San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
100 recommended books
FICTION AND POETRY
America Is Not the Heart, by Elaine Castillo (Viking; 408 pages; $27). Castillo’s first novel is a sharply observed family epic that centers on a young bisexual woman from a wealthy, influential family in the Philippines who comes to the Bay Area to live with her beloved uncle.
An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones (Algonquin; $26.95; 308 pages). Jones’ novel is fundamentally the story of a marriage. But it is also a searing critique of America — the generational, geographic and gender gaps that rend even the most loving couples and families; the separate and unequal treatment of African Americans in the penal system. Awayland: Stories, by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead Books; 224 pages; $26). Following her last, lovely novel (“Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty”) comes Ausubel’s assemblage of quasi-magical yet bewilderingly plausible tales.
Be With, by Forrest Gander (New Directions; 80 pages; 16.95). Gander’s latest poetry collection dwells on the 2016 death of his wife, C.D. Wright, who was an influential poet in her own right. In these poems, Gander’s visionary powers and inventive forms are on full display.
Belly Up: Stories, by Rita Bullwinkel (A Strange Object; 225 pages; $14.95). Each of the 17 stories in Bullwinkel’s debut collection is adventurous in attitude and unique in intent. Brass, by Xhenet Aliu (Random House; 295 pages; $27). In her thrilling first novel, Aliu focuses on the ones who don’t belong, the downtrodden, the immigrants and, in this case, a single mother and her stubborn teenage daughter, both living a nickel-and-diming kind of life in a onetime brass manufacturing capital that long ago began to show its tarnish.
Come With Me, by Helen Schulman (Harper; 307 pages; $26.99). Provocative, profound and a little unsettling, Schulman’s novel is about how technology breaks apart and then reconfigures a Palo Alto family. The Ensemble, by Aja Gabel (Riverhead; 339 pages; $26). Gabel’s phenomenal first novel follows an ensemble of musicians from their raw salad days in 1994 to their successes (and failures) piling up during the next 18 years.
Evening in Paradise: More Stories, by Lucia Berlin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 244 pages; $26). A decade after Berlin’s death, the 2015 compendium “A Manual for Cleaning Women” topped best-seller lists. Now we have 22 more stories that show her writing has just begun to breathe. Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan Poetry Series; 152 pages; $24.95). Few poets dwell on the cycle of life like Brenda Hillman. Her latest collection puts us in touch with nature and the passage of time, our birth and life span and death, and her approach is often playful and innovative.
The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer (Riverhead; 456 pages; $28). Like all of Wolitzer’s novels, “The Female Persuasion” is timely, but also timeless, accomplishing its feminist mission with an almost breezy lightness that belies its social weight.
Fire Sermon, by Jamie Quatro (Grove Press; 208 pages; $24). Adultery may be a tale as old as time, but Quatro’s take — in this first novel — is freshly urgent, as she grapples with themes of desire, sin, commitment, guilt and renunciation while writing frankly about both marital and extramarital sex.
Florida, by Lauren Groff (Riverhead; 275 pages; $27). Frequently funny, sometimes painful and always deeply sensitive, the stories in Groff ’s collection show that women and children are often stronger than we tend to think, and that the Earth is more fragile than we usually allow ourselves to understand.
French Exit, by Patrick deWitt (Ecco; 256 pages; $24.99). In deWitt’s meandering but markedly funny latest novel, the show stealer is his knack for scene setting and dialogue.
Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Mariner; 208 pages; $14.99). This collection announces the bold and innovative voice of Adjei-Brenyah. His 12 fierce stories animate — and, at times, amplify — a devastating portrait of race relations in our country today.
Fruit of the Drunken Tree, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday; 320 pages; $26.95). Set in Bogota, Colombia, during the “drug wars” of the 1990s, this dazzling and devastating novel features an exquisitely intimate double portrait of two young women — girls, really — whose lives are disrupted as well as disfigured by the intertwined effects of terrorism, poverty, violence and exile.
