Recommends three coming-of-age novels

By Joseph Altuzarra

The luxury designer launched his eponymous fashion house in 2008, and since then his star has only risen. Altuzarra is now a judge on Amazon Prime’s Making the Cut, and his pieces have become highly coveted: it’s not unusual to see the designer’s creations on the red carpet, and, often, his arm around the wearer’s—he designed Awkwafina’s Met Gala look, a floor-length gold gown, and in May was her guest to the party; most recently, he dressed and accompanied Vanessa Hudgens to the Tonys. Here, Altuzarra, whose spring-summer 2020 collection shows in Paris on September 28, shares the coming-of-age stories that he finds at once universal and relatable. READ ON

By May Jeong

“There is a bland vacation quality to most Maine literature,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in 1971. Back then, such a pronouncement might have lead to a bar fight in Portland, but today the critic would just be laughed out of the joint. Elizabeth Strout is one reason why; Olive Kitteridge, her novel about a decidedly unbland heroine battling depression, loss, jealousy, and familial psychodrama in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. (The HBO series based on the book and starring Frances McDormand won eight Emmys.)

Olive, Again is a collection of interconnected short stories READ ON

In the lifetime Carrie Fisher spent in the public eye, she became known for her fierce wit and unsentimentality. Three years on from her death, her biographer unveils her vulnerable, virtuous side

By Sheila Weller

I love writing about brilliant, risk-taking, complicated women, and Carrie Fisher had those qualities—plus bracing honesty—in profusion. Few celebrities have confessed with as much witty, ferocious candor their self-acknowledged imperfections and serious challenges—in her case: the effects of bipolar disorder and inherited drug addiction. (And in the process of writing about them with such honesty, Carrie was a significant force in de-stigmatizing them.) But it is one thing to be amused by a woman’s proudly overshared rule-breaking (Carrie went off her medications and defied drug sobriety many times, and admitted it in highly amusing writings and interviews); it’s quite another to learn, as I did, how deeply vulnerable she could be. READ ON

The love letter that made it out of Auschwitz intact

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Few letters survive from the death camps built by the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Here is an almost unreadably poignant short note, from the Czech prisoner Vilma Grünwald to her doctor husband, Kurt.

She, Kurt, and their two children, John and Frank (Misa), were arrested like thousands of other innocent Jewish families and transported to Auschwitz. At the selection, the S.S. doctor Josef Mengele sends the limping John to the left—for instant execution in the extermination camp. His mother, knowing what this means, chooses to join him in an act of maternal love. She READ ON

Who doesn’t delight in juicy tales of disruption among the ranks of disruptive technologies (see John Carreyrou on Theranos or Nick Bilton on Twitter)? In Isaac’s deeply detailed account, Uber turns out to be the Jamba of corporate chronicles, centered on the charming but difficult founder, Travis Kalanick. The stories of abuse and excess in the upper ranks are abundant, and in places like Brazil the lax screening of passengers led to robberies, carjackings, even murder. Isaac, who covered Uber for The New York Times, is at his very best in the boardroom, where the poor oversight of Kalanick followed by his ill-handled ouster makes you wonder whether your last Uber driver would have been better on the board. READ ON

By Simon Callow

To review certain books seems like an impertinence. This is one of them. It speaks for itself with such clarity, certainty and wisdom that only one thing needs to be said: read it. And then read it again. It is a short book, divided into brief chapters, some no longer than two pages, each recounting some incident from the author’s prison experience. It is wonderfully distilled, but not sententious; even in extremis, Ahmet Altan never loses the limpidity and translucence, vivid with the vividness of dreams, which is characteristic of his other writing – as far as one can judge from the only other books of his available in English translation, READ ON

By Helen Schulman

I fell into a dream when I began Jeanette Winterson’s 11th novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story. This was in large part due to its lush and evocative descriptions of young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s life in 1816 when she was domiciled outside of Geneva with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his best friend, Lord Byron. Both poets egged her on, some might say, into giving birth to science fiction by writing the totemic, tragic Frankenstein.

In Winterson’s intimate, romantic rendering of Mary’s own tragic life—she never knew her famous writer mother; she lost three of her own children by READ ON

In a new book, the former P.M. has little to show for the Brexit disaster he gave life to

By Jeremy Paxman

They used to ask people who had suffered a bad knock to the head a number of questions. After asking you to recall your own name, they usually asked for the name of the prime minister.

In the recent procession of failures, show-offs, and nonentities who’ve run Britain, you’d almost be forgiven for failing to know who David Cameron was. He was the one with the smooth skin and the air of entitlement, the last but one to hold what was once one of the most important jobs on earth.

