Twenty-two literary scholars each recount a different two-year span in the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) in this hit-or-miss attempt to capture a “plurality of perspectives” on the novelist. By devoting roughly equal space to each year of Fitzgerald’s life, Salmose, an English professor at Linnaeus University, and Rennie (American Writers and World War I), a high school English teacher, highlight how fleeting fame and happiness were for Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. Walter Raubicheck’s account of how the couple became Jazz Age celebrities by partying with money earned from Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, stands in stark contrast to the financial straits the couple found themselves in only a few years later, suffering under the strain of Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and Zelda’s declining mental health. Fitzgerald’s relatively uneventful early life is covered in as much depth as his adulthood, making for a slow first half that’s riddled with tenuous claims about the significance of incidents from the author’s youth. For instance, Philip McGowan overreaches in insinuating that President William McKinley’s 1901 assassination at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, which a four-year-old Fitzgerald had visited earlier that year, echoes in the murder of Jay Gatsby. This experiment doesn’t quite pay off. Photos. (July)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Musings on art, marriage, and motherhood animate this beautifully written collection from Hofstra University English professor McMasters (Welcome to Shirley). In the opener, McMasters signals that her marriage is doomed. She then leaves that idea to simmer in the background as she covers her life before and after meeting her husband, R. She writes with humor about her first job out of college as an assistant at a Manhattan law firm (“I felt like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl”), and with palpable terror about barely surviving 9/11. Elsewhere, she discusses the “brutality” of “part-time country houses turned full-time residences” after she left New York City with R. and their two children for a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania that brought her closer to the elements than she was used to. Their choice to leave the city marked the beginning of the end for McMasters, who grew restless as she ran a bookshop and cared for the children while R. painted and drifted away. Eventually, the couple divorced, and McMasters adjusted to life as a single mother. McMasters suffuses these essays with compassion and curiosity, neither pulling her punches nor succumbing to bitterness. The result is a powerfully candid ode to difficult endings. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Zanetti (You Can Run) sizzles in this dark, fantasy-tinged retelling of “Beauty and the Beast,” set in a world where power is derived from gemstones. Beautiful social media heiress Alana Beaumont likes to play the ditz online, but privately she’s smart as a whip and passionate about social justice. Thorn Beathach is the craggy and somewhat ruthless loner at the helm of another of the four social media empires, which are all run via a connection to a specific jewel. Thorn is single-minded in his desire for Alana, whose father keeps her under lock and key following her brother’s death in a car accident. After an assassination attempt in a crowded restaurant, Thorn whisks Alana to his remote castle, where an unlikely romance builds between them. When Alana’s father compels Thorn to return her for a large garnet he needs to stay alive, Alana is livid. But as the body count rises and villains are unmasked, Alana learns that Thorn’s precautions are what’s keeping them both alive. Zanetti is a master of red herrings, keeping readers guessing as to who’s behind the violence until the very end. Her characters elicit fierce loyalty from the first page, and her plotting is spot-on. Fans of dark romance won’t be able to resist this. (July)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Dane (Cry Pilot) delivers a fascinating but often frustrating tale of an unlikely friendship in a postapocalyptic wilderness, where the remaining humans have formed tight-knit communities to protect themselves from outsiders, especially “twitches,” robot-human hybrids with superhuman physical and mental capabilities. Ysmany, a teen girl raised in one of these communities, witnesses her people kill a family who wandered into their territory. Only one infant boy survives. Desperate to protect the baby, Ysmany runs away with a mysterious figure known as the Ragpicker, a twitch looking for his husband. The relationship between Ysmany, the Ragpicker, and the baby, and the ways it is perceived by those they encounter, forms the heart of the story and keeps the pages turning. Many readers, however, will struggle to orient themselves in this elaborate world as key concepts are kept obscure for much of the novel. Even understanding what exactly a twitch is, which is essential to grasping anything else that’s happening, proves arduous. For those willing to put in the work, however, there are plenty of enticing speculative ideas here. Agent: Caitlin Balsdell, Liza Dawson Assoc. (July)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Iandoli (God Save the Queens) stumbles with this limp saga of a mafia heir’s quest for revenge. Jimmy Martello lacks grit, but his math skills have made him a “human calculator” for the New York City crime family run by his father, Italo Martello Jr. For Jimmy’s 25th birthday, Italo and his cohorts throw an extravagant party, complete with Jimmy’s induction into “the business.” When the festivities are in full swing, hit men infiltrate the party, killing Jimmy’s father and grandfather. Jimmy manages to wound one of the attackers before fleeing to safety. Suddenly, he’s top dog, and he soon learns that his uncle, Salvatore, has been released from prison with hopes of taking over New York City’s drug trade. Coming to believe Salvatore ordered the hit, Jimmy swears revenge, and attempts to make allegiances with other crime bosses who can teach him to become a killer. Though the novel is set in the present, Iandoli’s depiction of the mafia is dated and unconvincing, rarely rising above cliché. Mario Puzo this is not. