The New York Times Book Review - 04.10.2026 — 2026-10-04

The New York Times

Book Review OCTOBER 4, 2026

Oh, Canada! In "True North," the veteran travel writer Paul Theroux crisscrosses the country of his forebears for insights about how it differs from his own. BY JENNIFER SZALAI | PAGE 9

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Book Review

The New York Times

OCTOBER 4, 2026

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Fiction

6 Fantasy

Reviewed by Jennifer Harlan

8 EXIT PARTY

By Emily St. John Mandel

Reviewed by Lincoln Michel

11 THE BREAKUP

By Kurt Andersen

Reviewed by Jonathan Dee

14 THE NEWER WORLD

By Sebastian Barry

Reviewed by Ian McGuire

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Nonfiction

7 GONZO NEUROTIC

The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl

By Jerry Stahl

CORNER BOY

Loiterings New and Old

By Nik Cohn

Reviewed by Dwight Garner

9 TRUE NORTH

On the Road in Canada

By Paul Theroux

Reviewed by Jennifer Szalai

10 REDWOOD The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy By Ben Macintyre Reviewed by Joseph Finder

15 ROLL THE CALLS

A Memoir

By Ari Emanuel

Reviewed by Alexandra Jacobs

16 MONEY TO BURN

The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street

By William D. Cohan

Reviewed by Jonathan Mahler

17 WHEN AMERICA ROARED

How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country — and Led Us to Today

By Jonathan Kaufman

Reviewed by Rick Perlstein

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Children's Books

18 DAD By Christian Robinson

THE MUÉGANOS

By Jaque Jours

NOBODY BUT ME

By Sara Lundberg

Reviewed by Bruce Handy

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Features

5 By the Book

Katt Williams

12 Essay

"Interview With the Vampire" at 50

By Christopher Rice

22 Appraisal

Wendell Berry

By Barbara Kingsolver

23 Read Like the Wind Lessons in World-Building By John Maher

Etc.

4 Letters

19 Best-Seller Lists

19 Editors' Choice

20 Paperback Row

Cover illustration by Nada Hayek

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Letters

Read It and Weep

TO THE EDITOR:

Regarding Erik Piepenburg's essay "How DNF Became A-OK" (Sept. 13): On the question of whether one has to finish a book once one has started it, Samuel Johnson had a characteristically robust view. "This is surely a strange advice," he pronounced. "You may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life." But to discover this you need to get to almost the very end of James Boswell's "The Life of Samuel Johnson" — Page 934 in the Penguin Classics edition. I can't help suspecting that Boswell was having a joke at the reader's expense.

ADRIAN JOHNS CHICAGO

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◆

TO THE EDITOR:

I would only add that if you really don't like that book, don't just put it on the DNF shelf. Rip it up — with gusto!

JUDITH JACKSON

IRASBURG, VT.

Moving Mountains

TO THE EDITOR:

W.M. Akers's review of "The Everest Mystery," by Julie Summers and Jochen Hemmleb (Sept. 6), adds to the growing fascination with George Mallory's early attempts to reach the summit of Everest.

Readers might also like to know about an acclaimed 2011 book by Wade Davis, "Into the Silence: The Great War, Mal-

lory, and the Conquest of Everest." It features the Canadian surveyor Oliver Wheeler, another overlooked and important character who figured out the route to the North Col, the main gateway to Everest's summit for Mallory, and created the first map of Everest. (Wheeler also introduced photo-topographical mapping techniques to the Himalayas.)

Davis looks at how Mallory's English upper-class upbringing influenced his treatment of Wheeler, who was from a former British colony. “Wheeler’s Everest,” a stunning documentary, is based on Davis's book and counts on the author's participation along with that of Wheeler's great-grandson Jeff.

HEATHER MACANDREW

VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA

Off Base

TO THE EDITOR:

Dwight Garner, in his review of “The Disappearers,” by Marlon James (Sept. 13), claims that “James is casually funny in a way Faulkner rarely is.” I’ve often found Faulkner “casually funny” even in his most tragic novels. One of my favorite moments comes in “The Sound and the Fury” when a paranoid Jason Compson, asked if he has his money on the Yankees after their Murderers’ Row season in 1927, says he’d never bet on any team with “that fellow Ruth” on it. That’s the same Ruth who hit a record-breaking 60 home runs in 1927.

RICHARD PETERSON

MAKANDA, ILL.

BOOKS@NYTIMES.COM

By the Book

Katt Williams

'Reading wasn't a hobby. It was my first hustle,' the comedian writes in 'Nine Lives, No Wives, and 69 Concubines,' his new memoir, which also explains why he ran into trouble with Dr. Seuss.

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How do you organize your books?

By subject matter. I like knowing where to go when I'm looking for something specific. I've always looked at books as resources, not decoration. So the shelves have to make sense to me.

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What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Most people probably don't know that I'm a gardener or how much I genuinely enjoy it, so they might be surprised by how many gardening books I have. There's something about growing things that teaches you patience. You have to understand what something needs, give it the right environment, and then let it become what it's supposed to become. I think there's a lesson in that.

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"Reading wasn't a hobby. It was my first hustle," you write. Explain.

As a kid, there were a lot of things I didn't have access to, but I had access to books. So if there was something I wanted to understand, I could go find a book about it. History, religion, business, science, people. I could teach myself. That's why I call it my first hustle. A hustle is figuring out how to use what you have to get what you need. What I had was the ability to read, the curiosity to keep going and enough sense to understand that knowing something other people didn't know could be an advantage.

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Which childhood books and authors still stick with you?

"The Swiss Family Robinson" changed my life. There was something about the adventure, the ingenuity, this family having to figure out how to survive and create a whole world with what they had. "The Diary of Anne Frank" was another one. I was young, but I understood that I was reading the words of somebody who had actually lived this. That made it different.

And then there was Stephen King. At some point I had to admit: I respect how good you are, Mr. King, but I also enjoy sleeping.

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Your "Club Shay Shay" interview has been viewed more than 88 million times. The audience for a book is tiny by comparison. Why bother writing one?

If you've read seven or eight hundred autobiographies of other people, you assume that at some point you have to add your name to that conversation. And as incredible as a hundred million views may be, that work still belongs to the internet. We haven't had the internet for thousands of years. Books, we have. There's something different about putting your story in a form that can sit on a shelf, get passed from one person to another, and still be there long after whatever platform is popular today is gone.

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How in the world did you make an enemy of Dr. Seuss?

By going around calling myself Katt in the Hat and making money doing it. Apparently, that will get you a cease-and-desist. I was just a young comedian trying to build a name for myself. I wasn't thinking about trademarks or intellectual property. I was thinking, "Katt in the Hat — that's funny." They were thinking something entirely different.

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Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

No, I was allowed to read pretty much anything I wanted. There was even a period in my life when all I wanted was to find the list of forbidden books so I could read every one. Because if you tell me a book is forbidden, now I need to know why. What kind of information could be so volatile that somebody decided I shouldn't have access to it?

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What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

The Torah. Everything. It reminded me that I don't think you can really read a book and not walk away with something.

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You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain and Jack London. Tolkien because I'd want to understand how somebody builds an entire world in their mind with that much detail and then convinces everybody else that it exists. Mark Twain because he understood how to use humor to tell the truth about society. Jack London because there was something fearless about his writing and his life. Put them at the table and I'm not even sure I'd say that much. I'd just want to see what they argued about.

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Immersive Experiences

New books from Lex Croucher, Mollyhall Seeley and Elizabeth DeLozier will whisk you away to magical new places.

READING THE UNMAGICAL LIFE OF BRIAR JONES (Harper Voyager, 447 pp., \$32) — the adult debut by Croucher, who has written several charming young adult novels — I completely lost my grip on time. I was so engrossed in the book, so immersed in the author's imagination, I forgot to eat dinner. When I finally emerged, I was exhausted, starving, a bit teary-eyed and totally exhilarated.

The novel follows Briar and Sebastian, inseparable childhood best friends who dreamed of attending the Temple School of Thaumaturgy — an upper-crust English institution whose curriculum is rumored to include sorcery — together. When the friends were 11, Seb was admitted to Temple, but Briar (who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns) was not, leaving Briar utterly crushed.

When the book picks up, it's seven years later, and Briar and Seb haven't spoken since. Then Briar takes a temp job at Temple. When they arrive, their hopes of magic's existence are realized — but they also discover that sensitive Seb has transformed into the

JENNIFER HARLAN is an editor, and the fantasy columnist, at the Book Review.

most powerful member of a gang of evil upperclassmen. Briar quickly finds their own group: the posh nerd Westby, dandy Tate and firecracker Hadley, who form a queer-friendly bubble within the traditionalist school. Something, Briar learns, is very rotten at the heart of Temple, and the four-some is determined to dismantle it.

Croucher is a deliciously witty writer, with a knack for seamless pop culture references, and is especially effective at writing about the camaraderie that blooms when you and your companions are running for your lives. Briar's story — part action adventure, part tender second-chance romance — is a moving meditation on friendship and trust, class and power, the terrible choices that do not have to define us. It's my favorite fantasy novel I've read all year. I would happily skip more meals to hang out with this gang again.

SEELEY TAKES A spikier approach to friendship in her debut novel, WE HEXED THE MOON (Saga Press, 215 pp., paperback, \$18). Jen, Goldie, Maycie and Harding are four best friends caught, in the summer of 2014, in that liminal space between senior year of high school and the rest of their lives. Like so many bored teenage girls before them, they decide to fill one of their waning days together with a ritual — complete with candles, blood offerings and an incantation courtesy of Tumblr — to summon the moon.

Unfortunately for them, the spell works. The moon vanishes from the sky, shows up in corporeal form in Jen's bedroom and refuses to return to her thankless perch, where nobody even sacrifices virgins to her anymore. The girls have 10 hours to find her replacement, she says, or the world as they know it will end.

The novel is written in the breathless rush of adolescence — a white-hot folie à quatre fueled by nostalgia and milkshakes. Things get messy (and I'm not just talking about the plotting, which I do wish had been tauter, especially given the book's brevity). But then, that's how these friendships go sometimes: burning impossibly bright and flaming out like a supernova.

"They'd never, never be as real," Goldie thinks, "never as fully alive as it was possible to be in Maycie's falling-down old house in a bed with your three best friends, still young, still hungry, still flayed alive on the altar of being a girl."

MUCH IS MADE of the symbiosis between fantasy and romance, but I would like to put in a plug for that other intoxicating hybrid: the fantasy mystery, which infuses the hairpin pleasures of a whodunit with a bit of magic. In THE WHITECHAPEL FULL MOON SOCIETY (Dutton, 354 pp., paperback, \$20), the thrills come from the hunt for the infamous Jack the Ripper. And you can probably guess, from the lycanthropic title, where the paranormal comes in.

Our heroine, Caroline, is the recently orphaned daughter of a debt-strapped nobleman. Forced to sell her family estate, she sets off for London hoping to find her beloved older brother, Charlie, who has stopped answering her letters.

The city is smog-choked and simmering with hysteria over a recent spate of murders. It's also seductive — especially for a novel-obsessed girl who has long dreamed of seeing the world beyond her manor. When Caroline arrives at Charlie's boarding-house, the titular Whitechapel Full Moon Society, he's not there. But there's something fishy about the way the landlady and boarders — especially Rab, Charlie's chemist best friend — dodge her questions. So Caroline gives them a fake last name and takes a job as the house's maid, determined to excavate their secrets.

Caroline is not the most competent sleuth, but DeLozier paints her and the other Whitechapel residents with such warmth I forgave her fumbling, even when it gummed up the mystery. The author also brings great humanity to the Ripper's victims, marrying supernatural terrors to the very real ones faced by women (especially single, economically vulnerable ones) — a story that tragically continues today.

