Rutherford’s economy with words and natural storytelling instinct pulls you in, and just when you think you can’t handle any more environmental violence, he drops into stillness and grace. The whole thing simmers with tension and mystery, and nothing turns out exactly as you expect. If you love The North Water or, it must be said, Moby Dick, and you like the subtle fantasy of David Mitchell, this one’s for you. (A Strange Object) —Daniel Kile, VP of global content strategy
This Year: 365 Songs Annotated by John Darnielle
‘This Year: 365 Songs Annotated’ by John Darnielle
To call musician and novelist John Darnielle prolific would be an enormous understatement. The primary member of The Mountain Goats, his band’s complete discography would run to over 75 releases. From bashing on a splintered acoustic guitar into a boombox for cassette-only releases for most of his first decade to fronting a crack band, Darnielle’s intensely literary, allusive, and wordy songwriting has been the constant. Structured as a book of days, This Year: 365 Songs Annotated will delight Mountain Goats obsessives (and they are out there: “300 words about every Mountain Goats song ever written” has 644 entries.) Ranging from fictional narrative to historical imagery and myth to personal trauma, Darnielle’s lyrics lose nothing when applied to the page. Yet even with extensive autobiographical asides, glosses on inspirations, and intimate writerly concerns, when it comes to unpacking all of the vast subtext, metaphor, and allusion in The Mountain Goats’ songs, it only scratches the surface. (MC) —Eric Miles, visuals editor
Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960–80 by Neneh Cherry, Joe McPhee, Byron Coley, Mats Gustafsson, and Thurston Moore
‘Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960–80’ by Neneh Cherry, Joe McPhee, Byron Coley, Mats Gustafsson, and Thurston Moore
Now Jazz Now is the product of decades of close listening by three musical obsessives—writer and critic Byron Coley and musicians Thurston Moore and Mats Gustafson. Free jazz and its various offshoots—which these days one will often see referred to as “weird jazz”—is not everyone’s cup of tea. As Moore writes in the book’s introduction, “Free Jazz became one of the most critically polarizing means of expression of the late 20th century.” A guide to one hundred essential recordings, the LPs, singles, and cassettes featured are pulled directly from the authors’ archives. Obscurity is a flex here. You won’t find most of these on Spotify, though you might find them on YouTube. And to acquire them would cost a small fortune. Although structured like a conventional record guide, the authors have imposed a few important parameters: no artist is allowed more than one entry as a leader; entries are arranged chronologically by release date, with the cutoff being 1980 (before CDs, and before any of them could have possibly participated in any of the choices). These strictures are intended to mirror the nonhierarchical and non-competitive nature of the music itself. After all, free jazz is a music of liberation. It’s ecstatic and devotional, “reflect[ing] Love, Pain, Glory, Joy, and Anger—all in a dance of fire,” as Moore writes. The unbridled enthusiasm of the writing is anything but dry and academic. For instance: “His characteristic vocalized cry-in-my-horn hits like a Mike Tyson delivered blessing and a message of love,” writes Gustafson in his entry for Don Cherry’s 1969 album, Where Is Brooklyn? An absolute gem for the adventurous listener, it promises, as the jacket copy asserts, to “drop you into the ravenous mind of the insatiable free jazz and free improvisation record collector.” I’m in. (Ecstatic Peace Library) —EM
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin
‘Great Black Hope’ by Rob Franklin
Issues of race and class come crashing into one another in the first some odd pages of Rob Franklin’s deeply compelling debut novel Great Black Hope when protagonist Smith, a Black queer college grad, gets arrested for cocaine possession while summering in the Hamptons. Things only get more complicated when his best friend and roommate, Elle, daughter of a Neo-soul singer, dies of an apparent overdose. But while Great Black Hope could easily veer into simple whodunnit territory, Franklin constantly zigs when you expect him to zag, at one point thrusting Smith back into his complicated family dynamic as the son of a prominent HBCU president in Atlanta. Franklin’s shrewdly observed Great Black Hope is beautifully restrained yet exceedingly honest about the trials and tribulations that Smith faces as a queer Black man and the code-switching he’s forced to do between the worlds he inhabits. Franklin constantly keeps you on your toes while examining and pushing against the rarely spoken but all too well-known racial, social, and class dynamics that define our modern world. (Summit Books) —Chris Murphy, staff writer
Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith
‘Dead and Alive’ by Zadie Smith
That our self-delusions mask our reality is a theme that runs throughout Zadie Smith’s work. It’s a quality she shared with Joan Didion, that late great writer of magical thinking, noting: “She probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth is in it.” One might say the same of Smith’s focus in Dead and Alive, a new collection of essays that interrogates everything from the collective hysteria of football (aka soccer) fandom—which Smith participates in but also compares to Nazism—to the bemused detachment her adolescent self felt toward adult guidance, with which she can still identify while simultaneously viewing now from the other side. That insistence on seeing people, including herself, from multiple perspectives and points in history serves her well here. By her own estimation, she’s no revolutionary, nor even especially in step with the times. Rather, she is someone attending to the reality of people in their complexity, whether they be the real Toni Morrison, who “claimed for herself the wide world,” or the fictional Lydia Tár, “a human being in crisis.” For her, that means detaching from the hive mind and evading the algorithms as much as she can. As I was reading, I kept thinking what a privilege it must be not to be extremely online. That’s true, yet it’s nice to be reminded by a thinker of Smith’s stature that submission to the tech oligarchy is not in fact a foregone conclusion. (Penguin Press) —Natasha O’Neill, digital line editor
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh
‘All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now’ by Ruby Tandoh
