Allgemein
New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2021
Dec
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review
Afterparties: Stories By Anthony Veasna So $27.99 Ecco Fiction Stories
The nine stories in this deeply personal, frankly funny and illuminating debut — published eight months after the author’s death at age 28 — are all set in California’s Central Valley, and follow the legacies of the Cambodian genocide among the diaspora who resettled there. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Appleseed By Matt Bell $27.99 Custom House Fiction
For some years Bell, the author of “Scrapper” and “Cataclysm Baby,” has had climate and apocalypse on his mind. This excellent novel continues and deepens his investment. Timely, prescient and true, the book tracks the planet’s progression from lush Eden to barren hellscape. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Beautiful World, Where Are You By Sally Rooney $28.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Fiction
In Rooney’s much-anticipated third novel, readers follow the lives of Alice, a writer of global acclaim, and her best friend, Eileen, who works at a literary magazine in Dublin. The two grapple with life’s biggest (and most inconsequential) issues in a lively correspondence. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Bewilderment By Richard Powers $27.95 W.W. Norton Fiction
Powers’s ability to translate arcane science into lush storytelling is on ingenious display in his latest novel, about a newly widowed astrobiologist and his troubled 9-year-old son, who embarks on an experimental neurofeedback therapy with profound implications for the human race. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Book of Mother By Violaine Huisman Translated by Leslie Camhi $27.00 Scribner Fiction
Part homage, part psychological investigation, this novelized portrait of Huisman’s mother seeks to capture on paper the life of a beautiful, charismatic, unstable and exasperating woman — as well as the experience of growing up in her ambit. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Build Your House Around My Body By Violet Kupersmith $27.00 Random House Fiction
This novel, about a half-Vietnamese American in Vietnam, is preoccupied with the body and its violations — both the sexual trauma experienced by the female characters and the ravages of colonial occupation and war upon the body of Vietnam. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Burnt Sugar By Avni Doshi $26.00 The Overlook Press Fiction
This remarkable debut novel, about a young Indian woman saddled with the care of her ailing and abusive mother, inflicts a visceral punch. In spare and exacting prose, Doshi documents the petty cruelties and helpless dependency of a primal relationship in disarray. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
A Calling for Charlie Barnes By Joshua Ferris $28.00 Little, Brown & Company Fiction
Ferris tells the complex and often very funny story of hapless Charlie and his various attempts at success. Charlie’s novelist son eventually reveals himself to be the narrator, and sets up an impressive reversal. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth By Wole Soyinka $28.00 Pantheon Fiction
The Nobel Prize winner’s first novel in 48 years, involving a sinister online business that sells human body parts for private use in rituals and superstitions, is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of Nigeria. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Cloud Cuckoo Land By Anthony Doerr $30.00 Scribner Fiction
Weaving narratives from three eras across most of a millennium, from Constantinople in the 15th century to a space pilgrimage in the 22nd, Doerr’s first novel since “All the Light We Cannot See” offers a paean to the consolations of storytelling, and to the people who pass down ancient texts. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Crossroads By Jonathan Franzen $30.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Fiction
Franzen’s sixth novel follows the Hildebrandt family in suburban Chicago, with a shaky marriage, a crisis of faith and teenage anguish driving the compulsively readable plot. Set in the 1970s, the book examines an age-old moral dilemma: how to do good in a selfish world. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Detransition, Baby By Torrey Peters $27.00 One World Fiction
Following three central characters — a trans woman who wants a baby; her ex, a man who’s recently detransitioned; and the cisgender woman he’s impregnated — this debut novel suggests there are many different ways to be a parent, or a person. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Ghosts of New York By Jim Lewis $22.99 Paperback West Virginia University Press Fiction
Lewis’s haunting novel is built of vignettes whose links become gradually clear, involving a dealer in Indigenous artifacts, the Ivy-educated scion of a West African family, an East Village street kid with a pure singing voice and a photographer just back from a decade abroad. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Harlem Shuffle By Colson Whitehead $28.95 Doubleday Fiction
After winning the Pulitzer Prize for each of his last two novels, Whitehead here delivers a rollicking crime caper set in the Harlem of the 1950s and ’60s, when social upheaval was just starting to roil the neighborhood. The highlight of the novel is a brilliantly executed robbery of the famed Hotel Theresa. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
