Journalist Talaga (Seven Falling Feathers) offers a haunting, meditative exploration of the atrocities Indigenous people faced for generations in Canada and the U.S. at the hands of both church and state institutions. Talaga juxtaposes centuries’ worth of history with a more personal story: her own efforts to learn about her great-great-grandmother Annie—“the first of five generations of Anishinaabe and Ininiw women in my family to live under [the] yoke” of Canada’s Indian Act of 1876. The array of abuses makes for harrowing reading, but Talaga has a graceful sense of when to pull back and give the reader time to process. Throughout, she reckons with the difficulty of revisiting the past through official records—“a State that is set on destroying you does not keep accurate records with proper spellings of names”—and uses photographs to express ineluctable gaps in the archive (one particularly chilling image is a photo taken by Talaga of the word “HELP” carved into a brick wall behind the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Ontario). In later chapters, Talaga chronicles efforts by the Catholic Church to make amends with Indigenous communities, but also unsettlingly finds that several U.S. residential schools remain operational to this day (a discovery that “shocks” but “does not surprise” the author). The result is a searing rumination on a still unresolved historical trauma. (July)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer winner Wright (The Human Scale) surveys his own wide-ranging journalistic career in this enticing collection of pieces from the New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. The earliest, from 1980, is a profile of an aging Texas baseball player; the most recent, from 2024, is a remembrance of Jimmy Carter. In between, the book touches on the space program, Jonestown, and literary heavyweights Richard Brautigan and Denis Johnson, among other diverse subjects, showing off the writer’s extraordinary versatility. Wright can be hard-boiled—“there was scarcely anything left after the .44 magnum and five weeks of maggots had done their work,” he writes of the aftermath of Brautigan’s suicide—but he’s also a master of the illuminating character detail; consider the volumes communicated about the couple’s long relationship when former first lady Rosalynn Carter expresses surprise that her husband reads the New Yorker (“‘I read it every week!’ he protested”). Readers occasionally get more personal glimpses of the reporter, especially in “No City Limits,” Wright’s lyrical paean to Austin, Tex., his longtime home, and in his introduction, where he reflects on his writing process. “What rounds out a character,” Wright explains, “is his capacity for surprise,” and in that sense, it’s Wright himself who emerges as the fascinating protagonist of this book. These are charming, empathetic dispatches from a probing writer who always allows himself space for astonishment. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

“Rock Lobster” hit music writer Crighton (The Vinyl Diaries) “like an electric jolt” when he first heard it at age 10, in 1979, leading to a lifelong love for the B-52’s “cool” and “campy” music, and culminating in this breathless paean to the band. The author speeds through the B-52’s early output before focusing on their fifth full-length album, Cosmic Thing, released in 1989 after “everyone had pretty much forgotten” about them (the band’s output between 1981 and 1988 garnered little attention, and they’d shrunk to four members after Ricky Wilson’s 1985 death). Despite this, Cosmic Thing was their most commercially successful album, and, Crighton argues, can be read as a celebration of “queer joy” amid the ongoing AIDS crisis, thanks to its utopic references to a “better place, a place where change is possible”—not to mention its innuendos and mentions of “glitter on the mattress.” Crighton movingly describes how the band served as the “soundtrack to my coming out.... Their music and their outrageousness helped me understand the... kind of gay man I wanted to be” and makes an affectionate case for the lyrics’ queer coding while encouraging readers to find their own ways to resist establishments that marginalize them. The result is a nostalgic love letter to the band and its influence well beyond the world of music. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

