new york times book review february 21 2021

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

• Seen & Heard

‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

• Book to Screen Apple TV+ Drops Trailer for ‘Presumed Innocent’

• Seen & Heard Bill Gates Shares His 2024 Summer Reading List

• Awards Winner of the International Booker Prize Revealed

• Profiles Andrea Wang Goes Back to Summer Camp

Our Take On This Week's Bestsellers

Our Verdict

More Seen & Heard

Featured Interviews

• podcast Episode 373: Guest Host Christopher Paolini

• podcast Episode 372: Miranda July

• podcast Episode 371: Best May Books with Aimee Nezhukumatathil

• podcast Episode 370: Alexandra Tanner

• podcast Episode 369: Guest Host David Levithan

The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews

Featuring 318 industry-first reviews of fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and YA books; also in this special Summer Reads Issue: interviews with Kevin Kwan, Ronald Drabkin, Andrea Wang, and Shivaun Plozza; and more

The Kirkus Star

One of the most coveted designations in the book industry, the Kirkus Star marks books of exceptional merit.

The Kirkus Prize

The Kirkus Prize is among the richest literary awards in America, awarding $50,000 in three categories annually.

Great Books & News Curated For You

Be the first to read books news and see reviews, news and features in Kirkus Reviews . Get awesome content delivered to your inbox every week.

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this

Now Read This

Join us each month as we choose a book, discuss it here and take your questions for the author.

Nomadland By Jessica Bruder

Interior Chinatown By Charles Yu

Trick Mirror By Jia Tolentino

Severance By Ling Ma

The Poet X By Elizabeth Acevedo

Helping Children Succeed By Paul Tough

Beaten Down, Worked Up By Steven Greenhouse

Beijing Payback By Daniel Nieh

Citizen: An American Lyric By Claudia Rankine

American Spy By Lauren Wilkinson

The Street By Ann Petry

Disappearing Earth By Julia Phillips

Inheritance By Dani Shapiro

American Prison By Shane Bauer

Heart Berries By Terese Marie Mailhot

Circe By Madeline Miller

The Overstory By Richard Powers

We the Corporations By Adam Winkler

Conversations with Friends By Sally Rooney

The Woman Warrior By Maxine Hong Kingston

The House of Broken Angels By Luis Alberto Urrea

The Fifth Season By N.K. Jemisin

An Odyssey By Daniel Mendelsohn

Brotopia By Emily Chang

The Power By Naomi Alderman

The Wife By Meg Wolitzer

Heart By Sandeep Jauhar

There Will Be No Miracles Here By Casey Gerald

A Separation By Katie Kitamura

American Wolf By Nate Blakeslee

Earning the Rockies By Robert D. Kaplan

What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky By Lesley Nneka Arimah

Pachinko By Min Jin Lee

Less By Andrew Sean Greer

Educated By Tara Westover

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes By Dan Egan

Exit West By Mohsin Hamid

Killers of the Flower Moon By David Grann

Sing, Unburied, Sing By Jesmyn Ward

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#nomadland

‘Nomadland’ by Jessica Bruder

Jessica Bruder’s "Nomadland," chronicles the growing community of transient older Americans who have taken to the road in search of seasonal work. The nomads Bruder followed were usually workers who did not completely recover from the 2008 Recession. Without enough saved for Social Security, and unable to pay off their mortgages, they moved their lives into RVs and trailers, congregating in camps stretching from North Dakota to California to Texas.

The latest selection for our “Now Read This” book club, Jessica Bruder’s “Nomadland,” documents a growing phenomenon in the country — a "wandering tribe" of seasonal workers. It has inspired a new movie of the same name. The film was the big winner at the British Academy Film Awards, and has multiple Oscar nominations. Jeffrey Brown has the latest for our ongoing arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Bruder, a journalist, spent three years speaking to folks on the road to write the book, and lived briefly as a nomad herself. She joined PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on Thursday to answer your questions about her reporting.

Author Jessica Bruder will join PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on Thursday, April 15 at 7:00 p.m. ET, to answer your questions about her book, "Nomadland,"

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month.

The March and April selection for Now Read This is Jessica Bruder's “Nomadland,” which chronicles the growing community of transient older Americans who have taken to the road in search of seasonal work.

Journalist Jessica Bruder says she’s seen a lot of great writers’ advice over the years, but one trick that she particularly likes “wasn’t devised for writers.”

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#interior-chinatown

‘Interior Chinatown’ by Charles Yu

This satirical novel centers around Willis Wu, an Asian actor who is typecast to fill Hollywood stereotypes in television such as “Generic Asian Man” or “Background Oriental Making a Weird Face.” He has a small part on a cop show called “Black and White,” but dreams of one day playing “Kung Fu Guy,” which he sees as the “pinnacle” role he could be offered.

Our February 2021 pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Charles Yu’s “Interior Chinatown,” which won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction.

February 16

Yu discusses how the 2016 election made him reconsider the framing of the American dream — and thus served as the inspiration for “Interior Chinatown” — plus some valuable advice his wife gave him while he was writing the book.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#trick-mirror

‘Trick Mirror’ by Jia Tolentino

“Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion,” is a collection of nine essays examining American life under late capitalism by Jia Tolentino. Her cultural criticism draws heavily on the internet and the myriad ways it shapes our lives.

The January pick for our “Now Read This” book club was a book of essays exploring many aspects of American culture through the prism of the internet and social media. At age 32, author Jia Tolentino has gained acclaim as one of its most astute observers. She’s a also a staff writer for The New Yorker and “Trick Mirror” is her first book. Jeffrey Brown spoke to Tolentino to learn more.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month

December 28

Our January book club pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Jia Tolentino’s "Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion."

“That day freed me from one of the worst traps in both life and writing, where you talk or think about something for so long that you neglect your freedom to just go out and give it a try,” Tolentino said. Read more from Tolentino on how she spent time in solitude while working on “Trick Mirror,” as well as which works form her personal literary canon.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#severance

‘Severance’ by Ling Ma

“Severance” follows Candace Chen, a millennial with a corporate job in book publishing who finds herself among the last survivors of a devastating virus in a largely empty New York City.

December 30

The author of our December pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club answered questions submitted by readers about her novel.

December 24

When writing "Severance," author Ling Ma drew inspiration from various sources, including several films.

December 18

"I thought I could somehow bridge the two," Ling Ma recently told the PBS NewsHour of her novel "Severance." "What if Terrence Malick directed a zombie B movie and this was the voiceover? Would that be in bad taste?"

Our December book club pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Ling Ma’s “Severance,” a satirical novel that takes place during a global pandemic.

“In the beginning, the writing routine sprang from the rhythms and trappings of the office, even as fewer employees showed up and it became deserted,” Ma recently told the PBS NewsHour. After her office closed, she continued writing as she lived off unemployment benefits, one freelance assignment and her own severance package. Ma shares more on her writing routine and sources of inspiration.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-poet-x

‘The Poet X’ by Elizabeth Acevedo

The verse novel chronicles 15-year-old Xiomara Batista’s struggle to adapt to the physical and emotional changes that come with adolescence, and how she finds an outlet in slam poetry.

Our November pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This," is "The Poet X" by Elizabeth Acevedo. She spoke to Jeffrey Brown about finding her voice through poetry and why she wrote a novel in verse.

November 30

“I wanted to make sure that emotionally, tonally, and in terms of the language of experience of the character that I didn’t stray from the heart of the story in trying to impress readers with my verse,” she wrote. You’ll find more insight on “In Translation” in Acevedo’s annotations.

Our November book club pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Elizabeth Acevedo’s “The Poet X”.

November 10

Acevedo said the practice of “reaching closure in poems” helped her realize when “The Poet X” was finished, as she “could sense when the project had said all I needed to say.” Hear more from Acevedo , including on her routine and favorite childhood books.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#helping-children-succeed

‘Helping Children Succeed’ by Paul Tough

In “Helping Children Succeed,” Tough delves into how teachers and caregivers can foster environments where children develop these character traits, and looks at examples of how schools across the United States are working to do so.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended American life. What are its consequences for the education realm, which is already characterized by major inequalities? Tough joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss troubling trends in K-12 and higher education.

When Paul Tough first began reporting on the skills that help children succeed both in and out of the classroom, he drew upon an already robust body of research on the subject.

What should teachers do to help their students succeed? That was a central question that journalist Paul Tough was trying to answer when he came across an innovative study in 2013.

September 30

Our October pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Paul Tough’s “Helping Children Succeed”, which looks at the unique challenges that children dealing with adversity face when they enter the classroom, and how teachers and policymakers can work to improve these students’ chances at success.

When Paul Tough was first starting out as a self-described “young and uptight” reporter, he found it “distressingly hard to ask people questions that struck me as potentially awkward or personal.” Tough shares Ira Glass’ advice and some favorite reads.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#beaten-down-worked-up

‘Beaten Down, Worked Up’ by Steven Greenhouse

“Beaten Down, Worked Up,” which traces the history of the labor movement in the United States, and considers the factors that led to a significant decline in worker bargaining power in recent decades.

Steven Greenhouse, author of our September pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “Beaten Down, Worked Up.”

September 23

Hear from Greenhouse about his reporting, as well as King’s lesson that “all labor that uplifts humanity has dignity,” in an annotated excerpt from the book.

September 14

“I try to keep whatever I write interesting and informative throughout, and hopefully at times it’s even captivating and entertaining,” Greenhouse said. More on his writing routine and sources of inspiration.

September 11

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. Greenhouse will answer reader questions about “Beaten Down, Worked Up” on the PBS NewsHour at the end of the month.

September 1

Steven Greenhouse’s “Beaten Down, Worked Up” traces the history of the labor movement in the United States, and considers the factors that led to a significant decline in worker bargaining power in recent decades.

September 7

Steven Greenhouse, author of “Beaten Down, Worked Up,” recommends these books for a sweeping history of labor in the U.S., as well as stories of specific campaigns and leaders.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#beijing-payback

‘Beijing Payback’ by Daniel Nieh

A fast-paced thriller about a young man whose discovery upon his father’s death of his involvement in a vast crime syndicate leads the protagonist on a journey to tie up loose ends with his father’s former associates back in China.

September 2

"There is a feeling unavailable to people who were born in the United States: None of us can know what it’s like to come from a country that’s not the richest and most powerful country in the world," writes "Beijing Payback" author Daniel Nieh.

Daniel Nieh, author of our August pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “Beijing Payback.”

Nieh told the PBS NewsHour that San Gabriel Valley — which is home to one of the largest Chinese communities in the United States — and more specifically San Dimas, was “an irresistible choice” for the setting of Victor’s sheltered childhood.

Our August book club pick for Now Read This is Daniel Nieh’s “Beijing Payback”

As a Chinese-English language translator, writer Daniel Nieh is well accustomed to thinking in two different languages and straddling the customs and cultures of both East and West. While living in Beijing in 2009, he was inspired to write a page from the perspective of a Chinese-American football player who also spoke a different kind of language.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#citizen:-an-american-lyric

‘Citizen: An American Lyric’ by Claudia Rankine

Our July book club pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is poet Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric.” It’s a collection of essays, images and poetry that consider how individual and collective expressions of racism add up and play out in our contemporary society.

Claudia Rankine, author of our July pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “Citizen: An American Lyric.”

In her book “Citizen,” the poet Claudia Rankine aims to show readers how Black people experience racism in their everyday lives. And to help tell that story, she reached out to visual artists.

Our July book club pick for Now Read This is Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric"

Rankine writes about police brutality, as well as many of the other forms of racism that Black Americans encounter in their everyday lives. She told the NewsHour she was prompted to consider these themes in her work after Hurricane Katrina devastated Black communities in 2005.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#american-spy

‘American Spy’ by Lauren Wilkinson

Set in 1986, the novel follows Marie Mitchell, a young black officer with the FBI who joins a task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the then-president of Burkina Faso. When she finds herself involved in a plot to overthrow Sankara, she begins to reconsider what it means to be a good American and a spy.

Wilkinson talks about other sources of inspiration, and how she came to write “American Spy” as her debut novel.

Our June book club pick is a thrilling story about an intelligence officer who navigates love, family and duty in the years leading up to the end of the Cold War.

Lauren Wilkinson’s “American Spy” is a contemporary take on a classic spy novel, but it originally started as a graduate school assignment: She was prompted to write a short story about the suburbs, and chose Connecticut as the setting.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-street

‘The Street’ by Ann Petry

The Street is a novel published in 1946 by African-American writer Ann Petry. Set in World War II era Harlem, it centers on the life of Lutie Johnson. Petry's novel is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted her character, Lutie Johnson, as a single black mother in this time period.

Ann Petry’s “The Street” was the first novel by a black woman to sell more than a million copies. But over the years, not all of its covers conveyed the complex themes of race and class.

Author Tayari Jones wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ann Petry's 1946 novel "The Street," our May pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This. Jones joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about the "The Street," and Jeff announces the June book selection.

In Ann Petry’s 1946 novel “The Street,” which chronicles an African American woman’s pursuit of the American dream, the main character’s predicament is not unlike that of many workers today.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Tayari Jones, author of an “American Marriage,” on our Google form. Jones will answer reader questions about the enduring relevance of “The Street” which was originally published in 1946, on the PBS NewsHour at the end of the month.

“The Street” by Ann Petry is the May pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour's book club with The New York Times.

Jones, who is the author of “An American Marriage” and several other novels, writes with a typewriter and keeps a couple of pens filled at her desk most of the time. She shares more on her writing routine, as well as the books she’s drawn inspiration from over the years, below.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#disappearing-earth

‘Disappearing Earth’ by Julia Phillips

Set on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, a region where social and ethnic tensions have long shaped the lives of the residents there, Phillips’ novel follows a cast of characters who are connected by the crime. The mysterious disappearance of the Golosovsky sisters one summer day ignites an onslaught of media attention that lays bare the broader tensions, particularly for women who feel their struggles have not been given equal notice.

Julia Phillips, author of our April pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “Disappearing Earth,” and Jeff announces the May book selection.

More than a decade ago now, I started to dream of writing a book set in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. That region, 4,200 miles east of Moscow, is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It hangs off the edge of the country into the Bering Strait. It’s packed with volcanoes, geysers and natural wonders – I couldn’t wait to go.

“The whole book rests on this story one sister tells another about a town that vanished, swept away by a giant wave,” Phillips wrote. “That’s our chunk of disappearing earth.”

Our April book club pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Julia Phillips’ “Disappearing Earth,” a novel about a community’s reckoning with the sudden disappearance of two young girls.

Phillips shares her writing routine, sources of inspiration, and the process of writing “Disappearing Earth”

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#inheritance

‘Inheritance’ by Dani Shapiro

After submitting her DNA for analysis to an ancestry website in 2016, Dani Shapiro received a piece of news that rocked her to the core: The man who had raised her, her now-deceased father, was not her biological kin.

Dani Shapiro, author of our March pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on "Inheritance," and Jeff announces the April book selection.

Years after her dad died, Dani Shapiro found out he was not her biological father. But she had long sought to better understand him through her writing before that moment.

Our March 2020 pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club is Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance.”

February 28

Our March book club pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance”

Our March pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club “Now Read This” is Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance.” Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter. Learn more about the book club here. For Dani Shapiro, finding out that the father who had raised her was not, in fact, her biological dad “was such an impossible thing to learn, in midlife.” The unexpected results

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#american-prison

‘American Prison’ by Shane Bauer

“American Prison” draws from Bauer’s own experience working undercover as an entry-level prison guard at Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Center while on assignment as a senior reporter for Mother Jones. His book weaves together his own stories of working with Winn corrections officers and prisoners, along with the history of for-profit incarceration in the U.S.

February 26

"American Prison" author Shane Bauer highlights a few key moments in the history of prison-as-profit in America, drawing from research he conducted for the book.

February 18

“Power struggles in prison are sometimes overtly violent, but mostly they are psychological and subtle,” he said.

“American Prison” draws from Bauer’s own experience working undercover as a prison guard at Louisiana's Winnfield Correctional Center while on assignment as a senior reporter for Mother Jones.

February 10

“It will make your writing much better in the end,” says Shane Bauer.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#heart-berries

‘Heart Berries’ by Terese Marie Mailhot

Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir traces her family’s history on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia, Canada. Her collected essays address the trauma experienced by indigenous people across generations, as well as the author’s own struggles with mental illness.

Terese Marie Mailhot, author of our January pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “Heart Berries,” and Jeff announces the February book selection.

“Photographs informed parts of the book my memory could not retrieve,” said Terese Marie Mailhot.

The stories I wrote about him always had murky endings, where you could tell the protagonist had unfinished business with him, and that she had been hurt,” said the author of "Heart Berries."

