Notes from the book closet on new titles that caught our eye.

GuideToBeingBorn-154.jpg

“A Guide to Being Born” (Riverhead Books), by Ramona Ausubel, out May 2nd. “A Guide to Being Born” is Ramona Ausubel’s second book, following her much-praised début novel, “No One Is Here Except for All of Us.” This compact collection is divided into four sections: “Birth,” “Gestation,” “Conception,” and “Love.” In stories like “Safe Passage” (which opens with the otherworldly line “The grandmothers—dozens of them—find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there.”), “Atria,” (which first appeared in The New Yorker and follows a pregnant teen-ager who believes she is bearing an inhuman child), and “The Ages” (about a young couple moving into a new town populated by “a lot of old people with very regular schedules”), Ausubel applies her spacious imagination to the subjects of sex, birth, growth, and death.

The Short Strange Life-154.jpg

“The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris” (Liveright), by Jonathan Kirsch, out May 6th. On November 7, 1938, the Jewish-Polish refugee Herschel Grynszpan was seventeen years old when he walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot a Nazi diplomat. This was one of the pretexts for Kristallnacht, which erupted two days later. Jonathan Kirsch explores the causes and consequences of that bullet, tracking its trajectory from the moment it was fired: “The idea that one can divert the currents of history by committing one single homicide is ancient, powerful, and enduring,” he writes, before investigating the details of Grynszpan’s life, which has remained a historical mystery (was he a partisan? Acting out of personal animus? An agent of the Gestapo whose act was an excuse for an escalation of Nazi murderousness?). “What I seek to do now,” Kirsch writes, “is restore Herschel Grynszpan to his rightful place in history.”

who-owns-the-future-154.jpg

“Who Owns the Future?” (Simon & Schuster), by Jaron Lanier, out May 7th. In his best-selling 2010 manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” the computer scientist and digital-media pioneer Jaron Lanier argued that programming choices made in the early stages of the Internet had created an online culture that devalued individual intelligence and ownership and increasingly promoted bullying and mob-like behavior. “Who Owns the Future?” continues to explore the troubling ways that technology is transforming our culture; this time, Lanier focusses on how digital networks helped destabilize the middle class and led this country into an economic recession. Lanier proposes a path toward a more stable economic future that rewards those who share and post information online. “We’re used to treating information as ‘free,’ ” he writes, “but the price we pay for the illusion of ‘free’ is only workable so long as most of the overall economy isn’t about information.”

Forty One False Starts-154.jpg

“Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Janet Malcolm, out May 7th. Janet Malcolm, a New Yorker contributor since 1963, has provided years of commentary on subjects as varied as interior design, photography, murder trials, and psychiatry. She is also a master of the profile, and her alluring, pointed, singularly perceptive tellings of the lives of Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Anton Chekhov, and Ted Hughes, to name a few, have now been gathered together in “Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers.”

homeward_bound-154.jpg

“Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity” (Simon & Schuster), by Emily Matchar, out May 7th. In “Homeward Bound,” Emily Matchar explores a trend she calls the “New Domesticity”: the recent surge in popularity of traditional domestic skills like cheese-making, knitting, and home gardening. Previous generations of women struggled to be free from these tasks, but high-achieving women (and men) today are increasingly embracing them. Matchar researches the trend of the “homemade, from scratch, DIY, straight from the backyard, fresh baked, [and] artisan” by visiting practitioners of the New Domesticity across the country—Etsy entrepreneurs, food bloggers, knitting circles—and she provocatively explores what the movement says about the role of women in society today. (An excerpt from the book that ran in Salon under the headline “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” makes the case that some sustainable-food advocates are wrong to blame the feminist movement for the decline of home cooking.)

