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SHORELINE

Nayman, a clinical psychologist and a fiction and nonfiction writer, brings her storytelling skills to bear in her poignant memoir. Unfolding across standalone chapters, the book explores connections with lost friends, her children, and her mother, who continues to be a complicated character in the author’s life even years after her death. “To live is to grieve,” Nayman writes, ruminating on the deaths of close friends and both of her parents, as well as imagining the impact her own future pass

NOWHERE AT HOME

“October leaves / pile up like scattered drafts of some design” the author writes in “Raking” as fall sets in, “aching on this byway to December...” Even so, he still has more in life to conquer, finishing the job with “my feet still two good inches off the ground.” The moodiness of academic life intrudes, as Poitevin, a mathematics professor, is annoyed by a shared office, pesky students, and Red Sox chatter in “Nostalgia for Quieter Times”; he longs for the halcyon days of grad school at the

THE PARTITION PROJECT

Pakistani American seventh grader Mahnoor Raheem, an aspiring journalist, and Talha, her older brother, are instructed by Abba to greet their grandmother with “happy faces”—Dadi is leaving Lahore to live with them in Sugar Land, Texas. But smiling is hard for Maha. She’s had to give up her bedroom for Dadi and move into the attic, and she even has to take care of her after school. She’s excited about media studies, her new elective, but even that goes awry when they’re assigned to make document

ALL THE BEST DOGS

Displaying sharp insight into how both pets and middle schoolers see the world, the author spins interwoven storylines around regular visitors to a Brooklyn dog run. In this safe social space, friendship crises, beloved companions lost and found, tempests emotional and digestive, and new family arrangements play out in benign ways over the course of one June weekend. Narrated in third person, the book follows a bevy of canine and human characters, giving readers true-to-life glimpses of both vi

MINISTRY OF TRUTH

It’s one thing to spin fables about the phone company killing JFK. It’s quite another to take an event within recent memory and twist it out of all recognition—to say, for instance, that the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol was just everyday tourist visitation or legitimate political protest. As Benen, a producer for the Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The Impostors, writes, any Republican who wants to make such claims has to do so without an ounce of bashfulness or self-doubt, for th

AT THE MERCY OF THE SEA

In September 1663, 12-year-old Etienne Gayneau is waiting on the dock in the harbor of New Amsterdam, waiting to board a merchant ship that will take him, as a crewmember, to Boston and then across the Atlantic. He’s a French immigrant whose Protestant family fled religious persecution in his country several years ago. He’s now embarking on a new career at sea. Standing near him is 10-year-old Abraham Dayton, who’s traveling with his English father to Boston, where his dad hopes to obtain a loa

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

BUTTER

Three of the men died in suspicious accidents, one of a drug overdose, another under a train, and another in a bathtub. Determined to score an interview with the assumed murderer, who is in a detention center awaiting a second trial, Rika overcomes the woman’s refusals by expressing great interest in food. To further gain her trust, Rika carries out the extreme assignments concocted by Kajimana, including having sex (with her droopy older boyfriend, as it turns out) before rushing out to consum

SCHLEMIEL COMES TO AMERICA

Schlemiel the tailor lives in Chelm, a town in Jewish folklore famous for fools. He fancies himself wise and a shrewd arbiter, and he just might be…at least, compared with the other Chelm residents. Look what happens when the mayor is frightened that a rock on the mountain looming over Chelm might fall. Some citizens carry the rock down to the village, and Schlemiel remarks they could have rolled it down instead. The villagers haul it back up to where they found it—then roll it down, crushing s

ASH'S CABIN

Ash has always felt like an outsider, and ever since Grandpa Edwin passed away, that feeling of isolation has only gotten worse. Their parents haven’t fully accepted Ash’s recent name change or newly shorn hair, and school isn’t much better. When Ash learns that their family plans to sell Grandpa Edwin’s old ranch, they come up with a plan: to find Grandpa’s secret cabin in the woods and stay there—forever. They earn money, watch online videos to pick up survival skills, and buy food, gear, and

BINDING 13

Beautiful, waiflike, 15-year-old Shannon has lived her entire life in Ballylaggin. Alternately bullied at school and beaten by her ne’er-do-well father, she’s hopeful for a fresh start at Tommen, a private school. Seventeen-year-old Johnny, who has a hair-trigger temper and a severe groin injury, is used to Dublin’s elite-level rugby but, since his family’s move to County Cork, is now stuck captaining Tommen’s middling team. When Johnny angrily kicks a ball and knocks Shannon unconscious (“a so

THE WORKING SOVEREIGN

Most people in a given society are workers, observes Honneth in this accessible work of political philosophy, and it is “one of the major deficiencies of almost all theories of democracy” that this fact is not of central importance. Workers can be made the backbone of civil society by creating dignified conditions that promote cooperative, social behavior; if poorly run, a society will instead produce egocentric, us-against-them citizens. That’s precisely what we have, Honneth argues, because w

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

STARTER VILLAIN

Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along wit

FAMILY LORE

Acevedo’s widely anticipated new novel, her first for adults, begins with an oblique bit of magic: Flor, who for her whole life has been able to predict when and how people will die, announces that she will be holding a living wake for herself, and all her siblings are invited (and their children, too). Whether Flor has predicted her own death—or anyone else’s—doesn’t become clear to either the reader or Flor’s family until later. In the meantime, we’re introduced to Flor’s sisters, Matilde, Pa

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

VENISS UNDERGROUND

Today VanderMeer is celebrated for twisting and stretching the familiar tropes of science fiction in taffylike ways and at epic scale, most famously in his Southern Reach trilogy. His debut novel, first published in 2003, is more compressed but blurs themes and styles in familiar VanderMeer-ian ways, combining cyberpunk, horror, noir, and myth while remaining remarkably cohesive. At the story’s center is Shadrach Begolem, who is on a mission to rescue his beloved, Nicola, who’s been kidnapped b

WESTFALLEN

It all starts with a ham radio that Alice, Lawrence, and Artie fool around with in 1944 and Henry, Frances, and Lukas find in 2023. It’s late April, and the 1944 kids worry about loved ones in combat, while the 2023 kids study the war in school. When, impossibly, the radio allows the kids to communicate across time, it doesn’t take long before they share information that changes history. Can the two sets of kids work across a 79-year divide to prevent the U.S.A. from becoming the Nazi-controlle

MR. S

On the first day of school, a light-skinned man carefully writes the words Mr. S on the blackboard and then, noticing that a tree has crashed on his car, dashes out to the parking lot, leaving behind a stack of papers and a sandwich. When a dozen or so big-eyed students arrive, they argue about what to do in the absence of their teacher, but when a ruler falls to the floor with a mysterious “THWACK!” the kids come to a conclusion: The sandwich is their instructor. Held together with a toothpick

THE NOTEBOOK

British publisher and diarist Allen brings his love of notebooks to a lively, wide-ranging history of bound blank pages. Notebooks, he writes, “interest me as a technology that has had tangible effects on the world around us.” The author started keeping a journal in 2002: “Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made me more reliable (which in turn made those around me happier), and I learned never to go to a doctor’s appointment, or a meeting of any kind, without taking not