10 New Books We Recommend This Week
May 6, 2021
Our recommended books this week offer revisionist views of a couple of historical figures: In “The Invention of Miracles,” her biography of the often-lionized Alexander Graham Bell, the writer Katie Booth takes a dim view of his efforts to eradicate deafness and its culture, while in “The Bomber Mafia,” Malcolm Gladwell looks favorably on the much-criticized Gen. Curtis LeMay and his ruthless Japanese bombing campaign late in World War II. We also like a posthumous essay collection from the beloved travel writer Jan Morris and a new graphic memoir from the brilliant Alison Bechdel that explores her obsession with physical fitness, along with a lot of fiction: story collections by John Lanchester and Te-Ping Chen, and new novels from Rachel Cusk, Helen Oyeyemi, Ben Hopkins and J. Robert Lennon.
Rachel Cusk’s lovely, vicious Second Place seethes with the desires of a woman on the verge Vox.com 5/6/2021
Rachel Cusk’s new novel
Second Place her first since the breakaway success of her Outline trilogy is a lovely and vicious piece of work. It is vexed and questing, in search of some missing piece, some object that will bring meaning to the world but is utterly inaccessible; it fairly seethes with discontent.
Cusk has patterned
Second Place loosely after
Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir by the artist’s patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay in her artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico. “My version,” Cusk writes in a brief author’s note, “is intended as a tribute to her spirit.” Like
This book has been cancelled Blake Bailey’s new book on Philip Roth has been withdrawn by its US publisher after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the biographer. Should the work be judged by the standards of the life? One of the most striking elements of the allegations against the celebrated literary biographer Blake Bailey was the speed and fervency of his denial. Over the course of recent weeks, Bailey, 57, whose biography of Philip Roth was published last month, has been accused of multiple acts of grooming and sexual assault. The allegations encompass a 20-year period, from the mid-1990s when Bailey started teaching an eighth-grade English class at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans, until 2015, when Valentina Rice, a publishing executive at Bloomsbury USA, claims that he raped her at the house of the
Listen • 53:01 National Writers Series: Martha Teichner and Dwight Garner
Martha Teichner has been a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning since 1993. Her new book is called “When Harry Met Minnie.” It’s about a chance encounter… Listen • 53:00
Listen • 53:01 National Writers Series: Martha Teichner and Dwight Garner
Martha Teichner has been a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning since 1993. Her new book is called “When Harry Met Minnie.” It’s about a chance encounter… Listen • 53:00