Daily Review

In Extremis:
The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin
by Lindsey Hilsum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$28.00 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
Fighting Words
By Megan K. Stack
Dec/Jan 2019
Early one morning in February 2012, as the Syrian army was pounding the besieged city of Homs into submission, artillery fire crashed around a building in the embattled district of Baba Amr. As rocket fire closed in, the handful of foreign journalists and activists who’d been using the building as a makeshift media center panicked.
Double Dare Ya
By Lauren Oyler
Dec/Jan 2019
On the night the French author Virgine Despentes was gang-raped, at age seventeen, she had a switchblade in her pocket but was too terrified to use it. “I am furious with a society that has educated me without ever teaching me to injure a man if he pulls my thighs apart against my will, when that same society has taught me that this is a crime from which I will never recover,” she writes in her sweeping 2006 manifesto/memoir, King Kong Theory.
This Mournable Body:
A Novel
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Graywolf Press
$16.00 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
By Leah Mirakhor
web exclusive
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body follows a single, unemployed young black woman (Tambudzai), as she attempts to escape the entangled forces of neocolonialism, patriarchy, poverty, and history’s ever-present effect on daily life in modern-day Zimbabwe. Tambu, who also appeared in Dangarembga’s

…
We Can Save Us All
by Adam Nemett
The Unnamed Press
$18.99 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
We Can Save Us All by Adam Nemett
By Ryan Chapman
web exclusive
Adam Nemett's debut novel We Can Save Us All deserves points for ambition. In just under four hundred pages he's folded in the campus novel, socialist activism, toxic masculinity, psychopharmacology, communalism, American mythology, the anthropocene, and the apocalypse. All from the perspective of

…
The Circuit:
A Tennis Odyssey
by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$26.00 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
Courtly Love
By Lynne Tillman
Dec/Jan 2019
In film, no long shot is more iconic, precise in its intention, disturbing, and startling than Alfred Hitchcock’s of a tennis match in Strangers on a Train. The camera looks at the crowd looking intently at a game in action; the crowd mirrors the audience watching the film (the meta Hitchcock loves).

…
Silicon City:
San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
W. W. Norton & Company
$26.95 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland
By Luisa Rollenhagen
web exclusive
In his new book, Silicon City, Cary McClelland observes that San Francisco “has always been something of a funhouse mirror, reflecting a strange yet sublime potential self back to the rest of the nation.” The city was a myth machine, attracting pioneers, refugees, misfits, and artists—all of whom

…
The Patch
by John McPhee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$26.00 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
John McPhee’s ways of seeing
By Alex Abramovich
Dec/Jan 2019
John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, attended Princeton High School and Princeton University (class of 1953), and raised his four daughters in Princeton. He lives and works in Princeton to this day, practicing the craft he learned in New York—at Time magazine, where he spent seven years, and at the New Yorker, where he’s been a writer on staff since 1965.
The Injustice Never Leaves You:
Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
by Monica Muñoz Martinez
Harvard University Press
$35.00 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez
By Andrew R. Graybill
web exclusive
In the wee hours of January 28, 1918, the men of Texas Ranger Company B and a handful of local ranchers descended upon the tiny hamlet of Porvenir, hard against the boundary with Mexico. The police had come in search of alleged bandits who were hiding in the area, which, like much of the Texas border

…
The Piranhas:
The Boy Bosses of Naples: A Novel
by Roberto Saviano
translation by Antony Shugaar
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$27.00 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
The Piranhas by Roberto Saviano
By Molly McArdle
web exclusive
In English, “novel” equals “fiction”—the meaning is unambiguous. In Italian, however, it’s a bit more complicated. The word romanzo describes a book-length prose narrative, but it does not distinguish between fact and fiction. In the work of Roberto Saviano—Italy’s most famous living writer save

…
Seasonal Associate
by Heike Geissler
Semiotext(e)
$16.95 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler
By Jesse Barron
Dec/Jan 2019
Heike Geissler, the German novelist and translator, ran out of money in the winter of 2010 and took a temporary job at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig to support her two children. As she tells us in the opening pages of her book about that experience, she was not intending to write a book about that

…
Fair Game
By Christopher Lyon
POV
On a steamy Friday afternoon that felt more like late July than mid-September, I headed to the annual New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, aiming to learn more about the state of independent art publishing. Run by Printed Matter, the nonprofit organization that promotes artists’ books with evangelical zeal, the fair is now in

…
On Joan Didion
By Miranda Popkey
POV
I “She cooked nonstop,” Eve Babitz, the Los Angeles–based artist and author of Eve’s Hollywood, remembers. “She made stuff like beef Wellington—for a sit-down dinner for thirty-five people—with a side dish, Cobb salad or something, for those who didn’t eat meat. . . . It’s the first time I ever saw Spode china. . .

…
Hearing Voices
By Tobi Haslett
POV
Last month, part of the street I live on was renamed “Do the Right Thing Way,” after the Spike Lee Joint. It’s a taunting slap to this little strip of gentrifying Brooklyn. Do the Right Thing, which was shot a few blocks from my building, is a film about racial hatred and police slaughter, but

…
Will the Real American Psycho Please Stand Up: Why Donald Trump Was Patrick Bateman’s Hero
By Dan Duray
POV
Recently, I had cause to reread Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 bestseller American Psycho. A lot has been said about this controversial comic novel’s violence, but I think it’s best classified with social satire like Vile Bodies or Speedboat (just with, you know, a homicidal narrator). And as it turns out, despite its twenty-four years, some

…
Neoliberalizing Liberal Education
By Jim Sleeper
POV
A good liberal education has three dimensions—learning, teaching, and citizenship building—each of which the journalist Fareed Zakaria has mishandled enough in his own academic career so that he misrepresents them for the rest of us in In Defense of a Liberal Education. I review that book in Bookforum’s summer issue, but before the predictable coronation gets too far along, here

…

Daily Review

In Extremis:

The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin

by Lindsey Hilsum

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$28.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Megan K. Stack

By Lauren Oyler

This Mournable Body:

A Novel

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Graywolf Press

$16.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Leah Mirakhor

We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

The Unnamed Press

$18.99 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Ryan Chapman

The Circuit:

A Tennis Odyssey

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$26.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Lynne Tillman

Silicon City:

San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley

by Cary McClelland

W. W. Norton & Company

$26.95 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Luisa Rollenhagen

The Patch

by John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$26.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Alex Abramovich

The Injustice Never Leaves You:

Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas

by Monica Muñoz Martinez

Harvard University Press

$35.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Andrew R. Graybill

The Piranhas:

The Boy Bosses of Naples: A Novel

by Roberto Saviano

translation by Antony Shugaar

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$27.00 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Molly McArdle

Seasonal Associate

by Heike Geissler

Semiotext(e)

$16.95 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

By Jesse Barron

By Christopher Lyon

By Miranda Popkey

By Tobi Haslett

By Dan Duray

By Jim Sleeper

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble