10 New Books We Recommend This Week
The New York Times, Editors’ Choice
The new normal still doesn’t feel normal, exactly. But judging from conversations with friends and family, a lot of us are starting to settle into some kind of routine. If yours includes reading — and I hope it does — might we suggest these recent books?
In fiction, Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life” gives a fresh twist to the traditional campus novel, and there’s new work from the old favorites Anne Enright, Louise Erdrich, and Emily St. John Mandel. Unlike her last novel, “Station Eleven,” Mandel’s latest does not involve a pandemic, you may be relieved to know.
In nonfiction, we offer a couple of substantial biographies, of the Catholic activist Dorothy Day and the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, along with a consideration of California’s housing crisis, a literary and cultural study of Shakespeare’s plays in America, and a historian’s look at the United States’ forced relocation of Native Americans during the 1830s.
Finally, you shouldn’t need the excuse of National Poetry Month to pick up a collection of poems, but it is April after all: How about treating yourself to Victoria Chang’s “Obit”? It grapples with all sorts of endings, not just mortality, and proves to be rigorous and cleareyed, even comforting. We can all use a little poetry in our life these days.
DOROTHY DAY: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Day, the activist and co-founder of The Catholic Worker, is under consideration for sainthood; this timely biography wrestles with how to reconcile her religious conservatism with her radical politics. “Day’s life highlights tensions that are currently of concern to both Catholics and Americans,” Karen Armstrong writes in her review. “The authors render their subject in precise and meticulous detail, generating a vivid account of her political and religious development.”