How Beautiful We Were By Imbolo Mbue $28.00 Random House Fiction
Mbue’s quietly devastating second novel — about a fictional African village with high mortality due to an American oil company’s pollution — charts the ways oppression, be it at the hands of a government or a corporation or a society, can turn the most basic needs into radical acts. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Intimacies By Katie Kitamura $26.00 Riverhead Fiction
In the latest novel by the author of “A Separation,” a court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of the “plethora of war criminals in our midst.” AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Kink: Stories Edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell $17.00 Paperback Simon & Schuster Fiction Stories
Not quite erotica, this fiction anthology is more about the transformative nature of kink as a practice. Featuring works from a diverse selection of writers, the collection explores issues of power, agency and identity. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Klara and the Sun By Kazuo Ishiguro $28.00 Alfred A. Knopf Fiction
Klara, the solar-powered humanoid who narrates the Nobelist Ishiguro’s powerful eighth novel, is an “Artificial Friend,” purchased as a companion to a sickly teenage girl. Through the robot’s eyes, and haunting mechanical voice, we encounter a near future in which technology, ominously, has begun to render humans themselves obsolete. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Libertie By Kaitlyn Greenidge $26.95 Algonquin Fiction
Based on the lives of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black female doctor in New York State, and her daughter, Greenidge’s second novel centers its post-Civil War New York story on an enduring quest for freedom. A feat of monumental thematic imagination. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself By Peter Ho Davies $24.00 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Fiction
In Davies’s wise, bracingly honest novel, a father chronicles his son’s birth through his teenage years. He juggles guilt, worry and marital strife alongside the joys, triumphs and laughter of family life — never sugarcoating, always leaning into the hard parts in a way that’s refreshing, timely and necessary. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Light Perpetual By Francis Spufford $27.00 Scribner Fiction
Do we live and die by accident, or according to some preordained plan? Spufford explores the question in this vividly imagined and richly drawn novel, which is based on an actual World War II bombing in London. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Lincoln Highway By Amor Towles $30.00 Viking Fiction
Set in the 1950s, Towles’s exhilarating novel follows four boys on a trip across America, from rural Nebraska to the skyscrapers of New York. All of them seek a better future but have very different ideas about how to get there; over the course of 10 days this multiperspective story offers an abundance of surprising detours and run-ins. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers $28.99 HarperCollins Fiction
This triumphant debut novel follows a young Black woman figuring out how to live with joy in the modern American South. The novel switches between the past and the present, alternating the heroine’s story with those of her ancestors. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Magician By Colm Toibin $28.00 Scribner Fiction
In this novel of huge imaginative sympathy, Toibin delves into the rich interiority of the German novelist Thomas Mann. From childhood to early success to exile abroad, we follow Mann through personal challenges and political turmoil as he turns the complexities of life into art. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Morning Star By Karl Ove Knausgaard Translated by Martin Aitken $30.00 Penguin Press Fiction
In his haunting new novel, Knausgaard alternates between the first-person accounts of nine characters, all of whom spot a huge, bright star that has inexplicably appeared in the sky. Realist drama gradually gives way to touches of horror and an enigmatic spiritual treatise. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
My Monticello: Fiction By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson $26.99 Henry Holt Fiction Stories
Comprising a title novella and stories, this debut depicts finely drawn Black characters awash in microaggressions across Virginia, past and present. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
My Year Abroad By Chang-rae Lee $28.00 Riverhead Fiction
Part study of suburbia, part globe-trotting adventure, Lee’s latest novel follows a young man from a transformative trip in Asia to a low-key life in a New Jersey town. Reflective, precise writing and a steady churn of pleasures and perils make for a winning combination. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family By Joshua Cohen $16.95 Paperback New York Review Books Fiction
Cohen imagines a college job interview in the 1950s for Benzion Netanyahu, academic and father of the recently ousted Israeli prime minister. The novel explores themes of Jewishness and diaspora as Netanyahu’s fatalistic view of Jewish history bumps up against that of the narrator, an assimilated American Jewish professor. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
