9 New Books We Recommend This Week
Target Tabloid – As the war in Ukraine enters its third year with no sign of disappearing from headlines, Simon Shuster’s well-timed look at the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, tops our list of recommendations this week. You might pair that one with Guzel Yakhina’s newly translated historical novel, “A Volga Tale,” about a rural villager facing an earlier Russian encroachment — or consider an altogether different novel about imperial ambitions, Álvaro Enrigue’s hallucinatory reimagining of the fateful meeting between Cortés and Moctezuma.
Also up this week: Cynthia Zarin’s lovely and deeply interior novel “Inverno,” along with a history of hate mail, a look at the moon’s significance, an account of women taking justice into their own hands, and two books exploring San Francisco’s colorful history. (What does it mean, a week before the Super Bowl, that we recommend two books about San Francisco and none about Kansas City? We’ll let you draw your own conclusions.) Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles.
- THE SHOWMAN: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
Using interviews with the Ukrainian president, his closest associates and his critics, Shuster crafts an intimate account of the Russian invasion, which vividly captures Zelensky’s transformation from a clean-cut funnyman into a war hero out of central casting.
- A VOLGA TALE by Guzel Yakhina
Yakhina’s novel, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon, centers on an eccentric tutor who, recalling the comfort he once took in folk tales, contrives to make a living writing a “new folklore” for the Communist organizer who wants to mold local villagers into paragons of socialist virtue.
- OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle
The moon may seem the least mysterious of our celestial neighbors, but Boyle gracefully argues that our development as a species and a planet is inextricably linked to its presence.
- PENNING POISON: A History of Anonymous Letters by Emily Cockayne
The internet may be rife with anonymous cruelty, but this lively study demonstrates that the impulse goes back centuries or more: Neighbors, friends, enemies and strangers send poison pen letters for all kinds of reasons, and in all kinds of ways. The motives are often obscure, the effect disquieting.
- YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Álvaro Enrigue
The Mexican writer Enrigue recasts the fateful meeting between Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs in this hallucinatory novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Moctezuma is fearsome yet depressed, often tripping on magic mushrooms, while the conquistadors grow increasingly anxious.
- THE LONGEST MINUTE: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 by Matthew J. Davenport
Through meticulous research and vivid reporting, Davenport brings April 18, 1906, to life, chronicling every moment of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the ensuing fire that devastated the city.
- PORTAL: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities by John King
King, a longtime writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, presents a history of the city through one structure: the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, built in 1898.
- THE FURIES: Women, Vengeance, and Justice by Elizabeth Flock
What happens when women resort to violence, in self-defense or in defense of others? Flock, a journalist, explores this question through the stories of three very different women, in Alabama, rural India and northern Syria, avoiding easy moralizing.
- INVERNO by Cynthia Zarin
This brief, meditative novel begins with a woman waiting in a snowy Central Park for a phone call from a former lover. Time and space blur, and riffs on fairy tales, movies and music provide glimpses of her interior states.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/
