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THAT REMINDS ME

There’s a life packed inside the pages of this slim novel. One of Owusu’s most impressive achievements here is creating the space of a much larger life—both for the novel’s narrator, K, and for K’s family—through elliptical references. The prose is often stunning: “So now I breathe British air with airs akin to royal heirs—my mum thought she was making a dark life fair.” The first half is told in short vignettes, each a page or less, and even in the second half, the chapters remain brief. K spe

LAZARUS MAN

Thirty-six hours after the event, workers pull from the rubble 42-year-old Anthony Carter, an unemployed biracial schoolteacher and recovering coke addict. In the days—and daze—that follows, he doesn’t find religion as much as it finds him in the form of a female prophet. Targeting him with her “raging aviary of disembodied howls and shouts,” she helps transform him into an unlikely motivational speaker and media star. But close observers, including young freelance photographer Felix Pearl, fin

WE WALK THE EARTH IN BEAUTY

In this third edition of a work originally published in 1991, Hooker shares the pictures of Navajo photographer Helen Lau Running and adds extensive interviews and commentary of her own to a text in which the Diné people talk about their traditional ways of life (the interviewees would often demonstrate time-honored Navajo techniques for Hooker, which Running would photograph). In these pages, readers are introduced to the quotidian aspects of traditional Navajo life, from handling animals to c

QUANTA IN DISTRESS

Hassani observes that quantum physics has always attracted those with an interest in New Age spirituality, especially since the “rush of gurus” to the West in the 1960s. The injection of Eastern thought into Western philosophy, and the fascination with occultism in the West, had much to do with this rush, as well as the inherent “weirdness of quantum physics.” Many of the founders of quantum physics, like Schrödinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg, encouraged this association by publicly linking their w

THE SIEGE OF TYRE

In an absorbing, meticulously researched study, Guenther hones in on Alexander’s 332 BC siege of what was once a Phoenician island—now attached to the coast of Lebanon. In hot pursuit of the Persian emperor, Darius, Alexander made the strategic move to disband the Macedonian-Greek navy, as it was no match for the powerful Persian navy, and instead concentrate on striking by land the string of Phoenician coastal towns that made, supplied, and repaired the great Persian ships. After enduring a lo

IN THROUGH THE SIDE DOOR

Technology giants have long been known for an atmosphere of sexism, with the upper tiers looking like a boys-only club. Malone, head of the interaction design program at the California College of the Arts, argues that women have always been an essential part of the tech equation, even though men reserved the spotlight—and the high-paying positions—for themselves. The “side door” for women to enter the tech industry was the field of user interface design, which called for deep skills in communic

I DO (I THINK)

From author and comedian Raskin comes a sincere examination of the laws, history, and social norms surrounding Western society’s expectations for a successful relationship and marriage. Drawing on personal experience as well as interviews and first-person stories from American couples, she explores the cultural effects of marriage and how modern-day relationships continually change and evolve. Beginning by questioning what the actual definition of marriage is and why so many unions are often di

ONLY IN AMERICA

Today, Al Jolson (1886-1950) is famous mainly as the star of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length synchronized-sound film. More specifically, he’s famous for singing its showstopper, “My Mammy,” in blackface, a performance that would be unthinkable today. But in his heyday, Jolson was the best-paid entertainer on Broadway (earning $5,000 weekly at one point). In Bernstein's thoughtful account, the author of Out of the Blue (2003), China 1945 (2014), and other works, doesn’t diminish

THE WEDDING SHOE SNATCH

Shilpa’s older sister, Maya, is getting married, and Shilpa is nervous. What if she loses Maya to her new family? Maya’s future husband’s younger brother, Rishi, makes her especially uneasy. For one thing, he won’t stop calling Shilpa “Bean.” For another, Maya calls Rishi “sweet”—will Maya ever call Shilpa that again? Shilpa tries to get past these troubles and focus on her main responsibility: upholding the tradition of Joota Chupai, or stealing the groom’s shoes and returning them only when h

CARRIED ON THE WIND

Aiming, as Mabry explains in her afterword, to explore both our connections with the natural world and chaos theory in operation, this globe-spanning episode starts with a tan-skinned child who lives in Alaska breathing on a puff of dandelion fluff—some of which ends up in a Rufous hummingbird’s nest. Eventually, one of the baby birds grows up and flies away to Central America to pollinate a coral bean flower. One resulting red seed floats over the ocean to a West African beach, where a doodleb

