Entertainment
6 New Books We Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
It’s (almost) the autumn of a presidential election year, which means that the political publishing season is suddenly upon us: Two of our recommended books this week cast an eye back on Donald Trump’s time in office, one from an insider’s vantage and one from the perspective of an experienced national security reporter. Also up this week, a Pulitzer-winning poet’s new collection, a satirical novel of race and class, a wide-ranging celebration of the Bronx and an expansive, admiring biography of the writer Christopher Isherwood. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
COLORED TELEVISION
Danzy Senna
In this fleet, funny novel, Senna’s fourth, a struggling writer in a mixed-race family is seduced by the taste of luxury that comes with house-sitting for a Hollywood insider, and makes the uneasy decision to sell out. As with nearly all of Senna’s work, she makes you feel the joys, the discontents, the estrangements of mixed-race life in America.
Credit…“The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart. … The characters in ‘Colored Television’ are wonderful talkers; they’re wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition.”
From Dwight Garner’s review
Riverhead | $29
PARADISE BRONX:
The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough
Ian Frazier
Stretching from before the glacier that 14,000 years ago covered the New York Botanical Garden — and indeed most of the city — to the thriving culture that arose in the wake of 1977’s infamous fires, this eccentric history by a longtime contributor to The New Yorker (whose previous books include chronicles of Siberia and the Great Plains) pays charming tribute to a New York borough that is often overlooked or outright maligned.
Credit…“Frazier has logged many, many steps in the Bronx, setting out, he writes, to walk a thousand miles there, sometimes 10 at a time. … A ramble in every way: physical, chronological, pedagogical.”
From Alexandra Jacobs’s review
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35