Now here come his memoirs. There is a predictable READ ON

A new book unites fashion and classical dance, from tulle to tutus

By Laura Jacobs

’Tis little I — could care for Pearls —
Who own the ample sea —
Or Brooches — when the Emperor —
With Rubies — pelteth me —
Or Gold — who am the Prince of Mines —
Or Diamonds — when have I
A Diadem to fit a Dome —
Continual upon me —
— Emily Dickinson, No. 466

In the poem “’Tis little I—could care for Pearls,” written in 1862, Emily Dickinson positions the artist as the richest of royals. Earthly treasures, those brooches and baubles bought at Cartier and Fabergé, are nothing compared with the imagination’s READ ON

By Henry Porter

Confirming the immutable law that governments always act most swiftly when their reputations are at stake, the Justice Department has sued Edward Snowden and the publishers of his book for violation of the secrecy and non-disclosure agreements that he signed before he worked for the C.I.A. and National Security Agency, and they are seeking to recover all proceeds from the book’s sales.

Although the horse has well and truly bolted on the state secrets brought out from the dark heart of the N.S.A. by Edward Snowden six years ago, a deed that resulted in espionage charges being filed aga READ ON

A never-before-published essay on the burns that almost cost the L.A. icon her life

By Eve Babitz

Here’s what you would have witnessed if you happened to be standing outside the Raymond restaurant in Pasadena on April 13, 1997: A ’68 VW Bug comes to a stop, a woman flies out, skirt aflame. She drops to the ground by the side of the road, rolls on the grass, setting the grass along the side of the road on fire, and then against the green bushes, setting those on fire too. “Oh no, oh no!” is all she can manage. That woman was me.

In fact, about 30 feet away, a poor Sunday-brunch couple getting out of READ ON

By Vir Sanghvi

In 1993, Rupert Murdoch bought Asian satellite TV service Star TV, the first step in his quest to become a global-media mogul. Star had tried to create pan-Asian channels, but that ambition was floundering when Murdoch swooped in and bought it. To celebrate the acquisition, Murdoch set off on a triumphant Asian tour. One of his stops was Delhi, where I interviewed him about his plans for India.

The whole idea behind Star TV was flawed, Murdoch told me. It was wrong to believe that a viewer in Beijing would want to watch the same channel as a viewer READ ON

Three new mysteries

By Lisa Henricksson

Heaven, My Home, the sequel to Attica Locke’s Edgar Award–winning Bluebird, Bluebird, is billed as a Highway 59 novel, announcing how integral that swath of East Texas is to its hero, Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. Being a black lawman in the heart of Trump’s America has its special set of challenges, which Matthews struggles with every day: the double takes provoked by his Stetson and his star, the ugly vibe that descends when he walks into a bar. When last we saw him, Matthews was not in good shape. He’d finessed a previous case in a way that left him open to both trouble and a bottle of bourbon. READ ON

Recommends three of this year’s best books

By Ann Patchett

“The books I love the most are the ones fresh out of the gate,” says Patchett, the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville as well as the author of several novels, including Bel Canto and, most recently, Commonwealth. Since opening her bookstore in 2011, Patchett has made a name for herself as much for her vocal support of independent bookstores as for her stellar writing. Here, the author, whose new novel, The Dutch House, is out September 24 from Harper, shares the recently published books she’ll be encouraging everyone to read in the coming months.

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, READ ON

By Mario Calvo-Platero

If you’ve ever been to Sicily, you’ll have fond memories—of its natural beauty, of the amazingly well-preserved Greek ruins of Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, of the first women in bikinis portrayed joyfully dancing on the mosaic floors of the ancient Villa Romana del Casale, near Piazza Armerina. You must have visited the 12th-century Norman castle in Palermo, sitting on top of a previous 9th-century Arab castle built during the region’s Muslim domination. You might even have reached the much-beloved destination of Corleone, the old village immortalized in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In short: in the collective mind, Sicily READ ON

Maaza Mengiste writes the alternate history of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia

By Chloe Malle

For Maaza Mengiste, the research on her new novel, The Shadow King, was a kind of archeological dig. The sweeping war epic is an elegy of loss, both personal and collective, set against Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. It will be classified as historical fiction, but it so deliberately questions the burden and responsibility of whose history and whose fiction is being recounted that it seems to challenge the entire genre. Researching the book took Mengiste years. The Ethiopian-American author moved to Rome and learned Italian to be able to properly probe what is considered one of the first confl READ ON