Godsend, by John Wray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 228 pages; $26). Inspired by the real-life story of John Walker Lindh, Wray’s latest novel portrays a troubled soul who finds solace in a rigid religious orthodoxy. It’s a work of great power, seamlessly elucidating the seductions of faith and violence.
The Golden State, by Lydia Kiesling (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 292 pages; $26). An astute cultural commentator, shedding light on our current political divide, Kiesling writes with breathtaking precision and honesty about motherhood in this debut novel, set in high desert country.
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking; 421 pages; $27). Makkai’s compulsively readable novel mows back and forth across decades, during the catastrophic AIDS crisis and latterly as terrorism begins making routine claims on daily realities.
Gun Love, by Jennifer Clement (Hogarth; 245 pages; $25). Dazzlingly written and painfully relevant, Clement’s novel targets American gun culture, focusing on the poverty-stricken denizens of an insulated Florida trailer park community.
History of Violence, by Édouard Louis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 213 pages; $25). Like Louis’ “The End of Eddy,” “History of Violence” is a work of autofiction, taking its incidents from Louis’ own life as a queer man raised in Picardy, a hollowed-out region in the north of France with few jobs and many social ills.
The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown; 326 pages; $27). In this raucous, moving and necessary novel, Urrea writes about a Mexican American family he never saw represented in the pages of American literature.
The Incendiaries, by R.O. Kwon (Riverhead; 214 pages; $26). Told in beautiful, aural sentences, Kwon’s taut, breathtaking debut novel begins with a man’s imagining of a Christian fundamentalist cult watching its bomb going off and felling a building. The why of the bomb unfolds, as do all the
events leading up to the bomb, before the story eventually explodes again.
Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen (Knopf; 704 pages; $30). Murakami is a wiz at melding the mundane with the surreal, and his latest eccentric novel — which features a talking painting and a portal to a quasiearthly realm — slots in nicely alongside his previous work. Kudos, by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 232 pages; $26). With “Kudos,” British novelist Cusk completes an extraordinary trilogy that eludes easy description but enters a reader’s imagination like a series of half-remembered dreams whose details seem at once to vanish, but whose ambience continues to haunt with an eerie, desolate beauty.
Last Stories, by William Trevor (Viking; 213 pages; $26). The 10 stories in Trevor’s posthumous collection satisfy on many levels — the masterful craft, the emotional precision, the agile interplay between the past and present. Motherhood, by Sheila Heti (Henry Holt; 304 pages; $26). Heti’s expansive novel treats the question of whether to become a mother and what it means to take on that responsibility with the seriousness and complexity it deserves.
My Ex-Life, by Stephen McCauley (Flatiron Books; 324 pages; $25.99). In his adroit and affecting novel, McCauley revisits the special closeness that may arise between a gay man and a straight woman.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press; 289 pages; $26). In her novel’s remarkably selfish but undeniably righteous narrator, Moshfegh has created a feminist of a new order — one free to do as she darn well pleases.
Oceanic, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Copper Canyon; 80 pages; $17). Nezhukumatathil sings an ode to earth and sea in her fourth poetry collection. Her images are lush with eroticism, always close to the body and its experience of wonder. The Only Story, by Julian Barnes (Knopf; 254 pages; $25.95). Barnes’ 13th novel reads at first like other books in his canon, in the way it combines complicated relationships with a limpid, unfussy style, brilliant wit with sorrow. But the novel plunges into darker, sadder places than the author’s work often goes.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers (Norton; 502 pages; $27.95). Powers’ latest novel is a rousing, full-throated hymn to nature’s grandeur, with a genuflection toward those miracles of creation, trees.
The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories, by Simon Van Booy (Penguin Random House; 192 pages; $16). Each story’s treatment resonates as vintage Van Booy: simple, distilled, deeply thoughtful prose that seems instantly to disappear into its own telling, like rain into the sea.
semiautomatic, by Evie Shockley (Wesleyan University Press; 104 pages; $24.95). Ablaze with wordplay and formal ingenuity, Shockley’s poems chronicle the horrors of the 21st century while igniting the imagination as an act of hope.