Wild Ones-154.jpg

“Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America” (Penguin Press), by Jon Mooallem, out May 16th. Jon Mooallem’s magazine writing about animals has focussed not only on the beasts and critters themselves but on the place they occupy in the American culture and collective imagination. His first book, “Wild Ones,” is propelled by two sets of ideas. The first is the prevalence of wild-animal imagery in American culture, from his young daughter’s polar-bear pajamas to his own childhood experiences watching nature shows on TV. The second is the decreasing prevalence of wildlife in nature, where half of all species could be extinct by the end of the century. Seeking to make sense of these two seemingly opposing phenomena, Mooallem takes his daughter with him to visit modern-day endangered animals and the preservationists who are going to “surreal” lengths to intervene on their behalf. In documenting their trip, he writes a cultural history of Americans’ relationship with wildlife and compares his firsthand field notes “to the bestiary in my mind.”

The Unwinding-154.jpg

“The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by George Packer, out May 21st. In his ninth book, New Yorker staff writer George Packer unpacks the current state of United States democracy by weaving together profiles of Americans as varied as tobacco farmers, Washington insiders, Newt Gingrich, and Jay-Z. “The Unwinding,” which depicts America as “a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working,” reads eerily like dystopian fiction.

americanah-154.jpg

“Americanah” (Knopf), by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, out May 14th. “Americanah” is the third novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize for her 2006 novel “Half of a Yellow Sun,” about two sisters during the Biafran war. (A New Yorker contributor, Adichie was one of the magazine’s “20 Under 40” authors in 2010.) Like much of her previous fiction, “Americanah” is the story of Nigerians pulled between two cultures. It tells the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, childhood sweethearts who grow up in Lagos during Nigeria’s military dictatorship. Ifemelu moves to America to study; Obinze, unable to join her because of restrictions on post-9/11 immigration, ends up living undocumented in London, and the two reunite years later in their newly democratic homeland. The book, in part a love story, is also a story of dislocation, and an exploration of race in the U.S. and U.K.

The Son-154.jpg

“The Son” (HarperCollins), by Philipp Meyer, out May 28th. Eli McCullough, the first male child born in the Republic of Texas, lives past a hundred years of age. His long life is marked by constant flux and tension, both personal and political. With no reverence for chronology, Meyer (a New Yorker contributor who was included in the magazine’s 2010 “20 Under 40” list) tells this character’s story through a narrative that surveys multiple generations, including diary entries by Eli’s son Peter and the struggles of his modern-day great-granddaughter, Jeannie. Underneath the saga of this fictional family, is a tale about America, and about consequences of tradition, inheritance, privilege, and power.

Good Kings-154.jpg

“Good Kings Bad Kings” (Algonquin Books), by Susan Nussbaum, out May 28th. Chicago-based playwright Susan Nussbaum won Barbara Kingsolver’s PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for this début novel about a group of people living in an institution for juveniles with disabilities. Nussbaum has been a wheelchair user since the late seventies, and had been dismayed by portrayals of disabled characters in movies and in books, from angelic Tiny Tim to monstrous Quasimodo to mad Ahab. As someone with firsthand experience of disability, she wrote in the Huffington Post last year, she knows “the jokes, the words, the underground details” of this often-stereotyped world. Her characters form friendships and romances in a place of neglect and mistreatment. They are not “particularly courageous or angelic or suicidal,” she says. “Some of them are sucked under by the riptide of repression, some of them bob to the surface against all odds, and maybe one or two find a way to fly away.”

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.

The New Yorker offers a signature blend of news, culture, and the arts. It has been published since February 21, 1925.

&
Subscribe to The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/books-to-watch-out-for-may-2
www.newyorker.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-07
117359
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BP44ZNMZGSHSWSRHVDQW2VFXCXMAXHZN
<urn:uuid:ced9f7ed-f1a2-4186-b32a-18eb756026c8>
2016-02-09T10:22:09Z
199.27.76.239
sha1:DU26TO7DXTNZTTFLTM3332NZV3LACGGD
<urn:uuid:d4263eee-2889-4e8c-8dea-f3484b657b14>
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/books-to-watch-out-for-may-2
length
response
<urn:uuid:dbec0c8b-df46-4ab7-ae6d-d0bf55931152>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-236-182-209.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-07
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf