When I was a kid, I kept a book called No More Dead Dogs under my pillow to read when I couldn’t sleep; some two decades have passed since I last picked it up, but I remember it being funny and comforting, about a group of middle schoolers who stage a play in protest of all the books they’d been assigned to read in which a beloved animal gets knocked off: Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Yearling. The book came to mind in recent weeks, while reading Kristi Noem’s bizarre account of killing her dog and goat. Or rather, accounts of the account, because there are a lot of books in the world and her memoir didn’t quite make it onto my bedside stack. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe my subconscious planted something, but either way, this month I, instead, happened to reread a novel in which the narrator shoots a goat—to quite a different effect.
Here, more great reads, old and new.
‘Colton Gentry’s Third Act: A Novel’ by Jeff Zentner
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As an author, Jeff Zentner has a knack for finding poetry in everyday situations. Not literally, in this case, as Colton Gentry’s Third Act marks Zentner’s shift into adult fiction from the young adult realm, but in countless little ways that end up on the page. The tenderness with which a small town is crafted, the emotion that flows through a character’s veins. Fittingly, we meet Colton Gentry, the character, just as a drunken speech on stage (and the words “fuck your guns”) derails his country music comeback. The narrative weaves between Colton’s come-up, adolescence, and present, stitching heartbreak, grief, and hope into one devastating arc that will leave a smile on your face even as it draws out a tear. (Grand Central, 2024) —Tyler Breitfeller
‘Imagination: A Manifesto’ by Ruha Benjamin
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In the opening pages of Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto, the professor presents an argument concerning the dejected state of our society that is as simple as it is jarring: We are living according to someone else’s imagination—one which is deeply hierarchical and unjust (sexist, exclusionary, racist, extractive of our environment and productivity, etc). Throughout the following chapters, which often open with epigraphs: activating lines of poetry or whimsical quotes from literature. (“One can’t believe impossible things,” from Through The Looking Glass. “I daresay you haven’t had much practice.”) Benjamin makes the case for imagination being a core tool to revolutionary work without getting too lost in the clouds. “We must not fetishize imagination as somehow operating magically and independently from other powerful ingredients like strategizing and organizing, to make our vision a reality,” she warns.
Alongside an extensive reading list of theory and criticism on and related to the topic, from scholar Angela Davis to Professor Robin D.G. Kelley to Black queer feminist author Ariana Brazier, Benjamin weaves pop culture references like King Richard and anecdotes which happily amble into memoir for an astonishingly breezy 167-page read. In tones that transport the reader back to sentiments of the wide-eyed openness to possibility “the student” often occupies Imagination’s brevity and makes it clear that it is an activation point. Start here, and then go about the work of imagining the world anew. (W.W. Norton, 2024) —Arimeta Diop
‘James’ by Percival Everett
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James tells the story of a Civil War–era runaway slave from Hannibal, Missouri, who joins forces on the Mississippi with a white boy named Huck. Yes, this may sound like a familiar tale, but nothing about Percival Everett’s reimagining of Huckleberry Finn is at all predictable or formulaic. The latest novel by the author of Erasure (which you might know from its Oscar-winning screen adaptation, American Fiction) combines propulsive action with staggeringly effective irony and philosophical depth. Once you’ve read it, you won’t be able to imagine American literature without it. (Doubleday, 2024) —Radhika Jones
‘Relative Moments’ by Deanna Dikeman
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In Relative Moments, Deanna Dikeman relishes the everyday moments in her family’s life. For the past three decades, Dikeman photographed her parents, son, aunts, and uncles in the American Midwest. She published a subset of these photographs in Leaving and Waving (2021), which showed her parents waving goodbye to Dikeman from their driveway over the years in a sentimental yet propulsive narrative about aging and loss. The 200 photos in this new book broaden our access to her family’s world. A black-and-white snapshot aesthetic makes the photographs feel like off-the-cuff family moments, but they are no less masterful in revealing the clothes, living rooms, and behaviors of their subjects than the more theatrical family portraits by Larry Sultan and Tina Barney. A tight-knit group of elderly relatives gather to cut cakes and do dishes in homes with floral drapes, thick carpeting, wood-paneled walls, and screen doors. Dikeman’s parents cook outside on a charcoal grill, pick leafy bunches of rhubarb from the backyard, and fill the birdbath from a garden hose. Dikeman’s son appears in the pictures and the routines continue; he is taught to push the lawn mower, to fill the birdbath. Dikeman’s emphasis on domestic routines says that it’s not just the major milestones that make up our family story–in fact, not a single wedding or graduation appears–but the repetition of small, daily actions that creates meaningful connections and comfort over our lifetimes. (Chose Commune, 2024)—Madison Reid
‘Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth’ by Elizabeth Williamson