December 31

We’re excited to announce our first book club pick for the new year: Terese Marie Mailhot’s “Heart Berries.”

"I found myself writing the book professors wanted me to write," said author Mailhot, before she decided to strip her "fiction for the truth." Leaving expectations behind, she wrote a memoir, "Heart Berries," because, she said, you have to deal with your history "or it will consume you."

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#circe

‘Circe’ by Madeline Miller

The novel that reimagines the story of Circe, a lesser-known and yet much-reviled goddess and witch from the Greek epic poem "The Odyssey."

Here's a small sampling of the goddess' rich visual history, from ancient Greece to contemporary America.

Madeline Miller, author of our December pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “Circe,” and Jeff announces the January book selection.

December 26

Author Madeline Miller reimagined a reviled minor goddess from the "Odyssey" into a powerful figure who finds herself through hard work and dedication.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. She will answer reader questions on the PBS NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce our December pick for “Now Read This,” our book club in partnership with The New York Times. It’s Madeline Miller’s “Circe,” a novel that reimagines the story of a lesser-known and yet much-reviled goddess and witch from the Greek epic poem “The Odyssey.”

December 13

Before she was the author of the best-selling novel "Circe," Miller believed that she had to write around the clock. Now, she says, “Discipline is important, but so is taking a breath and looking around."

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-overstory

‘The Overstory’ by Richard Powers

In a review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, author Barbara Kingsolver writes that "The Overstory" is "a delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking hoodwink" that seems to be a book about people but is actually about trees -- and reimagining how we relate to them.

November 29

Powers shares his bibliography for “The Overstory” – 26 books that contain a wide range of information about trees, from how the American Chestnut disappeared to histories of radical forest activism.

November 20

Powers annotates the beginning of the first chapter of “The Overstory,” whose first line, about chestnuts, is adapted from the journal of Henry David Thoreau.

"The Overstory" is our November book club for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This"

"The Overstory" is a novel about trees, activism and our relationship to the natural world.

November 18

Powers shares how nature has changed how he writes and lives, the importance of being present and paying attention, and what the book “Harold and the Purple Crayon” means to him.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#we-the-corporations

‘We the Corporations’ by Adam Winkler

Winkler, a professor of law at University of California, Los Angeles, argues that the question of constitutional rights for corporations began long before the controversial Citizens United decision. (In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled the government could not keep corporations or unions from spending money to influence elections.)

Long before there were calls to break up Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, long before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, corporations had gained significant rights and powerful influence in the United States. “We the Corporations” author Adam Winkler shares five people who battled for and against those rights.

Corporations have often leveraged progressive reforms to serve the ends of business, says author Adam Winkler. "Perhaps more surprising is that corporations have also been innovators in constitutional law."

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Adam Winkler on our Google form here. Winkler will answer reader questions on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

Author Adam Winkler argues that the issue of constitutional rights for corporations began long before Citizens United.

"I sit down at the computer every weekday morning and begin to write, even if I feel blocked or don’t have much to say," says Winkler, author of "We the Corporations."

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#conversations-with-friends

‘Conversations with Friends’ by Sally Rooney

“Conversation with Friends,” which is set in Dublin, is a novel told through the eyes of 21-year-old Frances, a student of big ideas and intellectual convictions — until several relationships spin out of her control. It’s a novel about belonging and growing up, about bad decisions and human nature, and about how the world doesn’t always fit into the archetypes we’ve seen or read.

Sally Rooney, author of our September pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “Conversations with Friends,” and Jeff announces the October book selection.

September 17

“I find that when I force myself to slow the pace down a little, I can discover sensory and psychological details I missed or elided in the first draft,” says Rooney, author of "Conversations with Friends."

We’re excited to announce our September pick for “Now Read This”. It’s one of the most talked-about debut novels in recent years: “Conversations With Friends,” by the young Irish writer Sally Rooney.

"Once I identified that impulse, and reasoned myself out of it, I wrote the final scene as it is now – and I felt the novel was finished," Rooney said.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-woman-warrior

‘The Woman Warrior’ by Maxine Hong Kingston

The memoir, which blends autobiography and folktale, dips back and forth in time between the past of Kingston’s ancestors in pre-Mao China, to her growing up Chinese-American in modern-day California, to the fantasy of an imagined life as a female avenger. As cultural critic John Leonard wrote in the New York Times’ 1976 review, the result is a book that is “fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions.”

Celeste Ng, author of “Little Fires Everywhere,” and Maxine Hong Kingston, author of "The Woman Warrior," join Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions.

Author Celeste Ng takes us behind the scenes of the book "The Woman Warrior."

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. Author Celeste Ng, who chose August’s book, will appear on the PBS NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month to take your questions about “The Woman Warrior” and talk about what the book means to her.

Author Celeste Ng chose a classic to re-read for our August book club pick: Maxine Hong Kingston's 1976 memoir, "The Woman Warrior."

"It was so close to my experience, it was almost painful" says the best-selling author.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-house-of-broken-angels

‘The House of Broken Angels’ by Luis Alberto Urrea

It’s the story of what happens when one Mexican American family living on the border comes together for a party — and a funeral. It’s a tender, joyous and intimate novel. And it’s especially timely as questions are being raised about how immigrant families are being treated in the U.S.

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of our July pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “The House of Broken Angels,” and Jeff announces the August book selection.

Luis Alberto Urrea told us that music was key to the writing of “The House of Broken Angels” — so we asked him if he could share a mixtape to accompany the book. He did, choosing a song to match every main character. He calls it: “The Satanic Hispanic Party Mix-Tape.” You can listen and read why Urrea chose each song here.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions. Urrea will answer reader questions on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

In the coming days, we’ll post discussion questions for “The House of Broken Angels,” an annotated excerpt from the book, and writing advice from Urrea. At the end of the month, he will answer your questions on the PBS NewsHour.

Listen to a playlist made by author Luis Alberto Urrea, who says music was key to the writing of his novel.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-fifth-season

‘The Fifth Season’ by N.K. Jemisin

In “The Fifth Season,” the planet is menaced by environmental catastrophe, and its inhabitants struggle to survive. Jemisin’s fantasy novel follows the narratives of three “orogenes,” individuals who can draw power from the earth to subdue its violence. “The Fifth Season,” the first book in her “Broken Earth” trilogy, won the 2016 Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest honor.

N. K. Jemisin joins Liz Flock to answer reader questions on “The Fifth Season,” and Liz announces the July book selection.

Read what Jemisin was thinking as she wrote “The Fifth Season.”

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Jemisin on our Google form here. Jemisin will answer reader questions on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season” is the June pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

Jemisin shares her daily writing routine (she doesn’t get up til 10, but her daily word count is high), her best writing advice (persist, and then persist some more), and how “The Fifth Season” came together (some of it happened at NASA).

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#an-odyssey

‘An Odyssey’ by Daniel Mendelsohn

“An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, And An Epic” is the story of what happened after Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father, Jay, enrolled in his college course on Homer’s “Odyssey.” While the book is family memoir, it is also part literary criticism, as Mendelsohn’s narrative tells us much about — and even reflects — the Greek epic poem itself.

Daniel Mendelsohn, author of our May pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “An Odyssey.” Plus, Jeff announces the June book selection.

Read an annotated page of “An Odyssey,” read more about what Mendelsohn was thinking as he wrote the book, and why Homer’s “Odyssey” remains relevant today.

In the coming days, we’ll post discussion questions for “An Odyssey,” an annotated excerpt from the book, and writing advice from Mendelsohn. And at the end of the month, he will answer your questions on the PBS NewsHour.

Read writing advice from Mendelsohn, author of “An Odyssey.” He shares the books he thinks deserve more attention, his daily writing routine, and more.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#brotopia

‘Brotopia’ by Emily Chang

“Brotopia” is an exposé of the dark, misogynistic side of Silicon Valley, and how that’s seeped in to the everyday tech we use. Chang, a journalist and the host of Bloomberg Technology, employs history, interview, data and anecdote to tell the story.

Emily Chang, author of our April pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “Brotopia.” Plus, Jeff announces the May book selection.

Chang recommends five books you need to read to understand Silicon Valley right now, from the memoir of a tech icon’s daughter to an exposé of corporate fraud.

