Playworld
By Adam Ross
“In the fall of 1980, when I was 14, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was 36, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man.” So begins the tale of Griffin Hurt: older brother, prep-school wrestler and reluctant child star. Ross, a former child actor himself, dapples the novel’s 500-plus pages with nostalgic signposts: Ted Koppel on TV, “American Gigolo” posters on the walls, Christie Brinkley on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Mothers and Sons
By Adam Haslett
In Haslett’s first novel in nearly 10 years, a gay immigration lawyer’s controlled life is disrupted when he takes on the case of an Albanian asylum seeker whose own sexuality is a matter of life and death back home. The lawyer’s estranged mother, a clergywoman, struggles to do good by others while grappling with the secret that ripped her and her son apart.
You’ll Never Believe Me
By Kari Ferrell
In the early 2000s, a figure known as the “Hipster Grifter” became a sensation in certain corners of the internet — acquiring that particular form of salacious scammer notoriety reserved, in this modern age, for young women. In real life, the person convicted of financial fraud and fetishized for cutting a sleazy swath through Vice-era Brooklyn was Kari Ferrell. In her memoir, she takes a hard look at her younger self and at the culture that made — and exploited — her.
The Bewitched Bourgeois
By Dino Buzzati; translated by Lawrence Venuti
Buzzati, a prolific novelist, journalist and artist who died in 1972, never liked his designation as the Italian Kafka, but his fantastical, absurdist fiction certainly evokes the biting humor and social critique of his more famous predecessor. Buzzati published hundreds of short stories in his lifetime; 50 of them — from his early career to his final days — are collected here, some appearing in English for the first time.
The Granddaughter
By Bernhard Schlink; translated by Charlotte Collins
After finding his alcoholic wife dead in the bathtub of their Berlin apartment, Kaspar, a 70-something bookstore owner, discovers an unfinished book she was writing, in secret, about her own history: from her youth in postwar East Germany — including an affair with a Communist Party member that ended in her parting with their baby girl — to her marriage to Kaspar. The remainder of the novel — the latest by the German author of “The Reader” — traces the bookseller’s search for the daughter his wife gave up decades ago.
Immortal
By Sue Lynn Tan
Tan draws on Chinese folklore to craft this stand-alone romantasy about gods, monsters and a young woman determined to change the status quo. When her grandfather suddenly dies, Liyen finds herself inheriting his throne amid domestic turmoil and supernatural threats. She is summoned to the Immortal Realm to pledge her allegiance to the gods above and is determined to use this opportunity to fight for greater autonomy for her people — even if she has to forge an alliance with the enigmatic God of War to do it.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
By Grady Hendrix
“I need you to understand what they did to us when we were girls.” So begins Hendrix’s horror novel about Fern, a pregnant teenager who is sent to a brutal school for girls where the young charges are abused and controlled. Then Fern is given a book about witchcraft, and it gives her the power to change her fate and the structures that determine it.
Death of the Author
By Nnedi Okorafor
Okorafor’s latest follows the high highs and low lows of a struggling author named Zelu whose stalling career is changed when she writes a blockbuster science fiction novel. But as both Zelu and her fictional characters learn, success comes at an unexpected cost — one that challenges what it means to own your own story.
The Containment
By Michelle Adams
Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case overturning racial segregation in America’s public schools, is rightly cited as a landmark for civil rights. But as Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, shows, the promise of Brown to end segregation has been steadily eroded. She homes in on a seminal 1974 case that originated in Detroit, her hometown, and restages the courtroom battles to dramatic effect while probing the rise of a post-Brown legal doctrine that questioned the constitutionality of considering race at all when assigning students to schools.
Good Girl
By Aria Aber
“I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life,” admits Nila, the 19-year-old daughter of Afghan refugees who wanders, parties and drugs her way through contemporary Berlin in this debut novel by a Whiting Award-winning poet. A troubled affair with an older American artist opens some doors for Nila, while simmering racism is a reminder that Germany’s welcome has its limits.
Vantage Point
By Sara Sligar
A Kennedy-esque family — seemingly as cursed as it is wealthy — grapples with a torrent of compromising videos that threaten to topple their lives. Clara and Teddy lost their parents when they were teenagers, and have been the focus of intense scrutiny (and envy) on the Maine island where they grew up. Now, as Teddy barrels ahead with a Senate campaign, they are targeted by an anonymous leaker showing them in compromising positions. But are the videos real, or sophisticated deepfakes?
We Do Not Part
By Han Kang; translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
In the first novel published by the South Korean author of “The Vegetarian” since she won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, a quixotic bird-rescue expedition takes Kyungha, a writer and documentarian, from Seoul to Jeju Island during a dangerous snowstorm. There, Kyungha encounters the specter of her friend Inseon, who recounts her family’s suffering at the hands of the Korean military (backed by the U.S. government) in the 1948-49 Jeju massacres,.
Mona Acts Out
By Mischa Berlinski
A doyenne of downtown theater impulsively leaves her family on Thanksgiving morning, dog in tow, for a daylong Manhattan odyssey, during which she reflects on aging, Shakespeare and the post-#MeToo shift in sexual politics that embroiled her mentor in a career-ending scandal.
Somewhere Toward Freedom
By Bennett Parten
In this vivid and intricate history, Gen. William T. Sherman’s 1864 march across Georgia to subdue the Confederate state’s civilian population is recast as a liberation movement in which half a million enslaved people rushed to join or take refugee with the Union forces — not all of whom were happy to receive them.
Bright Circle
By Randall Fuller
Fuller’s lively group biography introduces readers to five remarkable young women who, in 1830s Boston, gathered to form a “conversation society” in order to answer “great questions.” The salon that resulted prefigured many of the ideas that would come to be identified with Transcendentalism, influencing not just a circle of famed contemporary thinkers but also an entire movement.
Black in Blues
By Imani Perry
Subtitled “How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” this prismatic volume finds the National Book Award-winning Princeton professor meditating on skin color and the indigo trade, Louis Armstrong’s music and Toni Morrison’s writing, in short, lyrical chapters.
Everything Must Go
By Dorian Lynskey
Doomer, polycrisis, collapse culture, Generation Dread: These are just a few of the inventive terms now in circulation that Lynskey cites as evidence of a global fixation on the coming apocalypse. The subject may sound like a downer, but the aim of this book is to show, through examples ranging from St. Augustine to Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Bob Dylan, nuclear winter, the extinction of the dinosaurs and “The White Lotus,” that an obsession with end times has been a feature of human life since forever.
Good Dirt
By Charmaine Wilkerson
In the second novel by the author of “Black Cake,” Ebby Freeman, the adult daughter of a rich Black family in New England, is haunted by a childhood tragedy: At 10, she found her brother dead on the floor of her father’s study in a murder that remains unsolved nearly two decades later. Try as she might to escape that trauma, she remains fixated on the memory — and on a large stoneware jar, made by an enslaved craftsman in South Carolina and passed down in her family for six generations, that was shattered by the gun that killed her brother.
Superbloom
By Nicholas Carr
Fifteen years ago, in his best-selling book “The Shallows,” Carr sounded the alarm about what the internet was doing to our attention span, our ability to absorb and retain information, even our neural pathways. Now, he considers the rise of social media, explaining how platforms originally conceived with grand visions of connecting people around the globe have devolved into fractious conduits of misinformation and aggression at the expense of real-world progress.
The Killing Fields of East New York
By Stacy Horn
In the early 1990s, the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York had the highest murder rate in N.Y.P.D. history. What came to be known as “the Killing Fields,” writes Horn, was a direct result of the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and the ensuing decades of unpunished white-collar crime. Blending the vividness of true crime with original investigative journalism, Horn tells the story not just of one neighborhood, but of an avoidable — and tragic — crisis.
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