If Samantha Power had never won a Pulitzer Prize for A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide or worked for Barack Obama, first as his human-rights adviser and then as U.N. ambassador, her life would still be worth a memoir. The Dublin-raised daughter of two doctors, Samantha was brought to America at age nine by a mother intent on furthering her medical career and just as intent on leaving her husband, whose second home had become the local pub. School in Atlanta led to college at Yale, a freelance-journalism career covering the Balkans, Harvard Kennedy School, and a job in then senator Obama’s office. READ ON

By Aatish Taseer

Arthur Koestler, who lived one of the great adventuring lives of the 20th century, has in death left us one last surprise. When, on March 1, 1983, the 77-year-old Hungarian-born writer entered into a suicide pact with his much younger wife, Cynthia, months after discovering he had leukemia, it was thought—including by Koestler himself—that the full original German manuscript of his finest novel, Darkness at Noon, was lost. Recalling the extraordinary circumstances under which the book was completed, in Paris in 1940—arrests, searches, seizures, and internment in French concentration camps—Koestler, in the second volume of his autobiography, Invisible Writing, recalls, “In the end, I was again arrested and the READ ON

Frank Lloyd Wright’s biographer seeks to understand the architect through the gruesome crime he wasn’t home for

By Paul Hendrickson

The most iconic and savage event in Frank Lloyd Wright’s turbulent and nearly century-long life took place on August 15, 1914, at his rural and stunning cantilevered hillside home, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. A black employee in a white serving tunic, supposed to be setting out the noonday meal, went berserk with gasoline and a shingling hatchet. In 12 to 14 minutes of blurring chaos, quiet-seeming Julian Carlton, who probably never weighed more than 150 pounds in his life, managed to murder or fatally wound seven people. (Three died more or less instantly, and four others lingered for several hours or days.) Three of his victims were children under the age of 14, although none were Wright’s own children. READ ON

By Julie Burchill

Though they would have gasped and giggled if you’d told them so, the seven writers profiled in Celia Brayfield’s excellent book were the modest midwives to the fierce feminism which erupted in the capitals of the West at the end of the 1960s, among them Edna O’Brien, Shelagh Delaney, and Nell Dunn. Following the rise of the Beat poets came two decades of being snubbed and slapped around by rebellious movements for social change whose members believed that once you’d ticked the box marked Brotherhood of Man, you were free to treat women any way you wanted. But perhaps READ ON

By James Atlas

The first thing you notice about Benjamin Moser’s massive biography of Susan Sontag is that the cover has no type on it, no author’s or subject’s name. It’s just a photograph—we don’t need to identify who it is. Sontag, more than any writer of the period, perhaps of any period, was iconic: her coal-black hair divided down the middle by a white skunk’s stripe was as instantly recognizable as Marilyn Monroe’s platinum coif, and as meaningful to the culture. It defined the idea of the modern.

Perhaps it’s hard to remember now how transformative, how shattering Sontag’s first collection of essays, READ ON

A new volume celebrates New York City’s charming independent-bookstore scene

By Cleo Le-Tan

As a teenager, I spent much of my time hiding in majestic, beautiful, sometimes abandoned libraries in grand old buildings. I pottered around Paris and London, uncovering hidden treasures in weird bookstalls on the banks of the Seine and hunting down dusty antique shops only my dad knew of.

My father, Pierre Le-Tan, first came to New York in July 1968. Though still a teenager, he had sold drawings to The New Yorker that would eventually appear on the magazine’s cover. He spent his days discovering classic Midtown and Uptown addresses like Ursus, Argosy, and Swann, and still today fondly recalls the legendary Gotham Book Mart in the Diamond District— READ ON

Recommends the best books on climate change

By Jonathan Safran Foer

“I spent the last two years writing a nonfiction book about climate change, so most of my reading has been on that subject,” says the author, whose past books have tackled everything from the history of Jews in Ukraine to the food that we eat. Along the lines of Foer’s newest, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, out on September 17 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, are four books that, “despite the gravity of their concerns, were something like ‘fun.’”

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, READ ON

By Jessica Lahey

Paul Tough is one of the country’s leading writers on education, parenting, poverty, and politics. His wildly successful book, How Children Succeed (2012), introduced readers to vital concepts that shape educational and socio-economic success, such as Adverse Childhood Experiences (A.C.E.), and “noncognitive skills,” like resilience, self-control, and character.

In his newest book, The Years that Matter Most, Tough investigates the nature of higher education: who gets in, who stays in, and how much that college degree matters. Education can be society’s most powerful equalizer, Tough argues, but the way many colleges admit, instruct, and support their students serves to reinforce, rather than redress, our nation’s deep socio-economic divide. READ ON