10 New Books We Recommend This Week
This content was originally published by on 11 May 2017 | 4:35 pm.
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WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. (Riverhead, $26.) Originality and narrative verve characterize the stories in this first collection by a British-Nigerian-American writer. A witty and mischievous storyteller, Arimah can compress a family history into a few pages as she moves between comic distancing and insightful psychological realism. She is especially interested in the cruelty and losses brought about by clashes between women, particularly girls.
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DEMOCRACY: Stories From the Long Road to Freedom, by Condoleezza Rice. (Twelve, $35.) The promotion of democracy should shape America’s foreign policy in the 21st century, the former secretary of state writes in this important new book, even though she recognizes that it’s “really, really hard.” It remains, she insists, both an inescapable moral responsibility for the United States and the only policy that, long-term, has the potential to safeguard American security.
BETWEEN THEM: Remembering My Parents, by Richard Ford. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) In two discrete sections written 30 years apart, Ford describes his parents’ lives and deaths by turn, driven by his curiosity about who they were. This slim beauty of a memoir is a remarkable story about two unremarkable people — and a reminder, as Cheryl Strayed writes in her review, that “we all have a dazzling lack of authority about the inner lives of even the people with whom we are most intimate.”
BORNE, by Jeff VanderMeer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A climate change survivor in a post-apocalyptic city in a sea of toxicity tries to adopt a nonhuman life-form capable of changing and learning. Her companion, along with a defunct (probably) biotech company and a flying bear, also make appearances. This coming-of-age story signifies that eco-fiction has also come of age.
FEAR CITY: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, by Kim Phillips-Fein. (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.) Phillips-Fein narrates the story of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s with fresh eyes, suggesting that the transformation of New York into two cities — one of great wealth, the other of searing poverty —was not an inexorable evolution but a political choice. The young Donald Trump makes a cameo appearance as an emblem of the new New York.
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem, by George Prochnik. (Other Press, $27.95.) When he embraced Jewish tradition as a source of meaning, Prochnik sought out Scholem, a scholar who introduced the kabbalah to secular society. To describe his book as part biography and part memoir is to miss the point; it is instead a hunt through the crevices of one life in search of clues that might unlock the mysteries of another.
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NOTES OF A CROCODILE, by Qiu Miaojin. Translated by Bonnie Huie. (New York Review Books, $15.95.) First published in 1994, this cult classic novel depicts a group of quick-witted and queer friends, students at a university in Taipei, and an obsessive love. The author took her own life at the age of 26, but her novel is about finding the will to live, both through creative means and the sheer vulnerability of being intimate with another person.
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