See Chang’s annotations of a page of “Brotopia” in which she meets a group of teenage girl coders, who discuss what it’s like to be a girl in tech, and what they want to do when they grow up.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Chang on our Google form here. Chang will answer reader questions on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that Emily Chang’s “Brotopia: Breaking Up The Boys’ Club Of Silicon Valley” is our April pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

Chang, a Bloomberg TV correspondent who covers technology, shares the moment that lit the fire in her to write “Brotopia,” the best advice she received while writing the book, and the children’s books that inspire her.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-power

‘The Power’ by Naomi Alderman

In “The Power,” Alderman imagines a future in which women have special (electrostatic) powers that flip the established gender dynamics and turn the world on its head.

Naomi Alderman, author of our March pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “The Power.” Plus, Jeff announces the April book selection.

Alderman addresses the burning question that many of our book club members have had, and that many readers have asked her: What’s the deal with the voice?

“Shame takes our bodies away from us. I can’t say it more clearly than that,” she explains. Read more of what Alderman was thinking in her annotation of that scene here.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions. Alderman will answer reader questions on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that Naomi Alderman’s “The Power” is our March pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.” It’s a genre we haven’t tackled yet: science fiction.

Alderman, who is both a novelist and game writer, shares where the book began (maybe at her bat mitzvah), her writing routine (but don’t expect it to last), and the best writer’s advice she’s ever received (it’s all about saying no). In her words:

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-wife

‘The Wife’ by Meg Wolitzer

“The Wife” is a darkly funny, intelligent tale of what happens when you decide to stop sacrificing your own talents in service of your spouse’s success. Glenn Close, who plays the title character in last summer’s film adaptation, is up for an Academy Award for her performance.

Meg Wolitzer, author of our February pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about “The Wife.”

February 19

Author Meg Wolitzer explains where she gets her settings and stories, why she set the book in the first person (from Joan’s perspective), and how she creates humor on the page.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Wolitzer on our Facebook page, some of which she will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that “The Wife” by Meg Wolitzer is the February pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club.

February 12

Read writing advice from Wolitzer, about her daily writing routine, and the one book she thinks everyone should read.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#heart

‘Heart’ by Sandeep Jauhar

“Heart: A History” is an exploration of our most vital organ and favored metaphor. Jauhar, a cardiologist, surveys the heart from all angles — the public and personal history, as inspiration for poets and scientists, what it means for doctor and patient alike.

Sandeep Jauhar joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “Heart.” Plus, Jeff announces the February book selection.

Jauhar walks through an angiogram procedure, done on a real-life patient at his hospital, to explain to readers how it works, what it looks like, and how it can save a life.

Jauhar explores more deeply the actions of C. Walton Lillehei, an American surgeon considered the father of open heart surgery and one the most innovative surgeons of the 20th century.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Jauhar on our Facebook page, which he will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that “Heart” by Sandeep Jauhar is the January pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club.

Read writing advice from the author, including the counterintuitive but useful guidance: “Don’t be such a writer!”

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#there-will-be-no-miracles-here

‘There Will Be No Miracles Here’ by Casey Gerald

“There Will Be No Miracles Here” is part memoir and part meditation, tracing Gerald’s journey from his childhood in a poor neighborhood in Dallas all the way to Yale and the halls of power. It also questions what that power means in America today, how it is attained and who it hurts. The New York Times named it a best book of 2018.

December 27

Gerald shares a playlist of songs to accompany you while reading his memoir.

Casey Gerald joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “There Will Be No Miracles Here,” and Jeff announces the January book selection.

Gerald annotates the first page of the book, which opens at the end of the world (or the supposed end of the world), and in which we are introduced to his unique writing style, often questioning and irreverent.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Gerald on our Facebook page, which he will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

November 28

We’re excited to announce that “There Will Be No Miracles Here” by Casey Gerald is the December pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

December 10

Gerald shares his writing routine (he writes by hand), his favorite childhood book (“The Boxcar Children”) and the best writing advice he’s received.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#a-separation

‘A Separation’ by Katie Kitamura

“A Separation” is a psychological thriller about a woman who learns that her estranged husband has gone missing in Greece, and tries to find him. It explores intimacy and infidelity, power and control. It was named a best book of the 2017 by The New York Times, NPR, Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and many more.

Katie Kitamura, author of our November pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “A Separation,” plus Jeff announces December’s book.

November 23

Kitamura recommends a list of three psychological thriller films to watch alongside her novel — movies that follow the missing and murdered, and also walk the line between the real and the imagined.

November 14

In the pages Kitamura annotates, she explains how her fascinations with masculinity and privacy in a marriage became major themes in the book, as well as the significance behind certain references.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Kitamura on our Facebook page, which she will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that “A Separation” by Katie Kitamura is the November pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club.

Kitamura shares her writing routine (much different now that she’s a mother), her favorite childhood book (it’s actually a series) and the best writing advice she’s received.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#american-wolf

‘American Wolf’ by Nate Blakeslee

“American Wolf” tells the tale of O-Six, a Yellowstone alpha female who was known as the “most famous wolf in the world“. As author and environmental activist Rick Bass writes in The New York Times Book Review, it also tells the story of the people who love and hate the wolves (which were reintroduced to the Rockies in recent decades), and the complex politics of the West surrounding them.

Nate Blakeslee, author of our October pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer questions from readers, plus Jeff announces November’s book.

See photos of the wolves, their human wolf watchers and some of the settings from the book, with insights from author Nate Blakeslee.

Blakeslee explains more about how he reported the book, why he lingered on certain moments, and the decision to describe the wolves with both human-like and very canine qualities.

Haven’t yet received the book? Here’s an audio clip to get you started, narrated by Mark Bramhall, from the first few pages of Chapter 1. The passage describes O-Six and her pack hunting an elk, which is common prey for the wolves, and also one of the reasons hunters feel threatened by the wolves’ presence.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Nate Blakeslee on our Facebook page, which he will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month

We’re excited to announce that “American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West” by Nate Blakeslee is the October pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

Read about Blakeslee’s daily writing routine (erratic, he says), the best writing advice he’s ever received (it was more of a threat than advice), and how the seeds of the book “American Wolf” were planted.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#earning-the-rockies

‘Earning the Rockies’ by Robert D. Kaplan

“Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World” is a mix of road trip, memoir, history and political analysis by Robert D. Kaplan, a geopolitical thinker and bestselling author of 17 books on foreign affairs and travel.

Robert Kaplan, author of our September pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer questions from readers, plus Jeff announces October’s book.

September 19

Robert Kaplan said he knew the mixing of genres in “Earning the Rockies” ran the risk of alienating some readers. Parts of the book read like a travelogue, while others delve into foreign policy and geopolitics. But that was intentional.

September 13

To really earn the sight of the Rockies and comprehend what those mountains mean, Robert Kaplan writes that you have to drive for days across the prairie and the Great Plains. Flying there in an hour or two won’t cut it.

September 4

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Robert Kaplan on our Facebook page, which he will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that “Earning the Rockies” by Robert D. Kaplan is our September pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

September 10

In his three-decade career, best-selling author and analyst Robert Kaplan has reported from nearly every region of the world and authored 18 books on foreign affairs and travel.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#what-it-means-when-a-man-falls-from-the-sky

‘What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah

“What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky” is a debut short story collection from Nneka Arimah that ranges from realism to folk tale to sci-fi, telling tales of family and home. It won the 2017 Kirkus Prize and New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

Jeffrey Brown speaks with Lesley Nneka Arimah, author of “What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky,”

Nneka Arimah annotates a page of “Glory,” explaining where she got the opening scene, how she sees Glory, and the challenge of writing unlikeable characters.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Nneka Arimah on our Facebook page, which she will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that “What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky” by Lesley Nneka Arimah is our August pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

Nneka Arimah says the collection is the product of years of published stories, decades of voracious reading and a long “brewing” process for each story until it finally comes to a boil. She shares her writing routine, the best writing advice she’s ever received, and the overlooked books she thinks are important to read now.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#pachinko

‘Pachinko’ by Min Jin Lee

"Pachinko" is an epic family saga and historical novel about ethnic Koreans who migrate to Japan. It was a National Book Award finalist for fiction, and the New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of the year.

Min Jin Lee, author of our July pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer questions from readers, plus Jeff announces August’s book.

Earlier this month, PBS NewsHour visited Lee and her mother in their home in Harlem in New York City to learn how to make their family recipe for stuffed cucumber kimchi, or “oi-soh-bahgi.”