No One Is Talking About This By Patricia Lockwood $25.00 Riverhead Fiction
This singular novel by Lockwood, a lauded memoirist and poet who first gained a following on Twitter, distills the experience of life online while transfiguring it into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Oh William! By Elizabeth Strout $27.00 Random House Fiction
In her quietly radiant new novel, Strout returns to a subject she writes about brilliantly (marriage) and a character readers have met before (Lucy Barton). A long-divorced couple team up for a (platonic) trip to Maine, where they learn about family history and also about themselves. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
One Last Stop By Casey McQuiston $16.00 Paperback St. Martin’s Griffin Fiction
Part romance, part fantasy, this gorgeous novel is about meeting someone on your daily commute — a girl, it turns out, who has been riding the train since the 1970s, thanks to a magical timeslip. But it’s also about loneliness, and being unmoored from normal time, and missing people you’ve lost, and dealing with generational trauma and fearing an unknowable future. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Our Country Friends By Gary Shteyngart $28.00 Random House Fiction
Shteyngart’s fifth novel begins at the onset of the pandemic, with seven friends and one nemesis gathered at an estate in the Hudson Valley to wait out what they’re sure will be a quick blip in their convenient and prosperous lives. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems By Rita Dove $26.95 W.W. Norton Poetry
Plenty of poems here address disability, history and quotidian human behavior, but racism and economic oppression are the former poet laureate’s primary concerns in this book, her first in 12 years. With Dove’s characteristically affable voice, the book tries to understand saving graces and the things they save us from. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Plot By Jean Hanff Korelitz $28.00 Celadon Fiction
A struggling writer steals a plot from his student and his life changes overnight. Suddenly, he’s a household name and the toast of the literary community. But somebody knows what he did — and wants revenge. Korelitz’s latest novel is a literary thriller with two questions at its core: Who knows the truth? And who really owns a story, anyway? AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Promise By Damon Galgut $25.00 Europa Fiction
This novel follows a white South African family from the final years of apartheid to the present. A long-deferred vow to their Black housekeeper becomes a stand-in for the nation’s moral bankruptcy. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Prophets By Robert Jones Jr. $27.00 G.P. Putnam’s Sons Fiction
A lyrical and rebellious love story about two enslaved boys in Mississippi, whose relationship is accepted and even cherished until a Christian evangelist, also enslaved, turns the plantation against them. The novel is about their choice to love in the face of the forces that would crush them, and the repercussions of that love. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Razorblade Tears By S.A. Cosby $26.99 Flatiron Fiction
This sprawling, go-for-baroque pulp thriller is about two dads — one Black, one white, both ex-cons — who decide to avenge the murders of their sons. Cosby writes in a spirit of generous abundance and gleeful abandon and, unlike a lot of noir writers, he doesn’t shy from operatic emotion. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Send for Me By Lauren Fox $26.95 Alfred A. Knopf Fiction
Inspired by a trove of letters written by her great-grandmother in 1930s Germany and incorporated into the text, Fox’s latest novel spans four generations and two continents, offering a nuanced exploration of the burden of inherited trauma on a single family riven by the Holocaust. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Sentence By Louise Erdrich $28.99 Harper/HarperCollins Fiction
Erdrich’s playful wit and casual style belie a seriousness of purpose, which in the case of this winning novel, entails tackling the pandemic, the death of George Floyd, the trials of doing time in prison and, not least, the power of books to change lives. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Something New Under the Sun By Alexandra Kleeman $28.00 Hogarth Fiction
Kleeman’s novel is an unlikely amalgam of climate horror story, movie-industry satire and made-for-TV mystery, following a flailing writer who has come to Los Angeles for a film adaptation of his novel starring a tabloid-tragic teen star. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Strange Beasts of China By Yan Ge Translated by Jeremy Tiang $25.99 Melville House Fiction
Elusive creatures flit through a Chinese city in this enchanting novel, alternately avoiding and consorting with its human inhabitants, all the while pursued by a cryptozoologist with a fondness for smokes and booze — a female, science-minded Sam Spade. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Sun Collective By Charles Baxter $27.95 Pantheon Fiction
In Baxter’s new novel, an aging couple‘s search for their missing son leads them to a quasi-anarchist group. With generous, keen humor, the author suggests that their real problem might be mortality: not our tumultuous times, but time itself. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Trees By Percival Everett $16.00 Paperback Graywolf Fiction