The Shape of the Ruins, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez; translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (Riverhead; 509 pages; $27). In this somber but gripping tale, a fictional stand-in for the author — same name, same career — is drawn into a maze of enduring conspiracy theories.
A Shout in the Ruins, by Kevin Powers (Little, Brown; 272 pages; $26). Powers’ haunting second novel, about the Civil War and the destruction of slavery, sizzles with authentic tragedy, realism and unreconciled memory.
Some Trick: Thirteen Stories, by Helen DeWitt (New Directions; 224 pages; $22.95). The artist-characters in DeWitt’s bitingly hilarious stories discover that integrity and commercial success are incompatible, or at most a fluke that can’t be replicated without sacrificing one’s sanity and/or soul.
The Sparsholt Affair, by Alan Hollinghurst (Knopf; 417 pages; $28.95). Hollinghurst is a wicked satirist and a delicious plotter, and in this formally inventive and frequently gorgeous novel, he tells of beauty and its relationship to pleasure and power, secrecy and love. Transcription, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown; 352 pages; $28). Opening with the presumed death of its protagonist, Atkinson’s suspenseful novel is a triumph, equal to her previous works in thematic heft, precision prose and sheer reading enjoyment.
The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Berkley; 288 pages; $20). Arikawa’s novel is as much a loving tribute to Japan’s obsession with and reverence for cats as it is an endearing introduction for non-Japanese readers to the country’s ever-fascinating culture and deeply rooted traditions.
Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper; 464 pages; $29.99). Told from the perspective of the families living in the same dilapidated house in New Jersey more than a century apart, Kingsolver’s thoughtprovoking novel is also a muchneeded reminder that literature can and should serve as both a learning tool and a salve for some of the fear and outrage we are experiencing in these trying times.
Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf; 96 pages; $24). In her fourth collection, the U.S. poet laureate examines American history with formal precision and clarity; her poems dance between private and public, give voice to the voiceless, and shine with a resolute spiritual vision.
Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan (Knopf; 334 pages; $26.95). Centered on the life of a young slave, Edugyan’s third novel is a sparkling subversion of a high-stakes Victorian yarn, full of truths and startling marvels.
White Houses, by Amy Bloom (Random House; 218 pages; $27). In her first fully historical novel, Bloom has found a tailormade subject: the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.
You Think It, I’ll Say It: Stories, by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House; 226 pages; $27). The stories in Sittenfeld’s first collection are at once psychologically acute, deftly crafted and deeply pleasurable.
NONFICTION
Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, adapted by Ari Folman, illustrated by David Polonsky (Pantheon; 160 pages; $24.95). This imaginative, often-playful graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” — the only one ever authorized by the Anne Frank Foundation — presents readers with a wise, irresistibly big-eyed Anne, illustrated with heart by David Polonsky.
Arthur Ashe: A Life, by Raymond Arsenault (Simon & Schuster; 767 pages; $37.50). Twenty-five years after Ashe’s death, Arsenault has written a thoroughly captivating biography of the tennis player who became engaged in the civil rights movement, the quest to end apartheid in South Africa, AIDS-related activism and many other causes.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou (Knopf; 339 pages; $27.95). Carreyrou’s riveting book-length amplification of his Wall Street Journal expose fills out the narrative of Theranos’ elaborate shell game. Becoming, by Michelle Obama (Crown; 426 pages; $32.50). From the silly to the surreal, from the momentous to the mundane, Obama recounts her life story in her signature tell-itlike-it-is style.
Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home, by Nora Krug (Scribner; 288 pages; $30). Krug, who was born in postwar Germany and now lives in New York, investigates her family’s wartime history in this exquisite and emotionally resonant graphic novel, enriched by family photographs.
