Pink Mountain Pizza (PMP) in Alberta, Canada, Métis 17-year-old Berlin ("Bee") Chambers thinks she spots Kiki Cheyanne Sound, a missing Cree schoolmate. But Bee, usually "firing on all cylinders," isn't sure; she hasn't been sleeping, hasn't been
Read More »
by Nathan Hill
It's been seven years since the publication of Nathan Hill's first novel, The Nix, and anyone who loved that book will be delighted he's returned with equally expansive, audacious, and bighearted style in Wellness. In a novel that's both emotionally astute and deeply attuned to the 21st-century American zeitgeist, Hill also remains true to the imperative to tell a good story.
When photographer and artist Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine, who's committed to "studying the whole human condition,"
Read More »
by Daniel Mason
In his deliciously imaginative North Woods, Daniel Mason (A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth; The Piano Tuner) demonstrates that the story of a single plot of land and the people who inhabit it is a tale that's capable of containing multitudes.
Spanning a period from the middle of the 18th century to an indeterminate future when climate change has irrevocably altered the earth, North Woods focuses on a section of several hundred acres in rural Western Massachusetts first cultivated
Read More »
by Jessica Knoll
"We were twenty-one-year-old sorority girls; we screamed not because something was heinously, improbably wrong but because we had everything to be excited about." So muses Pamela, one of two narrators, in an opening chapter of Jessica Knoll's third novel, Bright Young Women, right before everything, indeed, goes wrong.
Why does the public often remember the names of criminals, but not their victims? Knoll shines a light on that injustice in this electrifying thriller, which deftly and compassionately gives
Read More »
by Nikkolas Smith
Activist and artist Nikkolas Smith (The 1619 Project illustrator) tells an approximation of his own story through a child narrator in the motivating, moving, and passionately illustrated The Artivist.
A child with natural hair and skin shaded in browns and golds is Smith's picture-book proxy. The child loves to paint (artist) and help their community (activist), "But sometimes the world that I see is not the world that I wish to see." The protagonist decides to combine both parts of their identity "to take
Read More »