Lee annotates the first page of “Pachinko.” In her annotations, she explains why she chose that as the book’s opening line, how she finds her ideas, and what she was thinking as she wrote.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. You can also submit your own questions for Min Jin Lee on our Facebook page, which she will answer on the NewsHour broadcast at the end of the month.

We’re excited to announce that “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee is our July pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

Min Jin Lee shares her daily writing routine, the best writer’s advice she’s ever received, and the overlooked books she thinks are important to read now. In her words:

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#less

‘Less’ by Andrew Sean Greer

'Less' is a laugh-out-loud comedic novel about a failed writer named Arthur Less — referred to throughout the book only as “Less” — who sets out on a round-the-world trip to avoid attending his ex-boyfriend’s wedding.

Andrew Sean Greer, author of our June pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer questions from readers, plus Jeff announces July’s book.

For the Now Read This book club, Greer replicated three of those exercises, on “omission,” “order” and “beginnings.”

Greer annotates a page of “Less” that hinges on the narrator’s identity (spoiler alert) and the book’s central heartbreak. In his annotations, Greer also talks about how he established the novel’s unique voice and humor, and why he sometimes tries to disorient the reader.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. They go in chronological order of the book’s chapters, so you can match the questions to your pace as you read. Spoiler alert for some of the latter questions below.

We’re excited to announce that “Less” by Andrew Sean Greer is our June pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

Greer shares advice on how he writes (daily), what he reads (poetry, among lots of other things), and how he gets out of a writer’s funk (it can take awhile).

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#educated

‘Educated’ by Tara Westover

'Educated' is a memoir of growing up in remote Idaho in a survivalist family who did not believe in formalized education, and how Westover ultimately made her way to Harvard and Cambridge.

During the NewsHour interview, Westover sang a Mormon hymn from her childhood: “Come, Come Ye Saints.” Mormon poet William Clayton wrote the poem in 1846 after learning that one of his wives had given birth to a healthy baby boy. Watch and listen to Westover sing the hymn

Tara Westover, author of our May pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer questions from readers, plus Jeff announces June’s book.

Westover annotates the first page of “Educated” to show readers how she chose her language and imagery, and explain the themes and ideas she wanted to set up from page one.

Because Tara Westover had never been allowed to go to school, the only history she had learned was the history her father taught her. "His perspective was my perspective," she says, and his fears became her fears. But when she discovered education -- different from school -- she began to construct her own mind from a diversity of ideas. Westover shares her humble opinion on remaking yourself.

Here are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. The questions are broken into three parts, to match the three parts of the book. (Spoiler alert on questions further down, which mention specific scenes in the book.)

"Educated," a memoir by Tara Westover of growing up in a survivalist family in remote Idaho, is our May pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

Since Westover’s memoir “Educated” was released in February, it has topped bestseller lists and been one of the most talked about books of the year. Below, Westover shares advice for how she writes, what she reads, and the best piece of writer’s advice she’s ever received. “Inspiration is a myth,” she says.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#the-death-and-life-of-the-great-lakes

‘The Death and Life of the Great Lakes’ by Dan Egan

Dan Egan's 'The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,' an epic and wonderfully told story of history, science and reportage, tells the story of the largest source of freshwater in the world, and the threats to America's waterways.

We’re never going to get complete control of the Great Lakes, says Dan Egan, who recommends greater humility for what nature can do to restore itself.

The quagga mussel is a small but dangerous invasive species in Lake Michigan. Dan Egan explains why in an annotated page of his book "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes."

Dan Egan's 'The Death and Life of the Great Lakes' — an epic portrait of the Great Lakes and the perils they face — is our next pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This."

We unveil our April selection for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This."

Dan Egan likes to say that he may be the only journalist in America whose beat is the Great Lakes.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#exit-west

‘Exit West’ by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid’s novel "Exit West," which blends the real and surreal, follows two people on the move from a country on the brink of civil war.

Mohsin Hamid says he has been migrating his whole life, his own experience playing a part of the inspiration for his newest novel. Hamid, author of our March pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer questions from readers, plus, Jeff announces April's book.

Mohsin Hamid's novel "Exit West," which follows two lovers on the move from a country on the brink of civil war, is our March pick for the new PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This."

In 'Exit West,' a city in the Muslim world is plunged into violence and two lovers join the mass migration of our time. Mohsin Hamid's story about refugees is a novel, not journalism, but it combines the surreal with the very real. Hamid sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss what inspired him and why he says he’s seeing a "failure of imagination" around the world.

'Exit West' author Mohsin Hamid shares his daily writing routine, favorite books and the best bit of writer's advice he's ever received.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#killers-of-the-flower-moon

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ by David Grann

The true crime tale, set in the 1920s, is about the mysterious murders of wealthy members of the Osage Indian nation after oil was discovered on their land. It was nominated for this year's National Book Award for nonfiction.

February 27

As part of the NewsHour and New York Times book club, Now Read This, author David Grann answers your questions about "Killers of the Flower Moon,"" his true crime book on the 20th century Osage murders. And Jeffrey Brown announces the March pick, a book that takes a surreal look at modern migration.

February 15

Author David Grann shares powerful images from one of the FBI’s first major homicide investigations, which he details in his book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI."

Questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month.

Author Dave Eggers reviews the book in the New York Times Book Review.

Grann shares how he found this story, and how he writes — from his daily routine, to the book he thinks everyone should read, to the best piece of writer’s advice he ever received.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this#sing-unburied-sing

‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ by Jesmyn Ward

The novel, set in contemporary Mississippi, is about family, ghosts, and the legacies of violence and love. It won this year's National Book Award for fiction.

Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, Mississippi, has a long history as a penitentiary. And it features as a haunted setting in Jesmyn Ward’s National Award-winning 2017 novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing.”

Ward shares the best writer’s advice she’s ever received, her daily writing routine, and more.

Your guide to Now Read This.

At the end of the month, Ward will take your questions on the PBS NewsHour program. Submit your questions for her.

U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reviews 'Sing, Unburied, Sing.'

Jesmyn Ward joins Jeffrey Brown to talk about the fictional Mississippi town featured in her stories, as well as her own childhood home.

February Book Review: 'One By One'

   The #1  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Turn of the Key  and  In a Dark Dark Wood  returns with another suspenseful thriller set on a snow-covered mountain. 

Ruth Ware, an alias for Ruth Warburton, is a British, psychological-crime, thriller author and no stranger to the New York Times bestsell er list . Her latest book, One By One, could be the perfect read when you leave the slopes surrounding us here in Park City and curl up by the fire.

T he body count in a Ware story is normally quite low, so this is an exception to the rule. When asked about her inspiration, the author replied, “ I’ve always wanted to do sort of a Christie-ish, And Then There Were None, with people kind of being picked off one by one in a remote location. ” A skier, herself and having experienced some exciting and rather fearful runs down treacherous slopes, she decided a ski resort isolated on a mountain might just be the perfect setting.

In the luxurious French ski resort of St. Antoine, the chef and manager of a private chalet await the arrival of their corporate guests . T he chairman and shareholders of a h igh tech computer software company have planned an off-site retreat to work on mindfulness and collaboration. And, as it turns out, to debate on whether or not to accept an extremely lucrative buyout offer. At least it will be lucrative for some, not so much for others.

Ware puts us into the heads of different people in the group as we learn who they are, their involvement with the company and relationships with each other. When members of the party begin to disappear or die one by one, there is obviously much more at stake than a business deal.

I love the author’s style of using various points of view to tell us the story as it unfolds. Ware develops great characters with intriguing backstories. They are a unique cast in a page turner that will have you looking over your shoulder and not really sure who m you need t o warn and who m you need to watch out for.

O ne by One by Ruth Ware can be found at our local libraries. 