Loitering With Intent

Two career-spanning essay collections, from Nik Cohn and Jerry Stahl, revel in life's margins and recapture auras past.

By DWIGHT GARNER

"FIRST OF ALL," Michael Kinsley wrote in the preface to one of the collections of his columns, "I don't want any grief about throwing together a bunch of old articles and calling it a book." He liked this sort of volume (so do I) because they're a "way to recapture the flavor of the recent past."

Two longtime freelance scene-makers, Nik Cohn and Jerry Stahl, have new collections out soon. They're dissimilar writers in many ways, but read together, the commonalities really begin to pile up.

CORNER BOY

Loiterings New and Old

By Nik Cohn

ZE Books. 372 pp. \$35.

GONZO NEUROTIC

The Best (and Not-So-Best) of Jerry Stahl

By Jerry Stahl

ZE Books. 444 pp. \$24.

Neither is a mainstream type (their work doesn't go well with the furniture) and each practices a form of journalism that might be called loitering with intent. Each was born in the middle of the last century (Cohn in 1946, Stahl in 1953) and each wrote for a slew of music magazines, alt-weeklies, and slick and lowlife outlets that aren't around any longer. Each has admitted smuggling fiction into what appeared to be fact pieces.

Each was a drug addict, though only Stahl made a career out of it. His junkie memoir, “Permanent Midnight,” from 1995, was turned into a film with Ben Stiller. Each is Jewish. Each wrote more books than most people are aware of.

Each wants to semi-disown his most popular work. In Cohn's case, that's "Tribal Rites of a New Saturday Night," a 1976 New York magazine article about the disco and club scenes in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that inspired the movie "Saturday Night Fever." He later admitted he'd made most of it up, and seemed surprised people hadn't known all along. In Stahl's case, he made a killing writing for "ALF," the late-1980s NBC sitcom about a furry alien.

Each took an interest in unknown and marginal souls and wrote profiles of people like boxers, preachers, night court defense lawyers, barbers and exuberant peddlers of bedspreads. Each speaks about having a heavy freight of impostor syndrome.

Each of their new, career-spanning collections — which include essays, reviews, profiles, think pieces and random blurts — is issued by ZE Books, the iconoclastic independent publishing house. Cohn's is called "Corner Boy." Stahl's is "Gonzo Neurotic."

I'm going to begin with "Corner Boy," be-

DWIGHT GARNER has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.

Nik Cohn

cause Cohn's stuff is more to my taste. He's cool to the touch, for the most part, while Stahl has an over-the-top, Hunter S. Thompson meets Anthony Bourdain meets Cosmo Kramer (he's always bumping into the things he's writing about) shtick, a maniacal style I dug when I was 17 but now mostly clangs on my ears.

Cohn grew up amid the rubble of post-World War II London and was in the exact demographic place to feel the detonation of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who across a formerly dull, gray landscape. He was a pioneering rock critic, the author of “Awopbopalooob Alopbamboom” (1970), a landmark early history of rock.

His music writing was ardent, fond and knowing, and it had bite. He mostly loathed Bob Dylan (“the whining dentist’s drill in his voice”). While the Stones were his favorite band — he wrote about them as crude, mean, vital liberators — he thought they’d gone soft and posh by the late 1960s. He infuriated Mick Jagger by writing that a) he’d gradually lose his hair and b) the band wasn’t meant to get old. “If they have any sense of neatness,” Cohn wrote, “they’ll get themselves killed in an air crash, three days before their 30th birthdays.”

There are profiles of Phil Spector, Grace Jones and Gary Stewart, the honky-tonk renegade who's back on the radar thanks to Jimmy McDonough's recent biography. But Cohn was more interested, ultimately, in trends and scenes, in what was happening on the streets. He wrote a book — “The Heart of the World” (1992) — about walking up Broadway, from Battery Park to

Times Square, and about those he met along the way.

This collection's best piece might be one about Teddy Boys, the truculent, middle-finger-giving subculture that sprang up in London after the war. The Teds, as they were often known, wore Edwardian-style jackets, drainpipe trousers, slim-jim ties and combed their greased hair into pompadours. They mattered, Cohn writes, because England's teens had previously been so bland and sheeplike and deferential to their elders. The Teds gave the world a blueprint for all future teen revolts.

Cohn bores down into fashion. Indeed, the Teddy Boys piece is adapted from his book "Today There Are No Gentlemen: The Changes in Englishmen's Clothes Since the War" (1971), now so scarce that the few extant copies sell for enormous sums.

Cohn returns repeatedly to New Orleans, where he has sometimes lived, and he has good antennae for how the city, mostly below sea level, pulls your spirit around with its strange tides. He describes walking the

Nik Cohn infuriated Mick Jagger by predicting that he'd lose his hair.

Jerry Stahl, right, with Ben Stiller in 1997.

French Quarter with Pete Townshend in 1972; Townshend is so blown away by the life-affirming chaos that all he can do is utter a long string of expletives.

Cohn was an aspiring rap producer in the city, and he wrote a good book about it — “Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap” (2005) — that’s excerpted here. He’s witty about all the things that can go wrong in a recording studio. The excerpt is strewed with lines like, "I'd seen dead men in coffins before, but none who'd been shot in the face."

Cohn has revised some of these old pieces, cutting them down and rewriting. He refers to this process as “remixing.” (Stahl has done the same thing.) I’m of two minds about this practice, but rare is the writer who can resist airbrushing old material and deleting idiocies.

YOU CAN INFER the tone of Stahl's book, "Gonzo Neurotic," by its title and by the first sentence of the author's note up front: "I would rather have testicle surgery, on horseback, performed by Special K-crazed lumberjacks, than sit down and read my old writing."

Well, that makes two of us, a reader is tempted to respond. In truth, Stahl is funny, self-aware and very much in on his own “professional ex-junkie” act. His pieces may fly off the tee like screaming bananas, to borrow a bit of golf slang. (I don’t play golf.) But he’s a more sober observer than he lets on.

There are essays here on the Miss America pageant — Stahl asks each contestant, hoping to shake them out of their canned responses, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” — and a nudist colony. Amid the meditation rooms and hydropools, he thinks to himself: “If I’m lucky I just might find Gay Talese’s wallet!”

Stahl writes about the making of “Café Flesh” (1982), the postapocalyptic porn film he co-wrote that became a cult classic. He profiles, or tries to profile (this book includes a lot of write-arounds), Marlon Brando, Benicio Del Toro, the wild-eyed TV host Tom Snyder and Hugh Grant’s short-term girlfriend Divine Brown. He wrote for “Twin Peaks” and says he was fired for turning in scripts with blood and hair on them. There are semi-believable pieces about being the Joey Chestnut of heroin.

He writes about honeymoon suites, religious television and appearing on “Oprah.” There’s a piece about ruining his liver (“my big pink organ”) that segues into a wildcat appreciation of the liver steak at Musso & Frank Grill in Los Angeles, “roughly the width of a car seat and the length of a baby’s forearm.”

Stahl is his own vivid comic invention. Life whooshes past him like arrows, and some of those arrows stick in his guts. He wonders if Ray Kroc, the McDonald's innovator, knows how much his restaurants have meant to generations of junkies. Stahl has a survivor's wariness and takes the long view. He asks, in what might be the best bit of self-help language I've ever stumbled across, "Maybe that's as close to happiness as you get — not making other people unhappy."

Ben Ratliff, the journalist and rock critic, edited Cohn's "Corner Boy." In his introduction he delivers a line that applies to both writers: "His writing on any subject is for anyone who believes that the best option is usually off the menu."

World's End

In Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, two versions of America's future crash into each other.

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By LINCOLN MICHEL

THESE DAYS AMERICANS of varying stripes worry the country faces a perilous future. Could the nation collapse into civil war? Or might it descend into a dystopian authoritarian state? In Emily St. John Mandel's ambitious and captivating new novel, "Exit Party," the answer is: maybe both.

“Exit Party” opens in a 2031 Los Angeles after “the United States had come undone following a coup d’état” where states seceded and “war had broken out within the month.” But for now, the fighting is over, the curfew in the Republic of California has been lifted, and people are ready to let loose.

Ari Waker, recently released from prison for attempted murder, joins her roommate

LINCOLN MICHEL is the author of the novels "Metallic Realms" and "The Body Scout." He writes the weekly newsletter Counter Craft.

Gloria in attending a party at her friend Kareem's apartment. Gloria is secretly pregnant with Kareem's child and traumatized by a loyalist suicide bombing that occurred at "a crowded house party" in the early days of the chaos. "When I think about parties, I think about bombs," she confesses.

EXIT PARTY

By Emily St. John Mandel

Knopf. 301 pp. \$32.

Still, the friends go . . . and then things get odd. Doppelgängers of some guests arrive while Kareem disappears without a trace. A painting, “Swan Dive,” materializes in the middle of the kitchen floor, but while Ari stares, it vanishes, “blinked out of existence.”

These events spawn a series of interlocking mysteries that the novel explores over 300 pages, a century of time and a large cast of characters. It is tricky to summarize this multilayered novel without spoiling the pleasures of its construction, but readers should know that “Exit Party” takes place in two crisscrossing universes with differing dark visions of America’s future. “There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray,” one character explains, “and another where my homeland had closed like a fist.”

In timeline A, Ari enters the post-collapse gig economy, taking odd jobs for militias vying for control of the former states. The narrative jumps to the future, where an older and wealthier Ari has settled in the “elite center of Paris” that’s encased in a weather-controlled dome shaped like “a series of giant soap bubbles,” protecting the rich from the ravages of climate change and pandemics. Ari lives a comfortable life as an art collector focused on “Post-Collapse Formalism.” One of her prized pieces is “Swan Dive,” which she purchased from a desperate Gloria. Then one day she is visited by Sebastian, Glo ria's now teenage son, who has come to steal the mysterious painting.

In timeline B, Ibari — Ari's double — lives a quite different life. Instead of a criminal, she's a government spy in the Internal Security Service of the authoritarian United States. While other countries in this multiverse “crumbled,” the State survived by knowing that “the difference between mayhem and order is control.” In this future, every neighbor is watching the other and if you attend “pro-democracy demonstrations” you might be turned into “a ghost” no longer “entitled to a home, or health care, or the protections of the law.”

Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds. Her characters are distinct in both worlds as the novel explores how circumstances determine our fates. The novel also sharply renders the psychology of formerly privileged Americans in a world turned, for them, upside down. “I just never wanted to be a part of history,” one party guest laments.

WHAT REMAINS MUDDIER are the two future Americas. Similar to Alex Garland's film "Civil War" (2024), "Exit Party" avoids discussing politics and ideology even when describing political upheaval and ideological struggle. America A is the product of an unexplained civil war along unclear fault lines. America B is a "surveillance state" of informants meeting in bureaucratic offices that could exist anywhere. Both feel more allegorical than extensions of America's specific history or its existing internecine and authoritarian tendencies, where partisan allegiances are loudly declared and surveillance is enabled via tech corporations and consumer complicity.

Still, “Exit Party” does so much so well — from tense action sequences to an inventive structure that switches up P.O.V. and form — that the novel will rightly entrance new readers while gripping Mandel’s existing ones. “Exit Party” feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author’s early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like “Station Eleven.” In addition to thematic connections to her prior books, there are literal ones: Ari Waker is a central character in “The Singer’s Gun” and the painter of “Swan Dive” appears in “The Glass Hotel.”

“If you live long enough,” Gloria’s double says, “you become a migrant from another timeline.” The world we know is always disappearing. “Exit Party” raises important questions about who people are when not just personal but societal circumstances change. Is everyone capable of murder or heroism? Crime or complicity? Despair or rebellion? As the narrator pointedly asks near the novel’s close, “Who will you be at the end of the world?”

