Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of André Aciman, Marie NDiaye, Kevin Wilson, Natalie Eve Garrett, and more—that are publishing this week.
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Find Me by André Aciman
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Find Me: “The elegant sequel to Aciman’s celebrated first novel, Call Me by Your Name, revisits his best-known characters some 20 years later. The story opens as Samuel, a classics professor who has abandoned hope of love, boards the train from Florence to Rome to visit his pianist son, Elio, the earlier novel’s narrator. On the train, Samuel strikes up a conversation with a beautiful photographer named Miranda, an American expatriate like him, though she’s half his age. In dialogue that quickly turns searching, they sense in each other a soul mate (‘I’ve known you for less than an hour on a train. Yet you totally understand me’); later that day, once they arrive in Rome, they begin planning new lives together. Several years later, Elio has moved to Paris. He begins a satisfying relationship with Michael, an attorney two decades or so his senior, but Elio’s memories of Oliver, whom he loved and lost as a teen, reawaken. A third segment focuses on Oliver, now a married father yet unable to leave the past and its passion behind, before Elio and Oliver meet again in the novel’s brief coda. Elio is the heart of the novel, as its core themes—including fatherhood, music, the nature of time and fate, the weight and promise of the past—are infused with eroticism, nostalgia and tenderness in fluid prose. The novel again demonstrates Aciman’s capacity to fuse the sensual and the cerebral in stories that touch the heart.”
Eat Joy edited by Natalie Eve Garrett (illustrated by Meryl Rowin)
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Eat Joy: “In this delightful anthology, Garrett (The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook, editor) presents culinary essays from notable authors and the dishes associated with them. In ‘Comfort with Eggs,’ short story writer Laura van den Berg, addressing her anorexia as a teen, faces ‘the ghost of the person who believed it was… reasonable to starve herself to death’; novelist Chantel Acevedo cherishes hours with her grandmother toasting stove-top ‘Merenguitos’ (‘gooey like a marshmallow’); and for novelist Rakesh Satyal in ‘Bake Your Fear,’ baking pies was ‘waving a Pride flag before I could officially come out.’ Prominent writers shine, including Colum McCann, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Alexander Chee, whose story about a juice cleanse entertains. Accompanying recipes often prioritize comfort over ambition: Edwidge Danticat shares diri blan (white rice) on her father’s deathbed; short story writer Carmen Maria Machado mixes Kraft macaroni and cheese with tomato soup and hot dogs in ‘Meals of My Twenties’; and novelist Anthony Doerr slurps brownie batter in the wilderness in ‘Homesick at the Outer Edge of the World.’ Garrett has selected the best kind of culinary writing—unfussy recipes and heartfelt stories that use food as an avenue for reflection. Foodies and fiction readers alike will devour this excellent collection.”
The Cheffe by Marie NDiaye
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about The Cheffe: “The life and career of a majestically talented, intensely private master chef is narrated by her greatest admirer and loyal employee in NDiaye’s engrossing psychological novel (following My Heart Hemmed In). Born in the early 1950s in the southwestern French town of Sainte-Bazeille, to a large, poor family, the Cheffe leaves school at 14 to work as a maid for the Clapeaus, a wealthy older couple who ‘loved eating with a fervent, unrelenting love.’ She finds her calling in replacing the Clapeaus’ vacationing cook and goes on to devote herself to cooking, moving through kitchens ‘with the kind of controlled, dynamic, galvanizing intentness that attracted miraculous ideas’ and eventually opening her own award-winning restaurant. But this single-mindedness is also the source of painful lifelong conflict between the Cheffe and her only daughter, whom the narrator resents for what he sees as ingratitude. Deeply in love with the taciturn Cheffe, who makes him her confidante but doesn’t return his feelings, the narrator acknowledges his bias but insists on the accuracy of his insights. Like the Cheffe’s recipes, at first tantalizingly simple but eventually so austere they threaten to ‘tumble into fruitlessness’ and become useless, the narrator’s efforts to describe the Cheffe’s mind and heart are both enthralling and fundamentally unreliable as a record of her life. Readers will be consumed by this tale of talent and obsession, even as the Cheffe herself remains both fascinating and mysterious.”
