Books to Breeze Through This Summer
This content was originally published by JANET MASLIN on 25 May 2017 | 9:34 pm.
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SHATTERED: INSIDE HILLARY CLINTON’S DOOMED CAMPAIGN By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. 464 pages. Crown. $28. This is the summer book most likely to be read inside the cover of something else. There’s something guilt-inducing about even wanting to know exactly how the Clinton campaign imploded. Its readers are less likely to be vengeful Hillary-haters than baffled voters wondering how things could go so wrong. “Shattered” promises chapter and verse on that, and it ruefully delivers.
RICH PEOPLE PROBLEMS By Kevin Kwan. 398 pages. Doubleday. $27.95. The Singapore-born Kwan was relatively unknown when he came along with the uproarious satire “Crazy Rich Asians” four years ago. Who would read his outrageous stories of characters who reeled off the brand names of everything they wore or owned, and constantly tried to one-up one another? The answer turned out to be everybody. Kwan followed it up with “China Rich Girlfriend” in 2015, and now “Rich People Problems” ends the trilogy. Even if the problems of the wealthy draw fewer fun-seekers than they used to, Kwan deserves to attract another large audience.
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THE FORCE By Don Winslow. 482 pages. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99. (June 20) Winslow, the West Coast star who writes so atmospherically and authoritatively about surfers, drug dealers and horrific drug-related crime, shifts his focus to the South Bronx in his latest book. “The Force” is a stunner of a cop novel, with dialogue, gritty New York setting and moral pincers all in the service of a devastating plot. Clearly invigorated by the success of his previous novel, “The Cartel” (2015), Winslow weaves a complex story around a detective who wants to stay clean even though he’s already dirty.
THE CHICKENSHIT CLUB: WHY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FAILS TO PROSECUTE EXECUTIVES By Jesse Eisinger. 400 pages. Simon & Schuster. $28. (July 11) The title of this nonfiction account of the government’s failure to prosecute white-collar criminals was inspired by the former F.B.I. director and current newsmaker James Comey. He was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former federal prosecutor when he gave a speech to prosecutors working under him, asking how many of them had ever had an acquittal or a hung jury. If they hadn’t, Comey said, they were members of the above-mentioned club: too chicken-hearted to take on the really tough stuff. This book provides a history of how, in the opinion of its Pulitzer Prize-winning author, the Justice Department has gotten soft.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
THE DINNER PARTY: AND OTHER STORIES By Joshua Ferris. 246 pages. Little, Brown. $26. Everything comes mordantly alive in the priceless imagination of Ferris, who can describe an onion being diced and think of the other vegetables near it as “bright and doomed.” Here’s a welcome chance to read stories that have appeared in publications from The New Yorker to Prairie Schooner, and his perverse short narratives do not disappoint. If you’re looking for happy endings, go somewhere else. Ferris’s view of the human condition falls somewhere between Woody Allen’s and Franz Kafka’s. A Ferris story can merrily pave the way from bad to worse.
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WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE: ESSAYS By Samantha Irby. 275 pages. Vintage. $15.95. The second book of essays from this frank and madly funny blogger includes pieces titled “You Don’t Have to Be Grateful for Sex,” “I’m in Love and It’s Boring,” “A Case for Remaining Indoors” and “The Real Housewives of Kalamazoo.” Her opening essay alone is enough to make this collection a winner. It starts with a fake application to become a “Bachelorette” contestant, and then details how the show would be different if she were on it, including the wardrobes. (“I don’t wear evening gowns and booty shorts every day. I wear daytime pajamas and orthopedic shoes, and lately I have become a big fan of the ‘grandpa cardigan.’”) A sidesplitting polemicist for the most awful situations.
