Carson the Magnificent
By Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas
Ten years after retiring from “The Tonight Show,” Carson talked with Zehme for a 2002 Esquire piece that stands as his only public discussion of life after TV superstardom. Plans for a biography were stalled, then cut short, when Zehme, the author of books about Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman, died in 2023. Finished by his former research assistant, “Carson the Magnificent” promises to capture an entertainer who remained at once familiar and remote.
Didion and Babitz
By Lili Anolik
Following her discovery, in Eve Babitz’s Huntington Library archives, of an unsent letter addressed to Joan Didion — “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” — Anolik, a Vanity Fair journalist, probes the relationship between these two contemporaries. The writers moved in similar circles in 1960s and ’70s Los Angeles, but their connection went far deeper than Anolik had previously known.
The New India
By Rahul Bhatia
This account of India’s embrace of ethnic and religious nationalism under the rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi integrates archival sources, reportage and interviews with ordinary Indians as well as the author’s personal history to deliver a disturbing chronicle of a country where the push to modernize has been accompanied by an assault on democratic institutions, along with surging discrimination and intolerance.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
By Haruki Murakami; translated by Philip Gabriel
Murakami’s latest novel explores a walled city imagined by the protagonist and his teenage sweetheart. She works in the city’s library, while he becomes a reader of the dreams that are archived there. Decades later, in the real world, the protagonist leaves Tokyo and becomes a librarian in a small town, where he forms friendships that may help him reconnect with the strange city of his youth.
Cher
By Cher
Or, to be more specific, “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” with Part Two coming in 2025. (Take that, Barbra Streisand!) The 432-page volume turns back time to the beginning, from a chaotic childhood to making music with (and marrying) Sonny Bono.
The Serviceberry
By Robin Wall Kimmerer; illustrated by John Burgoyne
In her follow-up to the literary phenomenon “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer turns her attention to the serviceberry, a fruit that plays a crucial role in its own ecosystem — and from which we can all draw lessons about living in harmony with nature.
Stranger Than Fiction
By Edwin Frank
Frank, the editorial director of New York Review Books, offers a close look at 30 novels by 30 novelists from around the globe, arguing that they tell “the story of an exploding form in an exploding world.” Among those sidling up next to the usual suspects (Woolf, Joyce, Ellison): Machado de Assis, Jean Rhys and Elsa Morante.
Time of the Child
By Niall Williams
Williams’s latest is a companion to his acclaimed 2019 novel, “This Is Happiness.” This time readers follow two outcasts in a small Irish village who begin taking care of a baby they find abandoned one Christmas season — a development that gives them the opportunity to right past wrongs and changes their lives for the better.
Variation
By Rebecca Yarros
Yarros, who exploded onto the romantasy scene with her “Empyrean” series, returns to her dragon-less, contemporary roots with this stand-alone novel about a ballerina who returns to her summer home to recover from an injury and finds herself entangled in a web of family secrets.
V13
By Emmanuel Carrère; translated by John Lambert
For 10 months in 2021 and 2022, Carrère, among France’s most renowned writers, attended the trial of 20 men charged in the 2015 terrorist attacks on the Bataclan nightclub and other Paris venues. This book, adapted from columns Carrère wrote for a French newsmagazine, features testimony from brutally wounded victims, their family members, the lawyers and the defendants themselves — a wrenching procession that forms the basis for a singular meditation on an act of violent fanaticism and the community of survivors created in its wake.
Freedom
By Angela Merkel
Merkel has said little in public since stepping down in 2021 as chancellor of Germany, a post she held for 16 years after an early career as a research scientist. Her 720-page memoir promises to elucidate her rise to power, her behind-the-scenes dealings with other world leaders and the business of running Europe’s largest economy as autocratic forces began to gain strength on the continent.
Memories of Distant Mountains
By Orhan Pamuk; translated by Ekin Oklap
Pamuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, shares more than a decade’s worth of personal writings and journal entries, which are illustrated with his paintings. Notes on the creative process, teaching, politics and travel are included here, giving readers glimpses of the writer’s internal life.
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