Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your May reading list.
Each year in a sign of hope, garden perennials return, even when they’ve received little to no care. This month’s literature also blooms with hope, whether that’s easily spotted — as in Alison Bechdel’s witty autofiction and Ron Chernow’s biography of a great American humorist — or needs careful observation, as is the case with Yiyun Li’s reckoning with grief and Madeleine Thien’s stunning novel of ideas. Happy reading!
FICTION
The Words of Dr. L.: And Other Stories By Karen E. BenderCounterpoint: 304 pages, $27(May 6)
Bend it like Bender and you get stories that are straight out of “Black Mirror” — sci-fi that’s immediately relevant — yet unlike that bleak series, Bender’s work always includes timeless empathy for characters, especially those struggling with invisibility. From families in quarantine during the global pandemic to a kidnapped therapist, her characters combine the familiar with the strange in fresh ways.
The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel By Ocean VuongPenguin Press: 416 pages, $30(May 13)
Vuong (“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”) examines inherited trauma with a lyrical narrative set in Connecticut. When the desperately depressed 19-year-old college dropout, Hai, meets the 82-year-old Grazina, he becomes her live-in caregiver. Hai and his cousin Sony, whose Vietnamese families escaped to America, realize how much Lithuanian refugee Grazina can teach them about psychic survival.
The Book of Records: A Novel By Madeleine ThienW. W. Norton: 368 pages, $29(May 20)
In the tradition of Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” and Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” Thien’s new work almost seamlessly integrates literary, historical and science fiction. Lina, 50 years into her future, recalls the years she and her father Wui Shin spent in a place known as the Sea, where inhabitants cross space and time as they help fellow exiles consider the possibility of redemption.
Spent: A Comic Novel By Alison BechdelMariner Books: 272 pages, $32(May 20)
A great practitioner of graphic memoir, Bechdel (“Fun Home”) turns her gimlet eye selfward in this hilarious account of a slightly autobiographical “Alison Bechdel,” who lives on a pygmy goat farm with her partner, Holly. Alison, a grown-ass adult, finds middle age exhausting: Making a living, trying to live intentionally, maintaining artistic integrity and coping with other people. Truthful, rueful and delightful.
That’s All I Know: A Novel By Elisa Levi, trans. Christina MacSweeneyGraywolf: 192 pages, $17(May 20)
The end of the world is supposedly at hand and a young woman speaks from her home at the edge of a strange and menacing forest in Spain. Things are downright grim, and reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm too, although narrator Little Lea doesn’t know in 2013 that her mayor’s Mayan calendar-based predictions won’t come true. At least not yet. For Lea’s troubled family, they might as well have.
NONFICTION
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas By Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’oNew Press: 224 pages, $26(May 6)
These essays by the acclaimed African novelist and post-colonial theorist include pieces on important contemporaries including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, but also delves into the links between language and identity. Thiong’o, whose first novel, 1964’s “Weep Not, Child,” was published under the name James Ngugi, stopped writing in English in the 1970s and began composing in Gĩkũyũ, his first language in Kenya.
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age By Amanda HessDoubleday: 272 pages, $29(May 6)
Internet cultural critic Hess might have written about pregnancy in a number of ways, but in 2020 she found herself vulnerable to the very aspects of life online she covered when a last-trimester ultrasound detected an abnormality. Hess explores her own experiences, apps to chat rooms to influencers (including “freebirth” advocates and pronatalists), but also connects her experiences to excellent research.
What My Father and I Don’t Talk About: Sixteen Writers Break the Silence Edited by Michele FilgateSimon & Schuster: 320 pages, $30(May 6)
This new collection follows Filgate’s 2019 “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,” which grew out of a powerful essay she wrote, and includes pieces by the editor herself as well as Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Kelly McMasters and Jaquira Díaz. The men might be aging, absent, ill or estranged; but each writer approaches him with understanding and intention rather than anger or confusion.
Mark Twain By Ron ChernowPenguin Press: 1200 pages, $45(May 13)
Washington, Hamilton, Grant; perhaps Chernow needed a respite, so instead of writing about a towering figure of politics or finance, this time he picked author and humorist Samuel Clemens, whose nautical nom de plume “Mark Twain” comes from the Mississippi River setting of some of his famous novels. Twain’s literary life, though, has as many ups and downs as that river’s tides; expect to be enthralled.
Things in Nature Merely Grow By Yiyun LiFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 192 pages, $26(May 20)
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” Li’s astonishing record of how she has chosen acceptance over despair shows why artists among us sometimes offer more wisdom than any other spirituality.
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