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MAGPIE MURDERS By Anthony Horowitz. 496 pages. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99. (June 6) Take a perfect faux version of an Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot book. Call the detective in it Atticus Pünd. Make Pünd’s creator a writer named Alan Conway. Write a full mid-20th-century book starring Pünd called “Magpie Murders.” Then wrap this fake novel in a “real” present-day one in which Conway dies, and you have the mystery lovers’ buffet that is Horowitz’s latest novel. “Magpie Murders” is a double puzzle for puzzle fans, who don’t often get the classicism they want from contemporary thrillers.
NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US By Stephanie Powell Watts. 371 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99. Set in North Carolina, Watts’s book envisions a backwoods African-American version of “The Great Gatsby.” The circumstances of her characters are vastly unlike Fitzgerald’s, and those differences are what make this novel so moving. No frivolity or superficiality here. JJ Ferguson, the dreamer who returns home to woo his now-married sweetheart by building a big house, is positively pragmatic by Gatsby standards.
THINGS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE By Chiara Barzini. 320 pages. Doubleday. $26.95. (Aug. 15) An Italian teenage girl shows up in 1990s Southern California in this culturally astute, strong-voiced novel. Barzini, truly a writer to watch, positions herself astride both American and Sicilian cultures, and packs this visceral book with strong sensations from both. The novel and its heroine, Eugenia, are deeply seductive.
EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL By Malcolm Mackay. 291 pages. Mulholland Books/Little, Brown. $26. Mackay’s hard-boiled books set in Scotland aren’t well known in the United States, but there’s a reason those who know them love them. His Glasgow Trilogy is classic, and this new book brings forth Nate Colgan, an earlier Mackay character, to narrate. The subject is organized crime, but it’s the author’s blunt eloquence that matters. Don’t pick up a Mackay book unless you’ve got spare time. They’re habit-forming.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
THE CHANGELING By Victor LaValle. 431 pages. Spiegel & Grau. $28. (June 13) This novel is afflicted with an unfortunate Anthony Doerr blurb calling LaValle a mix of Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison. That just proves how fiercely it defies categorization. Written as a self-proclaimed “fairy tale” in a punchy, inviting style, Mr. LaValle’s haunting tale weaves a mesmerizing web around fatherhood, racism, horrific anxieties and even “To Kill a Mockingbird.” And the backdrop for this rich phantasmagoria? The boroughs of New York.
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THE JERSEY BROTHERS: A MISSING NAVAL OFFICER IN THE PACIFIC AND HIS FAMILY’S QUEST TO BRING HIM HOME By Sally Mott Freeman. 588 pages. Simon & Schuster. $28. The subtitle of Mott’s first foray into highly dramatic history says it all. Her book is liable to break the hearts of “Unbroken” fans, and it’s all true. Happy Father’s Day. You’re welcome.
THE DESTROYERS By Christopher Bollen. 480 pages. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99. (June 27) Beautiful people visiting glamorous places, being wicked enough to bring Patricia Highsmith to mind. It just isn’t summer without this kind of globe-trotting glamour to read about, especially when most of it is set in the Aegean. Bollen is stylish enough to know what sells, and happy to write sentences like: “Marisela single-handedly rendered my cherished porn sites irrelevant.” Escapism, as calculating as it gets.
THE LEAVERS By Lisa Ko. 338 pages. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $25.95. This wrenching and all-too-topical debut novel picks up the life of an 11-year-old American-born boy on the day his mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, disappears. As with the recent film “Lion,” he has adoptive white parents in his life and a missing mother on his mind. Ko uses the voices of both the boy and his birth mother to tell a story that unfolds in graceful, realistic fashion and defies expectations. Though it won last year’s PEN/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction, Ko’s book is more far-reaching than that.
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And lastly, notes on a couple of additional titles: John A. Farrell’s biography “Richard Nixon: The Life” is a great read that will come up in conversation frequently and possibly win prizes. And for Lee Child fans, his previously published Jack Reacher stories and a new novella have been collected in “No Middle Name.” Its cover depicts a cup of coffee, and if you’ve read about Reacher you know why. If not, get started.
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