Once again, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq is a step ahead of current events. But his themes are timeless

By Lee Smith

Michel Houellebecq’s new novel is the story of a middle-aged man who had his chance at love and missed it, twice. There is no cure for his despair, neither sex nor consumer goods, not even the antidepressant prescribed to boost the neurotransmitter referred to in the title, Serotonin. He is resolved to disappear, but not before embarking on a journey to make his final farewells. His doctor tells him that the remarkably high level of cortisol he is secreting suggests he is dying of sorrow. The way Houellebecq sees it, so is France.

In its essence, Serotonin is an updated version of the Henry James novella about a man READ ON

The photographer behind My Name Is Prince, the largest-ever collection of images of the star, recalls the extraordinary experience of being in his orbit

By Randee St. Nicholas

Prince was a true genius, whose craft transcended all musical categories and inspired so many. His androgyny, both naughty and seductive, was somehow commercially viable; his fashion, quite cleverly his own, created a universe of his own; and his enigmatic character and prolific volume of work intimidated even those closest to him.

So, who was this fascinating creature? I spent 25 years getting to know him, following him around the world on many wild and sleepless adventures, documenting the powerful charisma that he embodied. I still do not claim to truly know him, but here is what I do READ ON

By James Kirchick

Lord Louis and Edwina Mountbatten were one of the most famous couples of the 20th century. “Dickie,” as he was called by friends, was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the supreme commander of Allied forces in Southeast Asia during World War II, and the last viceroy and first governor-general of India. Edwina was the richest heiress in the world, a legendary bon vivant, and royalty in her own right, albeit as a descendant of the Native American princess Pocahontas. Both were endowed with sexual and romantic appetites too great for only one partner to fulfill, and it is the adulterous aspects of the Mountbattens’ relationship that form the heart of Andrew Lownie’s entertaining joint biography. READ ON

By John Banville

Among the arguments against the existence of God, pedophilia is surely one of the more compelling. Human beings are ingenious in the variety and cruelty of the sufferings we inflict upon each other, yet even St. Paul, who has a lot to say about the sins of the flesh—indeed, he is suspiciously hot on the subject—is silent in the matter of child abuse. Perhaps in the old days, as indeed in our young days, children, being mere adults-in-waiting, were considered fair game.

The narrator of The Sacrament is a French nun, Sister Johanna Marie, who in the late 1980s READ ON

On the unlikely books that offer a break from your routine reads

By Lee Child

Given the enduring consistency with which Lee Child delivers sophisticated, gripping novels, you’d think he reads crime fiction and nothing else. Somehow, though, the British author, best known for his Jack Reacher thriller series, finds time for books he groups in the “random” category: “I grew up reading, before the Internet, before book-club culture, before any kind of recommendation network, and I became addicted to random finds—books I had never heard of, fields I had never thought about, avenues I had never explored,” says Child, whose new Jack Reacher novel, Blue Moon, is out now from Delacorte. This addiction READ ON

By Stephen O'Shea

Conventional wisdom once held that the refined European should speak German to his philosophy tutor, French to his cook, Italian to his lover, and English to his horse. The polyglot protagonists in Orlando Figes’s wonderful study, The Europeans, would have been capable of that, with Spanish and Russian thrown in.

At the fulcrum of a romantic love triangle central to the story stands Pauline Viardot, the toast of mid-19th-century European opera houses for her soaring mezzo-soprano and amazing vocal versatility. Not a conventional beauty by any means, her long neck and bulging eyes made her what the French call une belle laide READ ON

By Mark Bowden

I would propose an alternate subhead for this book, “Sort of True Travels …,” because this account of journeys through Russia and nearby states is delivered by a distinctly unreliable narrator. It reads like a cross between Mark Twain and Hunter S. Thompson.

Which is a very good thing, because Rory MacLean’s new book is darkly entertaining throughout, if not entirely to be believed. Like Twain’s camel that chokes to death trying to eat one of his manuscripts, gagging on “one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public,” or the screeching bats (unseen by others) that attack Thompson in Las Vegas, many of the supposedly true details in this book serve a purpose larger than mere truth. READ ON

A new book remembers more than a decade spent in the orbit of Beckett and de Beauvoir. Here, its author describes her early encounters with the literary stars

By Deirdre Bair

“So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.” This was the first thing Samuel Beckett ever said to me, on a cold November day in 1971 when I, a newly minted twentysomething Ph.D. who had never read biography and had no idea how to write it, decided that he needed one and that I was the person to write it.