The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, by James Crabtree (Tim Duggan Books; 408 pages; $28). Sordid rich men and their political accomplices are the focus of Crabtree’s first book, a timely primer on India’s contemporary economic history. Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis, by Sam Anderson (Crown; 432 pages; $28). Anderson’s book is a delightfully deep dive into what he calls “one of the great weirdo cities of the world.” Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, by Mark Dery (Little, Brown; 512 pages; $35). In his provocative biography of Gorey, Dery shows that the artist, instead of being a fusty old Edwardian misanthrope, was a flamboyant dandy and an early avatar of asexuality.
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, by Claire L. Evans (Portfolio; 278 pages; $27). Evans’ engrossing revisionist history details the effacement of women from the annals of computing.
The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation, by Miriam Pawel (Bloomsbury; 483 pages; $35). Pawel’s narrative is unflaggingly direct, but it also functions as deep art, for the book is actually a history of California posing as a family portrait.
Bruce Lee: A Life, by Matthew Polly (Simon & Schuster; 640 pages; $35). Polly’s illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable biography is a deeply humanizing portrait of a complicated character.
Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays), by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket; 188 pages; $15.95). In this collection, Solnit takes on issues as diverse as climate change, feminism, homelessness, the death penalty and the brutal founding of the state of California. Her essays are witty, well researched, and pack a powerful political punch.
Calypso, by David Sedaris (Little, Brown; 259 pages; $28). You always expect smart, sidesplitting sunniness in any book by Sedaris, but here, the author casts some shadows, too, as he ruminates on aging, family and loss.
Carbon Ideologies: Volumes One and Two, by William T. Vollman (Viking; 601 pages and 667 pages; $40). Vollmann has been writing big, iconoclastic novels for 30 years, but he’s never imagined a dystopia as terrifying as the one he conjures in these two engrossing and immense nonfiction books about the damage we’re doing to the environment.
Carleton Watkins: Making the West American, by Tyler Green (University of California Press; 574 pages; $34.95). Full of drama, Green’s biography broadens the story of the photographer who made mammoth pictures of the West, usually in the service of the men who were selling and exploiting its land.
The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, by Michiko Kakutani (Tim Duggan Books; 208 pages; $22). In her pointed and penetrating book, Kakutani draws on her vast literary knowledge to pen truth’s obituary in the era of Trump.
Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover (Random House; 335 pages; $28). The beauty of Westover’s astounding account of her upbringing and ultimate transformation — from being home-schooled in an abusive, survivalist household in Idaho to earning a doctorate in history at Cambridge University — is in her frank, unsensational approach to her own past. Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, by Priya Satia (Penguin Press; 528 pages; $35). Satia claims that war, and, more specifically, the gun industry, helped usher in the Industrial Revolution, redefined the roles of public and private sectors and the functions and contours of the state, and facilitated imperial expansion.
The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 240 pages; $26). Franzen’s essay collection teems with exotic avian life, but don’t be scared off. The author is just as eloquent when writing about friendship, technology and other novelists. Though the subject matter of these pieces varies widely, they’re united by a belief that, in our fragmented, increasingly absurd world, paying close attention — to the planet, to books, to those we love — is perhaps the most meaningful thing any of us can do.
Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, by Adrienne Rich; edited by Sandra M. Gilbert (Norton; 411 pages; $27.95). A career-spanning volume, this posthumous collection curated by poet and feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert of Berkeley weaves together personal essays, speeches and letters from one of America’s most important poets.
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, by Cynthia L. Haven (Michigan State University Press; 317 pages; $29.95). At a time when religious fundamentalism, violent extremism and societal division dominate the headlines, this first fulllength biography of the acclaimed French thinker is a call to revisit one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers, who taught at Stanford.
Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward
(Simon & Schuster; 420 pages; $30). As in each of the Woodward books about the White House since “All the President’s Men,” which he co-authored with Carl Bernstein, “Fear” brings the readers inside the room and onto the phone line for a meticulously reported, disturbing portrait of the president and the people who surround him.