Oh, Canada!

The veteran travel writer Paul Theroux crisscrosses the country of his forebears for insights about how it differs from his own.

By JENNIFER SZALAI

AMONG Donald Trump's signature achievements when it comes to Canada — starting a trade war, threatening annexation, insulting its people, wrecking a longstanding alliance just because he could — the president has also managed to make a travel book about Canada improbably timely.

In “True North: On the Road in Canada,” Paul Theroux describes how an exploration of his ancestral roots in Quebec grew into a cross-country account of what Canada is and what it means to the people who live there. Canadians happen to know plenty about the United States; with its comparatively tiny population of 41 million, Canada

TRUE NORTH

On the Road in Canada

By Paul Theroux

Mariner. 423 pp. \$32.

has long paid close attention to its hulking neighbor as a matter of necessity. (I was born in Toronto.) Needless to say, the reverse hasn't been true, despite a history of American attempts to annex Canada that ended up going nowhere. “Canadians are the strangers next door,” Theroux writes. The country “is a blur to most Americans.”

Theroux, 85, presents this travel book — his 12th — as his last. “The planet is overrun with travelers and tourists, like ants on a bruised peach,” he writes, with his characteristic mix of grumpiness and verve. Having chronicled his far-flung journeys to places like Patagonia and China in previous books, Theroux says he now prefers puttering around his homes in Hawaii and on Cape Cod, where he can also sit at his desk and write his (many) novels. As a self-identified traveler, he long eschewed a tourist’s comforts, enduring the ordeal of a “decrepit bus station” or a “malodorous flophouse” in order to talk to the locals.

And talk to the locals he does. Most of “True North” recounts his conversations across Canada, with only the occasional mention of anything as obvious as a monument or a museum. He presses Canadians to “generalize” about differences between them and Americans, and gets a range of answers. Some are familiar, like the notion that Canadians are more deferential to authority and willing to work for the common good. Others are more striking. A woman in Belleville, Ontario, the birthplace of Theroux’s grandmother, considers Americans “a fearful people,” and points to the fact that they have so many guns. She asks Theroux what Americans are so afraid of. “That’s obvious,” he says. “They’re afraid of other Americans with guns.”

The book, like Theroux's journey, is mostly organized geographically, though

JENNIFER SZALAI is the nonfiction critic at The Times.

he begins with some family history in Yamaska — a tiny municipality in Quebec, where a Theroux named Antoine settled with his wife and children more than 300 years ago. The long history of these Canadian forebears is lovingly reconstructed, in often inordinate detail, and it's only when Paul Theroux himself crosses the border that the book's pace picks up.

He took a trip to freezing Ottawa in early 2022, after he heard that truckers protesting anti-pandemic measures had descended on Canada's capital in what they called a “Freedom Convoy.” Some of the organizers issued a written demand to replace the government. He wandered through the chaos, agape at the rare sight of Canadian disorder.

The non-convoy Canadians who talked to Theroux were almost unanimously appalled. He also notes that though about 20 percent of Canadian truckers are Pakistani or Sikh, you wouldn't know it from the protesters he saw. As it happened, nearly half the donations for the trucker protests came from the United States. As an article in The London Review of Books put it in April 2022, “Americans were directly funding a movement whose stated goal was to overthrow the democratically elected government of a neighboring country.”

Three years later, shortly after Trump began his second term, Theroux found that the president's barrage of insults had effectively united otherwise fractious groups of Canadians in their patriotism. Their rage has been sharpened by the sting of betrayal. Canadians put a lot of stock in fairness; a “nice country you’ve got there” shakedown is widely seen as repugnant — a violation all the more heinous when perpetrated by one’s closest ally. As one Toronto salesman tells him, “We’ve been a good friend and neighbor, we’ve fought side by side in all your wars — and what do we get for it? Abuse.”

But “True North” isn’t a flattering one-note narrative of Canadian valor. Theroux talks to Indigenous people who share devastating stories of children being abducted and sent to the country’s notorious residential schools, the last of which closed in 1997. He wonders aloud whether Canada’s approach to immigrants — promoting a “mosaic” of variegated cultures instead of a melting pot of assimilation — may have encouraged some newcomers to stay in their unassimilated “ethno-bubbles” rather than to identify with their adopted country. “No bubble dwellers seemed much troubled by the American president’s threat to make Canada the 51st state,” he writes.

Then again, that “seemed” is doing an awful lot of work. “True North” is inevitably an impressionistic book, filled with Theroux’s observations and interpretations. He’s a rambler, weaving in bits and

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'True North' is the final book in Theroux's North American road trip trilogy.

bobs of interviews, news reports, history and literary criticism. He admires the work of Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Mavis Gallant, even if the stories of Alice Munro have always left him cold. "I find them overlong and wordy," he complains, "their landscapes cerebral and agitated and indoors."

Theroux, for his part, is usually charming, even when he's cranky, and even when acting the braggy American, recalling instances of Canadians telling him how much they love his work.

"True North" is the final book in Theroux's North American road trip trilogy, which began with "Deep South" and continued with "On the Plain of Snakes," about his travels in Mexico. During an especially spectacular drive in British Columbia, he has "as close to a spiritual experience as I'd ever had."

He is already hoping to return. Crossing the border into the United States, he notices the inscription on the Peace Arch, with its lofty sentiment that now reads like a poignant memento: “Children of a Common Mother — May These Gates Never Be Closed.” □

Covert Operation

In his new book, Ben Macintyre tells the story of a Russian spy in Iran who betrayed his country in exchange for an unusual request.

By JOSEPH FINDER

THE BRITISH WRITER Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers. His “Operation Mincemeat” was adapted for both screen and stage, and “A Spy Among Friends” became a TV series. With his latest, “Redwood,” he has done it again. The story centers on the defection of the K.G.B. major Vladimir Kuzichkin, who was stationed in Tehran during the chaos following the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

REDWOOD

The Untold Story of the Cold War's

Most Extraordinary Spy

By Ben Macintyre

Crown. 393 pp. \$32.

The reason for his defection wasn't ideology or money but sex. Specifically, he suffered from erectile dysfunction. Kuzichkin was sure that the cause was "anatomical," an overly tight foreskin, and that a circumcision would resolve it. Afraid that the Iranians or the Soviets might discover his impairment, he insisted the operation be performed in the West. "Kuzichkin was the first spy in history," Macintyre writes, "to demand, as the price of defection, the removal of his foreskin." That insistence, Macintyre argues, altered the history of the Middle East.

The stakes were enormous. The fall of the shah had deprived Washington of its closest ally in the region, the hostage crisis had severed relations with Tehran and the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan had increased fears of a greater Kremlin expansion. Iran, which shared a long border with the Soviet Union and was now at war with Iraq, seemed particularly vulnerable. Western intelligence was especially concerned about the Tudeh, Iran's pro-Soviet Communist Party, which had penetrated the government and the military. What they didn't know was how extensive the penetration was — or when Moscow intended to exploit it.

On Oct. 1, 1981, Kuzichkin entered the British Embassy in Tehran, presented himself as a vice consul with an “urgent” matter to discuss, and told Nicholas Barrington, Britain’s senior diplomat in Tehran, that he wanted to spy for Britain.

MI6 code-named him REDWOOD. He stood over 6 feet 4 inches, a head taller than his case officer; the cryptonym was chosen for the world's tallest tree (the standard rule that code names be unrevealing is, as Macintyre observes, ignored by every service on earth). Nobody in London noticed the additional double entendre

JOSEPH FINDER, who writes frequently about Russia, is the author of 17 novels including, most recently, "The Oligarch's Daughter."

until later — RED for communist, WOOD for the thing he could not achieve.

For eight months, Kuzichkin spied from the Soviet Embassy, and what he produced was extraordinary. His intelligence portrayed the Tudeh Party as a Soviet-funded puppet, directed (and very likely armed) by the K.G.B.

Astonishingly, Macintyre writes, MI6 gave everything that Kuzichkin revealed to the ayatollah — “every Tudeh leader, every informant inside the government, every member of the military underground, every K.G.B. officer and spy in Iran” — with Kuzichkin himself presenting the evidence at a secret meeting in Islamabad.

MI6 had also revealed their source and plans to the C.I.A. director William Casey. In 1982, Casey gave the operation "full-throated American support," believing that he was thereby "signing the death warrant of the Communist Party in Iran," Macintyre writes, which meant putting "the lives of several thousand people at risk."

Casey likely kept the C.I.A.'s involvement concealed not just from the Soviets but from his own government, Macintyre explains, so President Reagan could truly claim ignorance of the damning fact that the United States was publicly denouncing the Khomeini regime while secretly cooperating with it. "It is unclear," Macintyre hedges, "whether Bill Casey sought or obtained Ronald Reagan's authorization."

In Macintyre's telling, the American spy chief was working from an interagency memo warning that the Soviets could take Iran in nine to 14 weeks, a scenario that raised the possibility of an American nuclear response. But not everyone shared the panic. Macintyre himself doubts that Moscow intended to invade. The evidence for such a plan was thin. The Tudeh Party was too weak to seize power on its own, and, in the short term at least, the Kremlin also had reasons to tolerate Khomeini: However hostile he was to communism, he was even more hostile to the United States.

To forestall a danger that might have been largely imaginary, between 6,000 and 10,000 Tudeh members were apprehended and locked up, Macintyre claims, and hundreds or perhaps thousands of people died. Tudeh leaders were tortured, forced into televised confessions, and, in some cases, executed or lynched. A far wider wave of killings followed in 1988, when Khomeini

The K.G.B. agent Vladimir Kuzichkin with his wife, Galina, at a Tehran botanical garden in 1977.

---

Nobody in London noticed the additional double entendre until later.

issued a fatwa against those who “make war against God,” and prisoners who had already completed their sentences were put to death. “The exact Tudeh death toll may never be known,” Macintyre writes. “The executioners were not counting.”

Macintyre's verdict is that “the REDWOOD case was both a success and a failure, a ploy that ended in victory and defeat, a significant achievement and a grave mistake, proof of the fickle pattern of unintended consequences.” By stoking the Islamic Republic’s paranoia and brutality and helping the mullahs to consolidate power, America and Britain, he writes, “inadvertently helped create the monster” they now condemn.

Macintyre's larger point — that the Iran of 2026 was not foreseeable from Century

House in 1982 — is unarguable, and his parallel to the arming of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan is well made.

But, of course, the consequences were foreseen, at least by some of the people who carried it out. Two senior officials said they would resign. One of them predicted that the people named in the REDWOOD files would meet “grisly ends.” British agents anticipated the crackdown. They were told, and yet they proceeded.

This doesn't mean that Casey and the MI6 members who backed the plan were cleareyed about its prospects for success. By Cold War logic, the liquidation of a bunch of communists barely mattered, especially if it could keep Iran from becoming a Soviet satellite.

One of Macintyre's more audacious conclusions is that had Viagra existed in 1981, Kuzichkin might not have defected, and there might have been a successful Tudeh coup after all with the help of Soviet firepower. The Cold War might have ended differently, or catastrophically.

It is a startling counterfactual, and one somewhat at odds with Macintyre's own skepticism about the Soviet threat. In fact, the Tudeh Party wasn't popular, even within Iran's fractured left, especially after the party joined a crackdown against independent secular and Islamist leftists who turned against the

ayatollah in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. And, despite this show of loyalty, the Islamic Republic was soon closing off the political space in which the Tudeh Party operated. By the early 1980s, its newspaper had been shut down and its official protection was wavering. Given the party's isolation and the regime's growing grip on power, a Tudeh takeover was far from inevitable.

