In theory we don’t play favorites among the books we recommend here — we love all our children equally, there’s something for everyone, et cetera — but indulge me this week in my particular affection for Maria Zoccola’s nifty debut poetry collection, “Helen of Troy, 1993.” By transferring the basic outlines of Helen’s story to small-town Tennessee, Zoccola’s book plays up the mythic dimensions of grubby chain-store Americana and the mundane, complicated humanity of Greek myth. It’s sharp, and a lot of fun.
Also recommended: a history of Detroit’s attempts to integrate the city’s schools, a philosopher’s case for emulating Socrates, a collection of stories by the terrific and much-mourned Canadian author Mavis Gallant, and new novels by Nnedi Okorafor, John Dufresne, Grady Hendrix and the Nobel laureate Han Kang. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
Nnedi Okorafor
Okorafor’s spellbinding new novel follows Zelu, a once-struggling writer grappling with power, privilege, agency and art after her book becomes a life-changing hit. The novel’s most prominent concern is the nebulous link between artists and their art, and Okorafor cleverly subverts the very nature of this link.
MY DARLING BOY
John Dufresne
In this heartbreaking novel of addiction, written with compassion and wit, a retired journalist races to rescue his son from the painful grip of opioids.
THE CONTAINMENT:
Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
Michelle Adams
In this powerful new book Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, recounts the failed effort to integrate Detroit’s schools through sweeping regional busing rules in the 1970s, struck down by the Supreme Court, and examines the case’s ongoing relevance.
WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS
Grady Hendrix
Set in 1970, in a private home deep in the Florida woods where pregnant teenagers are sent to have babies in secret, Hendrix’s superb new novel offers an unfortunately timely look at the lives of unmarried pregnant girls in the years right before Roe v. Wade was decided. Here, that examination comes with a leitmotif of witchcraft, by way of a mysterious librarian who opens the girls’ eyes.
OPEN SOCRATES:
The Case for a Philosophical Life
Agnes Callard
Could the secret to a good life be devoting yourself to thought, the way Socrates did? So argues Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, who suggests that self-improvement, at least as we usually understand the term, isn’t so much a matter of willpower, but of ideas.
HELEN OF TROY, 1993:
Maria Zoccola
Zoccola’s debut poetry collection transfers the familiar story of Helen of Troy out of Greek myth and into the world of Sparta, Tenn., a real town between Nashville and Knoxville, giving contemporary resonance to her troubled marriage and her affair with an exciting outsider.
WE DO NOT PART
Han Kang
The Nobel laureate’s new novel, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, revisits a violent chapter in South Korean history: Between 1947 and 1954 on Jeju, an idyllic subtropical island off the coast of South Korea, at least 30,000 people were killed in mostly government-perpetrated atrocities. The novel centers on a character who travels to Jeju to rescue a friend’s pet bird, only to uncover the depths of her friend’s obsession with the massacre.
THE UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF MAVIS GALLANT
Edited by Garth Risk Hallberg
Gallant, the great Canadian author who died in 2014, wrote two novels, a play and essays on life in her adopted Paris — but her imagination was most at home in deadpan, icy short stories mined with moments of brutal humor, like the ones in this omnibus collection.
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