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THE CURSE OF EELGRASS BOG

Twelve-year-old Kess and her older brother, Oliver, have lived alone in the Unnatural History Museum ever since Mam and Da left for Antarctica on a research trip ever so long ago. Well, there’s also Shrunken Jim, a pickled, disembodied head Kess carries around in a jar, a staunch if unusual friend. Kess hopes that new exhibits will revitalize the museum, and when newcomer Lilou visits, Kess finds a partner in exploration—and what they learn in Eelgrass Bog upends everything Kess thought she kne

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

OF DREAMS AND DESTINY

After being cruelly betrayed by a boy, Rosetta Academy senior Daphne Elizabeth “DE” McKinley is done with dating. Encouraged by her best friend, Jaya, to consult town psychic Madame Olivera, DE receives an ominous warning about an impending storm—and a death. Madame Olivera also gives her a note stating that, with an open heart, DE can vanquish the storm. Unconvinced, she dismisses it as a hoax. She also eschews love, even resisting handsome new boy Xander Murthy. But DE and Xander find a stran

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

BLUE RUIN

Kunzru’s seventh novel is narrated by Jay, who in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic is in ill health, getting by delivering groceries in upstate New York. His route takes him to an estate that’s coincidentally occupied by Alice, a former flame, and her husband, Rob, Jay’s one-time art school rival. Alice is disinclined to bring him into their pod for fear of infection—or of stoking old drama—so instead hides him in a barn while his health improves. In the weeks that follow, Jay recalls th

REAL TOADS, IMAGINARY GARDENS

For Rekdal, all poems, regardless of form or any other apparently defining feature, require individuals to pay “conscious attention to how [they] think about and use language.” Readers must therefore dispense with interpretations they may bring to a poem and instead become literary “detective[s].” To work toward that end, she dedicates each chapter to in-depth discussions of poetic elements—diction, rhyme, meter, etc.—and to what she calls “forensic” analyses of those elements that she accompli

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

LOVES AND ENTANGLEMENTS

In this assemblage of more than a dozen tales, Bogaty limns the fraught eccentricities that plague relationships between men and women with a perspicacious eye. In the first story, “Obsessed,” a married couple, Carol and Gary, meet a friend named Kempton for dinner. Kempton lives a soap-operatic personal life, one in which he is perpetually “at war with his corporate existence,” clinging fecklessly to his youth. But as messy and infantile as his romantic travails are, Carol can’t help but wonde