Feel Free: Essays, by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press; 452 pages; $28). Smith’s delightful collection features a smorgasbord of pieces: book, film and music reviews; examinations of art, modern culture ( Jay-Z, Facebook), other writers, politics and personal musings. What binds the collection is Smith’s voice: frank, urgent, self-ironic.
The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis (Norton; 221 pages; $26.95). It takes a writer of uncommon skill and perception to engage readers in a book about the federal bureaucracy. Yet Lewis rises to the challenge in his new book.
The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, by Maxwell King (Abrams; 416 pages; $28). In his meaty biography, King corrals telling anecdotes and makes insightful connections between Fred Rogers’ childhood issues and his life’s work.
Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, by Lillian Faderman (Yale University Press/Jewish Lives; 286 pages; $25). In her stirring biography of the pioneering political leader and beloved global icon, Faderman paints a multifaceted portrait of a complicated man.
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, by Sarah Smarsh (Scribner; 290 pages; $26). Smarsh’s intelligent, affecting memoir is a book we need: an observant, affectionate portrait of working-class America that possesses the power to resonate with readers of all classes.
Hippie Food: How Back-tothe-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, by Jonathan Kauffman (William Morrow; 344 pages; $26.99). By uncovering surprising histories in the domestication and widespread adoption of foods once considered the province of cultists and communards, Kauffman, a Chronicle staff writer, pays tribute to a generation of practical-minded idealists who changed our relationship to what we eat.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press; 465 pages; $28). In his enlightening book, Pollan explores the history of often-misunderstood substances, and reports on the clinical trials that suggest psychedelics can help with depression, addiction and the angst that accompanies terminal illnesses.
Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld; translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 454 pages; $30). This exceptionally relevant memoir provides an aweinspiring account of one couple’s relentless pursuit of Nazi criminals, whether by defying national borders or refusing to accept any statute of limitations.
I Will Be Complete: A Memoir, by Glen David Gold (Knopf; 482 pages; $29.95). In this wickedly intelligent and wildly imaginative memoir, Gold’s mother’s twisted antics and his increasingly muted reactions to them make for one helluva ride.
Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous With American History, by Yunte Huang (Liveright / Norton; 388 pages; $28.95). Huang’s exuberant and vivid account of the “original Siamese twins” examines 19th century American attitudes toward race and sex that resonate today.
The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West, by John Branch (Norton; 277 pages; $26.95). Keenly observed and artfully conveyed, Branch’s book celebrates a way of life that may be fading away but, like a bucking bronco, still possesses a few unexpected maneuvers.
The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire, by Deborah Baker (Graywolf; 356 pages; $28). Baker tackles the aftermath of World War I from an oblique angle as she explores Europe’s descent into chaos and India’s devastation at the hands of Britain.
Lessons From a Dark Time: And Other Essays, by Adam Hochschild (University of California Press; 288 pages; $27.95). This collection is advocacy journalism of the most persuasive kind — impassioned but never shrill or argumentative, solidly grounded in facts patiently marshaled to make the case.
The Library Book, by Susan Orlean (Simon & Schuster; 317 pages; $28). The latest from Orlean is a flitting and meandering masterpiece that is ostensibly about the Los Angeles Public Library. It browses and wanders among several threads; ultimately, it’s about nothing less than civilization. The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border, by Francisco Cantú (Riverhead; 250 pages; $26). Cantú worked as a U.S. Border Patrol agent for four years, and his book whips across your face like a sandstorm, embedding bits of the desert into your skin that, like it or not, you’ll carry forward. Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, by Roxanne DunbarOrtiz (City Lights; 238 pages; $16.95). Dunbar-Ortiz is a knowledgeable, unflinching writer whose book takes a close look at the origins of this country’s aberrant relationship with guns.
The Monarchy of Fear: A