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Brown’s sensuous and erudite debut follows a single day in the life of an Oxford student as she brainstorms an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel has yet to decide on her theme, and has risen early to “simply sit” with the text­—as a tutor once advised her to do when faced with an assignment. Despite her desire to focus, she can’t. Instead, she drinks tea, walks in the park, does yoga, and fantasizes about sex. Amid Annabel’s reveries, Brown inserts florid depictions of mundane matters (Annabel “sits on the toilet to piss. Empties herself into calmness”). Low-stakes tension simmers over whether Annabel will allow her older boyfriend to visit her on campus, while news of a friend’s hospitalization for anorexia provokes guilty feelings. When Annabel does turn her mind to the sonnets, Brown’s prose soars (“Could an essay smile with all the smiles she has for the Sonnets: the sad smile of sympathy, the wry smile sharing in his self-mockery... the soft sunlit smile when he offers an image of great beauty”). Lovers of the written word will be impressed. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, delivers a poignant ode to artistic inspiration. Patrik, whom Tawada obliquely refers to as “the patient,” is a literary researcher in Berlin whose love of art and objects often precludes his love for other people (“Even as a child, he called his toy tractor ‘my colleague’ and addressed his teddy bear as ‘Professor’ ”). After the Covid-19 lockdown lifts, Patrik receives an invitation to speak at a conference on his hero, the poet Paul Celan, but he feels too overwhelmed to attend. At a café, he meets a mysterious man named Leo-Eric Fu, who knows his work and encourages him to reconsider. The men’s lively conversations give the novel its charge as they discuss their shared love of Celan’s ever-surprising word choices and experience the ease and thrill of a new connection, which opens Patrik’s world in surprising ways (“A new friendship is my new form of long-distance travel. The airline is called Leo-Eric Fu and can fly much faster than any Lufthansa stork or the Indonesian divinity Garuda”). Readers will fall in love with this inventive and deeply human story. (July)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Gilbert, Taylor, and Allen debut with a quippy advice manual aimed at pastors’ wives and female pastors handling the ups and downs of ministry life. Cheerfully acknowledging that “once you’ve witnessed [the] behind-the-scenes” of church leadership, “there’s no unseeing it,” the authors expound on being compared to former pastors’ wives, parenting under a congregation’s scrutiny, and putting marital fights “on the back burner” when one is needed at church (“Step aside and allow the Holy Spirit to move when you must move on. He can reveal... a solution”). A particularly valuable section on sex in pastoral marriages captures the long-reaching effects of Christian purity culture (even after she got married, Gilbert “could not shake this strange underlying feeling that she might be doing something wrong” by having sex with her husband), and calls on Christian parents to initiate an “open dialogue with our children” about sex. The empathetic tone and down-to-earth humor (congregants “make life-altering decisions like choosing to follow Jesus or changing their hairstyle”) reinforce the simple yet worthy message that pastors, and their wives, are as flawed as everyone else. It’s an upbeat guide to the realities of ministry life. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lobbyists have cemented corporate control over the federal government, according to this savvy debut from Wall Street Journal reporter Brody Mullins and his brother, Luke, a writer for Politico. The account begins in the 1970s, when corporations began pouring vast resources into lobbying firms that steered federal policy in a business-friendly direction. The authors then survey lobbying milestones of the last 50 years, including Paul Manafort’s Reagan-era efforts promoting oil interests, as well as lesser-known episodes like Tommy Boggs’s 1978 quashing of an FTC initiative to limit TV advertising of sugary foods to kids and Evan Morris’s 2010 insertion of extra patent protection for Genentech drugs into Obamacare legislation. The narrative unfolds as a soap opera starring colorful lobbyists who fit the cigar-chomping, champagne-swilling, secretary-harassing stereotype, and who reveled in petty corruption until it brought many of them down. (Morris, for example, embezzled millions from Genentech, then shot himself at his country club when federal investigations closed in.) It’s also a canny study of the evolution of political corruption, as influence-peddling advanced from surreptitious envelopes of cash to meticulously coordinated PAC bundling to the subtle orchestration of far-reaching PR campaigns aimed at swaying public opinion rather than bribing legislators. Deeply reported and punchily written, this is an entertaining—and disturbing—account of the devious subversion of democracy. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Historian Wilford (America’s Great Game) argues in this vibrant account that the CIA came into being as a continuation of European imperial ambition. The CIA’s early, Ivy League–educated leadership “shared British values,” Wilford writes, and fancied themselves adventurers in the mold of T.E. Lawrence and Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s romantic portrait of the British Raj. (A bizarre number of early CIA agents were nicknamed “Kim.”) Founded in 1947 and freed from the wartime goals of its predecessor the OSS, the CIA latched onto fighting communism as its raison d’être—a so-called anti-imperialist effort that was carried out with supreme imperialist flair, Wilford contends, as the agency sought to prove America was “the rightful heir to European modernity.” Wilford structures his argument around profiles of prominent agents, including Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, architect of the CIA’s 1953 Iranian coup, who constantly played “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” from Guys and Dolls in the lead-up to the operation, and James Angleton, an obsessive orchid-growing loner and modernist literary scholar who went nearly insane trying to shake out the agency’s communist moles. The book is full of such striking character portraits, as Wilford evocatively suggests that the CIA’s tendency to overthrow foreign governments emerged from paranoia and personality defects among its leadership. This eye-opening slice of American history should not be missed. (June)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink