Mark Z. Danielewski returns with Tom’s Crossing, a “magisterial, page-turning epic” about a pair of young people who attempt to lead a couple of horses along an icy mountain route in Utah. It sounds like a coming-of-age novel. Or possibly a young Americana novel. Think All the Pretty Horses meets Huckleberry Finn. Or Lonesome Dove meets True Grit. But, at the heart …
Here is Sam Roberts’s Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit. Roberts, a 50-year veteran of newspaper journalism, is an obituary writer. The Art of the Obit does a deep dive into his working process. Look, the fact that you are dead is the least interesting thing about your obituary—at the very least, …
[In] Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Truths, the follow-up to her bestselling Big Little Lies, it’s ten years later, and the kids are all in high school now. The core group from the first book—Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie—are all dealing with midlife complications. Everything from the past is good and buried, except . . . …
This is the story of Skotch, the usual sort of private investigator, who gets involved in the usual sort of shady job that PIs get saddled with. His clients aren’t telling him everything. The missing individual he’s supposed to find has something that everyone wants. And it’s likely that a few dozen folk are going …
A “centaur,” in modern tech speak, is an individual who uses technology to be a more productive version of themselves. A “reverse centaur” is a person who is forced by technology to work at a pace that is thoroughly inhuman. Doctorow isn’t anti-AI, rather, he—like Pope Leo XIV—is all too aware of the cost hidden …
Joseph Eckert’s The Traveler is the science fictional story of a man out of step with time. Every day, at 7:52 AM, Scott Treder slips forward in time. At first it is only twenty-four hours—one day—but the next time it happens, he slips two days. Then, four. And, well, you can see where this goes. …
Well, let’s start with Isabel Klee’s Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About: A Memoir. Klee is @SimonSits on the socials, where she regularly tells stories about rescuing dogs. Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About takes us through the last decade or so of her life in New York City, dealing with—wait for it—rescue dogs, heartbreaking …
Here is Chuck Klosterman’s Football, a book about the singular force that shapes American life. That’s Chuck’s phrase, not ours, but it doesn’t take long to get swept up in his worldview. This is a book for both folks who like football—who will find much to agree with here—and those who don’t understand what the …
Travis Baldree is back with Brigands & Breadknives, which is the story of Fern, once a bookseller and now a lost wanderer in the company of a legendary warrior, a chaos-goblin with a fondness for silverware, and an absolutely monstrous hangover. Fern, you see, has been suffering from a bit of ennui these past months, …
Here is The Anthony Bourdain Reader, a deeply curated selection of the man’s writing—fiction and non-fiction—over the years. Through it all, as Patrick Radden Keefe makes note of in his introduction, it’s abundantly clear that Bourdain always thought of himself as a writer. Everything else—chef, TV personality, drug addict—was secondary to his desire to write. …