In rural Money, Miss., two white men are found murdered next to the corpse of a Black man whose mutilated face bears an eerie resemblance to Emmett Till’s. As more bodies pile up, Everett’s acid satire expands to encompass America’s racist past and present with equal parts horror and humor. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Velvet Was the Night By Silvia Moreno-Garcia $28.00 Del Rey Fiction
Immensely satisfying, refreshingly new and gloriously written, this vibrant noir, set in 1970s Mexico City, traces how a dowdy secretary on the cusp of 30 sparks to life thanks to the disappearance of her beautiful and glamorous neighbor. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The War for Gloria By Atticus Lish $28.00 Alfred A. Knopf Fiction
Lish’s substantial gifts are on abundant display throughout this gorgeously written novel, which offers a rich tapestry of troubled lives in and around working-class Boston. Corey, the young protagonist, grows up with a terminally ill mother and a perplexing father whose presence gradually turns sinister. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Wayward By Dana Spiotta $26.95 Alfred A. Knopf Fiction
A middle-aged woman spontaneously buys a new house and moves into it alone, without her husband or teenage daughter. Spiotta’s precisely observed, fiercely intelligent novel excavates the long and winding path that led our protagonist to this place. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
What Strange Paradise By Omar El Akkad $26.00 Alfred A. Knopf Fiction
El Akkad’s second novel examines opposing sides of a migrant crisis from the point of view of two children: a boy who washes up on an island after a doomed ship passage, and the girl who takes him in and tries to get him to safety. In a compassionate but nuanced telling, the novel effectively effaces assumptions of superiority and inferiority, good and bad. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
When We Cease to Understand the World By Benjamín Labatut Translated by Adrian Nathan West $17.95 Paperback New York Review Books Fiction
Labatut’s singular imagination dazzles in this hybrid of fiction and biography, exploring the lives of major 20th-century scientists. His true subject is the ecstasy of discovery and the agonizing price it can exact. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Winter Recipes From the Collective: Poems By Louise Glück $25.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Poetry
The 2020 Nobel laureate’s stark new collection consists of just 15 poems, but each is as breathtaking as a cold night; the book affirms her icy precision and extends her interest in silence and the void through verses that seem, at times, to offer a poetics of resistance to poetry. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels By India Holton $16.00 Paperback Berkley Fiction
This romance novel has considered realism and punted it outside the highest available window. Letter openers have a hidden rapier blade; a respectable lady’s house in Mayfair is equipped with a flying spell and can sail to Bath. Yet amid the often wacky melodrama, there are moments of emotion that cut to the quick. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler By Rebecca Donner $32.00 Little, Brown Nonfiction
Equal parts biography, history and thriller, this book tells the story of the author’s idealistic but doomed great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, who, between 1932 and 1942, helped build a network of objectors in Berlin who hoped to stop the Nazis. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present By John Ghazvinian $37.50 Alfred A. Knopf Nonfiction
This book presents the long, troubled relationship between the United States and Iran in a breezy and supple narrative, replete with poignant anecdotes, to posit convincingly that “antagonism between Iran and America is wholly unnecessary.” AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s By Elizabeth Hinton $29.95 Liveright Nonfiction
Hinton documents hundreds of often violent urban protests by Black Americans beginning in the mid-1960s, as policing grew increasingly aggressive. Such protests must be understood, she posits, not as riots but as “rebellions” against racial injustice. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption By Gabrielle Glaser $28.00 Viking Nonfiction
Focusing on a single intimate tale that contains the seeds of today’s adoption practices and parenting norms, Glaser’s account is the most comprehensive and damning yet of the scandals at the postwar adoption agency Louise Wise Services. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The American War in Afghanistan: A History By Carter Malkasian $34.95 Oxford University Press Nonfiction
A former civilian adviser in Afghanistan and aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Malkasian has written a broad-reaching, authoritative history of America’s longest war from 9/11 to the near-present, including knowledgeable details on the Afghan part of the story. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Beautiful Country: A Memoir By Qian Julie Wang $28.95 Doubleday Nonfiction Memoir
In 1994, Wang moved from China to Brooklyn with her family. This is her memoir of their tumultuous early years building a life in an unfamiliar and mostly inhospitable place. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville By Akash Kapur $27.00 Scribner Nonfiction Memoir