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly explores how he managed to dominate his country’s political life for decades. Jackson’s account of De Gaulle’s youth and conservative milieu only enhances one’s respect for De Gaulle’s stand, in 1940, against the Vichy government, and his account of De Gaulle’s war years in London makes clear why Churchill and Roosevelt found him almost impossible to deal with. The second half of the book—which deals with De Gaulle’s return to power during the conflict in Algeria, and his somewhat autocratic presidency—is even more compelling; together the two halves form as good an argument as one can make for believing that a single individual can alter the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and a sure grasp of the politics and personalities of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, never allows that argument to overshadow De Gaulle’s extremely difficult and domineering personality, and why it never entirely fit the democracy he helped rescue and then presided over. —Isaac Chotiner

“ Segu: A Novel ,” by Maryse Condé

In a year that began with an attempted coup, it was good to remember that zealotry and factionalism have menaced every society—and often make for excellent storytelling, too. Maryse Condé’s 1984 novel “Segu” opens in the ruthlessly competitive capital of the eighteenth-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the ruling mansa uneasily monitors the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. Griots sing the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose sons are destined to suffer every consequence of modernity’s upheavals. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and “Segu,” her masterpiece, is the mother of diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traores as they are scattered across the globe, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, pulled every which way by their ambitions, lusts, and religious yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a world in flux, whether it’s the ambivalence of a man torn between his family gods and Islam’s cosmopolitanism or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed woman who sells slaves on the coast of Senegal. Despite its magisterial scope, “Segu” is also warm and gossipy, and completely devoid of the sentimental attachment to heritage that turns too many family sagas into ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that doesn’t play favorites, especially with her mostly male protagonists, whose naïve adventurism and absent-minded cruelty (especially toward women) profoundly shape the history that eludes their grasp. —Julian Lucas

“ Upper Bohemia: A Memoir ,” by Hayden Herrera

I came upon this recent memoir while browsing the shelves at the Brooklyn Public Library, and was immediately drawn in by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two young girls, perched out the back window of a sports car, whose ruffled blouses and blond hair suggested a kind of patrician free-spiritedness. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in “Upper Bohemia” she turns to the story of her own family, a high-Wasp clan as privileged as it was screwed up. During the nineteen-forties and fifties, Herrera and her older sister Blair were shunted, willy-nilly, between their divorced parents, both of whom were possessed of great looks, flighty temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and father—each married five times—often disregarded the girls, treating them as considerably less significant than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, whose pursuit took them through urbane, artsy circles in Cape Cod and New York, Mexico City and Cambridge. Herrera tells a fascinating cultural history of a particular milieu, but what is most affecting is her ability to channel, in sensate detail, the life of a lonely child trying to make sense of the world around her. Her tone carries a measure of detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. “Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce,” she writes. “Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.” This is a beautiful book. —Naomi Fry

“ Long Live the Post Horn! ,” by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!”—a swift, darkly funny novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service—buoyed me during this strange, roiling year. Ellinor, the novel’s narrator, is a thirty-five-year-old public-relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a bleak, steady detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor grudgingly inherits one of his clients: Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, which wants to fight an E.U. directive that would usher in competition from the private sector. For Ellinor, the project begins creakily; gradually, she gets swept up. What results is a personal awakening of sorts—a newfound desire to live, connect, and communicate—and a genuinely gripping treatment of bureaucratic tedium. “Long Live the Post Horn!” is rich with political and philosophical inquiries, and gentle with their delivery. They arrive in the form of dissociative diary entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world’s loneliest description of a sex toy (“he had bought the most popular model online, the one with the highest ratings”). There’s also a long yarn told by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, near-mythic embedded narrative. “What exactly did ‘real’ mean?” Ellinor wonders, experiencing a crisis of authenticity while desperately trying to produce P.R. copy for the Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. “Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looked like every other capitalist.” Expansive and mundane—this novel was, for me, sheer joy. —Anna Wiener

“ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” by Lea Ypi

Some people feel free to imagine their lives unbounded by history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most sealed-off countries in the Communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until the day, in 1990, that she went to hug his statue and found that protesters had decapitated it. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism collapsed, too. Even more disorienting was the fact that Ypi’s parents turned out never to have believed in it—they’d just talked a good line to prevent their dissident, bourgeois backgrounds from tainting her prospects. Ypi’s new book, “Free,” out in the U.K. and to be published stateside in January, is a tart and tender childhood memoir. But it’s also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose in a world where history, far from having ended, seems energized by disinformation. Ypi, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought—“proletariat,” for instance—were replaced by reductive rallying cries like “freedom.” “When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen,” she writes. “We chewed little, swallowed fast and remained hungry.” Her parents became leaders in the new democratic opposition but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country devolved into civil war, in 1997, her formidable mother had to leave for Italy, where she worked cleaning houses. When Ypi studied abroad, her leftist friends didn’t want to hear about her experience: their socialism would be done right, and Albania’s was best forgotten. But Ypi is not in the business of forgetting—neither the repression of the system she grew up in nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but, like Marx’s spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you. —Margaret Talbot

“ Harrow: A Novel ,” by Joy Williams

I have already written at length about the wonder of Joy Williams’s most recent novel , “Harrow.” But I feel compelled to re-state my case. The book is set in a world that climate change has transformed into a grave, and it’s dense with wild oddity, mystical intelligence, and with a keenness and beauty that start at the sentence level but sink down to the book’s core. “Harrow” tracks a teen-ager named Khristen across the desert, where she eventually meets up with a sort of “terrorist hospice” of retirees determined to avenge the earth. Her companion, Jeffrey, is either a ten-year-old with an alcoholic mother or the Judge of the Underworld. Williams, the real Judge of the Underworld, moonlights here as a theologist, animal-rights activist, mad oracle, social historian, and philosopher of language. Her comic set pieces—e.g., a birthday party in which the hastily provisioned cake depicts a replica, in icing, of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”—unlock tears, and her elegies wrest out laughter, if only because it’s absurd to find such pleasure in a study of devastation. When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me. —Katy Waldman

“ A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera ,” by Vivien Schweitzer

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends holed up in his study—a sunken room, adorned with a ratty Chesterfield sofa and posters from various international chess championships—listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. I didn’t understand the languages blaring out of his record player, and I wasn’t old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in the form. Opera is about Big Feelings; it radiates youth, yet it remains a passion that most people age into. (Perhaps that has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to do was listen to Maria Callas, whose unhinged arias clicked into place as the soundtrack for my anxious, pacing mind. My grandfather was no longer around to discuss my fixation, but, fortunately, I found Vivien Schweitzer’s 2018 book, “A Mad Love,” which is a sparkling cultural history of opera’s greatest composers and their obsessive brains. Beginning with Monteverdi and barrelling through to Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat that goes into writing an opera (an often lunatic effort, it seems), and about the feverish attachment fans have to the resulting work. I found myself tearing through it in the bathtub, delighted not just to inhale the gossipy backstories of the “Ring” cycle and “La Traviata” but to join the society of opera nuts of which my grandfather was a card-carrying member. I finally understood what he was listening for on those Sunday afternoons: anguish, joy, love, betrayal. —Rachel Syme

“ Not One Day ,” by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

It is a peculiar feeling, reading a book that seems to have been written for you but wasn’t. The friend who recommended the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s “Not One Day” must have known that I would find this merger of intimacy and anonymity irresistible. While recovering from an accident that has left her body immobile, the book’s narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired. Each woman will be identified by a letter of the alphabet; to each letter, she will devote five hours a day for precisely one month. She knows that narrating desire requires discipline—and she finds that desire always, always exceeds it. Letters are skipped and jumbled, so that the table of contents reads, “B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z.” The narrator takes a long break from the project and, when she comes back to it, one of the stories she writes is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of “our little selves” in check—self and other, past and present, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion—get wonderfully and terrifyingly muddled. Instead of a confession written in the familiar “alphabet of desire,” we glimpse the making of a whole new language. I could smother the book with adoration—it is aching and maddening, intelligent and wildly sexy. But it would be simpler to say that reading it is like meeting someone new and feeling the world come undone. Here is a book that insists that the desire for fiction, for its mimicry and its mirage, is indistinguishable from the desire for another person. —Merve Emre

“ Tom Stoppard: A Life ,” by Hermione Lee

For a time this year, Lee’s newest biography just seemed to be around , and during a couple weeks when I was ostensibly reading other things, I found myself opening it in odd moments—over breakfast, waiting for the pasta pot to boil—until I realized that I’d worked my way through the whole thing. The biography is nearly nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a side pleasure, a lark, is a testament to Lee’s craft. Much of Stoppard’s history is widely known: his passage from peripatetic refugee youth to Bristol newspaperman and radio-drama hack, and then, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to fame and fortune as a witty playwright. What Lee adds is detail, particularly around interesting career turns, plus a big serving of her own admiration. (Not entirely to its credit, I think, this is the sort of biography that everyone dreams of having written about them; our protagonist is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard, on reading it, was apparently moved to clarify that he was “not as nice as people think.”) What Stoppard contributes is an air of whimsy on the ride up his great tower of success. There is pleasant cohesion to his body of work, with its blend of bookish intellection and breezy verbal humor. Off the page, it becomes clear, he pairs casual social climbing with the cheery pursuit of material ease, often courtesy of Hollywood. He has maintained a stream of scriptwriting work, on projects such as the Indiana Jones franchise, and his constant efforts to boondoggle more luxury out of what’s offered him—his budget must be increased to accommodate a high-end hotel suite, he tells a studio, “because I prefer not to sleep and work in the same room”—are among the smaller charms of this book. Lee’s biography is ultimately such a pleasure, though, because it is a writer’s book: full of respect for the thrill of the craft, able to keep the progress of the life and the work aloft in the right balance. To read it is to be excited about the act of literature all over again. —Nathan Heller

