Two of our recommended books this week put rock music front and center: Peter Ames Carlin’s biography of the band R.E.M., and Izumi Suzuki’s novel of Tokyo’s rock scene in the early 1980s. We also like a biography of the physicist Roger Penrose, a study of the 20th-century novel, and fiction by Elias Khoury and Sergio De La Pava. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
STRANGER THAN FICTION:
Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
Edwin Frank
Frank is the editorial director of New York Review Books, the publishing arm of the intellectual journal, and founder of its Classics series, which revives old works, many in translation. In this history of the novel he embraces works that shock, not soothe, and maps a path from Dostoyevsky to Sebald, finding surprising ties among 20th-century writers.
THE NAME OF THIS BAND IS R.E.M.:
Peter Ames Carlin
With its jangly guitars, wistful harmonies and perfectly shaped songs, the indispensable rock band R.E.M. was magic from the start, a college radio darling in the early ’80s before breaking into the mainstream. Carlin’s biography chronicles its rise in the music scene of Athens, Ga., and the evolution of its sound.
SET MY HEART ON FIRE
Izumi Suzuki
This Tokyo rock novel, first published in Japan in 1983 and here translated by Helen O’Horan, follows a young woman through a world of drugs, music and highly conditional relationships in which the cool kids are emphatically not all right. Suzuki (who died in 1986) is better known as a science fiction writer, for good reason, but “Set My Heart on Fire” shows her to be a keen observer of the rock ’n’ roll milieu.
EVERY ARC BENDS ITS RADIAN
Sergio De La Pava
When we meet Riv del Rio, the world-weary private eye narrator of De La Pava’s novel, he’s getting off a plane in Cali, Colombia. He has no firm purpose there, though he has family in the city. Rather, he seems to be fleeing something in New York — and the story of what he’s running from provides this deft, penetrating novel with its emotional weight.
THE IMPOSSIBLE MAN:
Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
Patchen Barss
This biography depicts the British mathematical physicist and Nobelist Sir Roger Penrose in all his iconoclastic complexity, as a needy genius who understood the cosmos but had a harder time with basic human interactions.
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO:
Elias Khoury
Khoury, a celebrated Lebanese writer, died at 76 in Beirut on Sept. 15, shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and not long after the publication in Arabic of his final work — the epic trilogy “Children of the Ghetto,” which follows the life of a displaced Palestinian named Adam Dannoun from 1948 forward. In this second volume, translated by Humphrey Davies, Adam is a teenager and young man passing himself off as a Jewish Israeli to sometimes fraught effect.
The post 6 New Books We Recommend This Week appeared first on New York Times.