Advertisement

Editors’ Choice

12 New Books We Recommend This Week

Image

Sometimes a book grabs you because it’s especially topical, or relevant to your life. Other times the appeal is more idiosyncratic: a strong voice, a great story, a brilliant mind at play. This week’s recommended titles offer distinctive and wide-ranging pleasures — beginning with a couple of distinctive and wide-ranging essay collections from Martin Amis and Zadie Smith, celebrated novelists who also rank among the best literary critics of their generations. Read them, and you’ll come up with your own recommendations. Or read more of ours! There’s a harrowing autobiographical novel about birth and death all at once, along with memoirs from a Chinese filmmaker and an indigenous Canadian writer. (I told you the list was wide-ranging.) For good measure we also offer a couple of World War II thrillers, one fiction and one non, and deep dives into French food, Israeli politics and the roots of environmentalism.

Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books

THE RUB OF TIME: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017, by Martin Amis. (Knopf, $28.95.) FEEL FREE: Essays, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $28.) The fourth collection of Amis’s nonfiction and Zadie Smith’s new book of essays find these two celebrated writers, friends from different generations, addressing politics, aging, art and more. “Amis’s new book, like the collections that preceded it, is the product of a ferocious yet sensitive mind,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “Even when he is considering writers he’s assessed many times before, his aim is so unerring that he resembles a figure out of Greek myth, firing arrows through ax-heads lined up in a row.” Garner writes that Smith’s “Feel Free” is a “gentler ride,” but in the best pieces, she “presses down hard as a cultural critic, and the rewards are outsize.”

HEART BERRIES: A Memoir, by Terese Marie Mailhot. (Counterpoint, $23.) Mailhot, whose early life on Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia was pocked with poverty, addiction and abuse, began working on this memoir when she had herself committed after a breakdown. In it, she reckons with the wages of intergenerational trauma. Members of her family had passed through Canada’s brutal residential school system, which separated indigenous children from their families and cultures, and, in some cases, subjected them to physical and sexual abuse. The book is a “sledgehammer,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. It has “a mixture of vulnerability and rage, sexual yearning and artistic ambition, swagger and self-mockery that recalls Chris Kraus’s ‘I Love Dick.’”

RISE AND KILL FIRST: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, by Ronen Bergman. Translated by Ronnie Hope. (Random House, $35.) Bergman, a journalist based in Israel, conducted a thousand interviews with political leaders and intelligence operatives for this history of Israel’s secretive program of targeted assassinations. The result is “an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Blending history and investigative reporting, Bergman never loses sight of the ethical questions that arise when a state, founded as a refuge for a stateless people who were targets of a genocide, decides it needs to kill in order to survive.”

IN EVERY MOMENT WE ARE STILL ALIVE, by Tom Malmquist. (Melville House, $25.99.) Based on a true story, this searing autobiographical novel, translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch, depicts a father struggling to cope with the tragic loss of his partner just as their daughter is born. “This is narrative as raw material,” Katie Kitamura writes in her review. “A novel about permeability, ‘In Every Moment We Are Still Alive’ captures the jumbled sensory experience of being profoundly, catastrophically overwhelmed. … It’s clear that Malmquist is explicitly interested in what can’t be contained, what continues to trouble.”

EATING ETERNITY: Food, Art and Literature in France, by John Baxter. (Museyon, paper, $19.95.) A diverse and lavishly illustrated guide to French gastronomy that broadens its subject into the fields of art and literature and the culture at large. Who ever suspected that Proust’s famous madeleine almost lost out to a plain slice of toast? “Some of the best treats provided by Baxter’s delightful book are his startling asides,” our reviewer Miranda Seymour writes. Describing Matisse’s fondness for one dish, for example, he lets drop that “the repeated washing of the codfish was best achieved, some housewives found, by a day’s soak in the cistern of a flush toilet.”

THE AFTERLIVES, by Thomas Pierce. (Riverhead, $27.) In Pierce’s warm and inventive debut novel, about a heart attack victim who finds the world subtly changed, the feeling that nothing’s quite real — that perhaps everything is a fever dream in the narrator’s dying brain — nags at him, and at us. According to our reviewer, Daryl Gregory, Pierce “isn’t afraid to pose the biggest questions: How do we deal with loss? What are the limits and possibilities of love? What is the nature of time?”

NINE CONTINENTS: A Memoir In and Out of China, by Xiaolu Guo. (Grove, $26.) Guo, a writer and filmmaker, grew up in China at a time of deprivation. The Beijing Film Academy introduced her to a more cosmopolitan world; now in London, she has been acclaimed one of Britain’s best young novelists. “As with so many Chinese born during the Cultural Revolution,” Hannah Beech writes in her review, “Guo’s roots are both tangled and tragic.”

THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, by Charles C. Mann. (Knopf, $28.95.) The essential debate of environmentalism — to respect limits, or transcend them? — takes shape through Mann’s double biography of two men, the dire “prophet” William Vogt and the technological “wizard” Norman Borlaug. “Mann’s storytelling skills are unmatched,” our reviewer Bill McKibben writes. “The sprightly tempo with which this book unfolds, each question answered as it comes to mind, makes for pure pleasure reading.”

THE SABOTEUR: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, by Paul Kix. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Dashing and brave, Robert de La Rochefoucauld was a member of the French Resistance who came from an aristocratic family. Kix details his exploits and many death-defying escapes during the war. “This is first-class adventure writing,” Alan Furst concludes in his review, “which, coupled with a true-life narrative of danger and intrigue, adds up to all-night reading.”

MUNICH, by Robert Harris. (Knopf, $27.95.) An expertly paced thriller featuring two junior diplomats, once friends at Oxford but now members of the opposing German and British delegations that would seal the fate of Czechoslovakia by permitting the Nazis to occupy it in 1938. “Harris steeps his tale in vivid descriptions of Europe on the brink of conflict,” our reviewer Joshua Hammer writes, adding that the novel “sticks close to the facts — even as it holds out the tantalizing hope of a different outcome.”

RESERVOIR 13, by Jon McGregor. (Catapult, paper, $16.95.) McGregor’s fourth novel opens with the disappearance of a teenage girl visiting an English village, but its deeper concern is the passage of time and its effect on local residents. “What would happen if the television cameras stayed?” our reviewer, the Times reporter Kate Taylor, asks, describing the book’s effect. “If they turned away from the supposedly newsworthy event, and instead zoomed in one by one on each house in the village and showed us the lives inside?”

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), and sign up for our newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Staff Picks From the Book Review. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/books/review/12-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html
www.nytimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-13
326315
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JWWYBGLKOJOC5V4WALTGNIDBD4L62RBQ
<urn:uuid:ab9ae5a5-dea4-483f-90cb-268650096d77>
2019-03-26T03:30:09Z
151.101.249.164
text/html
sha1:NPRM5VF574MSLZMY44OZGS7QQY733BNS
<urn:uuid:2105a40b-096b-4f39-9e2f-6ec97c15f7a4>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/books/review/12-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html
response
<urn:uuid:d9e257c8-11c9-46cc-822c-48d0a58e0242>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-13
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-5-254-60.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/