The book's last pages are its saddest. Resettled as Alexander Larkin, a British citizen, Kuzichkin drank, ranted about hit men and was once picked up naked at a Somerset service station. One evening in 2009 he sat down with a bottle of vodka and the film "Amadeus," a story of betrayal. By morning there was nothing left in the bottle, and Kuzichkin was dead. (Until quite recently, Wikipedia still had him living.) "In his cups," Macintyre reports, he grieved the people he had helped send to their graves. The defector reached a harsher verdict than his historian does. But only one of them was there.

Disunited States

Set just 19 years in the future, Kurt Andersen's novel follows a family navigating a nation ruptured by civil war.

By JONATHAN DEE

NOVELS SET IN THE FUTURE aren't exclusively the province of science fiction; anxious times tend to generate anxious, cautionary literary dystopias, and when was the last time you can remember not feeling anxious? The 20th century in particular abounded in such visions, some of which — "The Handmaid's Tale," or "Brave New World," published in 1932 and getting spookier every day — have proved more prophetic than others. They're best understood, though, not as genuine bets on our future, but as dreamlike unleashings of present-day fear over the blind volatility of the moment.

THE BREAKUP

By Kurt Andersen

Random House. 556 pp. \$30.

Kurt Andersen, in his new novel “The Breakup,” does something few such books do (Jon Raymond’s excellent 2022 climate-disaster novel, “Denial,” comes to mind); he sets his stage not in some distant century when our own problems are the stuff of history, but a mere 19 years from now, when most of his readers are still likely to be around.

In an effort to game out the frightening liminality of American life in 2026, he depicts a 2045 in which — some years after a short, dirty, rather brilliantly imagined second American civil war — the country has fractured into two sloppily distinct but still official entities: the United States of America (now down to 39 states) and the Free American Republic, a largely white and Christian throwback to certain retrograde ideals with which we are all, here in the present, glumly familiar.

With peacetime established, the entirety of the former United States is allowed to vote on which of these two entities they want to join. Thus there is, this time around, nothing so geographically and imaginatively neat as a Mason-Dixon line; travelers through Southern states, for instance — where urban areas don't want to be part of the F.A.R. any more than the F.A.R. wants them — are crossing and recrossing “national” boundaries all the time. Not secession, but “disunion”: As solutions, go, it's a mess, but at least it's halted the terrorist drone attacks and the Army's responsive deployment of robots to kill rebellious American citizens in the streets. For now.

Our docents through this new American life are a family called the Zimbalists, whose own lines of fracture mirror the nation's, as they are very much aware. In

JONATHAN DEE is the author of eight novels, most recently "Sugar Street," and the director of the graduate writing program at Syracuse University.

2044, the family moved from Tennessee to San Francisco so that Asher Zimbalist could take a job running a hazily defined "Institute" on behalf of a person who may be that most elusive of species, the altruistic billionaire. But Asher's wife, Natalie, couldn't bear the culture shock. She's a poet, of all things, though one who has earned some cultural infamy as a sort of plain-spoken, Lionel Shriver-coded abuser of liberal pieties; six months ago, she moved back to Tennessee.

So have they broken up for good? Is politics to blame? They themselves aren't sure (nor are their two children), and now their hand is forced by the imminence of a long-planned tour of prospective colleges for their younger child, Logan. This tour will take them through the newly reconfigured heartland of America.

It's a good setup. What's puzzling is that more than 300 pages of the novel go by before the engine of the Zimbalist family car, and thus of the novel's plot, finally turns over, and the much-touted road trip begins. Before that comes a vast and dramatically static stretch of what speculative-fiction circles often call “world-building” — a full, inventive, elaborately detailed portrait of Andersen’s vision of the next 19 years of American history. It’s fun to read, particularly since it involves the imagined fates of a great many present-day famous people. (Among the many dozens of such cameos, surely one spoiler won’t hurt: Elon Musk dies of an overdose en route to Mars.)

As a novelist, Andersen — whose works of nonfiction include “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire” and “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America” — is more philosopher than plot maker. The will-they-or-won’t-they domestic drama of the Zimbalists, when it finally gets out of the driveway, is less than suspenseful; it is very much like spending a week in a car with three people laughing at a series of inside jokes and then explaining to you why those jokes are funny.

---

This tour will take them through the newly reconfigured heartland of America.

But so what? Domestic dramas are already thick on the ground in American fiction. What readers of “The Breakup” will come for, in this moment of what seems like unsustainable polarization and anger and wanton trampling of American civic institutions and ideals, is a vision of our near-term future that is violent and admonitory and cathartically terrible and yet somehow still survivable. On that score, Andersen delivers the dopamine hit that has made his previous work best sellers. In his 2045, there’s still a new Sally Rooney novel (one with a very funny title), and the government even offers tax credits to book publishers who hire human beings as copy editors instead of just letting A.I. do it. How dystopian can things be? □

Essay / 'Interview With the Vampire' at 50 / By Christopher Rice

Anne Rice's son explains how his mother's first book transformed personal loss into a horror classic.

IN THE EARLY 1980S, a small group of my mother's readers attended one of her book signings in costume. It was the first time this had ever happened. The event was a sedate gathering in a small, warmly lit San Francisco bookstore. Outside, the surrounding concrete landscape of imposing civic buildings was seemingly a world away from lush, oak-filled New Orleans, the hometown Anne had rendered as a living, breathing character in the few novels she'd published by then, a place to which her name would later become inextricably linked.

The book being casually celebrated that night was a spectacular doorstop of a novel with impressionistic angels on the cover. “Cry to Heaven,” it was called, and it explored the lives of castrato opera singers in 18th-century Italy. Wine and cheese were served. No line formed at the signing table. A slow drip of artist friends and my father’s colleagues from San Francisco State University stopped by — nothing like the glittering seven-hour marathons that would come a few years later, where exhausted managers would keep their giant stores open well past closing time to accommodate the snaking line of bejeweled Goths eager to get the latest Vampire Chronicle signed.

Without warning, in walked a trio of handsome young men in 18th-century waistcoats, their thick ponytails tied off with ribbon. I was young, but I recognized their costumes. They were characters from my mother's literary debut, published shortly before I was born. A book that haunted our lives like a pesky ghost — a critically reviled flop called “Interview With the Vampire.”

If that description seems harsh, rest assured it was my mother's own assessment of the initial reception to "Interview," which she shared on Facebook decades later. That night, as she posed for pictures with her handsome admirers, the atmosphere inside the store turned electric. Anne blushed. Her laughter took on a white-hot, unguarded quality. The first proud foot soldiers of a growing fandom had marched inside the rarefied air of a gussied-up literary party to which the guests had mostly been drawn by my father's local celebrity as a poet.

Until then, Anne Rice had been viewed as a transgressive, not-quite popular author of lusty historical fiction who had been roundly scorned by critics after daring to write a vampire's account of his long, immortal life with serious and probing literary consideration. The famous historical novelist James Michener had praised its audacity, but initial plaudits were few. These were the days when comparing a work of fiction to a comic book could erase its literary merit to most readers, and that's exactly what The New York Times did to my mother's first novel. Most of the unsold copies were pulped at the warehouse, a moment my mother would bitterly recall to the end of her life. Today, those who call "Interview With the Vampire" an "instant best seller" are carrying on a fiction as enduring as the novel itself.

But books can follow a twisty and unpredictable path to success. In the years after its disappointing publication, groups of marginalized readers gradually discovered “Interview With the Vampire.” By 1982, their collective passion was not only spreading, it was strong enough to inspire cosplay. That foggy San Francisco night was the first time it became clear to all of us that my mother's debut was being transformed from a flop into a cult classic. The costumed men were proof — elegant caricatures of Louis and Lestat, stepping out of the wet gray evening in their silky garb.

A few days later, my family gathered around the kitchen table of our Edwardian home in the Castro District, studying the photos of my mother and her admirers with excited wonder. Yes, the men were striking. But the pictures felt hot to the touch for a different reason. They were evidence that Anne's once-dismissed debut was gaining a second life, particularly among the dispossessed and outsiders — the queer, although the term was still very much a slur in those days.

Only recently did I remember how another character from “Interview” stepped out of the fog that evening, but in a more subtle and indirect way.

A trusted aunt had been my babysitter for the evening. She guided me through the store, introducing me to my parents' old friends who were there — the poets, professors, sculptors and painters who'd filled their raucous parties in the Berkeley Hills before my birth. We came to one friend particularly known for his loose lips and love of alcohol. With a wild-eyed grin he chucked my chubby cheek. "He looks like Mouse!" he cried.

Suddenly my aunt was pushing me through a forest of grown-ups as he repeated the strange words in our wake.

I looked like a mouse? No sense in getting my feelings hurt, my aunt explained. Like so many of my parents' friends, the guy was eccentric. The moment passed.

A few years later, it returned with clarity.

One day at my highly progressive elementary school, my classmates and I were learning how to make family trees. After one kid cracked a joke about how to include dead relatives, my teacher upbraided him for being insensitive. "After all," she said, "Christopher had a sister who died."

"I most certainly did not," I answered with the prim officiousness of a precocious boy raised at the adults' table by two liberal writers. I repeated the words with an insistence that brought my classmates to hysterics. "I most certainly did not."

I wasn't angry. My teacher was confused, that was all. But the wilting gravity in her expression told me I was wrong. In a moment, my entire world changed.

Mouse, as it turned out, had been my parents' nickname for Michele, the daughter they'd lost shortly before I was born, a girl I still refer to as my sister with some struggle given I will never know for myself what her voice sounded like. Her enormous brown eyes earned her the nickname. For her first four years on earth, she was a radiant, doll-like little girl. Then one afternoon she walked into the kitchen and said, "Mommy, I'm too tired to play," prompting my mother to gaze down at her with deepening dread. What 4-year-old is too tired to play?

Michele's losing battle with leukemia cast my parents in the dark saga that gave birth to "Interview With the Vampire." And so in a way, Claudia, the child vampire frozen in her youth who completes the tragic trio at the novel's center, made an appearance at that San Francisco book signing as well, even if she didn't come in costume.

Why did they keep the secret from me? Simply put, they'd lost one child to a blood-borne illness and been granted another beset by anxiety. They didn't want to unleash the tragedy of what they'd endured on a son who could already hysterically imagine his bed was circled by sharks. But once I knew, they reacted with stunning generosity and candor. All the doors to their hidden past opened.

The crude drawings that hung on the walls of my father's home office? They weren't the work of a former neighbor's child, as he'd once told me. My every question about Michele was answered with bracing, unguarded truth. What her voice sounded like, what foods she loved. (I don't know how the child of a professor and a struggling writer managed to taste escargot, but it was one of

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Books can follow a twisty and unpredictable path to success.

her favorites.) The only barrier to my quest for information was my own hesitation to hear the quake of grief enter my mother's voice or watch a wet sheen appear in my father's eyes.

For years, I continued this halting interview of my parents about their defining tragedy, and for years my parents responded to every query with gentleness and honesty. If the interview had a climax, it came almost a decade after it began, when the three of us sat at a table outside a New Orleans restaurant. My mother's success had allowed us to move there in 1988 when I was 10. Three years later I had worked up the nerve to ask the question that had plagued me from the beginning. "What happened the day she died?"

We'd visited many other parts of their journey by then. I knew about the letters from leading cancer centers

that said my sister's case was hopeless. I knew that, at the doctor's recommendation, my parents never gave Michele her exact diagnosis or prognosis, just the constant, gentle refrain that she was ill and needed care. I even knew about the blood bag that burst next to her hospital bed the night before she died, and the last words she'd said to my father when he'd promised they would clean it up. "For me, your baby," she'd said softly.

