Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg. New York Review Books, $22.95 (624p) ISBN 978-1-68137-874-9
This landmark collection features stories by Canadian writer Gallant (1922–2014) not included in her New Yorker–centric Collected Stories. In novelist Hallberg’s artful introduction, he explains how encountering Gallant’s work restored his faith in fiction, describes her exacting c... Continue reading »
William Boyle. Soho Crime, $28.95 (448p) ISBN 978-1-64129-640-3
Boyle (Shoot the Moonlight Out) delivers his most ambitious novel yet with this extraordinary crime saga set in the working-class neighborhood of Gravesend, Brooklyn. The story opens in 1986, with 28-year-old Risa realizing she’s made a tragic mistake by marrying Saverio “Sav” Franzone. Sav... Continue reading »
Johanna Van Veen. Poisoned Pen, $17.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-72828-157-5
Van Veen’s stunning sophomore outing (after My Darling Dreadful Thing) is gothic horror for the ages. In 1887, Sarah finds a body in the bog surrounding her husband’s isolated mansion in the Netherlands and develops an obsession with the corpse that transforms into a mysterious illness. Wor... Continue reading »
Lindsay Lovise. Forever, $17.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-5387-4055-2
Lovise’s scintillating second Secret Society of Governess Spies Victorian romance (after Never Blow a Kiss) reintroduces Perdita’s Governess Agency, a front for an all-female spy ring set up by a mysterious figure code-named the Dove. After Frankie Turner’s younger sister, Fidelia, goes mis... Continue reading »
Keiichi Koike, trans. from the Japanese by Ajani Oloye. Last Gasp, $24.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-86719-929-1
Koike (the Heaven’s Door series) brings readers into a dazzling, drugged-out cyberpunk future in the first English language translation of the series widely regarded as his masterpiece. Cub, a stubble-faced junkie who escapes his grimy apartment through daily drug trips, is a typical citizen in a Bl... Continue reading »
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Univ. of Akron, $16.95 trade paper (82p) ISBN 978-1-62922-273-8
The brilliant third collection from Tuffaha (Kaan and Her Sisters), who is of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian descent, evokes the weight of a homeland’s genocide, but is equally about the joys of heritage and the righteous pursuit of justice for one’s oppressed brothers and sisters. She ... Continue reading »
Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee. Revell, $26.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-8007-4275-1
In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »
Robert Verkaik. Pegasus, $32 (400p) ISBN 978-1-63936-827-3
Historian Verkaik (The Traitor of Colditz) uncovers a startling new dimension to a well-known story of betrayal in this riveting account. Operation Market Garden, the September 1944 British-led invasion of the Netherlands by Allied paratroopers, was famously a failure—one usually chalked up... Continue reading »
Muhammad Abdul-Hadi. Clarkson Potter, $32.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-593-79640-5
“This book is a testament to the creative output Black people give birth to, time and again, in the midst of oppressive machinations,” Ajima Olaghere writes in the preface to this powerful debut from restaurateur Abdul-Hadi, who was on house arrest and wearing an ankle monitor when he launched Phila... Continue reading »
Pico Iyer. Riverhead, $30 (240p) ISBN 978-0-593-42028-7
Novelist and essayist Iyer (The Half Known Life) shares in this luminous account the lessons that more than 30 years of visiting a Benedectine monastery in California have taught him about silence. Convinced by a friend to visit the retreat in 1991, he describes it as less a place of solitu... Continue reading »
Mo Willems. Union Square, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4549-5149-0
Via anthropomorphized rabbits who represent the words me, you, we, them, and us, Willems (Are You Big?) movingly explores themes of individuality and belonging. Throughout the visually straightforward work, what distinguishes the terms is a willi... Continue reading »