FORTUNATE SON

Ben Danvers grew up in rural Vermont with cold, overprotective parents, and now he and his girlfriend live together in Boston, where he struggles to make a name for himself at Cambridge Hill Holdings. Then federal investigators tell him that he was a kidnapping victim in his youth, and that he’s actually the son of one of the most powerful people in the world: Vice President-elect Kimberly Hancock, “a descendant of American royalty. Wealthy beyond measure.”. Together with two FBI agents—one, a

INTO THE UNKNOWN

Geologist Jake Hall works at Maranga Goldfields, a Canadian “junior” mining company. When his boss sends him to the firm’s Mali headquarters to check on a colleague’s gold exploration project, Hall discovers that the man has been injured and that his pregnant wife, Ayesha, has been abducted. While searching for the woman, Hall himself is taken and winds up in a jihadist group’s clutches. His captors want his company, or perhaps the Canadian government, to fork over a tidy ransom for Hall’s rele

SOUR APPLES

It’s the 1970s in Walnut Creek, in an unnamed U.S. state, long before cellphones and social media, and preteen Jimmy Hamilton daydreams about big league baseball, throws crab apples at the neighbor’s cat, and hopes his mom doesn’t order him to tear down his tree fort. On the plus side, summer and Little League are about to start. If only his mother wouldn’t drag him to the library every week. (Jimmy’s dim view of libraries is a frequent reminder of the book’s subtitle: “for those who hate to re

ROMAN IVORY

Robert Stapleton, son of Joseph Stapleton, the “1st Viscount Barrington,” is 19 years old when his father dies suddenly of rheumatic fever in December of 1877. At the formal reading of Joseph’s will, Robert learns that in addition to his father’s title and the family’s two homes (one in London and another in Surrey), he has inherited a third house, located on Carlton Hill in St. John’s Wood, London. The St. John’s Wood house is a surprise—Robert has never heard of its existence, though it’s evi

WHO KNEW?

Packed with 18 spreads of engineering marvels, this book offers a brief introduction to the world of biomimicry (defined here as “the design and creation of materials, buildings, and processes that are modeled on nature”). Madden covers the Japanese Rail’s bullet train (based on the kingfisher bird’s beak), a type of concrete inspired by coral reefs, and space-focused examples, such as the lower body negative pressure device, designed by mimicking the blood flow of the long-legged giraffe. Many

OUR BEAUTIFUL TRIBE

Bella, who has light brown skin and reddish-brown hair, is sad because she hasn’t been invited to her friend Maggie’s party. Bella worries that she and Maggie are no longer “special together,” meaning that Bella herself might not be special. Her Mommy reminds her how much she and Bella’s Daddy love her, and how much Bella’s grandparents love her—even Grandma Louise, who died before Bella was born. This leads to talk of Bella’s eight great-grandparents, and 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on

MYSTERIES OF TRASH AND TREASURE

Detective skills gained in their two previous cases prove useful to Colin and his partner and best friend, Nevaeh. Haddix pitches the pair into an investigation that, despite Colin’s mother’s resolute stonewalling, uncovers some shocking facts about his recently deceased and previously long-absent father. Fueled by a credible mix of anger at being apparently abandoned and a yearning just to know what happened and what his dad was like, Colin’s inner odyssey makes up the emotional core of the st

EDDIE HEST VS. SUBURBIA

Eddie Hest loves living in Detroit and doesn’t want to move, but her landlord has sold the building where she resides. Divorced from her young daughter’s drug-addicted father, Eddie has only 30 days to find a new place for herself and Grace. Eddie has always been a bit of a nonconformist (think purple hair and a variety of tattoos) with a strong streak of independence, but she’s fiercely committed to being a “good mom” to Grace, and that requires setting up a stable home. After borrowing the do

THE NEW ANTISEMITISM

In his careful delineation of the causes of the most recent flare-up of antisemitism, Lappin, a professor of natural language processing, first looks at the big-picture forces that are feeding much of global society’s grievances, including widespread anti-immigration sentiment and ethno-nationalism. As the author demonstrates, extremist movements—such as those whose members chant, “Jews will not replace us”—seem to share four elements: loss of control over their lives and social context; dimini

THE WINTER HEIR

Months after the events of The Claiming (2023), Summer faerie princess Lady Dew Drop, nicknamed “Dewy,” remains a captive of the Winter Fae. They’re confining her to their Winter Court until Spense Ferrous, an apprentice mage in the human kingdom Telridge, tracks down a missing Heir—the child of exiled Princess Snow. It’s a seemingly impossible task that Spense willingly takes on, as he and Dewy have fallen for each other. His plan is straightforward: Find the faerie Oracles and ask them where