But I didn't know about that awful, final day.

And so they told me. They told me about the alarm that went off when her heartbeat dropped below a certain rate. They told me about the doctor who exhausted himself performing CPR before he said sadly, "We're kidding ourselves here." They told me about the light kiss goodbye my father gave her on the lips, only to be startled by the soft give of lifelessness that greeted it. And together, at a table on a leafy, sun-drenched New Orleans avenue, the three of us cried. We cried for Mouse. But I, in no small part, cried for my parents as well.

I didn't know it then, but I could have found the answers I was looking for in their work as well. As an adult I would discover my father had enshrined every awful beat of my sister's last night into a single, searing poem called "Incanto."

Anne in her blue robe astonished, after two years, still,

at the last moment,

ASTONISHED.

My mother's work was less overt. Memoir was not Anne's passion. She adopted it as a form for the fictional accounts of her immortals, but she prided herself on transcending what she called the pedestrian details of experience. After I became a published author, she sometimes praised those aspects of my work in ways that came off as unintentionally conde-

scending. “I could never write a book about going to high school,” she once told me with a proud smile. I’m still not sure whether she was more pleased about my having done just that, or about her own determination to refuse.

If “Interview With the Vampire” bears any trace of my sister’s illness, with its nightmarish hospital stays, brutal treatments and financial devastation (my parents were so broke by the end, Michele was buried without a headstone), they have been transposed by metaphor into elements as gilded as they are bloody.

Except for one.

The idea that Michele was behind the child vampire Claudia seems bracingly obvious to anyone who reads the book with Anne's biography in mind. But the implication offended my mother for years.

Eventually, the scales fell from her eyes. Perspective allowed her to see what others had suggested: a beautiful golden-haired girl who can never physically age, and a psyche that undergoes the perpetual sophistication of immortality while trapped inside the infuriating confines of a child's body. If these are not intentionally a meta-

phor for Michele herself, they were at least crafted by a mother's grief, fueled by her desire to keep her daughter alive and growing even without a mature body in which to place her.

It's also apparent that my mother's loss blew open the wide expanse of her title character's centuries of perspective on the world: his crushing guilt, his rage at death, his sometimes crippling despair over the predatory cycles that define earthly existence. Louis de Pointe du Lac struggles with profound questions about the human condition after a vampire's bite converts him, condemning him to take life to survive. Anne too confronted rage and anguish and doubt after watching the most precious and vulnerable thing in her life waste away as she stood by helplessly — “astonished,” as my father wrote.

In 2021, my mother died of complications from a stroke at the age of 80. By then, she had published 37 novels and her success had turned her into a household name. The honor of caring for her estate passed to me and her dear friend Eric Shaw Quinn through our production company, Dinner Partners, which Anne helped us start. (She was the first guest on our first podcast episode.) Covid didn't take Anne, but pandemic restrictions prevented us from having a large public service. Still, her passionate fans wanted a collective way to mourn. Over the next four years, Eric and I worked tirelessly to produce a celebration that would blend theater and an anthology of original documentary films to tell her story.

But what was the story of Anne?

There were the obvious threads that countless journalists had followed before. That she transformed the vampire novel by writing from the vampire's perspective. That her portrait of two men attempting to raise a child together in a dark and hostile world that demands secrecy about their true nature was a groundbreaking representation of queerness. That the 1994 film adaptation of "Interview With the Vampire," for which Anne wrote the screenplay, remains a horror classic, a time capsule from a bygone era in which lavish studio films tackled dark, sophisticated themes and were rewarded for it at the box office.

We would include those, for sure. But were any of them really the story of Anne herself? Of course, we knew Michele's death would be the dark centerpiece. But Anne's fans weren't planning to travel to New Orleans and fill the Orpheum Theater because she'd lost a daughter. It was her response to that loss that would draw them from all over the world. Days before our event, as I struggled to find a central thesis for the speech I planned, it was Eric who offered one with simple clarity. "Your mother turned the worst thing that ever happened to her into the best thing that ever happened to her."

That was it. The dominant theme of Anne's life was not just her greatest loss, but how she endured it.

If the subsequent novels in the Vampire Chronicles tell the story of how Anne survived terrible loss, “Interview With the Vampire” gives us a story that captures the spiritual and psychological fundamentals of what she survived. Out of the agony of my sister’s death, she spun a world of love and rage, of family, blood and savage beauty, that had us all dancing until midnight in costumes ranging from the flowing silk to naked abandon, a feat only a remarkable few achieve during their lifetimes. □

Freed but Not Free

Sebastian Barry's novel tours a post-Civil War America where cruelty is ever-present but love endures.

By IAN McGUIRE

"THE NEWER WORLD," the latest novel from the Irish writer Sebastian Barry, follows on from two of his earlier works, "Days Without End" (2016) and "A Thousand Moons" (2020). The protagonist, Tennyson Bouguereau, a Black man born into slavery in Tennessee around 1840, is a minor character in both books, and much of the first quarter of the new novel is taken up with brisk summaries of previously narrated events.

These catch-ups will be useful for those already familiar with the other volumes, but for new readers their necessary brevity will be confusing. For that reason, although “The Newer World” is certainly understandable as a stand-alone novel, it is probably best approached and appreciated as the third part of a trilogy.

Barry divides his story into three roughly equal sections. The first moves swiftly through Tennyson's childhood and,

THE NEWER WORLD

By Sebastian Barry

Viking. 259 pp. \$28.

after he and his sister, Rosalee, are freed, ends with the post-Civil War period in which Confederate sympathizers effectively retake control of western Tennessee.

In the second part, Tennyson, now fearing for his life, flees to Nashville, where he enters a newly established school for freedmen. Recognized for his musical talent, he joins the choir and develops an intense friendship with George, a fellow singer. He also falls in love with a woman named Minnie, who is headstrong and beautiful but not entirely trustworthy. Barry is excellent on the power of Black music to stir emotion and provoke empathy, and the scenes in which the choir performs before racist audiences are some of the strongest in the novel.

There is an abrupt and somewhat disconcerting shift in the final section, when George and Tennyson both leave the school, join the Army and then, in a direct echo of events described in “Days Without End,” are sent west to fight against the Apaches.

"The Newer World," "A Thousand Moons" and "Days Without End" are all set in the Southern and Western states in the years before, during and after the Civil War. As well as having many characters and scenes in common, they are linked thematically by their focus on the extreme prejudice, hatred and violence endured by Black people and Native Americans during this extraordinary period in the nation's history. When it comes to describing

IAN McGUIRE'S latest novel is "White River Crossing."

acts of racial violence, Barry rarely holds back, and a good deal of the trilogy's power comes from the stark lyricism with which he relates acts of enormous cruelty.

“Days Without End” contains lengthy and harrowing descriptions of the Army’s genocidal actions against the Yurok and Sioux, and the plot of “A Thousand Moons” centers on the violent rape of Winona Cole, a Lakota girl. In “The Newer World,” Tennyson’s parents are both murdered by white slave-owners, and he and his sister endure brutal assaults.

But the violence in these three novels, although important, is never the whole story. Just as central, and as persistent, is love. At the heart of “Days Without End” is the queer romance between the narrator, Thomas McNulty, a silver-tongued, cross-dressing Irish immigrant, and his quarter-Indian beau, John Cole. In “A Thousand

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Barry is excellent on the power of Black music to stir emotion and provoke empathy.

Moons" the youthful Winona finds comforts in the arms of Peg, a fellow orphan.

In both novels, Barry makes it clear that a form of deep familial love (however non-traditional that family may be) can balance out political and social brutality, making life bearable even for those who have suffered great trauma. This unusual conjunction of hair-raising violence and a slightly gushing emotionality is what gives the two earlier novels their undeniable originality and charm.

"The Newer World" seems ready on occasion, especially in its rather odd third movement, to repeat the comforting pattern established by its antecedents, but it is unable to do so satisfactorily. Whereas Thomas and Winona are passionate, wholehearted and utterly faithful to their lovers, Tennyson in his convoluted relations with George and Minnie is vacillating and uncertain. He seems unable to understand his own desires and is frequently at a loss to explain the decisions he has made or failed to make.

This would not be a problem if we felt that Barry fully understood and was able to communicate to the reader the reasons for his protagonist's confusion and self-doubt, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Instead, the puzzlement feels generalized and remains unresolved, which makes for a novel that strives to be more psychologically and emotionally complex than its precursors but ends up feeling significantly less sure-footed and coherent.

Anger Management

Fights, feuds and insults are all in a day's work for Ari Emanuel, who offers an unvarnished look at his career in a new memoir.

By ALEXANDRA JACOBS

FORGET THE "ODYSSEY." In his staccato, profane and vindictive new book, "Roll the Calls," Ari Emanuel invokes Homer's prequel, the "Iliad," whose first word is "rage." And "forget" is not the F-word he'd use.

Emanuel is a Hollywood superagent — that term now appropriated by A.I., the imminent industry crusher barely acknowledged in this book's pages. This is all A.R.I., baby.

He's represented people so famous they're one-named, like Oprah and the man formerly known as "the Donald," and became famous and one-named himself after "Entourage," the early-aughts HBO series featuring Ari Gold, the scenery-chewing-and-spewing character played by Jeremy Piven.

He's also youngest of the three high-achieving Emanuel brothers (Zeke, the doctor; Rahm, the politician); and his place in the birth order and relative struggles at school, Ari argues here, are what motivated him to become the richest.

“Third rail,” Emanuel tells a therapist nicknamed Dr. Calm, explaining how being treated as stupid sets off his notorious temper. “The only way I can describe it. Like an electric charge running through me. Zeerp! I lose all control.”

In recent years, showbiz bigwigs like Scott Rudin and Will Smith have been brought low after their own Zeerp! moments: furloughed from their careers and forced to apologize for their behavior.

Rage has an image problem. But move over, mindfulness; sayonara to stoicism: "Roll the Calls" wants to rebrand rage as potentially elevating, the way Gordon Gekko made greed good in "Wall Street."

“Rage might not solve every problem (or any problem), but it sure as hell clarifies the problem,” Emanuel writes, or dictates (nested in his acknowledgments is J.R. Moehringer, the A-list ghostwriter who worked with Prince Harry). “Rage brings things to a head.”

My editor has barred me from using any more cutesy portmanteaus, just as Emanuel was once barred from the studio lot at Disney, but I'm going to make like Ari and barrel forth anyway. This may be the world's first mad-moir. Or . . . mad-ifesto.

It's the story of how a kid with dyslexia and A.D.H.D. rose from licking envelopes for the very literary Robby Lantz, whose clients included James Baldwin and Carson McCullers; to the mailroom and upward at CAA; to cofounding the upstart agency Endeavor; to gobbling up William Morris and IMG. Notably, his jumbo bowl of alphabet soup, under the name TKO Group Holdings, now includes the fight giants U.F.C. and WWE.

ALEXANDRA JACOBS is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.

A wrestler himself in high school after tussling in childhood with his brothers (“two violent psychopaths” — one of the few insults that seem like a joke), Ari has taken this opportunity to pin his opponents to the mat in print.

On Barry Diller, after a meeting about Live Nation: "The dude is just a mélange of old farts and bad ideas." And furthermore: "BORRRR-ing."

"That glad-handing phony" and "that [bleeping] putz" are the niceties leveled at Jeffrey Katzenberg.

ROLL THE CALLS

By Ari Emanuel

Knopf. 432 pp. \$35.

And to Irving Azoff, after Azoff tried to poach a client: "You are fundamentally a liar and selfish . . . You can lie to other people and think you'll get away with it. That's not happening with me. I'm not from this town. My roots are elsewhere and let me tell you something: I don't forget and won't forget. I keep grudges for a lifetime."