Earlier, I had written a letter saying I didn’t believe he was only the “poet of alienation, isolation, and despair,” as all the critics so deeply steeped in French literary READ ON

By Garth Risk Hallberg

I was 13 when my best friend died of brain cancer. That was also the year my grandmother developed the first of the ovarian tumors that would eventually kill her. And the year her daughter, my aunt, was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer—maybe a product of the lymphoma that had afflicted her decades earlier, at 17, or of the experimental isotopes that had saved her life, but maybe just a freak coincidence. In any case, as I soon learned, cancer has a way of rendering the “why” largely irrelevant; a tumor is always, in some sense, a non sequitur. And READ ON

The woman behind the legendary Paris bakery recommends the best cookbooks

‘Poilâne and the Poilâne family have revolutionized the way we think about bread,” writes Alice Waters in her foreword to Apollonia Poilâne’s cookbook, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Poilâne: The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery marks the first time the recipes of the celebrated Parisian bakery, founded in 1932 by Apollonia’s grandfather, have been made public. After her parents were tragically killed in an accident, the 18-year-old Apollonia took over the family business in 2002, earning a degree from Harvard a few years later while simultaneously running the company, which celebrates its 88th anniversary in 2020. Here, the baker and C.E.O. shares her favorite books on food and drink. READ ON

Little-known correspondence from Elizabeth Bishop offers a glimpse into the poet’s romantic life

By Thomas Travisano

Elizabeth Bishop once told an interviewer that surprise is the one quality every poem should have. I have been chronicling Bishop’s life and art for more than 40 years, and she has never lost the power to surprise me. Soon after I began conducting research for Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop, I was astonished to discover a cache of nearly 50 intimate, brilliant letters that Bishop began writing at the age of 14 to a talented fellow summer camper and aspiring poet named Louise Bradley—letters that had been carefully preserved and were now tucked away in a little-known archive. I had already read thousands of Bishop’s letters and served as principal editor of READ ON

So much more than a children’s book: on metafiction for kids

By B.J. Novak

“To me, the No. 1 job of a children’s-book author is to be on the kid’s side. The book should feel like their friend, their ally, their partner in crime,” says the writer, director, and actor (Ryan from The Office). It’s a strategy lurking not far from the surface of all of Novak’s projects, and, arguably, what he owes much of the success of his humor to. “I believe that’s why some of my favorite classic children’s books were written by people without kids: people like Dr. Seuss, H. A. and Margret Rey, Maurice Sendak,” he READ ON

By Kerri Arsenault

Six thousand African refugees (mostly Muslim, mostly Somalian) relocate to the historically French-Canadian, Catholic, white, blue-collar town of Lewiston, Maine. The narrative tension hinges on this story’s improbabilities, the contrasts of black and white, snow and sun. And Lewiston is no Brigadoon; with its flatlined enterprises, environmental-pollution legacies, and aging homes and infrastructure, jobs and resources are precious to the locals. What could go wrong?

In Home Now, Cynthia Anderson chronicles the everyday lives of Lewiston’s African immigrants, such as Fatuma Hussein, who establishes a nonprofit, and Nasafari Nahumure, a high-school student planning to be an attorney. Strains occur—isolation, conflicts, peanut-gallery racists, clan-division hangovers between ethnic Somalis, and the intrusion of Maine’s former governor, who is a flaccid doppelgänger o READ ON

Never-before-seen Avedon, a Trump-free Palm Beach, Helmut’s nudes: everyone loves a beautiful coffee-table book, and this year options abound

In order of appearance: Helmut Newton: Sumo, 20th-anniversary edition, edited by June Newton (Taschen); Avedon Advertising (Abrams); Ralph Lauren: In His Own Fashion, by Alan Flusser (Abrams); Fabien Baron: Works 1983–2019, with a foreword by Kate Moss and text by Adam Gopnick (Phaidon); Palm Beach, by Aerin Lauder (Assouline); Mosques: The 100 Most Iconic Islamic Houses of Worship (Assouline); Waves: Pro Surfers and Their World, by Thom Gilbert (Abrams); Steve McCurry: Animals (Taschen); Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses, by Dominic Bradbury (Phaidon); Glasshouse Greenhouse, by India Hobson and Magnus Edmondson (Pavilion); Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting READ ON

By Max Carter

There exist various species of the revisionist historian, ranging from the contrarian Oxbridge smoothie, for whom conviction and intellectual vanity inversely relate, to the lapel-grabbing radical, who detects in all previous scholarship vast conspiracies of ignorance and evil. In Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome, which seeks to revise the historical consensus on the fall of the Roman Empire and the ensuing “dark” millennium, I have discovered yet another type: the techno-revisionist. To this strange, declarative being, humans are so many data points. Rejecting Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” and fluid style, the techno-revisionist does things like run time-cost models and quote Kurt Russell movies. Instead of transporting me to ancient Rome, Scheidel’s epigraph—“The days of empire are finished,” from READ ON

By Edward Sorel

It’s always good to have friends in high places. In 1968, when my friend Milton Glaser started New York magazine with Clay Felker, I became one of its regular illustrators. This brash new weekly didn’t pay a lot, but it gave me something I coveted more—a chance to write and illustrate my own ideas. Appearing in New York changed my career, just as it did the careers of Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, James McMullan, Nora Ephron, and the dozens of others who were given their big chance to strut their stuff.

In Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines, READ ON

By Lisa Henricksson

If you’re looking for an alternative to the hard-drinking, self-lacerating, morose detectives who dominate Scandinavian noir, Swedish cop Embla Nyström might be your girl. She was the Nordic light-welterweight boxing champion, won’t even touch coffee, hunts wild boar, and doesn’t turn inward much, though she’s had a difficult past. She is also an excellent detective who’s returning to work after a head injury that ended her boxing career.

Nyström’s skills are tested immediately when she, as part of a violent-crimes unit in Gothenberg, is called to the small harbor town of Strömstad to assist in solving a cluster of awful crimes that take place over the Christma READ ON

Recommends the books whose authors were as fascinating as their work

By Deborah Levy

“My apartment is crowded with books. Sometimes I wish they would all go on vacation and give me a break,” says the British writer, who began her career as a playwright before focusing on prose fiction; her novels include Swimming Home, Hot Milk, and, most recently, the Booker-nominated The Man Who Saw Everything, out now from Bloomsbury. “There are some books that make me think more about the writer than the writing. This is somehow critically forbidden, but I find it very enjoyable,” Levy says. Here, three books that invite readers to gossip about their authors’ “hairstyle rather than their prose style.” READ ON

The author of a new book on H. G. Wells’s writings on re-discovering his life and work

By Sarah Cole

Setting out to write a book about H. G. Wells was a strange and counter-intuitive thing for an academic, schooled in the high canon of literary modernism, to undertake. After all, Wells is barely recognized or taught in the academy; the works that are appreciated today all stem from the first 10 years of his 50-year writing career, and all are science fiction, itself a marginalized genre among literary scholars.

But my decision to write a book about him came not really as a decision at all but as a kind of inspiration. I knew almost nothing READ ON

By Evan Thomas

The last lifeboat had gone. R.M.S. Titanic was down by the bow, poised for a final plunge. On the bridge, Captain Edward Smith grabbed a megaphone and purportedly shouted to the 2,200 passengers and crew trapped on board, “Be British!” He meant die like the heroes of old, stoical and brave to the end.

The stiff-upper-lip Smith went down with his ship, though one witness described the captain leaping from the wing of the bridge, possibly hoping to save himself. Smith’s supposed last words were carved on the plinth of a memorial erected in his honor. The exhortation— READ ON

By John Reynolds

The “elegant, gossipy and bitchy” diaries of a Conservative politician who partied with Nazis in 1930s Berlin are to be published in full for the first time.

The first volume of the diaries of the socialite Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, who dined with Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau as a young man in France and was a close friend to Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, will be published next year. The uncensored observations include revelations that were deemed too shocking for the heavily sanitised edition published in 1967, nine years after his death.

Sir Henry’s trustees have now authorised the publication of the complete diaries, which cover the abdication, his encounters with Winston Churchill and a prewar visit to Germany for the Berlin Olympics. READ ON

By Bruce Handy

A single stone, rock, boulder, or whatever may strike you as an implausible subject for a picture book. And true, after the folktale Stone Soup and William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the shelf of first-rate lithologic literature for children lies fairly empty. So kudos to Brendan Wenzel for A Stone Sat Still, which, as the title suggests, is about a stone that’s not even animate, let alone magic. The cover art ups the ante by depicting a snail on top of the titular stone, almost as if Wenzel is daring himself to write the quietest, slowest, stillest book imaginable—or daring readers to pick it up. READ ON

By Tim Bouverie

The early hours of June 22, 1941, saw the opening of the greatest military operation the world had ever seen. One hundred eighty-six German and Axis divisions—more than 3.5 million men—invaded the Soviet Union, along with 3,350 tanks, 2,000 aircraft, 7,000 field guns, and more than 600,000 horses. To begin with, all went according to plan. Surprised and underprepared, vast swathes of the Red Army were swiftly encircled, and the German panzer divisions were well on their way to their objectives of Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow by the beginning of July. Hitler’s boast that the Germans had “only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure [of the Soviet Union] will come crashing down” appeared to be coming true. READ ON

The author who shared everything in My Struggle keeps his new book under wraps for 94 years

By Alison Flood

Karl Ove Knausgaard, who detailed the minutiae of his own life in the six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, has taken on a new challenge: the Norwegian writer is to become the sixth contributor to the Future Library, which collects works by contemporary authors that will remain unread until 2114.

The Future Library is described as a “living, breathing, organic artwork, unfolding over 100 years” by its creator, the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It currently consists of 1,000 spruce trees that were planted in Oslo’s Nordmarka forest in 2014. After a century, they will be cut down and turned into paper. On this, the manuscripts by participating authors including Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Elif Shafak, will finally be printed. READ ON