This haunting memoir, by a man who grew up in an intentional community in India and returned to live there with his wife and children, is a sensitive excavation of fraught family history as well as a philosophical meditation on the utopian impulse. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted By Suleika Jaouad $28.00 Random House Nonfiction Memoir
This memoir from a young survivor of acute myeloid leukemia provides an unlikely roadmap to the new not-normal of the pandemic era. Through her treatment and subsequent cross-country roadtrip, Jaouad demonstrates the courage it takes to live with unanswered questions. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour By Neal Gabler $40.00 Crown Nonfiction
Gabler relates how the youngest Kennedy brother overcame ridicule and scandal to become one of the most effective senators in U.S. history. In five decades, Ted Kennedy sponsored nearly 700 bills that became law, and left his imprint on scores of others. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel By Kati Marton $30.00 Simon & Schuster Nonfiction
As Marton demonstrates in this biography, Merkel’s was a life full of drama, as she rose from the hinterlands of East Germany to the center of power in Berlin and overcame all of the obstacles, from Communist repression to German misogyny, on her rise to the top. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill By Geoffrey Wheatcroft $40.00 W.W. Norton Nonfiction
Wheatcroft’s Churchill led Britain heroically during World War II, but at other times in his life, as recounted in this revisionist biography, he was an imperialist, a racist, a drunk, a neglectful father and, perhaps most of all, a masterful mythmaker. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power By Max Chafkin $28.00 Penguin Press Nonfiction
In this energetically reported book, Chafkin paints a deeply disturbing portrait of the billionaire entrepreneur turned Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel, tracing his ascent through the ranks of Silicon Valley moguls along with his embrace of far-right causes and beliefs. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency By Tove Ditlevsen Translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. $30.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Nonfiction Memoir
First published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s, Ditlevsen’s unstinting memoirs detail in luminous prose her hardscrabble upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the struggle to reconcile art and life. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir By Michelle Zauner $26.95 Alfred A. Knopf Nonfiction Memoir
In the musician’s gutting account of coming to terms with her mother’s death and coming into her own as a Korean American, food is her lifeline. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America By Eyal Press $28.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Nonfiction
In this powerful, discomfiting book, Press investigates a series of morally fraught jobs — among them drone warfare operators and prison psychologists — and shows how such work is tacitly condoned by society while also rendered invisible so as not to disturb our collective conscience. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America By Christine Leigh Heyrman $28.95 Alfred A. Knopf Nonfiction
This account of a love triangle that roiled the country’s burgeoning evangelical movement in the late 1820s is scholarship at its most entertaining and insightful, as Heyrman, mining smoldering letters by aspiring missionaries, chronicles the ambition, hypocrisy and sexism at the heart of a crusade. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty By Patrick Radden Keefe $32.50 Doubleday Nonfiction
Tenacious reporting and deft storytelling by Keefe, the prizewinning author of “Say Nothing,” about Ireland’s Troubles, give this exposé of the family widely blamed for igniting the opioid crisis the moral heft of Greek tragedy, yielding a mesmerizing portrait of appalling greed and indifference. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage By Sasha Issenberg $40.00 Pantheon Nonfiction
This lively, thorough and fascinating history reconstructs the fight for gay marriage, tracing how an issue that barely registered among queer activists became, in the wake of outspoken opposition from the religious right, a priority. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage By Eleanor Henderson $27.99 Flatiron Nonfiction Memoir
“It is a confusing time to be a woman who loves a troubled man,” Henderson writes in this unflinching memoir of her husband’s long and confounding illness. She tells their story with a novelist’s eye for detail and the honesty of a trusted friend. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain By Annie Murphy Paul $28.00 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Nonfiction
Paul exhorts readers to “think outside the brain.” We are not solo actors, she insists, forced to rely only on what’s in our heads to solve problems; rather, we’re networked organisms with the power to transform our thinking. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Family Roe: An American Story By Joshua Prager $35.00 W.W. Norton Nonfiction
In this nuanced portrait, more than a decade in the making, Norma McCorvey — best known as “Jane Roe,” the woman at the center of Roe v. Wade — emerges as a contradictory figure, both heroine and villain of her story and one whose views on abortion are as complex as those of her fellow citizens. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Festival Days By Jo Ann Beard $27.00 Little, Brown Nonfiction
