Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani recommend new fiction and nonfiction books. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here.
The Award, by Matthew Pearl
An aspiring — you might say grasping — novelist named David Trent moves into an unheated attic apartment with his fiancée. They can’t really afford it, but one of David’s heroes lives below, an important writer in the John Cheever–Philip Roth mold. It turns out the author is hostile and cruel, as far from a mentor as you could imagine — until David’s modest first novel wins a prestigious literary prize. A publishing-industry satire in the vein of Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort, The Award takes a dim view of its characters’ ambitions. Every bad and selfish choice made by the protagonist just adds to the pleasure of it. —Emma Alpern
The Lord, by Soraya Antonius
A reporter-narrator in early-’80s Lebanon meets Miss Alice, an English woman who was stationed in Mandatory Palestine in a Jaffa mission school founded by her parents. Alice reminisces about her student Tareq, an exceptionally talented boy who went on to travel the region performing miracles — and eventually to risk his life by leading the Palestinian resistance against the British. Antonius’s first novel is a rare and rich work representing pre-Nakba Palestine. —Jasmine Vojdani
Television, by Lauren Rothery
The skies are sunnier in Los Angeles, and the sentences shorter. Rothery’s debut is generous with its style — its clipped, cynical cadence is part Dashiell Hammett, part J.D. Salinger. That’s especially true for one of its two main narrators, Verity, an aging franchise movie star who acts, thinks, and pontificates like an adolescent. He trades chapters with his old writer friend Helen, who supported them in the years before his big commercial break. When Verity isn’t with someone too young for him, the two are also occasional lovers, each aware of how their attachment flickers in and out based on neediness, resentment, and actual affection. —E.A.
House of Day, House of Night, by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
From the beloved Polish writer who won both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in 2018 comes a translation of House of Day, House of Night, a “constellation novel” that preceded Flights by nearly ten years. House of Day proceeds as a suite of observations and anecdotes by a narrator who has moved to a small rural community in territory once occupied by Germany, where characters seem haunted or at least in contact with the dead. In a landscape of darkness, dreams, and drink, this novel is more than the sum of its eerie parts. —J.V.
Galapagos, by Fátima Vélez; translated by Hannah Kauders
It’s 1992, and a painter named Lorenzo notices his fingernails are falling off without explanation; similar things are happening to his friends. Unsettled, he travels from Colombia to Paris to see them, where all of their illnesses escalate. Vélez’s debut is surreal from the outset, with commas standing in for periods and unexplained phenomena all around, but it crescendos with a voyage to Galápagos that might also be a trip to the underworld. It’s an AIDS novel that’s both poetic and totally physical. —E.A.
The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits
Tom Layward has been waiting until his daughter goes off to college to make good on his promise to himself to leave his wife, Amy, who he reveals had an affair earlier in their marriage. Things in the law professor’s academic life aren’t going great, either; Tom unwittingly gave legal advice to an un-woke basketball-team owner and is convinced his university will find out. All of which is why, after dropping his daughter off at college, Tom embarks on a solo cross-country road trip. Markovits’s Booker-nominated novel marvelously inspects love that has been tested by infidelity, child-rearing, transgression, and — perhaps most injurious of all to the whole endeavor — time. —J.V.
