Entertainment
6 New Books We Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
The worldview of our recommended books this week offers, more or less, a view of the world, from a reporter’s look at Egyptian textile factories to a novel set in 1960s Amsterdam. Ruby Todd’s “Bright Objects” imagines small-town Australians contending with the approach of a dangerous comet. Yasmin Zaher’s “The Coin” features a Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City, working a side hustle in hopes of a big payday. And Alisa Alering’s “Smothermoss” takes us out of the real world altogether, to describe a murder on a supernatural mountain. Finally, in “Keeping the Faith,” Brenda Wineapple revisits the famous Scopes Monkey Trial to explore what it reveals about American culture a century later. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
KEEPING THE FAITH:
God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
Brenda Wineapple
Wineapple takes the familiar science-versus-religion story of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and teases out the political threads of the Progressive Era conflict that pitted a populist demagogue who was admired by white supremacists against a headline-chasing rationalist with a soft spot for labor organizers and anarchists.
Credit…“Surprisingly timely. … This tale is usually told as an epic confrontation between faith and science, with the past on one side and the future on the other. Wineapple frames it much more interestingly as a conflict between political visions that remain very much alive in the present.”
From Matthew Stewart’s review
Random House | $38
THE COIN
Yasmin Zaher
The narrator of this smart and sneering novel of capital and its consequences is an unnamed, parentless Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City who becomes involved in a scheme to buy up Hermes Birkin bags and scalp them to “trashy and unworthy” buyers. In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, the narrator seesaws between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement.
Credit…“The novel’s power is not in cohesion, but in chaos — in an ambience that is consistently murky, morally numbed, deceptively blasé. Throughout, her prose manages to be both deadpan and fertile.”
From Lauren Christensen’s review
Catapult | $27
