Memoirs from Bob Odenkirk and Sarah Polley top our list of books to read this March

Plus: Age Of Cage traces Nicolas Cage’s eclectic filmography, and The Emissary author Yoko Tawada kicks off a delightfully strange dystopian trilogy

Memoirs from Bob Odenkirk and Sarah Polley top our list of books to read this March
Cover images: Run Towards The Danger (Penguin), Age Of Cage (Henry Holt), Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (Random House), In The Margins (Europa Editions), Scattered All Over The Earth (New Directions) Graphic: Natalie Peeples

Every month, a deluge of new books comes flooding out from big publishers, indie houses, and self-publishing platforms. So every month, The A.V. Club narrows down the endless options to five of the books we’re most excited about.

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama by Bob Odenkirk
Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama by Bob Odenkirk
Cover image: Random House

(March 1, Random House):Bob Odenkirk’s elegantly titled Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama takes readers on a hilarious tour of the comedian and actor’s career, from his time performing at Second City in Chicago (comedy), to writing for (comedy), to creating the sketch classic with David Cross (comedy), to landing a plum role on (drama), then its eventual spin-off, . Celebrity memoirs are a dime a dozen, but if there were one we’d put our money on as being well worth the time this year, it’s this one.

Run Towards The Danger by Sarah Polley
Run Towards The Danger by Sarah Polley
Cover image: Penguin

(March 1, Penguin):Sarah Polley has embodied what feels like multiple lives. She’s been Canada’s sweetheart, a teen activist, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a documentarian, a filmmaker, and a TV director. It’s no wonder her diverse body of work tends to center on protagonists whose identities are shifting and morphing under the weight of an unexamined past and a tense present. In this essay collection, Polley projects that recurring question of memory on pivotal moments in her own life for a book that promises to be more vulnerable and introspective than your usual child-star-turned-adult narrative.

Scattered All Over The Earth by Yoko Tawada
Scattered All Over The Earth by Yoko Tawada
Cover image: New Directions

by Yoko Tawada (trans. by Margaret Mitsutani; March 1, New Directions)The prolific, multilingual Yoko Tawada follows up her beguiling 2018 novel, The Emissary, with another delightfully strange story of a futuristic world in decline. In Scattered All Over The Earth, Japan has all but disappeared from public memory. Hiruko, a refugee living in Denmark, teaches schoolchildren a language she’s invented, eventually drawing the attention of a linguist who helps her search for others who speak it. Scattered All Over The Earth is the first installment of a planned trilogy, and in it Tawada explores themes of not just language but also globalization and climate change. Tawada fans should also stay on the lookout for the slim short story collection, , which New Directions will publish in July.

In The Margins by Elena Ferrante
In The Margins by Elena Ferrante
Cover image: Europa Editions

(trans. by Ann Goldstein; March 15, Europa Editions):Part memoir, part craft book, Elena Ferrante’s new nonfiction collection promises to be a writer’s origin story. In four essays, the Italian author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life Of Adults revisits her first childhood experiments with narrative, her earliest attempts at writing a novel, the unique challenges faced by women writers, and how Ferrante was influenced by the work of Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, María Guerra, and Dante. In The Margins looks like an intimate self-portrait and an essential read for Ferrantephiles. 

Age Of Cage by Keith Phipps
Age Of Cage by Keith Phipps
Cover image: Henry Holt

by Keith Phipps (March 29, Henry Holt)In his first book, film journalist (and former A.V. Club editor-in-chief) Keith Phipps traces the eclectic filmography of the one and only Nicolas Kim Coppola, a.k.a. Nicolas Cage. Age Of Cage pairs a history of the film industry at large with analyses of Cage’s most well-known films, highlighting the actor’s many phases (and faces). There’s Cage’s breakout with 1980s comedies Moonstruck and Peggy Sue Got Married (the latter directed by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola). Then strong (if wildly different) performances in Wild At Heart and Leaving Las Vegas, for which Cage won his only Oscar; scenery-chewing turns in action-movie classics like Face/Off and The Rock; and into the present day. Publishers Weekly calls Age Of Cage an “entertaining odyssey,” and we’d expect nothing less from a book about one of Hollywood’s most fascinating stars.

 
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