This week’s @TheTLS , featuring Rosemary Righter and @peterfrankopan on Xi Jinping; @LaurenElkin on Annie Ernaux; @pottmeister on John le Carré; @MirandaFrance1 on Clarice Lispector; @Lordoflongitude on measurement – and more.
A posthumous release of the songwriter’s unseen novel and stories from the 1950s reveals his nascent fascination with human frailty.
Silicon chips power everything from cars and toys to phones and nukes. “Chip War,” by Chris Miller, recounts the rise of the chip industry and the outsize geopolitical implications of its ascendancy.
In his new book, the satirist and comedian traces the rise of ill-equipped politicians and considers how to thwart them.
By Robert Harris | Harper
The Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660 singled out a small number of regicides for grisly punishment. Robert Harris’s novel imagines the manhunt through colonial New England for two participants in the decision to execute Charles I roughly a decade before.
By Perhat Tursun | Columbia
“I don’t know anyone in this strange city, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or enemies with anyone.” The Kafkaesque story of a nameless Uyghur man in a Chinese metropolis renders the real-world crisis of an entire culture into a haunting parable of power and powerlessness, and the use of loneliness as a tool of oppression.
By Alessandro Manzoni | Modern Library
The sweeping tale, now little remembered in America, of a pair of 17th-century Italian lovers, separated by the designs of a cruel aristocrat. Michael E. Moore offers the first English translation in more than 50 years of Alessandro Manzoni’s masterpiece, a work of foundational Italian literature on par with the Divine Comedy and the Decameron.
By Andrew Sean Greer | Little, Brown
The “innocent abroad” at the heart of Andrew Sean Greer’s “Less” (2017) endured adventures both comic and heartwarming. The novel garnered the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. Now its good-natured writer-hero returns for another road trip in a rollicking sequel.
By Ian McEwan | Knopf
In novels like “Sweet Tooth” and “Atonement,” Ian McEwan has taught readers to be on their guard, ready for a twist or revelation that might put all that’s come before in doubt. In “Lessons,” Mr. McEwan has created something to confound such expectations, in the portrait of a lost, likable protagonist whose “shapeless existence” is at the center of an unpredictable, very human journey through his own traumas, failures and hopes.
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By Maggie O’Farrell | Knopf
At the tender age of 15, Lucrezia, the daughter of the Florentine ruler Cosimo de’ Medici, is wed in a marriage of diplomatic alliance to another powerful nobleman. She would survive less than a year—a timeframe brought into thrilling focus in an intense and vivid portrait from the author of “Hamnet.”
By Gwendoline Riley | NYRB Classics
The gaps in understanding between two people can be an occasion for frustration—or a confrontation with the central enigma of consciousness. In the spare but powerful fiction of the English novelist Gwendoline Riley, the tangled streets of a city or the banalities of a conversation can stand in for the uncertain terrain of the mysterious and elusive self.
By Andrea Barrett | Norton
In a unique set of linked stories, many of which take place in a small lakeside town in New York, the writer Andrea Barrett offers the interconnected histories of a set of characters deeply involved both with one another and the fragile, beautiful world around them. Here, the ecology of the heart and the wonders of nature flourish side by side.
By Orhan Pamuk | Knopf
The new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of “Snow” and “My Name Is Red” stages a turn-of-the-20th-century tale of intrigue on a Mediterranean island ruled by the Ottoman Empire. An outbreak of the Black Plague and the quarantines that follow set the stage for political strife: The assassination of a health official raises the stakes in a tale that combines mystery with a richly detailed portrait of a society in turmoil.
Shrines of Gaiety
By Kate Atkinson | Doubleday
In the nightclubs of 1920s London, frivolity and fun are the order of the day—and Nellie Coker reigns as monarch of the quasi-legal revels. In this novel from the celebrated author of “Life After Life,” the disappearance of a young girl brings both the police and a determined amateur sleuth into the demimonde that Nellie and her family rule.
Oct. 5, 2022
IN A TIME OF PANTHERS: Early Photographs, by Jeffrey Henson Scales. (SPQR Editions, $49.95.) Scales, a photography editor at The Times, has dug up intimate images taken of Black Panther members and protests during the late 1960s to share a “time capsule” that has taken on new urgency for the author and for our country at large.
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: Body Politics, edited by Lotte Johnson and Chris Bayley. (Yale University, $50.) This collection gathers six decades of work from the late experimental artist, including paintings, multimedia installations and films, to shed new light on Schneemann’s ideas about the body, war and more.
IN THE BLACK FANTASTIC, by Ekow Eshun. (MIT, $39.95.) In this exciting, wide-ranging collection, Eshun presents speculative art and imagery from the African diaspora with a focus on folklore and Afrofuturism and explores works such as the paintings of Kara Walker and Chris Ofili and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
FIELD OF PLAY: 60 Years of NFL Photography, by Steve Cassady and Michael Zagaris. (Abrams, $80.) Zagaris’s images — covering 42 Super Bowls, 49 seasons with the San Francisco 49ers and more — provide glimpses into moments of tension, pain and intensity over 60 years of N.F.L. history.
This week’s @TheTLS , featuring @GeorgeProchnik on Joseph Roth; @WilliamWootten on the Letters of Basil Bunting; Colin Thubron on human endurance; @lindseyhilsum on William Boyd; @GeorginaEMW on Shakespeare’s female editors – and more.
MATHEW LYONS A Country Fit for a Queen Tudor England: A History By Lucy Wooding
RICHARD VINEN: Kim Kardashian of WestminsterHenry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, 1943–57 By Simon Heffer (ed)LRR
FRANCES CAIRNCROSS: Daily Mail ManThe Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe By Andrew RobertsLR
THOMAS W HODGKINSON Dine HardMadly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries By Alan Taylor (ed)LR
ROBIN SIMON Smile & SubstanceThe Portraitist: Frans Hals and His WorldBy Steven Nadler
“Our Missing Hearts” explores a fictional world where Chinese Americans are spurned and books are recycled into toilet paper.
“Confidence Man,” Maggie Haberman’s biography of the former president, argues that it’s essential to grasp New York’s steamy, histrionic folkways.
Set on an imaginary island at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, “Nights of Plague,” by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, is a chronicle of an epidemic, a murder mystery and a winking literary game.
The queen presided over the death of a British world and yet was enormously successful in keeping alive the monarchy that symbolized it.
A poem by Emily Berry
It used to be that people complained how little they knew of Queen Elizabeth. Toward the end, her remoteness was treasured.
Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.
Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay
The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell
Jared Kushner’s anti-ideological ideology is to get the best deal for whomever he represents—the business he was born into, the business he married into, and, most of all, himself.
Breaking History: A White House Memoir by Jared Kushner
Our new issue is finally online, ft Mahmood Mandani on leaving Uganda, Tony Wood on Russia’s energy crisis, @MJCarter10 at Westminster Abbey, @danielsoar on Ian McEwan, @amiasrinivasan on Andrea Dworkin, T.J. Clark on painting & poetry & a @Jon_McN cover.
Uganda’s constitution of 1995 entrenched the barrier against citizenship for non-indigenous applicants, who now had to belong to an indigenous group.
The bald lesson of the abbey’s memorials is that money, power and connections repeatedly trump virtue and talent.
Boomers Daily 