“ Novel 11, Book 18 ,” by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

I first encountered “Novel 11, Book 18,” by the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, on a bright, warm day, on a walk with some friends who were visiting from out of town. Buzzed on the weather and the handsome paperback cover—deep green on cream—and, above all, on the nearness of my friends, I bought it. It was almost funny, then, to discover how relentlessly bleak the book is. Published in 1992, but released in the United States this year, by New Directions, with an English translation by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who has left his wife and son in pursuit of his lover, Turid Lammers. The change of life means a change of locale: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small, airless town where he soon joins an amateur theatre troupe, of which Turid is widely considered the most talented performer and a kind of spiritual leader. In probably the best and darkest bit of situational comedy that I read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the troupe—usually a vehicle for light musicals—to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” He wins out, but the show is a terrible flop—and, worse in Hansen’s eyes, Turid gives a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, from the more general disapproval of the audience. The relationship is soon over. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that repeat themselves in a fugal fashion, gathering new and ever sadder aspects of meaning as they recur. Hansen, wading through the disappointing wash of his life—he’s having the worst midlife crisis imaginable—eventually cooks up a scheme of revenge that’s so sad and absurd it’s almost slapstick. The book’s generic title implies that tiny tragedies like Hansen’s are happening everywhere, all the time, as a simple cost of being alive. For Solstad, what feels like a reprieve—sun and intimacy, the company of friends—is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe save this one for summer. —Vinson Cunningham

“ Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes ,” by Claire Wilcox

Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was “Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes,” a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and she writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity: century-old gowns are made from “narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom.” But this fragmentary, dreamlike book is not about fashion as it is often understood. There is no industry gossip, no analysis of trends. Rather, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the bags of lace in the museum’s collection, the pair of purple velvet trousers she borrowed from a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe. The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another, so that the sensation of holding a button in her fingers brings Wilcox back to her earliest memory of fastening her mother’s cardigan: “buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down again.” —Rebecca Mead

“ Sabbath’s Theater ,” by Philip Roth

Over the course of the pandemic, the actor John Turturro and I have been adapting Roth’s novel for the stage, so I’ve read the book probably twenty times now. I have been astonished again and again. It’s never the adulterous urinating or alte kaker underwear-sniffing that shock me. It’s Roth’s singular capacity for conjuring death—its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the relentless ache that it leaves behind. There are times when Roth approaches the subject with a cosmic lightheartedness: “Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks his dead mother’s ghost. “Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue?” When it pertains to Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian mistress—his “sidekicker,” as she puts it—death is tinged with so much yearning that it’s almost too much to bear, for both Sabbath and the reader (this one, anyway). “Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed,” Sabbath thinks, recalling the last of many nights he spent at her hospital bedside. “Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too.” For all of Sabbath’s lubricious opportunism, Drenka is his one love. “We can live with widespread and we can live with tears; night after night, we can live with all of it, as long as it doesn’t stop.” But it does, of course. It always stops. Though not, in this book, for Sabbath, Roth’s most unrepentantly diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation with suicide: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” —Ariel Levy

“ Warmth ,” by Daniel Sherrell

In “Warmth,” the writer and organizer Daniel Sherrell’s bracing début memoir , he refers to climate change as “the Problem”—the horrifying, galvanizing fact that should cause all sentient people to lose sleep, to shout themselves hoarse, to reorient their lives in fundamental ways. And yet, apart from a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic, shushing anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my harsh indictment, not Sherrell’s. For an unabashed climate alarmist, he is mostly compassionate to the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he used to be one. Sherrell was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, took long research trips to the polar ice caps. Of all people, the Sherrells understood what an emergency climate change was—and yet their household was a normal one, in the sense that the Problem didn’t come up much. “Even when all the evidence was there before us,” Sherrell writes, “it was difficult to name.” The book is marketed as a climate-grief memoir, and it certainly is that, but what came through for me, even more clearly than the grief, was a kind of existential irony: not only are we apparently unable to solve the Problem, we can’t even seem to find an honest way to talk about it. Most Americans claim to believe the science; the science says that, unless we make drastic changes, the future will be cataclysmic; and yet, Sherrell observes, “it still sounded uncouth, even a little ridiculous, to spell this all out in conversation.” This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, and not even with much of a whimper. “Warmth,” written in the form of a letter to a child that Sherrell may or may not conceive, is not a thesis-y sort of book. But, if it has a central claim, it’s that the activist chestnut “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a facile mantra, a false choice. Why not both? —Andrew Marantz

“ Brothers and Keepers ,” by John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-seventies when, one day, his brother, Robert, showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and an academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; he was on the run after a botched robbery back home, in Pittsburgh, had ended with one of his accomplices shooting a man, who later died from his injuries. Published in 1984, “Brothers and Keepers” is Wideman’s attempt to reckon with their diverging lives, and with the bond that they will never relinquish. He sifts through episodes from their childhood, searching for overlooked turning points. No single genre can tell such a complex story. Sometimes, the book is about the deprivations of the criminal-justice system, as Wideman describes in granular detail his visits to the prison where Robert serves a life term. (Robert would pursue education himself in prison, and, in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical, as Wideman entertains the possibility that their lives might have taken them elsewhere. And there are moments of austerity and dread, as he contemplates the ethics of turning his brother into a character. I often find that memoirs flatten the degree to which “the personal is political” is an idea rife with contradictions. What makes “Brothers and Keepers” so absorbing is that Wideman feels love but not sympathy—not for his brother, and certainly not for himself. —Hua Hsu

2021 in Review

• Richard Brody on the best movies .
• Doreen St. Félix on essential TV shows .
• Ian Crouch on the funniest jokes .
• Amanda Petrusich on the best music .
• Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings .
• Michael Schulman on the greatest onscreen and onstage performances .
• Kyle Chayka on the year in vibes .
• Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Jennifer Wilson

By Adam Gopnik

By Susan B. Glasser

By Zadie Smith

Locus Online

The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

The New York Times Best Books of 2021

They also listed 100 Notable Books of 2020 , including the following titles of genre interest:

• Appleseed , Matt Bell (Custom House)
• Bewilderment , Richard Powers (Norton)
• Build Your House Around My Body , Violet Kupersmith (Random House)
• A Calling for Charlie Barnes , Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown)
• Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth , Wole Soyinka (Pantheon)
• Cloud Cuckoo Land , Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
• Detransition, Baby , Torrey Peters (One World)
• Harlem Shuffle , Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
• How Beautiful We Were , Imbolo Mbue (Random House)
• Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf)
• Light Perpetual , Francis Spufford (Scribner)
• The Lincoln Highway , Amor Towles (Viking)
• The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois , Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (HarperCollins)
• The Magician , Colm Tóibín (Scribner)
• The Morning Star , Karl Ove Knausgaard (Penguin)
• My Year Abroad , Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)
• One Last Stop , Casey McQuiston (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Our Country Friends , Gary Shteyngart (Random House)
• The Sentence , Louise Erdrich (Harper)
• Something New Under the Sun , Alexandra Kleeman (Hogarth)
• Strange Beasts of China , Yan Ge (Melville House)
• The Sun Collective , Charles Baxter (Pantheon)
• Velvet Was the Night , Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
• What Strange Paradise , Omar El Akkad (Knopf)

For more information, see The New York Times  website .

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

You May Also Like...

2021 International Dylan Thomas Prize Longlist

WisCon 45 Report

2023 Dwarf Stars Winners

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

We are a READER-SUPPORTED VENUE! That means you!

If you enjoy our book reviews, news, recommendations, and resources… if you value keeping up on new books and staying in touch with the field…

Support our work via Locus  Patreon and show the love, so we can keep doing the magazine, the website, and the Locus Awards! Books, short fiction, art, conventions, publishing industry news, international reports, recommended reading lists – don’t let them disappear!