No, it’s not fair that a former model who can bake a perfect twisted Swedish kanelbullar should also be such a terrific writer—but there it is. Ruby Tandoh, the wunderkind runner-up on the fourth season of The Great British Bakeoff, has published her fifth book, but unlike her previous four, you’ll find no cake recipes in All Consuming. For a book about food, I didn’t expect it to be so much about the media ecosystem’s transformation over the last several decades. But this is a cultural history of food, and in Tandoh’s telling, the media, coupled with market forces, has been the guiding hand for why we eat what we do—via pragmatic newspaper columns, glossy magazines, cookbooks, restaurant reviews, blogs, TV shows, online recipe aggregators, and now social media. In other words, while we might like to think that our appetites start with our guts, she argues this is anything but the case. In one sense, she’s tracking how quickly foodie trends have changed, but in another, she’s pointing out that we’ve always eaten this way—watching others and mimicking their choices, even, as in the case of TikTok-viral chocolate-covered strawberries, it’s not very good. Food writing can be sentimental, often dependent on tender personal backstories and family histories; Tandoh doesn’t say that’s wrong, but rather, she demonstrates that so much of what we eat is actually shaped by external cultural forces much larger than ourselves. (Knopf) —NO
Toni At Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship by Dana A. Williams
‘Toni At Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship’ by Dana A. Williams
By now, everyone is familiar with Toni Morrison the novelist, the Nobel Prize winner, the legend (not to mention bestie of Fran Lebowitz)—but what’s much less known is that before she was an acclaimed writer, she made her living as an editor of trade books at Random House. And not just any editor, but one of the most influential editors of the 20th century, shaping and advancing conversations on Black literature and Black life in America by editing a diverse corpus that proved transformative. As Dana A. Williams chronicles in her thoroughly researched biography, Toni at Random, Morrison’s most visionary editorial project was The Black Book, a scrapbook of sorts, the first of its kind, that set out to chronicle “the full history of Black people in America” by bringing together photos, newspaper clippings, recipes, demographic records, patents of inventions, ads, folklore, little-known facts, and much, much more. What comes through in Williams’s narrative is Morrison’s obstinacy (aka commitment) to building a multiracial book-buying readership in America that went against the received wisdom. She cajoled and charmed and pestered—did anything and everything to get it done. If that weren’t already hugely impressive, she did it all while writing her own groundbreaking oeuvre. (Amistad) —NO
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
‘The Dream Hotel’ by Laila Lalami
You’re standing in line at customs, returning home after an international business trip, and all too aware that your husband is circling the airport in the car with your twin toddlers in the backseat. After a fraught interaction with a government official, you’re flagged and brought to the back office, where you become increasingly frustrated. It is in this frightening but utterly imaginable situation that Laila Lalami places her protagonist, Sara Hussein. Sara’s world is not quite our own, but a not-too-distant projection of what ours might very well become as tech companies continue to harvest our data. Struggling with insomnia, Sara had previously undergone a surgical procedure promising guaranteed REM-cycle sleep on a nightly basis. The catch: By consenting to the fine print, Sara signed over ownership of her dreams to the company manufacturing the implant that makes this harvesting possible, which in turn signed them over to a draconian government bent on preventing crime before it happens. So begins Lalami’s gripping dystopia The Dream Hotel, which chronicles Sara’s Kafkaesque struggles with a corporate bureaucracy intent on monetizing her dreams. As our lives become more algorithmically determined, Lailami offers us a chilling glimpse into an all-too-possible future. (Random House) —NO
Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
‘Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature’ by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
We’re told from a young age that “natural” hierarchies govern the world. This structure, some say, is how humans distinguish between good and bad, lesser and greater. Yet hierarchies have been the basis of cruelty for generations—systems designed to oppress those deemed “abnormal” or anyone who fails to achieve the desired rank. We’re taught not to question these systems, to never wonder why beauty and goodness are conflated, or why creatures deemed more “human,” “pure,” or aligned with white-centric European ideals are typically held in higher esteem than anyone else. But in Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian urges us to reconsider this “natural” order. By examining the vast diversity of the animal world, she invites readers to reexamine human society. Kaishian reflects on growing up with gender dysphoria and how the queer expansiveness of nature stood in stark contrast to rigid social and sexual binaries in her day-to-day life. She realizes that “diversity is not only abundant in nature but is its very premise,” and mourns the socially-constructed division between humans and the natural world. As global warming rapidly encroaches, Kaishian urges us to no longer rely on human superiority or take it as law, because by doing so “we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation.” She adds: “The species that have brought me the most companionship, assurance, and inspiration are those furthest banished from human society, those least associated with the “desirable” traits of being human—upright and logical, two-legged and binary-sexed. My personal connections to these organisms have brought me a sense of queer belonging and comfort in the heaviest of times.” (Spiegel & Grau) —Kenneal Patterson, associate web producer
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by Beth Macy
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ by Beth Macy
I’m obsessed with parsing the intermingled realities of my two worlds, New York’s multi-culti megacity, where I’ve lived my adult life, and the suburbs of Southwest Ohio, where I grew up, a stone’s throw north of JD Vance’s hometown. Beth Macy, the author of Paper Girl (and of Dopesick fame), grew up a stone’s throw east of me, in small-town rural Urbana.
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