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Nothing to See Here: “Wilson (Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine) turns a bizarre premise into a beguiling novel about unexpected motherhood. When aimless, low-achieving 28-year-old Lillian Breaker receives a mysterious invitation from Madison Roberts, her former roommate at a prestigious high school, longtime correspondent, and now wife to a senator, she does not hesitate to travel to Franklin, Tenn. Madison offers her a job as a very discreet governess for the senator’s twin children from a prior marriage. Ten-year-olds Bessie and Roland sometimes burst into flames, and Madison is desperate to avoid a scandal upsetting the senator’s chances of becoming secretary of state. Lillian accepts and, with begrudging help from Carl, the senator’s shadowy right-hand man, guides the children through coping mechanisms in the guest house on the family’s lavish estate while Madison and Senator Roberts remain icy toward them. Their progress is upended, though, when the senator’s prospects rapidly change and Lillian has to decide where her loyalties are. Lillian’s deadpan observations zip from funny to heartbreaking while her hesitancy and messy love satisfyingly contrasts with Madison’s raw drive for power and tightly controlled affection. Wilson captures the wrenching emotions of caring for children in this exceptional, and exceptionally hilarious, novel.”
The Intangibles by Elaine Equi
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about The Intangibles: “‘I write because certain combinations of words really are magical,’ Equi explains in her enchanting 14th collection. Her signature quirkiness and alien perspectives on the quotidian (including T-shirts, rhubarb and radishes, and poems built from the ‘invisible architecture’ of scents) make appearances, and, as in previous volumes, many of these poems are written in response to modern technology: ‘Once upon a time, everything was not / connected to everything else… People knew too / how to inhabit a moment, / even while daydreaming, / all the way to the far edges.’ ‘Deep in the Rectangular Forest’ offers a slightly ominous look at post-internet, post-social-media behavior and the role individuals play in this technological habitat: ‘we pollinated the mostly mediocre content / with an innocuous brand of wit. // Left to our own devices, we’d eavesdrop / on conversations around the world. / If something was unpleasant, we deleted it.’ These poems suggest people should enjoy the fun of language while it lasts, before it’s ‘ground to numeric sand’ and ‘the rabbit / of the alphabet / drops back / into the void / of the black hat.’ Like her ‘Monogrammed Aspirin’—in which E is for both Excedrin and Elaine—Equi’s poems are easy-to-swallow capsules, so filled with ideas that, occasionally, they feel curtailed, as though they could have gone on longer.”
Vanity Fair’s Women on Women edited by Radhika Jones and Tad Friend
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Vanity Fair’s Women on Women: “This dazzling collection features 28 profiles of famous women, including politicians, artists, musicians, and actresses, from the last 36 years of Vanity Fair. The profiles, each of which was written by a woman, offer snapshots of their subjects at key points in time, often with remarkable prescience. For a 1992 piece about Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail stumping for her husband, author Gail Sheehy is present to witness Clinton watching Gennifer Flowers’s CNN interview on her affair with Bill, but more importantly, she captures her personality astutely, as the ‘tougher, cooler, and more intellectually tart of the two’ Clintons. Amy Fine Collins’s 1995 piece on Audrey Hepburn explores how the legendary actress’s relationship with designer Hubert de Givenchy helped shape her career. In 1985, Tina Brown articulates the precise nature of Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s mismatch, 11 years before their divorce, while, in 1984, Janet Coleman finds Whoopi Goldberg, just prior to the release of The Color Purple, wrestling with the implications of stardom, as ‘she had never yet been censored and was concerned for her integrity.’ This is an ideal collection for those who enjoy celebrity profiles with a bit more substance.”
