We recommend a bounty of good fiction this week, with a collection by Torrey Peters, a mystery by Deanna Raybourn and new novels from Chaim Grade, Karen Russell and others. In nonfiction, we like a journalist’s look back at a little-remembered episode of police brutality from the 1980s and a damning, juicy tell-all by a former Facebook insider. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Goddess Complex
by Sanjena Sathian
Sathian’s inventive second novel — at once a satire, a Gothic tale, a novel of ideas and a character study — follows a 32-year-old woman who is profoundly unsure what she wants from life after aborting a pregnancy and leaving her husband, even as her friends and peers are settling into comfortable adulthood and family life. Read our review.
Stag Dance:
A Novel & Stories
by Torrey Peters
The long novella and three short stories in this collection hopscotch through genres and decades, as Peters summons up characters whose ideas about sex, gender and sexuality exist beyond (or before, or to the side of) our current orthodoxies. Lumberjacks at a winter camp throw a gender-bending party; a boarding school romance goes sour; two women at a trans and cross-dressing convention challenge the authenticity of another attendee. Peters, the author of the celebrated novel “Detransition, Baby,” wants to show that all parts of the queer experience, even the disturbing parts or the parts we don’t understand, are worthy of being made into art. Read our review.
The Tokyo Suite
by Giovana Madalosso
A nanny goes on the run with someone else’s daughter in this tense, taut Brazilian novel, which explores the country’s contemporary class divisions via the twinned stories of a high-powered TV executive and the desperate caretaker of her child. The action takes place entirely in South America; the “Tokyo suite” of the title is a grand nickname the mother bestows on the room she has renovated for the nanny to make it feel less like a high-end prison cell. Read our review.
Sons and Daughters
by Chaim Grade
There is a fine line between hilarity and pain in Grade’s novel about Jewish life in 1930s Europe, which ran in serial form in two New York-based Yiddish newspapers in the 1960s and ’70s but remained unfinished upon Grade’s death. Centering mostly on rabbis and their wayward, modernity-seeking children, the novel — a melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny — offers an intimate and detailed portrait of Orthodox Jewish life in the old country between the wars. Read our review.
The Man Nobody Killed:
Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York
by Elon Green
Green’s telling of the life and death of the aspiring muralist and New York scenester Michael Stewart — a graffiti artist who died in 1983 after police officers allegedly caught him tagging a wall and beat him so severely they induced a 13-day coma — is filled with heartbreaking echoes of the present. Read our review.
The Antidote
by Karen Russell
Russell’s historical novel takes place in the fictional town of Uz, Neb., as Americans across the Great Plains are reeling from the Depression, and opens in the aftermath of the Black Sunday dust storm of April 14, 1935, when a sunny afternoon suddenly turned darker than night and the entire region became known as the Dust Bowl. Like Russell’s earlier fiction, the book blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. Read our review.
Careless People:
A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
For seven years, beginning in 2011, Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes. “Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. Read our review.
Kills Well With Others
by Deanna Raybourn
Raybourn reconvenes the four AARP-eligible female assassins from her fresh and fun 2022 novel, “Killers of a Certain Age,” for another adventurous romp. In this equally delightful sequel, the ladies discover that they’re on a kill list that’s somehow connected to their very first mission, in 1979. To save their own lives, and prevent more murders, they globe-trot, tussle, scuffle and, yes, kill when they have to. Read our review.