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EDITORS’ CHOICE
11 New Books We Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
Oct. 6, 2022, 4:30 p.m. ET
I was a French major in college, not an English major, and so I spent a lot of my early 20s catching up on the kind of classics that my friends had read in school: Austen, Dickens, Hemingway, Ellison. There’s a certain unhindered joy in reading for yourself instead of for a syllabus, but there’s also the considerable drawback — heightened in those pre-internet days — that you don’t have a professor standing by to explain the tricky bits to you. So while I cherish my memories of reading “The Waste Land” on city buses and park benches in 1990s San Francisco, I knew even while I was reading it that the main thing I would come away with was a feel for its rhythm and mood while galloping right over the context of Eliot’s life and times that might have cracked it wider open for me.
I was reminded of those heady, free-range reading days recently by a book that provided exactly the kind of context I could have used back then: Robert Crawford’s “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land,’” the second part of his two-volume biography, which draws on a trove of new documents and traces Eliot’s fascinating progression as a poet and a person.
That’s one of the books we recommend this week, along with a history of Catholicism over the past 250 years, a look at organized crime that focuses on the made women, an argument in favor of leftist economic policies, and two memoirs, Hua Hsu’s “Stay True” and Javier Zamora’s “Solito.” In fiction, the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has a new novel, as do Celeste Ng, Joanna Quinn and Elizabeth Strout (the latest in her series of books about Lucy Barton), and the Hong Kong author Dung Kai-cheung has a collection of 99 very short stories. Happy reading.
—Gregory Cowles
STAY TRUE:
A Memoir
Hua Hsu
In his quietly wrenching memoir, Hsu recalls his college friendship with Ken, who was killed in a carjacking less than three years after they met.
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“To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too.... This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion — all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life.”
From Jennifer Szalai’s review
Doubleday | $26
THE WHALEBONE THEATRE
Joanna Quinn
Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, and a big hit in England, this is a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as “Brideshead Revisited,” following a trio of children from their dramatic experiments on the beach of Dorset, to their adult roles in the theater of war.
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“Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like ‘Toodle-pip, darlings!’”
From Alexandra Jacobs’s review
Knopf | $29
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OUR MISSING HEARTS
Celeste Ng
In Ng’s gut punch of a novel, an 11-year-old boy named Bird searches for his mother, who is on the run from a government with antediluvian — but also depressingly timely — notions about free speech.
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Ng succeeds “partly because her outrage is contained and focused, and mostly because she is often captivated by the very words she is using. ... Bird is a brave and believable character, who gives us a relatable portal into a world that seems more like our own every day.”
From Stephen King’s review
Penguin Press | $29
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CATHOLICISM:
A Global History From the French Revolution to Pope Francis
John T. McGreevy
The number of practicing Catholics in Europe and North America has plummeted. The uproar over clerical sexual abuse continues. Yet Catholicism is thriving in many corners of the world, especially among people of color. In a sweeping narrative, a Notre Dame professor considers how the epic struggle between reformists and traditionalists has led to the present moment.
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“An attempt at making narrative sense of one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of the oldest institution in the Western world. ... He does a remarkable job.”
From Timothy Egan’s review
Norton | $35
SOLITO:
A Memoir
Javier Zamora
In this memoir, Zamora details migrating from El Salvador to the United States by himself when he was just 9 years old, to reunite with his parents. It’s a journey that spans thousands of miles, throughout which Zamora faces uniformed men with machine guns, smugglers, Border Patrol and more.
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“Zamora writes in such a way that you never forget that this harrowing journey is being experienced by a child … In telling this story from a child’s perspective, describing his surroundings with plainness, presenting his survival without bluster, he reveals the true horrors of migration.”
From Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s review
Hogarth | $28
NIGHTS OF PLAGUE
Orhan Pamuk
Set on a fictional Mediterranean island during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Nobelist’s intricate new novel (translated by Ekin Oklap) features a lethal epidemic, a restive population, a murdered health inspector and abundant political intrigue — the whole pleasingly garnished with literary high jinks.
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“If not for its immersiveness, the book might pass for an exercise in self-reflexive postmodernism. ... Pamuk’s delight in art and artifice is inextricable from his realistic accounts of disease, poisonings and assassinations, political intrigue, cultural and religious enmity, gender inequity and medical futility.”
From David Gates’s review
Knopf | $34
THE MIDDLE OUT:
The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity
Michael Tomasky
In this engaging mix of partisanship and history, the editor of The New Republic argues that Democrats succeed when they focus on the ways big government can make the lives of ordinary Americans more economically secure.
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“Tomasky pays particular attention to income inequality. Indeed, the book’s title refers to a ‘middle out’ philosophy in which the government creates a more democratic economy, not a nanny state, by focusing on ways to enlarge the middle and working classes at the expense of the wealthy.”
From David Oshinsky’s review
Doubleday | $28
LUCY BY THE SEA
Elizabeth Strout
A successful writer and her ex-husband relocate from Manhattan to Maine at the peak of the Covid pandemic in this loosely connected, deeply moving and quietly funny follow-up to Strout’s earlier novels about Lucy Barton.
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“The through lines of our lives have veered beyond our control, yet some of us cling to the myth that we can find a path back to 2019. By the novel’s end Lucy has discerned otherwise, but lo! there’s a proverbial ray of hope. A lapsed connection kindles anew as she forges a fresh life for herself, rendered in Strout’s graceful, deceptively light prose.”
From Hamilton Cain’s review
Random House | $27
ELIOT AFTER “THE WASTE LAND”
Robert Crawford
T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem, “The Waste Land,” was wildly experimental and moving, a touchstone of modernism. So how did he become so stodgy? This book, the second of a two-volume biography, offers some answers — and some revelations, drawing on a vast trove of hitherto sealed letters that Eliot wrote to a woman we now know was the great, secret love of his life.
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“Crawford is an excellent guide to the intense personal pressures and cultural forces that fueled the dramatic transformations Eliot underwent. ... A lively, illuminating narrative of the poet’s long second act.”
From Andrew Epstein’s review
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35
THE GODMOTHER:
Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women
Barbie Latza Nadeau
A rip-roaring history of the women who have led not just American crime families, but those the world over.
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“Criminal groups ... hardly feel bound by Title IX imperatives. Still, Nadeau observes, women in an organization like the Camorra ‘are making far more progress climbing the ladder and being treated as equals than their law-abiding peers.’”
From Clyde Haberman’s review
Penguin Books | Paperback, $17
A CATALOG OF SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON
Dung Kai-cheung
In each of the 99 short sketches in this collection, translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, the revered Hong Kong author crafts a miniature fictional world around a particular item from ’90s consumer culture: the “Tomb Raider III” video game, “South Park,” the Hello Kitty franchise.
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“Playful and quirky, the sketches reveal Dung’s eye for this particular moment in history, and his vast imagination. ... Documenting a particular place and time, this vibrant and distinctive collection offers a kaleidoscopic vision of that era.”
From Weike Wang’s review
Columbia University | Paperback, $28
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