Nancy Pearl, Ann Powers among latest paperback picks
Do you need a new paperback this week? Here are six possibilities.
› “Stay With Me” by Ayobami Adebayo (Vintage, $16). The Nigerian-born author’s debut novel (don’t worry, it’s a slim one), about a marriage filled with secrets. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani described it as written “not just with extraordinary grace but with genuine wisdom about love and loss and the possibility of redemption.”
› “The Chicken—— Club: Why the Justice Department Fails To Prosecute Executives” by Jesse Eisinger (Simon & Schuster, $18). This timely book from Eisinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica journalist, was described by NPR as “a wake-up call, delivered calmly yet with no shortage of well-reasoned urgency, to a nation whose democratic traditions are being undermined by backroom dealing, deregulation and the consolidation of corporate power.”
› “Goodbye, Vitamin” by Rachel Khong (Picador, $16). Khong’s debut novel, in which a young woman moves back home after her father begins to suffer from dementia, is both deliciously funny and gently poignant. I loved the book’s wry first-person narration, full of tartly perfect observations. “It was grotesque, the way I kept trying to save that relationship,” heroine Ruth muses, of an ex-boyfriend. “Like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.”
› “Who Is Rich?” by Matthew Klam (Random House, $17). Klam’s novel, about an affair that takes place at an annual writers conference, won accolades last year for its wit and perception; The New York Times called it “funny, maddening and, despite the well-worn subject matter, defiantly original.”
› “George & Lizzie” by Nancy Pearl (Touchstone, $16). Seattle’s iconic librarian came out with her first foray into fiction last year; a “romp of a novel,” wrote Seattle Times reviewer Ellen Emry Heltzel, about an opposites-attract sort of marriage.
› “Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music” by Ann Powers (Dey St., $19). Powers is a critic/correspondent for NPR Music. Seattle Times reviewer Charles R. Cross described her book as “a sharp analysis of the role that sex, gender and race played in creating popular music in America.”