We use essential cookies to make our site work. With your consent, we may also use non-essential cookies to improve user experience, analyze website traffic, and serve ads to our users based on their visit to our sites and to other sites on the internet. By clicking “Accept,“ you agree to our website’s cookie use as described in our Cookie Policy .  Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Ads Settings.

Advertisement

More from the Review

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

June 6, 2024

Current Issue

Table of Contents

February 25, 2021

The Trump Inheritance

Bildungsonline.

No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

Cubism’s Poet

Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

by Rosanna Warren

The Wanderer

Thinking Again

by Jan Morris

Rathlin Island

The stench of american neglect.

Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret

by Catherine Coleman Flowers, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson

Past Imperfect

Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems

by Erica Hunt

Pranksters and Puritans

The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England

by Peter C. Mancall

Deaccessioning Empire

The Metabolic Museum

by Clémentine Deliss

The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution

by Dan Hicks

The Power of Catastrophic Thinking

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

by Toby Ord

A Rush to Execute

A family romance.

Sybille Bedford: A Life

by Selina Hastings

Intrepid Navigators

What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why

by David Allen Sibley

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

Flights of Passage: An Illustrated Natural History of Bird Migration

by Mike Unwin and David Tipling

Promethean Women

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

by Sylvana Tomaselli

Artificial Life After Frankenstein

by Eileen Hunt Botting

Frankenstein: The 1818 Edition with Related Texts

by Mary Shelley, edited and with an introduction and notes by David Wootton

Intensive Care

Why was there a reformation.

The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe

by Steven Ozment, with forewords by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers

Malcolm’s Ministry

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

Fiction and Life

Subscribe and save 50%!

Read the latest issue as soon as it’s available, and browse our rich archives. You'll have immediate subscriber-only access to over 1,200 issues and 25,000 articles published since 1963.

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

Advertisement

Supported by

She Survived a Train Accident. Her Train Wreck of a Dad Is Next.

In Garth Risk Hallberg’s new novel, a teenage rebel and her father reconnect amid a sea of their own troubles.

• Share full article

By Dwight Garner

• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

THE SECOND COMING , by Garth Risk Hallberg

Garth Risk Hallberg’s ambitious but uneven and exhausting new novel, “The Second Coming,” takes its title from an unreleased live album by Prince. One of the book’s central characters, a 13-year-old girl named Jolie Aspern, is on a Manhattan subway platform listening to a bootleg version when her phone slips from her hand and clatters onto the tracks below.

She climbs down after it. A train heaves into view. Oh no! Jolie is rescued, but she is hurt and shaken up. Was she suicidal or just foolish? The next day she is the subject of a New York Post headline: “APP-ETITE FOR DESTRUCTION.”

This early scene is one of many needle drops in Hallberg’s multigenerational and music-drenched novel, which is set primarily in 2011 but frequently flashes forward a decade, and backward even further. By the end, the novel has become a mixtape of sorts, with sections named after songs.

“The Second Coming” never becomes a great rock or music novel. Hallberg doesn’t make you feel what his characters are getting out of these songs. But this is certainly a novel that, to annex a thought from Annie Proulx in “The Shipping News,” makes you realize that one of the bummers of existence is that “there is no background music.”

This is Hallberg’s second novel, if you don’t count “A Field Guide to the North American Family,” a 2007 novella. His first, “ City on Fire ,” a sprawling New York City story set in part during the blackout of July 13, 1977, made an impact when it was published in 2015. It made best-seller lists. Frank Rich gave it a yea-saying review on the cover of The Times Book Review, though he also had a lot of caveats.

Speaking of The New York Post, it ran a “City on Fire” review, too. Its headline was: “Overhyped novel ‘City on Fire’ is a steaming pile of literary dung.” My opinion of the novel is closer to Rich’s, but The Post’s dissent registers with me. Hallberg is an intelligent writer, but he’s a wild and frequently sloppy one. His narratives don’t click into gear; his curveball only sometimes makes it over the plate.

Jolie, the girl who jumped on the subway tracks, is one of the most precocious eighth graders in recent literary history. She wears black and quotes Philip Larkin on how your parents mess you up. She name-checks Itzhak Perlman. She goes alone to a zendo to work on re-centering. Before long she will dye her hair pink, give herself a mental patient’s haircut, get a lot of piercings and stop talking altogether. She’ll drop acid.

She’s already a pint-size rock ’n’ roll survivor. As The Onion once joked about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love’s daughter, she seems to have been born ready to enter prehab.

She is her father’s daughter. Ethan Aspern is a washed-up actor who has been arrested on drug charges, gone through 12-step programs and burned every bridge he’s crossed. He walks around uttering things like “I’m only going to let you down.” He is not lying. He is scruffy, outstandingly handsome and has a heart of gold that’s visible from a satellite. When Ethan learns about Jolie’s accident, he comes back into her life after many years away and hopes to make amends, if he is not arrested first for abducting her.

Ethan has a tangled back story, with complicated parents of his own. His mother is a serious artist. And the novel summarizes his father’s story this way: “Naval Academy, Yale Divinity, a summer sailing for William F. Buckley of all people. And then right back to Annapolis for a chaplain gig.” Little of this material is picked up in the novel. This information is an indication of Hallberg’s flickering interest in big, interlocking American themes. Scenes play across Sept. 11 and Occupy Wall Street, and take us into Covid.

Hallberg is often at his best when he’s not reaching for big effects, when he gives himself room to breathe. Here’s Ethan defending his hometown, Ocean City, N.J.:

Like, did the Hamptons have stand-mounted binoculars that offered up only darkness unless you paid a quarter? Or the game with the giant mallets and the flying rubber frogs? Did the Hamptons have that? How about not one but two amusement parks called the Jolly Roger, each with a Tilt-a-Whirl so ultra-sketch you had to sign a waiver?

This novel’s scope and ambition are reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s novels. But Hallberg’s writing is more in the mold of Richard Ford. Like Ford, he’s enamored of New Jersey settings and lets crucial scenes play out over holidays, for supplemental resonance. He’s given to epigrammatic summing-up statements every other page or so. Ford’s are better; they’re crisper bites of the apple.

We follow Jolie and Ethan around. The narrative baton is passed among unreliable narrators. A lot of the sentences and dialogue are of the sort that might sound good in a Steve Earle song (“But what if I were to try calling on your better angels?”) but not so much in cold print, especially when they pile up.

Ethan is a familiar figure. He’s a beautiful loser, an amiable screw-up of the genus Jim Harrison once classified as the “nifty guy at loose ends.” We know this creature from Thomas McGuane’s novels, and from Barry Hannah’s, and from Harrison’s, among other writers. Hallberg’s amiable screw-up, unlike those in his predecessors’ fiction, is never much fun to be around.

Ethan is almost entirely sexless as well, which gives the novel a deracinated feeling. Like Ryan Gosling in “Barbie,” he seems to have only a smooth plastic panel down there.

Katie Roiphe has written about how a now not-so-young generation of male writers have jettisoned their carnal appetites for empathetic cuddling. The critic Elaine Blair, too, has thought through the new skittishness about sex in fiction written by men, the “fearful suspicion that if a man gets what he wants, sexually speaking, he is probably exploiting someone.”

Younger women hurl themselves in front of Ethan, who is still in his early 30s for much of the novel. When he does sleep with one, even after getting to know her, the vibe is one of disgust and sharp regret. It’s as if he has run over a small animal with a lawn mower.

He blames his weakness on his surroundings: “Apparently he’d been in California long enough to weaken a little on the numinous, the vibrational, and he couldn’t help but think that the sex was somehow related to his feeling of having upset the power balance between them.” Jolie’s first stab at sexual contact is porn-like, horrible, pitilessly bleak.

This novel, like Ethan’s life, lurches sideways. There are many, many characters — siblings, parents, parole officers, lovers, spouses, drug dealers, old friends. There is little sense of momentum; the pages never turn themselves. It is so intensely written that it gave me a headache, as if I had been grinding my teeth. I was glad when it was over.

THE SECOND COMING | By Garth Risk Hallberg | Knopf | 586 pp. | $32

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

An assault led to Chanel Miller’s best seller, “Know My Name,” but she had wanted to write children’s books since the second grade. She’s done that now  with “Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All.”

When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

“The Light Eaters,” a new book by Zoë Schlanger, looks at how plants sense the world  and the agency they have in their own lives.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .