Each week, our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
This “hidden history of the female body” reveals the ways that natural processes, such as giving birth, have been shaped by changing medical beliefs and social arrangements. Drawing on physicians’ casebooks, midwifery manuals, household recipe collections, court testimonies, private letters, and more, Maglaque constructs a kind of organic catalogue raisonné, indexing women’s experiences of their bodies from the fifteen-hundreds to the eighteen-hundreds. Her account is assembled from sharp examples. The “supposedly simple and natural gesture” of breast-feeding, for instance, came to be ruled by a “coarse moralism” in the eighteenth century, when the act “became the primary scene of sentimental motherhood: done out of a strictly defined maternal love” rather than as paid work.
At the outset of this chatty novel, the protagonist, Caroline, who was recently ghosted by a thoughtless man, has had a story published in this magazine. In an uncharacteristically impulsive move, she decides to quit her job and write full time. Because her mother is a successful writer—and likely a narcissist—the decision is a complicated one. But soon Caroline finds herself at a seaside residency in Massachusetts, where she falls in love with a local. As she gets to know his childhood friends, whom Jackson renders vividly, further complications mount; one of the group, it emerges, is pregnant with his child. The novel is ultimately a study of the season in life when friendships are tested by growing families and by the realization of ambition.
What does it mean for something to be considered “wilderness” in a world saturated by human intervention? Searching for answers, Flyn travels to various remote sites—including the Transylvanian Alps; the Niassa Special Reserve, in Mozambique; and the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica—journeys that lead her to conclude that wilderness is “a negative definition, an absence.” For one thing, wild places are increasingly threatened by the trophy-hunting industry, scientific study, and corporate exploitation. But, for another, Flyn argues, wilderness is about being able to “open oneself to the immensity of all existence, all creation, all of everything.”
Get our latest book recommendations in your inbox each week.
De Greef’s true-crime thriller, which grew from reporting originally published in The New Yorker, explores the origins of the toad-smoking movement, and the trail of death and abuse that one psychedelic guru left in his wake.
Madeleine is a “promising” twenty-three-year-old graduate student who decides, to the shock of other academic women in her life, to have a baby. (“They all say congrats, by the way, and better you than them,” one colleague says.) The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry. Is the baby really a baby, or has it been replaced by a changeling? Is Madeleine still herself, or has she been stolen away, too? Can her husband be trusted? The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.
This biography of Harry Belafonte, who died in 2023, paints the singer and civil-rights activist as “our first post-racial pop star.” In his music, Belafonte sought to honor his Caribbean heritage—he was born in Harlem to Jamaican parents in 1927—without being reduced to a mere exotic persona. Throughout his career, he merged his work as an entertainer with his political convictions (he refused to perform in segregated venues, for instance), a pursuit that required him to square his fame “with his anger at the society that gave it to him.” Jelly-Schapiro draws on a range of sources, including conversations with Belafonte, presenting a portrait of a formidable figure who, as Belafonte’s son puts it, “was serving two families: us and the family of Man.”
In “The Ardennes Forest,” one of the three newly translated stories in “We Were Forbidden,” male and female soldiers rove aimlessly through the woods, unsure whether they’re still at war. The story’s dreamlike, surreal style permits few identifying markers; we never find out what conflict the characters have stumbled into, only that they await the activation of their “post-hypnotic orders.” “The Outcast” similarly circles feelings of entrapment, disorientation, and exile: its narrator is unkind to a hypocritical classmate at her French school in Morocco, and her teachers punish her with forty days of “ostracization,” during which no one speaks to her and she doesn’t speak to anyone. The gem of the collection is its longest story, “The Broom Closet,” an arch, light-fingered, and very funny exploration of the relationship between fantasy and fiction-making.
This strange, ambitious novel is set in a version of Dublin where cars have been banned and people enter the country by teleportation. Bartholomew Port, an Irish writer living in London, returns to his homeland to participate in a literary festival, and arrives on the eve of a populist uprising. Dublin, he observes, has become a machine “for enriching the rich” and “impoverishing the poor,” a place where “life is not as important as money.” As Port falls in with a group of conspirators preparing for the insurrection, the book takes on a hallucinatory, digressive quality, blurring the lines between life and death, reality and illusion. Ultimately, Ridgway asks what responsibility bystanders must take for the injustices around them.
This stylish group biography of eight structuralist and post-structuralist philosophers interweaves details of its subjects’ lives with careful close readings and memoir. Eakin, an editor at the Times Book Review, aims to “re-embody” the so-called French theorists, “to recover the hidden human element beneath their often stringent antihumanism.” Her biographical approach allows her to highlight connections that a more straightforward intellectual history might not, such as the role that a chance encounter between the linguist Roman Jakobson and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss played in the development of the latter’s thought.
After an “entangled divorce,” a woman escapes with her daughter to Catania, a port city on Sicily’s eastern coast. Upon arrival, they are met with an ominous forecast: Mt. Etna has “spewed a plume of ash and gas,” a lunar eclipse is imminent, and the Levante, a strong easterly wind, will soon blow in. Amid the ever-shifting atmosphere, mother and daughter each search for “the chance to begin, or to begin again.” The novel was excerpted in the magazine.
This sweeping biography of the daughters of a French Jewish banking dynasty—who were painted by Renoir, and counted Proust as a family friend—unfolds in parallel worlds: a glittering Paris of privilege, and a Paris where widespread poverty and political instability fuelled profound social anxiety. Ostler traces a thread of anti-Jewish hatred through both worlds, as she illustrates how the sisters’ rarefied existence was frequently marred by bursts of prejudice. In 1882, shortly after completing the girls’ portraits, for instance, Renoir declared that he was “washing my hands of the Jews.” As Ostler shows, his stated reasons were vague and irrelevant. Renoir was merely a “cork in the current” of antisemitism.
Two story lines anchor this novel: one centered on a present-day designer with a Luddism-inflected aesthetic, and one that takes place in a fantastical realm where a young girl accidentally shoots a man she has mistaken for a deer. In the first plot, the designer disappears during a solar storm while working on a project in Norway. In the second, the girl and the man run from soldiers sent by a malevolent ruler. In that reality, people live on what they forage and kill; they wear shared clothes; they don’t have inventions like mirrors or—crucially—antibiotics. Though this world lacks the twenty-first-century trappings that so bothered the designer, its brutalities also suggest that nostalgia for the pre-modern is a knife that cuts both ways.
“A new person finding you interesting makes you feel new.” So reflects one of the protagonists of this intimate novel, which follows the relationship between two creative aspirants in London—a young woman working as a barista while nursing dreams of poetry, and a slightly older man who is a copywriter, but hopes to become a novelist. The two meet at a bar one night, then go home together. As Calder tracks the course of their romance, from the careful texting of its early days to reckonings with the characters’ darker elements—the copywriter, it emerges, drinks excessively—he gives the perennial human features of self-sabotage and solipsism a fresh look.
