Our recommended books this week include two substantial new biographies: one a reassessment of Ronald Reagan and his legacy, the other an account of the estimable partnership between the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny Van de Grift. We also recommend a memoir of raves and romance gone wrong, a new poetry collection by the virtuosic Paul Muldoon, and fiction from Yoko Ogawa, Ismet Prcic and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
REAGAN:
Max Boot
Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan, but in this measured, comprehensive biography of the 40th president, he explores the legacy of the Reagan years to ask whether they paved the way for Donald Trump, whose presidency led Boot to abandon his habitual embrace of the right.
A WILDER SHORE:
The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
Camille Peri
Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny Van de Grift, was a powerful personality in her own right: an individualist who paid no mind to conventional gender roles, a brave and sometimes reckless adventurer who encouraged Stevenson’s penchant for a wandering life.
MINA’S MATCHBOX
Yoko Ogawa
Translated by Stephen Snyder, this novel follows a 12-year-old girl to a coastal town in 1972 Japan, where she takes up with her wealthy aunt and uncle and their chronically ill daughter. The household, whose glory has begun to fade, harbors dark secrets, which bubble to the surface as the young protagonist adjusts to her enigmatic new world.
UNSPEAKABLE HOME
Ismet Prcic
Prcic’s latest is a meta and genre-defying exploration of displacement and immigration, about a narrator with the same name and background as Prcic, and who is, like Prcic, writing a novel about displacement and immigration.
SAFETY AND HEALING:
Emily Witt
The “breakdown” in the subtitle of Witt’s haunting new book isn’t hers. It belongs to Andrew, her boyfriend of four years; he started behaving erratically when pandemic lockdowns in 2020 put an end to the underground party scene in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, where Witt and Andrew had danced, done drugs and found friends. But Witt’s book — which braids that scene, Witt’s relationship and her work as a journalist during the Trump years — also encompasses a bigger breakdown, one that eroded the boundaries between their subculture and the world at large.
HERSCHT 07769
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The protagonist of this feverish novel, a hulking man-child living in what used to be East Germany, writes pleading letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel imploring her to use her physics background to prevent a pending apocalypse. Beneath that improbable surface, the novel — which unspools in a single breathless sentence, rife with detours and digressions ably navigated by the translator Ottilie Mulzet — raises the question of whether our hero’s despair points to some deeper truth.
JOY IN SERVICE ON RUE TAGORE
Paul Muldoon
Muldoon’s latest poetry collection continues his longtime trick of marshaling obscure references into fluent, fun and rollicking lyrics that lull you in with their musicality, then punch you in the gut with their full force once you decipher their meanings. In his best work, time dissolves and the sediment separating sections of human history melts away.
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