Editors’ Choice In a pandemic, apparently some people write “King Lear. ” Me, I’m grateful just to read it. If you find yourself stuck in house arrest like Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov in “A Gentleman in Moscow” — and able to concentrate on something besides the news or your immediate mortal peril — you may want to stock up on books as well as canned beans. This week we recommend a story collection and four novels, including one by the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay that was considered too edgy to publish during his lifetime.
In nonfiction there’s a biography of the supremely unsettling novelist Robert Stone, two memoirs (one by a writer who suddenly stopped writing, and one about an extended Soviet family), as well as a weighty analysis of capitalism and politics by the best-selling economist Thomas Piketty. Download that to your e-reader, and you’ll have something to chew on for the next 18 months. Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, BooksTwitter: @GregoryCowles CHILD OF LIGHT: A Biography of Robert Stone, by Madison Smartt Bell. (Doubleday, $35.
) In his best novels, like “Dog Soldiers” and “A Flag for Sunrise,” Robert Stone, who died in 2015 at 77, drew from a deeper well than most of his contemporaries. A simmering paranoia bubbles under the surface of his fiction, a paranoia he had a sense of humor about. Our critic Dwight Garner calls this new biography by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell “sensitive and thorough,” and says that reading it, “Stone’s distrust begins to make sense. He was not inherently a wild man, but he attracted wildness.
It came to him, as if he were coaxing it out of the soil. He fed off the destructive energy. ” YOUNG HEROES OF THE SOVIET UNION: A Memoir and a Reckoning, by Alex Halberstadt. (Random House, $28.
) Halberstadt had planned to write a book about his paternal grandfather, Vassily, who worked in a notorious Soviet prison for several years before becoming one of Stalin’s bodyguards. Instead, the author, who emigrated to the United States with his mother and her parents in 1980, when he was 10, has produced a memoir about not just Vassily but his wider family and the country where he was born. The result is “a loving and mournful account that’s also skeptical, surprising and often very funny,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, full of “confident, precisely drawn imagery that will make you remember what Halberstadt describes in his own unforgettable terms. ” MY DARK VANESSA, by Kate Elizabeth Russell.
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(Morrow/HarperCollins, $26. 99. ) In this unsettling debut novel, Vanessa Wye, now an adult — and a classic unreliable narrator — looks back at the sexual relationship with her English teacher that began when she was 15, superimposing a teenage girl’s love story onto a creepy tale of abuse. “The novel flickers between the horror of the situation and the romantic overlay with the stylized dizziness of a disco ball,” Katie Roiphe writes in her review.
“The reader struggles, along with Vanessa, to make sense of what is happening, to interpolate, to see the truth, with so many false accounts, so many delusions, so many efforts to neaten or prettify. … One of the more radical aspects of the novel is that it maintains its ambiguities, it refuses to give up entirely on the idea that there was love somewhere in this encounter, along with other sicker, darker things. ” APARTMENT, by Teddy Wayne. (Bloomsbury, $26.
) Wayne’s new novel, set in the mid-1990s, is about a volatile friendship between two men in Columbia University’s creative writing M. F. A. program.
Wayne rigorously draws out their dance of attraction and repulsion: Will they kill each other? Sleep together? Or just make passive-aggressive comments about each other’s writing?
“Wayne is “a veteran writer,” Andrew Martin writes in his review, who “knows that we know what he’s doing” by “asking the reader to cut through numerous layers of prophylactic irony — the unnamed narrator protecting himself, as an insecure aspiring writer; the author operating within the limited skill set of his narrator — to access some deeper emotional truth about these characters.”
It’s to Wayne’s credit that he often succeeds. ” CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY, by Thomas Piketty. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. (Belknap/Harvard University, $39.
95. ) Seven years after the publication of his best-selling “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Piketty returns with a global overview to understand some of the most pressing economic and social issues of our time. Reviewing it, Paul Krugman writes that the book advances “the outline of a grand theory of inequality, which might be described as Marx on his head. In Marxian dogma, a society’s class structure is determined by underlying, impersonal forces, technology and the modes of production that technology dictates.
Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions. Institutional change, in turn, reflects the ideology that dominates society: ‘Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political. ’” SCRATCHED: A Memoir of Perfectionism, by Elizabeth Tallent. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.
99. ) For most of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Tallent was considered one of the foremost practitioners of the short story. Then she went silent. In this memoir, she approaches the mysteries in her own story with the same astute but elliptical precision she applies to her fictional characters.
“We learn about the particulars of her life without fully understanding how she became the person she presents herself as being,” Daphne Merkin writes in her review. “This central blurriness in the midst of hypercharged description, furthered by a non-chronological structure, is both fascinating and confounding. It is also, I think, exactly the tantalizingly elusive effect Tallent intends. ” ROMANCE IN MARSEILLES, by Claude McKay.
(Penguin Classics, paper, $16. ) This vividly imagined, slyly political novel by a star of the Harlem Renaissance, features a boisterous, multicultural cast including a black stowaway who gains a windfall from a shipping company after he suffers severe frostbite onboard, has both legs amputated and sues. “Above all,” Brent Hayes Edwards writes in his review, “McKay seems to be struck by the inherent irony” of his hero’s predicament, which he casts as “a metaphor for the broader ironies of race in a racist world: the ‘enormous tragic joke’ that the amputation of Lafala’s legs leads to a financial windfall and thus to a sort of mobility. In this respect, as well as with its (even today) startling sexual frankness, what is remarkable about McKay’s fiction is its rejection of sentimentality of any stripe.
” THESE GHOSTS ARE FAMILY, by Maisy Card. (Simon & Schuster, $26. ) This rich, ambitious debut novel zigzags back and forth in time to tell the nonlinear family saga of Stanford Solomon, a dying 69-year-old Jamaican man living in Harlem who has a dark secret. Our reviewer, Mia Alvar, writes that the closer you look at the “family tree reproduced in the book’s front matter, the more compelling it becomes, as much for its gaps as for the names and dates.
… Card’s ghosts bracingly remind us that no family history is comprehensive, that some riddles of ancestry and heritage persist beyond this lifetime. ” DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIES: Stories, by Vanessa Hua. (Counterpoint, paper, $16. 95.
) The characters in Hua’s debut collection of short fiction — young and old, of varying nationalities, ethnicities and sexual orientations — lie with almost scientific precision, hoping their deceptions might serve as stopgaps until the lives they want take proper shape. “The most memorable stories address familial expectations placed on the next generation,” Jac Jemc writes, reviewing the book alongside two other story collections. “These lies are not frivolous, but motivated by a paralyzing desperation: Telling the truth would require these individuals to admit, to their families and themselves, that they must compromise the expectations and beliefs imposed on them.
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