Entertainment
6 New Books We Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
Our recommended books this week include four new novels that, taken together, offer a pretty good snapshot of the cultural zeitgeist: a polyamorous breakup story, a surreal post-pandemic fever dream, a book about the deep, cloistered pleasures of academic study and a novel that applies the “Romeo and Juliet” template to the federal siege of a doomsday cult like the one that rocked Waco, Texas, three decades ago. (That book is Bret Anthony Johnston’s “We Burn Daylight,” and it contains this kindling-dry line from the cult leader, after the local sheriff asks how he would respond to a visit from the taxman: “I’d assure him any money changing hands here is a donation to our church. Then I’d ask him if he’d prefer to shoot or pray.”)
In nonfiction, we recommend Jean-Martin Bauer’s firsthand account of efforts to eradicate global food shortages and Yuan Yang’s group portrait of four young women navigating social change in contemporary China. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
THE NEW BREADLINE:
Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century
Jean-Martin Bauer
An illuminating account of the author’s 20 years working with the World Food Program, this book provides a close-up look at efforts to vanquish global hunger.
Credit…“What makes ‘The New Breadline’ so compelling are not the big debates it touches on but the small details Bauer shares from a realm that usually operates out of the public eye.”
From Alec MacGillis’s review
Knopf | $30
WE BURN DAYLIGHT
Bret Anthony Johnston
“Romeo and Juliet” meets the 1993 Waco, Texas, siege in Johnston’s new novel, which follows two teenage lovers on opposite sides of an increasingly dire confrontation. One is connected to a heavily armed doomsday cult, while the other is the son of the sheriff investigating it.
Credit…“The music of it all is just so damn seductive. … A darkly dazzling pilgrimage of violent delights, and violent ends.”
From John Wray’s review
Random House | $29
STATE OF PARADISE
Laura Van den Berg
Van den Berg’s latest is a fever dream of a novel ostensibly about a narrator’s search for her missing sister, but more broadly about the borders of reality and the surreal nature of our post-pandemic life.
Credit…“Moody and hallucinatory, the novel asks: How do we distinguish reality from its opposite — whatever that might be?”
From Ruth Franklin’s review
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $27
PRACTICE
Rosalind Brown
Starring an undergraduate student at Oxford, Brown’s debut novel is exquisitely attuned to the thrill and boredom of academic life; it is hard to think of another novel that describes so precisely what happens when an ardent young person sits down to read and learn and write.
Credit…“Conveys the hesitancy, extravagance and naiveté of a young mind discovering what writing can do.”
From Brian Dillon’s review
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $26
PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS:
Four Women Face China’s New Social Order
Yuan Yang
For six years, the journalist Yuan Yang followed four very different young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order” — a country changing dramatically to an industrial superpower. The result is a moving work of reportage, whose scale toggles between global to personal.
Credit…“A powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots and make it in the big city.”
From Michelle T. King’s review
Viking | $30
MISRECOGNITION
Madison Newbound
The protagonist of Newbound’s witty debut novel returns to her hometown nursing a catatonic sorrow after her brutal breakup with a couple — a male artist and a female gallerist — who were her employers before they were also her lovers and roommates.
Credit…“‘Misrecognition’ is sharp and funny, but never cruel or condescending, when skewering quarter-life crises, contemporary sexual mores and internet addiction. … A quietly commanding debut by a writer of intense precision and restraint.”
From Justin Taylor’s review
Simon & Schuster | $27.99