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More than five years after the devastating Newtown mass shooting took the lives of 26 people, New York Times features reporter Elizabeth Williamson started covering the victims and their surviving families for an unexpected reason. Because the tragedy happened early in the social media era, the parents of murdered first graders received a heretofore unimaginable amount of online harassment for years after they buried their children. In her gripping and heartbreaking 2022 book, Williamson declines to linger on the details of the 2012 massacre, perhaps anticipating that there is plenty of queasiness to be experienced once she moves on to profiling the callous and deluded people who believed the event was a government hoax. I haven’t read anything that confronts the depravity and oddity of modern American life quite like this before, and due to its depictions of grief and the consequences of information disorder, I know I will be thinking about it for years to come. (Dutton, 2022) —Erin Vanderhoof
‘The Call’ by Yannick Murphy
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The novel spans a year in the life of a Vermont veterinarian, who narrates through a series of log notes (“Call: A colicking horse. Action: Drove to farm during snow flurries… Result: A cold shiver ran up my spine”). Early on, his son is shot by an anonymous hunter, and as the boy lies in a coma, suddenly everyone in the small rural town becomes, to the vet, a suspect. The book is only nominally a whodunnit. Instead, it focuses on the small human interactions that make up the vet’s days—with his children and wife; an elderly woman who lets her favorite sheep live inside; a farmer whose alpaca dies of fear—but also with the animals. The vet places a hand on a horse’s neck to soothe it, he hates the idea of people hunting for trophies rather than food. When a goat becomes fatally injured while birthing a kid and has to be killed, the moment becomes one of surreal meditation. There’s so much humanity in this book; this was my second reading, and I know I’ll return again. (2012, Harper Perennial) —KW
‘Women and Children First’ by Alina Grabowski
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Told from 10 different perspectives, this debut by Alina Grabowski (with whom I had the pleasure of speaking during a launch event) circles the death of a local high school student in a worn-out town on the Massachusetts coast. You can smell the brine of the tidepools! Through the kaleidoscope of 10 women and girls who live in Nashquitten—mothers and daughters navigating tricky teenage years, complicated childhood friends, a principal and a councilor—we gain a fractured, complex understanding of the events leading up to and following her death. Grabowski conveys the gulf between friends, family, and community members, as well as the risks and rewards that can be reaped when trying to bridge the gaps. (Zando-SJP Lit, May 2024)—K.W.
‘Enter Ghost’ by Isabella Hammad
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In Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, newly out in paperback, 30-something Sonia, a Palestinian British stage actress, has decamped from London (leaving behind the wreckage of a relationship with her married director) to visit her sister at her home in Haifa. While there, she trips into a West Bank production of Hamlet, which makes for good drama: cast members bicker and flirt; they debate policy issues and contend with checkpoints manned by Israeli soldiers. It also affords Hammad the opportunity to display a sharp command of language, as in when she adopts the pared-back form of a script to convey cast biographies and group conversations, blurring lines between fiction and life. Hammad is an acute observer of human nature—from the personal to the political to the many places those intersect—whether in rendering a momentary provocation in a dark hallway, or a quarrel between sisters, or questions of artmaking and revolution. (Grove, 2023) —K.W.
LIGHTNING ROUND
From the magazine, a taster-plate of noteworthy new titles.
‘All Fours’ by Miranda July
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Miranda July, marking nine years since her last novel, returns with unruly self-discovery: An artist starts across-country road trip, stops at a local motel, and begins a lusty, creative awakening. (Riverhead)
‘Another Word for Love’ by Carvell Wallace
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His mother’s “lipstick tattoo that smelled of rose and spit” on a Coke can, his body’s betrayal, his Black community in LA—Carvell Wallace’s melodic memoir brims with care. (MCD/FSG)
‘The Light Eaters’ by Zoë Schlanger
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Zoë Schlanger’s captivating exploration renders a rich world of plants: weird fern sex, sagebrush chemical communication, scientific debates on flora intelligence, and more. (Harper)
‘Empireworld’ by Sathnam Sanghera
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Following his best-selling Empireland, Sathnam Sanghera examines the long arms of British imperialism, from racial disparities on a Barbados beach holiday to indentured labor and the Red Cross. (PublicAffairs)
‘Cinema Love’ by Jiaming Tang
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This tender, elegant debut from Jiaming Tang follows gay men and their wives from pickups at a 1980s Mawei movie theater to loss and longing in NYC’s Chinatown. (Dutton)
‘The Paris Novel’ by Ruth Reichl
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Stella decamps to the City of Light—and pungent goat cheese, chilled wine, garlicky snails—in this giddy, escapist confection from Ruth Reichl, food writer par excellence. (Random House) —KW
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