September 22, 2022 Fall Books Issue

Wyatt Mason

Outdoing Reality

The absurd incursions of the real into the intelligent life of the imagination are central to the Afghan American writer Jamil Jan Kochai’s fiction.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

by Jamil Jan Kochai

Martin Filler

Despite designing over seven hundred buildings, the pioneering female architect Julia Morgan is now best known for a single, extremely eccentric commission: San Simeon, the estate of the legendary newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst.

Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect

by Victoria Kastner, with photography by Alexander Vertikoff

Julia Morgan: The Road to San Simeon: Visionary Architect of the California Renaissance

by Gordon L. Fuglie, Jeffrey Tilman, Karen McNeill, Johanna Kahn, Elizabeth McMillian, Kirby William Brown, and Victoria Kastner

Sophie Pinkham

Immune to Despair

In his novels, rock songs, and social activism, Serhiy Zhadan has long been a builder of bridges in Ukraine, an essential figure in a bitterly divided landscape.

The Orphanage

by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Fintan O’Toole

The Party’s Over

Boris Johnson’s short and flippant dalliance with power will have very long and serious consequences.

Clair Wills

Family Lore

In her latest book, Marina Warner uses her skills as a mythographer to tell the story of her parents’ lives in postwar Cairo.

Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir

by Marina Warner, with vignettes by Sophie Herxheimer

Eric Foner

The Complicity of the Textbooks

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

by Donald Yacovone

Deborah Eisenberg

Their Glorious Façades

Gavin Lambert’s novel The Goodby People captures the serious disorientation of 1960s Los Angeles.

The Goodby People

by Gavin Lambert

Anthony Grafton

How to Cast a Metal Lizard

The knowledge that underpins our world of things has been discovered over centuries, produced as the result of collaboration and generally unrecorded. How does a historian overcome these obstacles?

From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

by Pamela H. Smith

Elaine Blair

Questioning Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is rare in its ability to speak to a plural audience—queer and straight, multiracial and multigendered—with the assumption that we have some common interests in sex and dating even if we have varied experiences of them.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

by Amia Srinivasan

Tim Flannery

It’s Not Easy Being Green

George Monbiot argues that none of the most rapidly spreading alternative farming methods can help save our food system from impending crisis.

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

by George Monbiot

Wendy Xu

Little Emperor of Solstice

a poem

Steven Simon,
Jonathan Stevenson

These Disunited States

It is time to consider a radical solution to stave off the prospect of political violence and even civil war in the US.

Nicole Rudick

Where Does the Buck Stop?

Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Trust, incites mistrust from the very start, with the reader becoming a detective sorting through different versions of the truth.

Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

‘Hell, Yes, We Are Subversive’

For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer, Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why not?

Angela Davis: An Autobiography

by Angela Y. Davis

Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing

edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

David Motadel

My Husband the War Criminal

Nancy Dougherty’s The Hangman and His Wife portrays Reinhard Heydrich as a cold, apolitical technocrat while downplaying his ideological commitment to Nazism.

The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich

by Nancy Dougherty, edited and with a foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Dan Chiasson

Rococo Risks

With Venice, her latest collection of poems, Ange Mlinko offers an account of motherhood at a crossroads, now that art and mortality share an empty nest.

Venice

by Ange Mlinko

Michael D. Gordin

Our Toxic Nuclear Present

Blindness to the aftermath of nuclear detonations has consistently marginalized some of the most traumatized victims of the atomic age.

Blown to Hell: America’s Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders

by Walter Pincus

Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb

by Togzhan Kassenova

Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters

by Serhii Plokhy

Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis

by Toshihiro Higuchi

Geoffrey Nutter

Toy Apple Beauty

a poem

Joyce Carol Oates

Disaster Was Her Element

Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once is a richly detailed and warmly sympathetic look at Jean Rhys’s turbulent, disjointed life.

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

by Miranda Seymour

Joshua Hammer

Promise and Disillusion in South Africa

Despite a shift in political power, the country is plagued by racial divisions and economic inequalities.

These Are Not Gentle People: Two Dead Men. Forty Suspects. The Trial That Broke a Small South African Town

by Andrew Harding

Prisoners of the Past: South African Democracy and the Legacy of Minority Rule

by Steven Friedman

The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning

by Eve Fairbanks

Adrian Nathan West

Brick, Mortar, and Rot

The novels of the late, contrarian Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes have come to seem prophetic.

Cremation

by Rafael Chirbes, translated from the Spanish by Valerie Miles

Laurence H. Tribe

Deconstructing Dobbs

Whether or not one sees the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as barely concealed theocracy, it fails to provide any coherent legal analysis of why the right to abortion is not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.