Featuring characters mostly drawn from life confronting illness, loss, violence and death, this exquisite collection of pieces defies classification, blending intuition and observation into something unaccountably yet undeniably real. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War By Louis Menand $35.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Nonfiction
In a sweeping, original history, Menand employs finely tuned capsule biographies of writers, filmmakers, artists and more to cover the interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the decades following World War II. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
A Ghost in the Throat By Doireann Ni Ghriofa $16.95 Paperback Biblioasis Nonfiction Memoir
This powerful blend of memoir and literary investigation begins with the author’s obsession with an 18th-century Irish poem. But it’s far from dusty scholarship; Ni Ghriofa weaves past and present, dreams and harsh reality, in an account of motherhood and transformation. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America By Clint Smith $29.00 Little, Brown Nonfiction
Smith, a poet and journalist, spoke with scholars, guides, heritage fanatics and tourists as he visited sites key to America’s slavery past. The result is timely and profound, an eloquent view of a history we have yet fully to confront. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America By Kiese Laymon $16.00 Paperback Scribner Nonfiction
A contentious publishing experience left Laymon unsatisfied with his 2013 essay collection. Now, seven years later, after buying the book back from his initial publisher and revising the collection, he returns with Take 2. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
I Came as a Shadow: An Autobiography By John Thompson with Jesse Washington $29.99 Henry Holt Nonfiction Memoir
Standing 6-foot-10 with a booming voice and an urban dictionary’s worth of curse words, the onetime Georgetown basketball coach inspired a potent mixture of fear and respect. In this lively and entertaining book, Thompson, who died in August, finally gets to cast his legend on his own terms. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City By Andrea Elliott $30.00 Random House Nonfiction
Expanding on a 2013 series for The Times about a homeless New York schoolgirl and her family, Elliott delivers a searing account of the family’s struggles with poverty and addiction in a city and country that have repeatedly failed to address these issues with efficacy or compassion. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 By Fredrik Logevall $40.00 Random House Nonfiction
In this first of two projected volumes, Logevall demonstrates how, even at an early age and despite his playboy reputation, John Kennedy took a serious interest in politics, forming a cleareyed sense of the world and his nation’s place in it. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art By Rebecca Wragg Sykes $28.00 Bloomsbury Sigma Nonfiction
Sykes explores the world of our ancient cousins, offering a full picture of what their lives may have looked like. It’s a remarkably crisp portrait because recent science has been able to infer a lot about Neanderthals from the little they left behind. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal By George Packer $27.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Nonfiction
This slim but forceful treatise begins with patriotic despair: With inequality persisting in the United States across generations, Packer paints a picture of a deeply fractured America that he divides into four irreconcilable categories. The result, he believes, is that we are losing the art of self-government. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Let Me Tell You What I Mean By Joan Didion $23.00 Alfred A. Knopf Nonfiction
The 12 previously published essays collected here (mostly) for the first time were written between the late 1960s and the year 2000. Revisiting Didion’s work now provides a familiar joy, as well as a reminder of her prescience. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 By Sarah Schulman $40.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Nonfiction
Based on the author’s own involvement in the movement as well as on 17 years of interviews conducted with 188 members of the group, this book is a weighty masterpiece: part sociology, part oral history, part memoir, part call to arms. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive By Carl Zimmer $28.00 Dutton Nonfiction
Zimmer’s book tackles some of biology’s hardest questions: What is life? How did it begin? And what criteria should we even use to call something “living”? From metabolism to sentience to evolution to our current focus on DNA, Zimmer takes the reader on an elegant, deeply researched tour. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance By Hanif Abdurraqib $27.00 Random House Nonfiction
Abdurraqib, a poet, cultural critic and essayist, uses the tales of Black performers to make powerful observations about race in America, gliding through music, television, film, minstrel shows and vaudeville. The book is also a candid self-portrait, written with sincerity and emotion. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation By Thomas Dyja $30.00 Simon & Schuster Nonfiction