And this was a "side skirmish"!

Emanuel's roots are middle-class Chicago, but also Jerusalem, where his father, Benjamin, who became a pediatrician, was born after his forebears fled the pogroms in Ukraine. The family name was changed from Auerbach in honor of Benjamin's brother, Emanuel, who was killed by a stray bullet. Ari remembers wetting his pants during a prison attack in the West Bank when he was 7.

He was touring the prison because his mother, Marsha, was friends with the local police chief. She was a civil rights activist and tough cookie — Ari feels a kinship with Jackson Pollock upon hearing that the painter's mother was "volatile" and "withholding." She put his bad report cards on the refrigerator alongside those of his better-performing brothers. "She wasn't like other moms," he writes. "She cursed a lot."

Emanuel had an adopted younger sister with disabilities, Shoshana, but this book is primarily a Battle of the Gods in which we learn little of her, or his relationships with women. Those include a long first marriage to Sarah Hardwick Addington, with whom he has three sons and a daughter; and a second marriage to the much younger designer Sarah Staudinger, whom he refers to by the brand name of her clothing line, Staud.

"You fired me, Ari, and let me put this in a way you'll understand," Staud tells him when he wants her back after, incredibly, making Dr. Calm call her for a break. "If I let you rehire me, I want a promotion. And equity. Or else I quit."

Emanuel is a talker, not a reader; he gives Rahm the middle finger on a panel after he jokes Ari can't read anything over 200 pages. "Roll the Calls" is over 400, but goes fast, to Moehringer's credit, as if it were barked into a voice-memo app and transcribed by a quivering assistant. The iPhone has only accelerated Emanuel's roll. "I'll use my teleputer on you like a two-by-four," he asserts, using the word coined presciently by George Gilder in "Life After Television" (1990).

Oh, for 1990, when it was a flex merely to order off-menu at Spago!

The storied agent Sam Cohn devoured paper, who knows why. Bill Block popped raw garlic, we learn, to enhance his testosterone. Ari Emanuel? He ingests a daily cup of live worms to address what he calls (without irony) “inflammation,” recommending to an old antagonist, Mike Ovitz — how they’ve mellowed — that he do the same.

But these days Hollywood is less concerned with “hugging it out,” Gold’s signature catchphrase, than with Hugging Face. Will any of us eat lunch in this town again? □

The fashion designer Sarah Staudinger and talent agent Ari Emanuel in 2025.

Expense Report

A journalist charts the rise and fall of the Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, who gave millions to Jeffrey Epstein.

By JONATHAN MAHLER

Leon Black at the Museum of Modern Art in 2024.

THE FINANCIER Leon Black may be entitled to his own wall in the rogues' gallery of Jeffrey Epstein's enablers. Between 2012 and 2017, Black gave Epstein a staggering \$158 million — or more than \$170 million if you count a big loan that Epstein had not made good on when he hanged himself in his jail cell in 2019. Not only did the revelations of these payments put a premature end to Black's Wall Street career, they ensured that he would be remembered not as one of the great dealmakers of his time but as Epstein's most generous client.

In “Money to Burn,” the journalist William D. Cohen offers a detailed account of Black’s rise and fall. A former investment banker himself, Cohen is nothing if not thorough, and “Money to Burn” is a coup of reporting, based on extensive interviews with Black, his business partners and many others who are often quoted at great, and at times trying, length.

Cohan is telling two stories, really. One is about Black. The other is about the private equity firm he built, Apollo Global Management, which has been at the center of Wall Street's ongoing transformation from a place dominated by relatively staid banks and brokerage houses to a more shadowy realm ruled by “alternative asset managers” who raise and lend their own capital.

Black's arc makes for an almost perfect parable for the corrupting influence of money. His father, Eli, was settling into life as a Long Island rabbi when he pivoted in the mid-1940s. A career in finance, he reasoned without apparent irony, could be just as rewarding as one in the pulpit, as long as “men of virtue” were in charge.

Eli Black became enormously successful, the architect and chief executive of an international conglomerate called the United Brands Company. But his life ended tragically: In early 1975, with the company facing mounting financial problems and a bribery scandal, he leaped out the window of his 44th-floor office in Manhattan's Pan Am Building.

None of this ultimately deterred Leon from going into finance. Armed with a pair of Ivy League degrees (Dartmouth College, Harvard Business School), he started his career in 1977 at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk-bond powerhouse where men of virtue were in distinctly short supply.

When Drexel was forced into bankruptcy in 1990, following a protracted federal investigation into illegal trading, Black launched Apollo. He and his new team raised hundreds of millions of dollars to get started. Their plan was to leverage

JONATHAN MAHLER is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author, most recently, of "The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990."

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MONEY TO BURN

The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street By William D. Cohan

Portfolio. 667 pp. \$40.

this money to gain control of distressed companies and then have their way with them.

As Cohen makes clear, sucking profits out of struggling businesses was hard work that often entailed logic-defying feats of financial engineering and self-dealing. Needless to say, Black and his partners fared a lot better in these ventures than the employees or customers of the entities they bought. A series of sexual assaults at an Apollo-owned acute-care facility in Iowa helped prompt a Senate report, whose title — “Profits Over Patients: The Harmful Effects of Private Equity on the U.S. Health Care System” — speaks volumes and yet may still understate the matter.

Bargain hunting became not just a career but an avocation for the billionaires who ran Apollo. In 2011, Josh Harris, an Apollo co-founder and Black protégé, bought a big stake in an N.B.A. franchise, the down-on-their-luck Philadelphia 76ers. Another co-founder, Marc Rowan, set his sights on the Long Island surf town of Montauk, where, to the fury of many locals, he turned an affordable seafood shack into an upmarket one that, in 2019, served a \$54 lobster Cobb salad and \$795 bottles of rosé.

I guess everyone needs a hobby. Black's was art. In 2012, he spent nearly \$120 million for Edvard Munch's 1895 drawing of "The Scream." By then, Black had long been friendly with Epstein, whom he had met at a wedding in 1996. He would eventually fork over tens of millions of dollars to the convicted pedophile and registered sex offender.

Black spoke at length to Cohen about his interactions with Epstein, presumably believing that this book might help him clear his name. And Cohen gives Black plenty of room to mount his defense, however preposterous it may seem: Black claims that he paid Epstein these exorbitant sums — many multiples of what a first-rate Wall Street trusts-and-estates lawyer would charge, as Cohen notes — solely for his tax-and estate-planning advice.

Cohan seems skeptical, but neither does he fully endorse the alternative and seemingly far more credible explanation: that Epstein was less financial adviser than personal fixer for Black, helping him manage his illicit relationships with numerous women.

The news of Black's entanglement with Epstein first broke in 2019. Then, in March 2021, Guzel Ganieva, a young Russian woman to whom Black had paid millions of dollars in hush money, wrote on Twitter that she'd been sexually abused by him.

Days later, Black stepped down from Apollo, naming Rowan — not Harris, who had long aspired to succeed him — as chief executive. A few months after that, Black filed a RICO suit against Harris and Ganieva, accusing them of conspiring to make her sexual-abuse claims public in an effort to push him out. Black's complaint compares Harris to "Shakespeare's lago," alleging that once Harris knew he was being passed over for the big job at Apollo, he turned his wrath on his former mentor.

“It’s hard to imagine that that’s where we’re at,” a befuddled Harris told Cohan about Black’s charges. Indeed, reading Black’s unhinged theories about Harris, a different Shakespeare character comes to mind: King Lear. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in Manhattan in 2022. A year later, though, Black prevailed in a civil suit that Ganieva had filed against him, accusing him of defamation and sexual assault.

In laying out this sordid saga, Cohan offers a lot of conflicting claims. It's my one real gripe with this book: Cohan is so focused on allowing his subjects to have their say — and, perhaps, on making the most of his considerable access — that he delegates too much of the storytelling to them rather than forcefully shaping the narrative himself.

Last March, a few of my colleagues at The New York Times made a convincing case that Epstein's services included helping Black obscure millions of dollars that he paid to a dozen women, at least some of whom he had sexual encounters with, a report that Black denied. For whatever reason, in "Money to Burn," Cohan doesn't reach his own conclusion about the mystery at the heart of Black's story: What, exactly, was he paying Epstein for? The resulting picture of Black's relationship with Epstein — and, in turn, of Black himself — is blurry.

Setting this issue aside, “Money to Burn” is an engaging and valuable work, a portrait of a man and a milieu whose inexhaustible devotion to the accumulation of personal wealth may test your faith in capitalism. What’s more, if Black’s hope was that Cohan would help redeem his character, he may be disappointed with the final product, which closely chronicles his tawdry descent into infamy.

And yet the joke may be on us. Since Black's departure, Apollo has moved more aggressively into the private-credit markets, exploiting its advantage over banks and brokerage houses, whose debt loads and lending practices are much more heavily regulated. Business is booming. By 2029, Apollo aims to have \$1.5 trillion in assets under management — more than the G.D.P. of Indonesia. Black has been thoroughly disgraced in the court of public opinion, but he is still Apollo's largest individual shareholder. With an estimated personal fortune of around \$15 billion, he is surely richer than ever.

Hits of the '80s

A reporter draws together a bushel of figures who thrived in one fateful decade.

President Trump in the Oval Office in July.

By RICK PERLSTEIN

SOME SAY Leo Tolstoy's “War and Peace,” with its scores of plots and subplots carried out by hundreds of named characters, is not a proper novel at all. Instead, all that fine-grained narrative specificity is grist for the book’s essayistic critiques of what actually concerns the author: the way historians reduce history to over-tidy categories that explain how things turned out. “Any conclusion of historical science, without the least effort on the part of criticism, falls apart like dust, leaving nothing be-

WHEN AMERICA ROARED

How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country — and Led Us to Today

By Jonathan Kaufman

Viking. 294 pp. \$35.

hind," he insisted, because "any chosen historical unit is always arbitrary" — including what we call a historical "period."

Tolstoy would especially despise the way many history books, in our own time, isolate a single decade or a single year to “explain how we live now.” Were we able to place before the master a book called “1969: The Year Everything Changed,” then one called “1968: The Year That Rocked the World,” then “1967: The Year of Fire and Ice,” then “1966: The Year the Decade Exploded,” then “The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964,” he would point out what we all should see: If every year can be said to have been the most important, then none of them were. (He might also say 1965 needs a better literary agent.)

The problem is the same with “decade” books. And yet they proliferate, perhaps because, in a time when profit margins are tight in the literary world and the corporations that own publishing imprints demand predictable returns, decade-bound tomes are easier to sell than more nuanced stuff.

Jonathan Kaufman's “When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country — and Led Us to Today” is hardly the worst of the genre. The organizing idea is sound: The embrace of market dynamism during the years of Ronald Reagan's presidency broke through the stagnation and alienation of the years that immediately preceded it, but led in turn to inequality and alienation and populist discontent of our own time.

Kaufman assembles his narrative out of the interlocking stories of several figures he finds exemplary, including G.E.'s superstar C.E.O. Jack Welch, who fought against labor organizing; the Black investor John Rogers, whose rise in 1980s Chicago, Kauf-

RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of several books, including "Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980."

man argues, paved the way for Barack Obama; the former anti-Vietnam War activist Karen Nussbaum, whose spectacular success organizing secretaries into a union called 9to5 inspired the hit 1980 film of the same name; and Evan Wolfson, the Yale grad who navigated between the Scylla of conservative resistance and the Charybdis of ultraleft movement radicals to turn gay marriage into a legally imaginable goal. There are useful insights along the way, though none are mind-blowing, and some are banal; and some are incorrect.

It is always interesting to review the saga of Welch, a working-class child of a postwar prosperity built on strong unions, community-minded corporations and activist government who proceeded proudly and ruthlessly to decimate all of that and thus ruin the future prospects of the generations of working-class children who came

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Kaufman assembles his narrative out of interlocking stories.

after him.

Nussbaum serves as Welch's main narrative foil. Her efforts in the 1970s turning harried victims of an office world that resembled “Mad Men” into a political force soon hit the same wall all late-20th-century union organizers hit, in the midst of the “unprecedented assault on unions” that Kaufman says began in 1981, shortly after Reagan moved into the White House.

The problem with this formulation is that the assault was anything but unprecedented (before the 1940s, labor agitators were frequently shot); and its pieces were well in place by the end of the presidency of Jimmy Carter, whom the historian and New Deal partisan Arthur Schlesinger found so neglectful of labor that he said Carter was, actually, “not a Democrat — at least in anything more recent than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word”: a good example of how the “decade that changed everything” frame obscures more than it enlightens.

Kaufman's freshest and most interesting contribution is his portrait of Mark Fowler, Reagan's first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. It's fascinating to learn, from Kaufman's interviews with him, that Fowler's passion for obliterating regulation of TV and radio broadcasts, which he considered a world-altering intervention in the history of liberty, was borne out of an irritation with having to fill out logbooks to document what songs and public-service announcements he played, in his college days as a rock D.J.

It is frustrating, however, to see how much Kaufman gets wrong about one of the important consequences of this deregulation: the rise of right-wing shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh. This telling imputes their success not to politics but to a simplistic class resentment: Limbaugh's listeners were, Kaufman contends, "overwhelmingly middle- and lower-class white men" left behind once newspapers and public radio "abandoned them" for more affluent audiences. This is incorrect, as a matter of both sociology and intent; Limbaugh himself, in 1991, boasted that he prioritized callers with car phones, because they must be rich.

"When America Roared" is best once Kaufman abandons the market-forged manacles of the "decade" conceit and turns to his own life story. As a young journalist in the late 1980s, he was The Boston Globe's second reporter on the scene after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, where activists had littered Beijing streets with broken bottles to taunt the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whose name sounds like the Mandarin words for "little bottle." Then he was sent to the crumbling Eastern bloc, where during the final protests against Communist rule he heard rumors that Leipzig hospitals had been stocking up on blood, fearing a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown.

Tolstoy's favorite metaphors for historical change involved oceans. “Though the surface of the historical sea seemed immobile, mankind moved as ceaselessly as the movement of time,” he wrote in “War and Peace.” You can describe the fascinating things that float on the surface, but grasping the underlying, invisible currents that brought them there, over a year or a decade, before they sink below the froth to contribute to future tidal shifts, is a task for masters. Some can do it — Christian Caryl in “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century” is my particular favorite — but Kaufman doesn't quite pull it off here. A memoir about his stint as a young reporter as Communism was falling apart, though: That's a book I'd want to read.

Children's Books

Breaking Away

In three new picture books, young offspring taste independence from messy, ‘sticky’ and nurturing family bonds.

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By BRUCE HANDY

FAMILIES: Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. And who, besides long-term analysands, knows that better than kids tasting independence by pushing against those messy, sticky and — best-case scenario — nurturing bonds? It's a theme that underscores shelves and shelves' worth of classic children's literature.

Three terrific new books — each a marvel of imagination, sensitivity and craft — take up the baton. All contain art so thematically and visually audacious that, if I didn't quite gasp when I first turned the pages, I mouthed a silent “whoa.” Or laughed out of sheer delight.

Among the trio, Christian Robinson's "Dad" addresses the youngest audience. Robinson is one of the 21st century's foremost picture-book makers, illustrating his own stories as well as others' — notably Matt de la Peña's "Last Stop on Market Street," for which Robinson was a Caldecott honoree (and de la Peña won a Newbery Medal). His new book's text and premise are simple: Short sentences detailing fatherly attributes are juxtaposed with illustrations of animal dads (and a few human ones) rendered in his trademark mix of collage and paint.

For “Dad is strong,” Robinson offers a wary-looking gorilla, his body as heavy and graceful as a Henry Moore sculpture, standing guard over his child. You can feel

BRUCE HANDY is the author, most recently, of "Hollywood High," a history of teen movies, and "Balloon," a picture book illustrated by Julie Kwon.

the strength in the ape's massive forearms, and the love in the sheltering curves of his back and shoulders.

"Dad holds on tight" depicts a papa sea-horse with a baby in his pouch, his tail clutching a strand of seaweed. The ocean

DAD

By Christian Robinson

Balzer + Bray. 48 pp. \$19.99.

(Ages 3 to 6)

THE MUÉGANOS

By Jaque Jours

Transit Children's Editions. 48 pp. \$20.95.

(Ages 3 and up)

NOBODY BUT ME

By Sara Lundberg

Translated by B.J. Woodstein

Triangle Square. 64 pp. \$21.95.

(Ages 4 to 7)

depths are ebony black, so we can only sense the threat of a strong current in the bending seaweed and the protective tension in the silvery seahorse's spiny body. It's a sublime composition.

Though “Dad” leans more into attachment than testing family bonds, Robinson wisely acknowledges that fathers may have shortcomings. “Dad needs lots of space.” (Illustration: a toothy, grimacing shark.) “Dad lets you down.” (A carefree gibbon ignoring his charge.)

“Dad had to go away” depicts two owlets left behind in their nest. Behind them, a jagged opening to the sky feels like a wound. In a letter included with reviewers' copies, Robinson writes that his own father “wasn’t around growing up, and I am not yet a dad myself.” For me, that bit of back story makes a remarkable book even more remarkable.

Did I mention messy, sticky bonds? The debut author-illustrator Jaque Jours makes them literal in “The Muéganos,” a wonderfully droll book about a rabbit family named for a “traditional Mexican candy made of small, square pieces of fried wheat dough, stuck together with honey or pilon-cillo syrup.” (Jewish readers may be reminded of teiglach.)

As portrayed in Jours's mixed-media art, the five Muéganos — Papá, Mamá and three children, including Julia, our protagonist — are joined together at the shoulders, the bunnies' feet dangling amusingly in the air. "They are never apart," she writes. "Papá Muégano says honey glues them together. Mamá says it's love. Julia thinks it is a little boring."

And there, fiction workshoppers and child-psychology students, is your primal conflict!

One day, while visiting a museum, Julia's "simple urge" to wander off by herself and see what she wants to see is so strong that it makes "something crack." Jours depicts the family starting to splinter and then, with the page turn, a stunning image: a tiny but big-eyed Julia alone in a black void that also suggests a torn page. Is she exhilarated, terrified or merely startled? Probably all three.

Back home, the family tries to repair the breach, but “some things are just inevitable,” a truth Jours illustrates with broken Delft-style crockery. Her ending is a happy one, though. Genuinely loving families learn to allow breathing room.

Sara Lundberg's "Nobody but Me," translated by B.J. Woodstein, is a masterpiece with a wordless middle section that defies easy summary.

One summer day a little boy visits a lake with his mom. Itching to do something by himself, he unties a small inflatable raft and drifts off — in the literal sense but also,

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The five Muéganos are joined together at the shoulders, the bunnies' feet dangling amusingly in the air.

maybe, in the sleepy sense. Gentle (at first) waters carry him on a dreamlike journey through an enveloping forest and then into the wider world, where, among other things, he finds love (or at least friendship) and danger.

But don't worry: A trio of forest children in leaf skirts — sprites, perhaps — serve as guardians and keep trouble from getting out of hand. Changed but unchanged, the boy drifts back to his mom clutching a seed, which he plants when they return home. It too will grow.

Lundberg, a beloved and well-honored Swedish picture-book maker, works here in a vivid, liquid, painterly style that reminds me of David Hockney's late-period landscapes; you want to dive in.

“Nobody but Me” won’t be for every kid, or adult, but it will touch something in many, even if they don’t yet know what that something is. □

Above, Christian Robinson's art from "Dad." Below, art by Jaque Jours from "The Muéganos" (left) and Sara Lundberg from "Nobody but Me."

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COMBINED PRINT AND E-BOOK BEST SELLERS | THIS WEEK | LAST WEEK | Fiction | WEEKS ON LIST | 1 | HOLLOW BONES, by Jodi Picoult. (Ballantine) A woman who runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness and her husband, who is a police polygraph expert, face a crisis in their marriage. | 1 | 2 | $^{2}$ | THEO OF GOLDEN, by Allen Levi. (Atria) A man travels to a small Southern town, where he purchases pencil drawings of local residents and exchanges them for stories. | 42 | 3 | THE THOROUGHBREDS, by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham. (Little, Brown) The second book in the Academy series. Close relationships and the stability of the boarding school are in doubt. | 1 | 4 | $^{4}$ | THE CALAMITY CLUB, by Kathryn Stockett. (Spiegel & Grau) As things get tougher during the Depression, several women look for ways to improve their circumstances. | 20 | 5 | DEAD BEAT, by Leigh Bardugo. (Flatiron) The third book in the Ninth House series. Alex and her allies battle demons found in New Haven and on the Yale campus. | 1 | 6 | EXIT PARTY, by Emily St. John Mandel. (Knopf) In the near future, after America has had another civil war, Ari Waker embarks on a journey to seek answers to a mystery. | 1 | 7 | WE CHASE SHADOWS, by Richard Osman. (Pamela Dorman) The second book in the We Solve Murders series. Amy, Rosie and Steve go after a killer at large. | 1 | 8 | GRIM TIDINGS, by B.K. Borison. (Avon) The second book in the Ghosted series. A Grim Reaper looking to not do harm forms an unexpected alliance with a Guardian Angel. | 1 | 9 | $^{7}$ | DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, by Matt Dinniman. (Ace) A Coast Guard vet named Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, are trapped in a fantasy dungeon. | 37 | 10 | $^{13}$ | VERITY, by Colleen Hoover. (Grand Central) Lowen Ashleigh is hired by the husband of an injured writer to complete her popular series and uncovers a horrifying truth; the basis of the movie. | 101 | SALES PERIOD OF SEPTEMBER 13-19 | THIS WEEK | LAST WEEK | Nonfiction | WEEKS ON LIST | 1 | THE PERILOUS FIGHT, by Colin Kaepernick with Nick Chiles. (Legacy Lit) The Super Bowl quarterback and civil rights activist describes defining moments in his life and their outcomes. | 1 | 2 | END TIMES FASCISM, by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) An investigation of the shared beliefs belonging to religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists and ethno-nationalists. | 1 | 3 | ONE MAN IN, by Christian Craighead. (Threshold Editions) A former British special forces soldier gives an account of his fight against a unit of ethnic Somali terrorists at a hotel and office complex in Nairobi. | 1 | 4 | CONFRONTING AMERICA, by Bill O'Reilly and Josh Hammer. (St. Martin's) The conservative commentator shares his views on education, family, drugs, work and religion. | 1 | 5 | $^{15}$ | THE NERD REICH, by Gil Durán. (Avid Reader) An independent journalist portrays a new political order that would supplant elected governments with corporate rule. | 5 | 6 | LIVE LAUGH LOVE, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. (Liveright) The author of “Jesus and John Wayne” explores the history of white Christian womanhood in the United States. | 1 | 7 | PROFILES IN COWARDICE, by Jacob Weisberg. (Penguin Press) How eight individuals may have been complicit in President Trump's acquisition of authoritarian power. | 1 | 8 | $^{1}$ | THE COUNTERREVOLUTION, by Victor Davis Hanson. (Basic) A look at the influence of President Trump's time out of office on his second term. | 2 | 9 | $^{11}$ | THIS IS ME, by Hayden Panettiere. (Grand Central) The late actress describes how she contended with fame. | 6 | 10 | REDWOOD, by Ben Macintyre. (Crown) The author of “The Spy and the Traitor” portrays an MI6 undercover officer's work to help a Russian double agent hiding a secret in 1981. | 1 | The New York Times best sellers are compiled and archived by the best-sellers desk of the New York Times news department, and are separate from the opinion, culture, advertising and business sides of The New York Times Company. Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles published in the United States. ONLINE: For complete lists and a full explanation of our methodology, visit www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers.

