craig brown’s ‘ninety-nine glimpses of princess margaret’ (farrar, straus & giroux.) brown ignores the starchy obligations of biography and adopts a way of his own to tell the story of The beautiful Princess Margaret, moody and scandal-prone, one of the great malcontents of the 20th century. she pounces on her subject from all angles, in a cubist portrait of a lady; one chapter lists her most famous reproaches. But the real art of the book is how it broadens the focus of her, from Margaret’s misbehavior to those who gaped at her, pens on her journals. History isn’t written by victors, Brown reminds us, it’s written by writers, and this study turns into a scathing group portrait of a generation of real-watching carnivores. (read the review).
‘The Impostor: A True Story’ by Javier Cercas, translated by Frank Wynne (Alfred A. Knopf). For three decades, Enric Marco, a Catalan mechanic, was a prominent public face of Spanish Holocaust survivors, until his story was revealed to be a hoax in 2005. Cercas, a novelist, becomes the (somewhat reluctant) Boswell of framework in this nonfiction work as he tries to understand why the man lied and why he was believed, and to investigate his own feelings of kinship. it’s exciting to be in the room with the two of them once he starts his game of cat and mouse. (read the review).
You are reading: Ny times books 2018
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‘your duck is my duck: stories’ by deborah eisenberg (ecco/harpercollins publishers). Eisenberg is a writer of legendary accuracy and slowness. this is the first new collection from him since 2006, and the wait was worth it, so instantly absorbing that it feels like abduction. these are stories of painful awakenings and rejections of innocence, rising from the ashes of the invasions of iraq and afghanistan, environmental dispossession and looting. the sentences are full of syntactic fireworks, dizzying detours and very dark humor. “I’m speeding through time, tied to an explosive device, my life,” the narrator of the main story tells her therapist. “Plus, it’s starting to look like a photo finish: me first or the world.” (read the review).
‘asymmetry’ by lisa halliday (simon & schuster). Tragedy unfolds slowly over an Iraqi American detained at Heathrow Airport. a third section hints at the link between these two stories that never explicitly intersect. The profound pleasure for the reader is to trace resonances, how themes sound and rhyme, as well as Halliday’s beautifully articulated underlying arguments about the possibilities and obligations of fiction. it is the kind of book that makes you a better reader, a more active and subtle observer. sharpen your senses. (read the review).
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‘American sonnets for my murderous past and future’ by terrance hayes (penguin poets). In these 70 sonnets, written after the 2016 election, Hayes set himself the challenge of writing political poems disguised as love poems. each one is different: some are sermons, some are swoons. they are acrid with tear gas, and they melt with desire. Hayes revisits lifelong obsessions—the cage of masculinity, the abyss between fathers and sons—and plays with different registers, returning to lament, to annihilating pain for “all the black people I’m tired of losing,” as he puts it. a narrator. “all dead from parts of florida, ferguson, / brooklyn, charleston, cleveland, chicago, / baltimore.” (read the review).
‘belonging: a German considers history and home’ by nora krug (writer). Krug traverses a fog of shame, determined forgetfulness, and misdirection to unearth her family’s role in the holocaust, as well as the stubborn silences of German life. his visual memories take the form of an overstuffed scrapbook, filled with letters, photographs, and impassioned praise for the household items of his childhood (soap, a brand of bandage, a rubber hot-water bottle) that speak to those insatiable desires. remove stains, repair scars, do everything. the wisdom of this book is that she eschews such palliatives. What Krug is after is a better quality of guilt, a way of dealing with the past without paralysis. (read the review).
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