This capacious account of New York’s recent rise describes the men and women in every facet of life who helped revitalize the city. Yet for Dyja, who sees the need for another reinvention of New York, the city has in many ways fallen prey to its own success. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son’s Memoir By Christopher Sorrentino $22.99 Catapult Nonfiction Memoir
This stunning memoir is less an account of the writer’s own life than a post-mortem of his parents’ marriage, and an honest and heartfelt portrayal of his mother. Sorrentino aches to gain her acceptance, a lifelong effort that often results in disappointment. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint By Maggie Nelson $27.00 Graywolf Nonfiction
Nelson’s brainy, affecting, genre-crossing books have earned her a deserved reputation as a sui generis amalgam of poet, memoirist, theorist and critic. This provocative meditation on the ethics of freedom as a source of constraint, as well as liberation, shows her at her most original and brilliant. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
On Juneteenth By Annette Gordon-Reed $15.95 Liveright Nonfiction Memoir
In a book that is part memoir, part history, Gordon-Reed (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Hemingses of Monticello”) recounts her continuing affection for her home state of Texas, despite its reputation for violence and racism, writing that “the things that happened there couldn’t have happened in other places.” AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present By Dara Horn $25.95 W.W. Norton Nonfiction
In a series of striking essays, Horn explores how the ways we commemorate antisemitism and Jewish tragedy distract from the very concrete, specific death of Jews. She wants a more direct reckoning with Jew hatred and its consequences. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir By Brian Broome $26.00 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Nonfiction Memoir
Broome’s coming-of-age memoir explores Black manhood and queerness in the Rust Belt, and the pressures that Black queer boys face to change. Broome pairs his own story with a scene he witnessed, of a father screaming at his young son. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park With George” By James Lapine $40.00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux Nonfiction
A fascinating and rigorous, no-punches-pulled account of Lapine’s first collaboration with Sondheim, on a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. Despite the hilarious anecdotes, this is not a collection of gossip. It is actually a story of artistic steadfastness. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath By Heather Clark $40.00 Alfred A. Knopf Nonfiction
The bar is high for a new Plath biography, but Clark’s meticulously researched account manages to be both riveting and revelatory, restoring complexity and nuance to a poet whose career has been overshadowed by the circumstances of her tragic early death. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture By Randall Kennedy $30.00 Pantheon Nonfiction
This collection of essays offers a full portrait of Kennedy’s thinking as a law professor and public intellectual, demonstrating his commitment to reflection over partisanship, thinking over feeling. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
The Secret to Superhuman Strength By Alison Bechdel $24.00 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Nonfiction
The acclaimed cartoonist uses her lifelong obsession with exercise to ponder some big questions: What is going on with our ridiculous bodies and our even more ridiculous relationship between our bodies and minds? AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir By Kat Chow $28.00 Grand Central Nonfiction Memoir
Nearly two decades after her mother’s death, when Chow was just 13, her family is still in deep mourning, an experience she documents with wit, poignancy and fresh insight and imagery. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir By Ashley C. Ford $27.99 Flatiron Nonfiction Memoir
This memoir begins with a phone call in which the author learns that her father is coming home after almost 30 years in prison, and it ends with his release. But at its heart, this is the story of Ford as her mother’s daughter, for better and often for worse. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Three Girls From Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood By Dawn Turner $26.99 Simon & Schuster Nonfiction Memoir
A former columnist for The Chicago Tribune offers a textured portrait of her 1970s childhood on the South Side, where three Black girls with similar aspirations ended up with wildly divergent fates. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
A Whole World: Letters From James Merrill Edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser $45.00 Alfred A. Knopf Nonfiction
The poet’s letters cast light on a generous soul with an active social life and a quicksilver wit. Artifice was Merrill’s way of being natural. He lavished his correspondents with parody and aphorism, as well as assessments of his poetic peers. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America By John McWhorter $28.00 Portfolio Nonfiction
McWhorter, a Black liberal who dissents from much of the left’s views on race, argues against the position that racism and white supremacy are “baked into” the structure of American society. AmazonLocal BooksellersBarnes & Noble