This wonderful novel by Tristana author Perez Galdos (1843–1920) peers into 1880s Madrid through the prism of the middle-class Villaamils family. There is patriarch Ramón, an unemployed civil servant desperately seeking one final appointment so he can retire soon after on a decent pension; his spendthrift wife, Pura; her sister, Milagros; and his daughter, Abelarda. Pura, Milagros, and Abelarda regularly frequent the theater, where they have derisively been dubbed the Miaows by fellow patrons for their catlike appearance. Their humiliation is contrasted with depictions of Ramón’s “sweet and humble” young grandson, Luis, who charmingly and comically dreams of conversing with God about the fate of his family. Luis’s mother died when he was a toddler, and upon the reappearance of his absentee father, Víctor, Ramón’s son-in-law, who embodies the calculating, dishonest order of corrupt civil servants whom honest, hardworking Ramón abhors, the family fortunes become even more unpredictable. Perez Galdos reflects the characters’ theatrical predilections in arch parenthetical asides, as in Pura’s dressing down of her husband: “You’ll never be anything, and if they do give you a job, they’ll pay you a pittance, and we’ll still be in the same mess. (Growing more heated),” and he flits with remarkable ease from the hilarious to the heartbreaking. This is a tragicomic triumph. (June)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Nigerian British writer Okojie makes her U.S. debut with a bewitching if underdeveloped time-warping novel following contemporary Londoner Therese and 17th-century migrant Zulmira in Gethsemane, Cape Verde. Both women are followers of the shaman god Oni, who leaves gifts with her worshipers to indicate the offerings and sacrifices they’re meant to make in return. Among these gifts is a rib cage placed with Therese and her three male roommates, all of whom bear the birthmark on their neck that marks them as one of Oni’s disciples. This rib cage, which they name Ovida, contains berries that make the four roommates have visions of Zulmira, including her arrival in a new land after being forced to leave her baby. In Zulmira’s story line, she is taken in by a fisherman named Domingos, whose wife, Marguerite, and daughter, Sueli, veer into madness as Zulmira harnesses Oni’s energy in their presence. After Sueli makes a devastating sacrifice, the reader uncovers the girl’s link to Ovida. The ending, which is meant to connect the two threads, feels like an abrupt turn, but there are plenty of vivid images and stimulating narrative swerves along the way. Though it’s a mixed bag, it contains plenty of gems. Agent: Tucker Smith, Wylie Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Willingham’s suffocating latest Southern thriller (after Only If You’re Lucky) thrusts disillusioned New York City journalist Claire Campbell back into the rural South Carolina environs she’d hoped to flee forever. When Claire’s father calls to tell her that her mother has been in an accident, she reluctantly returns to her hometown of Claxton, S.C., having just quit her job and tired of her latest friend-with-benefits. Still grieving her older sister Natalie’s disappearance 22 years earlier, Claire can’t bear to stay at home, so she takes lodging on a spooky nearby island and finds a job picking grapes for elderly local Mitchell and his spacey wife, Marcia. Finding Marcia’s teenage diary ignites Claire’s curiosity about her new employers, and soon, she’s mired in Dixie-fiction clichés, dealing with copperheads and cups of suspicious tea as she notices that Marcia’s youthful obsession with an older man mirrors the long-missing Natalie’s. Willingham tries to enliven the flat proceedings with gothic accouterments and long-festering family secrets, but none of it takes. The result is a pedestrian tale of angst and obsession that will leave overheated readers yearning for a blast of convincing realism. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist and NBCC award winner Quinones (The Least of Us) assembles an eclectic and affectionate ode to the tuba and those who devote their lives to it. Roaming far and wide through the instrument’s history, he highlights legends like New Orlean’s Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen (1950–2004), who innovated New Orleans jazz and blues, and New York’s Bill Bell (1927–2005), who played with the New York Philharmonic as well as in Broadway shows and circuses (and may have kept a sousaphone in a Grand Central Station locker so he could join parades on short notice). Elsewhere, the author captures the tuba’s role in genres ranging from jazz to punk rock, explores its ubiquitous presence in marching and military bands, and spotlights musicians who have spent their careers mastering the instrument. Along the way, Quinones emphasizes the tuba’s unique demands on musicians, like the mega lung capacity and impressive lip musculature needed to produce a special ear-throbbing sound called “grit” (which fills halls and stadiums but is “not necessarily pretty to hear close up”). Quinones finds in the tuba and those who play it a surprisingly moving symbol of tenacity in today’s hectic, destabilizing world—a quiet willingness to work at one’s “craft, usually alone, in spite of the... indifference of others” in pursuit of that “which cannot be purchased other than by hard work, preparation and persistence.” Attesting to the tuba’s central place in American music, this exuberant love letter resonates. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

James Beard Award winner Edge (The Potlikker Papers) serves up a bountiful repast that covers family legacy, Southern history, and enduring connections between race and food. Growing up in small-town 1960s Georgia in a house originally owned by a Confederate general, Edge learned early on to regale his friends with stories of the Lost Cause. His bohemian mother fueled such tales, while his father pulled him away to visit local “houses of smoke,” where Edge’s “passion for food blossomed, born of my father’s taste for barbecue and our shared curiosity about the wider world.” After graduating from the University of Mississippi with a Southern studies degree, Edge settled in Oxford, Miss., eating and writing until, in 1999, he became the founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization devoted to preserving the South’s diverse food cultures. In 2020, activists called for him to step down, citing a lack of diversity among leadership, pushing him to reconsider “the stories on which I depended” about his homeland. His subsequent reckoning with his role as a white spokesperson for Black cultures is gracious and direct. Clear-eyed, bighearted, and beautifully written, this nourishing memoir offers readers plenty to chew on. Photos. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

The man who invented the World Wide Web recaps its spectacular growth and ponders its uncertain future in this knotty memoir-cum-manifesto. Berners-Lee (Weaving the Web) begins by revisiting his achievement while a programmer in Switzerland in 1990 of conceiving and writing the software—URL addresses, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and Hypertext Markup Language (html)—that lets users access websites, files, and images from other computers on their own. He continues on to his stint as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, where he warded off attempts to turn the web into a patchwork of proprietary networks and fought for “net neutrality,” the principle that service providers should allow equal access to all web content. When the account wanders into Berners-Lee’s techno-optimism, however, it’s not always consistent or convincing. He pushes at great length a scheme called “Solid” to enable individuals to control their own data by placing it in digital “pods” in ways that sound fuzzy and dull. He’s bullish on AI, but fails to support his assertion that it can analyze a person’s data to help them “understand better who [they] really [are].” As an account of the web’s conception, this captivates, but as a forecast of what’s to come, it underwhelms. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Mount Shasta, Calif., high school senior Izumi Tanaka is a normal 18-year-old American girl: she enjoys baking, watching Real Housewives, and dressing like “Lululemon’s sloppy sister.” But Japanese American Izzy, conceived during a one-night stand in her mother Hanako’s final year at Harvard, has never known the identity of her father. So when she and her best friend find a letter in Hanako’s bedroom, the duo jump at the chance to ferret out Izzy’s dad’s true identity—only to find out he’s the Crown Prince of Japan. Desperate to know her father, Izzy agrees to spend the summer in his home country. But press surveillance, pressure to quickly learn the language and etiquette, and an unexpected romance make her time in Tokyo more fraught than she imagined. Add in a medley of cousins and an upcoming wedding, and Izzy is in for an unforgettable summer. Abrupt switches from Izzy’s perspective to lyrical descriptions of Japan may disrupt readers’ enjoyment, but a snarky voice plus interspersed text conversations and tabloid coverage keep the pages turning in Jean’s (Empress of All Seasons) fun, frothy, and often heartfelt duology starter. Ages 12–up. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink