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LOOT

Abbas, the hero of James’ lively and symbolically rich third novel, is a poor 17-year-old artisan in Mysore in 1794 when he’s recruited by Tipu Sultan, the local ruler, to apprentice with Lucien Du Leze, a French clockmaker. Together they are charged with making an automaton of a tiger attacking a British soldier. The experience hones his carving skills, but just as importantly it introduces him to an intercontinental power play: Tipu, aka the Tiger of Mysore, is attempting to fend off an incur

MY MEN

In 1876, 17-year-old Brynhild Størset is overwhelmed by her own longings and her religious-induced shame. When she becomes pregnant, an act of violence leads to a miscarriage and, from there, a miserable boat trip from Norway to the United States. She makes her way to the Midwest and moves in with her disapproving sister, Nellie, and her family, even taking a new name: Bella. (Later, she becomes Belle.) Despite the vast landscape, she tries to keep herself small and contained, focusing on her w

ROMAN STORIES

Lahiri’s third collection follows her Pulitzer-winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and Unaccustomed Earth (2008), with novels and essays interspersed. In 2011, she moved from the U.S. to Rome, where she has become a prolific translator and editor in Italian, and like its immediate predecessor, the novel Whereabouts (2021), the stories in this book were written in Italian then translated to English. As a group, they evoke her new city from the perspective of an outsider loo

NERO

To borrow a philosopher’s phrase opining on another era, life in ancient Rome was nasty, brutish, and short—and being on top of the heap didn’t seem to help much. In the year 37 CE, the brutal Emperor Tiberius is dying. Agrippina is related to him by marriage and has a young son, Lucius, who will one day become known as Nero. Sit back and enjoy—or cringe at—this bloody tale that is littered with the bodies of the powerful, the ambitious, and the innocent. The story roughly follows Agrippina and

GILM!

Geoff Smith and his dad have recently relocated from hot, sunny Houston to cold, rainy Portland, Oregon. Not only is the weather difficult to adjust to, but Geoff—a budding guitarist and singer-songwriter—must also cope with the separation from his band mates. The only good thing about the move is his new history classmate, Corinne Shelby. When Corinne challenges Geoff to “write me a song that rhymes something with the word ‘film’”—and promises to take him on a date if he succeeds—his heart soa

THE BRONTËS OF HAWORTH MOOR

The six Brontë children—Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—weren’t permitted to play with the local children but found solace and companionship with each other, playing, writing, and taking long walks on the moors. The children’s educated and literary mother may have influenced their curate father, who came to support education for his daughters. But a disastrous foray in a harsh boarding school tragically led to the tuberculosis deaths of Maria, 11, and Elizabeth, 10, just

WACI! DANCE!

“On the morning of a hot summer day, / you heard the powwow drums over the hill.” The parent and child journey until they reach the site of the powwow. The mother unwraps the child from a cradle board, and the two participate in the sacred community ceremony. Infused with Indigenous joy, the narrative combines stylized text told from the perspective of the mother addressing her child, Lakota words, and vivid images. Cultural touchstones, including ribbon skirts and beaded hapans (moccasins), ar

THE SIXTH LEVEL

Traditional leadership culture, per the authors, has stressed power, profit, and competition. While this approach can yield short-term gains, such success comes at a high price for companies and individuals alike; as teams fight and fragment, underrepresented voices go unheard and employees are reduced to cogs in a corporate machine. The co-authors argue that these toxic cultures have been shaped by aggressively masculine values and winner-take-all dynamics that undervalue empathetic outlooks.

WRONGLAND

It’s been 27 years since Karl left his native city of Ters, Albania, for a better life in Greece and, ultimately, America. The death of his father has brought him back home, however, and he finds a city just as riddled with contradictions as it was when he left. Ters is a city in which Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Soviet pasts mingle, a city “in which everything—religions, people’s names, streets, animals, inanimate objects—existed in double or triple versions.” There he finds his brother, Fr

BRIDGES

From the 10.4-foot-long El Marco Bridge that links Spain with Portugal to the 34-mile Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge—an undulating ribbon in Majewski’s painted overview that sweeps elegantly into the distance and out of sight over the edge of the page—this gallery of nearly two dozen examples, drawn from every continent except Antarctica and Australia, offers both a dazzling catalog of engineering wonders and an opportunity to reflect on their commonalities. “All over the world,” the author/illu

LIFE AND OTHER LOVE SONGS

In her sophomore novel, following The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls (2019), Gray again braids the narrative perspectives of three family members—here Daniel Ozro Armstead Jr.; his wife, Deborah; and his daughter, Trinity. Trinity narrates the opening section of the book, which is set at her father's funeral—though they are burying an empty casket because her father vanished years earlier and his death is only presumed. From there, the sections move back and forth in time to illumi

MELVILL

“Call me Herman.” Such a commandment could come from only one writer, Herman Melville, who stands at the center of Fresán’s narrative. Occupying much of that space, too, albeit in sometimes spectral form, is Melville’s father, Allan Melvill (the -e a typo that his son, the victim of a bureaucrat’s pen, stuck with, even as, later in the novel, he notes ruefully that his obituary in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, where several of his stories appeared, will render his name as Henry). Allan, born to a

HOW TO CATCH A MAMASAURUS

The long-running series continues its successful formula with this Hallmark card of a book, which features bright illustrations and catchy rhymes. This time, the mythical creature the racially diverse children set out to catch is an absent mom who does it all (lists of descriptors include the words banker, caregiver, nurse, doctor, driver, chef, housekeeper, teacher, entertainer, playmate, laundry service, problem solver, handywoman, cleaner, and alarm clock) but doesn’t seem to have a job outs

I'LL GIVE YOU A REASON

In the opener, “Great American Scream Machine,” a teenager named Eva uncovers a secret her parents have kept since she was born: her undocumented status. Later, in “The World as We Know It,” a white couple who call Child Protective Services on their downstairs neighbors inadvertently kick-start the deportation process. In “The Fake Wife,” Chris, an American man, begins to fall for Marisa, the Dominican woman marrying him for a green card. López works where American and international identities

SELF-PORTRAITS

Born in 1909 to a powerful, landed family in Aomori prefecture, Dazai lived a rambunctious socialite’s life—one marred by quarrels, suicides, adulteries, and addictions. He survived the communal traumas of World War II and the atomic bombings before dying, by suicide, in 1948. All this is summarized neatly in translator McCarthy’s introduction, where he praises Dazai as “the one Japanese author who consistently turned out entertaining and worthwhile literature…when the entire nation was toeing

THE EQUINOX TEST

Rose Vera is a fifth-year student at Brooklyn School of Magic. She wishes she were better at school, like her best friend, Amethyst Vern. Unfortunately, Rose is easily distracted, and her spell-casting abilities are limited. The school principal meets with Rose and her parents to discuss her academic performance and the possibility of transferring to the nonmagical Rogers Middle School. Rose is embarrassed at the prospect of not moving up to Middle Magic with everyone else, and she’s certain th

BLOOD IN THE HOLLER

Eric Johnson is a performer in the Midwest American Wrestling Association; his ludicrously misspelled stage name (even he hates it) is “Jiggolo.” While he earns a certain modest measure of notoriety from his profession—his matches are sometimes televised—he’s hardly a celebrity, and his income is fairly modest as well. He hitches a ride with a group of other wrestlers headed to a match in Richmond, Virginia. On the way, they stop at a greasy spoon for a late-night meal deep in the hinterlands o

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY WITH MURDER

When Lauren moves to Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, just before her senior year, the last thing she wants is to get involved in more drama. When she left everything she knew behind in California, desperate to start over in a new place with her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend, all she brought with her were terrible memories of an unimaginable trauma. But Lauren’s plans fail when a no-strings-attached hookup with classmate Robbie Crestmont unwittingly entangles her in something dangerous: She learns

BAKING SPIRITS BRIGHT

Becca Ransom has no regrets about giving up her Los Angeles life to return to her gorgeous childhood home of Larch Haven, Vermont, where winter makes everything in the small town look even more beautiful. Not only does Becca get to be near her beloved grandparents Lolly and Pop; she’s also happily taken over their family chocolate shop, True Confections. When her closest friend, Dizzy Bautista, tries to talk Becca into entering the upcoming third annual Baking Spirits Bright competition, Becca

MISBELIEF

Duke psychology professor Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, Payoff, and other books, begins by chronicling how he was accused of being a shill for big pharma and the “Deep State” for supporting Covid-19 vaccination. Why him? The conspiratorial echo chamber, he notes, searches high and low for heretics, aided by “technology, politics, [and] economics.” The technology is beyond individual control, the politics and economics thorny, and the battle against what Ariely characterizes as m