Also of interest... where life meets performance

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent

by Judi Dench (St. Martin’s, $32)

Judi Dench’s new book on the plays of Shakespeare is “a gloriously entertaining tour through the canon,” said Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. It’s a compilation of chats that Dench and actor-director Brendan O’Hea recorded across four years, and “the teasing, sparring, and mischief that characterized Dench’s side of the conversation is faithfully reproduced.” Dench, now 89, has played almost all of Shakespeare’s major female roles on stage, and as she talks about each of those characters, “it is as if she is discussing people she knows intimately.”

Muse of Fire

by Michael Korda (Liveright, $30)

To the extent we remember the truth of World War I, we owe that knowledge to its poets, said Malcolm Forbes in The Wall Street Journal. Unlike news reports and letters, poems sent from the front lines were uncensored, and Michael Korda’s “compelling and wellwrought study” resurrects six soldier-poets whose widely circulated verses first inspired the Anglo world, then awakened it to the conflict’s horrors. More than a century later, the poetry itself “has lost none of its power to shock and move.”

Reboot

by Justin Taylor (Pantheon, $28)

Justin Taylor’s new novel is a serious warning wrapped in a “very funny” TV-world yarn, said Mark Athitakis in The Washington Post. David Crader, the washed-up former star of a hit teen drama series, is trying to reunite his fellow former cast members for a reboot while contending with a world run amok on conspiracy theories and overheated fan culture. As Reboot “wrings brilliant laughs from the absurdity of David’s predicament,” California burns, New York City floods, and calamity moves ever closer.

The Band

by Christine Ma-Kellams (Atria, $27)

“Christine Ma-Kellams is not the first novelist to examine the poisoned chalice of fame,” said Stephanie Burt in The New York Times. But she may be the first who’s also a cultural psychologist and who applies her expertise to the story of a burned-out K-pop boy-band star who flees to the U.S. and moves in with a married woman who’s also a cultural psychologist. Though the story “moves almost too fast” given its many threads, Ma-Kellams “does tie them all up elegantly.”