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Editors' Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review

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TAIPEI STORY, by R.F. Kuang. (William Morrow. 279 pp. \$32.)

Kuang, a successful fantasy writer, once again explores the link between language and empire in this realistic novel about an American student adrift in Taiwan. By homing in on everyday dramas of midterms and sisters and sex, she shows she's as skilled at literary fiction as she is at its speculative cousin; if you didn't know better it would be hard to imagine her writing in any other register.

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TOWER HILL: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion, by Alan Taylor. (Norton. 324 pp. \$35.)

In this rich study of the Blow plantation in Virginia — not far from the site of Nat Turner's 1831 uprising — the Pulitzer-winning historian Taylor endeavors to separate tradition from the truth, attending carefully to the mix of high-minded sympathy and chilling cruelty that churned inside American slave owners. The result is like a nonfiction version of William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!"

SWITZY, by Emma Cline. (Random House. 352 pp. \$32.)

Cline's new novel gets inside the head of a stoic businessman with dementia, who is flying to Switzerland to end his life — but not before confronting the boarding-school roommate who has held an outsize place in his psyche. A Booker nominee, and a significant swerve from Cline's female- and youth-centric earlier fiction, "Switzy" does so much so very well; Cline collates beautifully the absurd detritus of modernity.

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| THIS WEEK | LAST WEEK | Fiction | WEEKS ON LIST | 1 | DEAD BEAT, by Leigh Bardugo. (Flatiron) The third book in the Ninth House series. Alex and her allies battle demons found in New Haven and on the Yale campus. | 1 | 2 | HOLLOW BONES, by Jodi Picoult. (Ballantine) A woman who runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness and her husband, who is a police polygraph expert, face a crisis in their marriage. | 1 | 3 | THE THOROUGHBREDS, by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham. (Little, Brown) The second book in the Academy series. Close relationships and the stability of the boarding school are in doubt. | 1 | 4 | EXIT PARTY, by Emily St. John Mandel. (Knopf) In the near future, after America has had another civil war, Ari Waker embarks on a journey to seek answers to a mystery. | 1 | 5 | 2 | THE CALAMITY CLUB, by Kathryn Stockett. (Spiegel & Grau) As things get tougher during the Depression, several women look for ways to improve their circumstances. | 20 | 6 | 8 | THE ALTAR OF PERGAMON, by Jonathan Cahn. (Frontline) Ariel Herzog and Lara Winter are pursued as they go around the world in an attempt to unlock a mystery. | 3 | 7 | THE EMPEROR'S ENEMY, by Jasmine Mas. (MIRA) A skilled hunter named Zora Ravenal is caught in a war and kept in close quarters with a man who is obsessed with her. | 1 | 8 | WE CHASE SHADOWS, by Richard Osman. (Pamela Dorman) The second book in the We Solve Murders series. Amy, Rosie and Steve go after a killer at large. | 1 | 9 | ELDRITCH, by Keri Lake. (Bloom) The second book in the Eating Woods series. As the mortal world grows darker, Maevyth and Zevander face new dangers. | 1 | 10 | 4 | THE PIRATE QUEEN, by Ariel Lawhon. (Doubleday) In 16th-century Ireland, Grace O'Malley endures betrayal and hardship before leading a fleet of ships to defend her land. | 2 | THIS WEEK | LAST WEEK | Nonfiction | WEEKS ON LIST | 1 | THE PERILOUS FIGHT, by Colin Kaepernick with Nick Chiles. (Legacy Lit) The Super Bowl quarterback and civil rights activist describes defining moments in his life and their outcomes. | 1 | 2 | END TIMES FASCISM, by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) An investigation of the shared beliefs belonging to religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists and ethno-nationalists. | 1 | 3 | CONFRONTING AMERICA, by Bill O'Reilly and Josh Hammer. (St. Martin's) The conservative commentator shares his views on education, family, drugs, work and religion. | 1 | 4 | ONE MAN IN, by Christian Craighead. (Threshold Editions) A former British special forces soldier gives an account of his fight against a unit of ethnic Somali terrorists at a hotel and office complex in Nairobi. | 1 | 5 | LIVE LAUGH LOVE, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. (Liveright) A history of white Christian womanhood in the United States. | 1 | 6 | 7 | THIS IS ME, by Hayden Panettiere. (Grand Central) The late actress describes how she contended with fame. | 6 | 7 | 1 | THE COUNTERREVOLUTION, by Victor Davis Hanson. (Basic) A look at the influence of President Trump's time out of office on his second term. | 2 | 8 | 15 | THE NERD REICH, by Gil Durán. (Avid Reader) An independent journalist portrays a new political order that would supplant elected governments with corporate rule. | 5 | 9 | PROFILES IN COWARDICE, by Jacob Weisberg. (Penguin Press) How eight individuals may have been complicit in President Trump's acquisition of authoritarian power. | 1 | 10 | 5 | REGIME CHANGE, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. (Simon & Schuster) Two White House correspondents for The New York Times delve into the first year of President Trump's second term. | 13 | An asterisk (\*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.

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Paperback Row / BY MIGUEL SALAZAR

SHADOW TICKET, by Thomas Pynchon. (Penguin Books. 304 pp. \$20.)

In Depression-era Wisconsin, Hicks McTaggart, a reluctant private eye, is tasked with what appears to be a straightforward

assignment: to find and return a wandering cheese heiress. The job takes him to Eastern Europe, where he becomes entangled in a world of swing dancers, motorcycle outlaws, Soviet agents and Nazis rendered with classic Pynchonian excess.

TOWER OF BASEL: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World, by Adam LeBor. (Public-Affairs. 416 pp. \$22.99.)

The Bank of International Settlements, a "bank for central banks," as LeBor calls it, is a little-known but crucial

institution at the center of the world's economy. His account, first published in 2013, chronicles the bank's checkered past — it was a vital supporter of the Nazi regime during World War II — to shed light on the political and moral ramifications of global finance.

THE WILDERNESS, by Angela Flournoy. (Mariner. 304 pp. \$18.99.)

Narrated in shifting perspectives, Flournoy's novel traces the lives of four friends — Desiree, January, Monique and Nakia — over two decades

beginning in 2008, as they grapple with the demands of adulthood, friendship and an increasingly volatile 21st century. Our reviewer, Niela Orr, called it a book that attests to “the ways a person’s mind can become a haunted house, its private ghosts compounding with time.” | THIS WEEK | LAST WEEK | Paperback Trade Fiction | WEEKS ON LIST | 1 | 1 | THEO OF GOLDEN, by Allen Levi. (Atria) A man travels to a small Southern town, where he purchases pencil drawings of local residents and exchanges them for stories. | 43 | 2 | GRIM TIDINGS, by B. K. Borison. (Avon) The second book in the Ghosted series. A Grim Reaper looking to not do harm forms an unexpected alliance with a Guardian Angel. | 1 | 3 | 2 | DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, by Matt Dinniman. (Ace) A Coast Guard vet named Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, are trapped in a fantasy dungeon. | 38 | 4 | 3 | VERITY, by Colleen Hoover. (Grand Central) Lowen Ashleigh is hired by the husband of an injured writer and uncovers a horrifying truth; the basis of the movie. | 162 | 5 | 4 | BRAIN DAMAGE, by Freida McFadden. (Poisoned Pen) A dermatologist who took a bullet through her skull tries to piece together her memories and determine if someone close to her is a threat. | 5 | 6 | THE WOMEN, by Kristin Hannah. (St. Martin's Griffin) A nurse follows her brother to serve during the Vietnam War and returns to a divided America. | 1 | 7 | 6 | PROJECT HAIL MARY, by Andy Weir. (Ballantine) The fate of humanity rests on Ryland Grace's shoulders; the basis of the movie. | 65 | 8 | SHIELD OF SPARROWS, by Devney Perry. (Red Tower) A princess deals with various adversaries as she moves into the role she chooses for herself, not the one chosen for her. | 1 | 9 | 8 | CARL'S DOOMSDAY SCENARIO, by Matt Dinniman. (Ace) The second book in the "Dungeon Crawler Carl" series. | 7 | 10 | 7 | WILD DARK SHORE, by Charlotte McConaghy. (Flatiron) A woman washes ashore on a tiny island near Antarctica, where the only inhabitants are a man and his three children. | 3 | 11 | 10 | THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS, by Ali Hazelwood. (Berkley) A young professor agrees to pretend to be a third-year Ph.D. candidate's boyfriend. | 45 | 12 | 12 | RED RISING, by Pierce Brown. (Del Rey) A member of the lowest rung of a society on Mars in the future mixes in with humanity's overlords in the hopes of taking them down. | 14 | 13 | 9 | MY DREADFUL DARLING, by H. D. Carlton. (ZPN) Reverie Adams attempts to put her dark past behind her but Dreadful Sharpe's desire for revenge brings it back. | 3 | 14 | 13 | A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES, by Sarah J. Maas. (Bloomsbury) Feyre is taken from her home and placed inside the world of the Fae. | 88 | 15 | 14 | THE DIVORCE, by Freida McFadden. (Poisoned Pen) After her husband ends their marriage, Naomi suspects she might be in danger. | 16 | Sales are defined as completed transactions between vendors and individual end users during the period on or after the official publication date of a title. Sales of titles are statistically weighted to represent and accurately reflect all outlets proportionally nationwide. The panel of reporting retailers is comprehensive and reflects sales in tens of thousands of stores of all sizes and demographics across the United States. ONLINE: For a full explanation of our methodology, visit www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers.

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Appraisal / Wendell Berry / By Barbara Kingsolver

The award-winning author remembers the man she counted among her most important literary mentors.

A GREAT MENTOR gives us the confidence to look ahead to our own work while we still feel that gentle hand at our back, always there to help move us along. I've felt Wendell Berry's literary hand between my shoulder blades for such a majority of my life that, after his death in August at the age of 92, it's a shock to wake up into a day without him in this world. The only words I want to read right now are his. "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," for a start, advises me this morning to ask the questions that have no answers. To invest in the millennium.

... Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

The manifesto further instructs me to put my faith in humus, listen to carrion, expect the end of the world and laugh. To swear allegiance to my better self with the courage of insurrection:

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

Wendell and I grew up a generation apart but joined in a culture that puts great stock in neighborly civility. We rural folk are mostly polite. It helps us to get along, get invited back, and sometimes sneak mutiny in the door. Even in the fanciest company. Even in church. This is the power of Wendell Berry. He was a welcoming, funny, gentle-spoken man who knew what was right — unfailingly, it seems to me. He could deliver it on the page with such lyrical self-possession, the reader might take a while to register the volley of interior explosions. You're left with fresh truth and some reckoning on your hands, and a clear sense that it was a gift.

As a writer he distinguished himself early, first as a Stegner fellow at Stanford and then on the faculty of New York University, acclaimed by the literati but uneasy with the growing distance between himself and his home. His academic peers warned him against leaving the cultural capital; they surely thought a Kentucky farmer-poet would be doomed as a literary nobody.

It turned out, becoming “somebody” meant something different to Wendell than it did to them. “The Long-Legged House,” his first book of essays, from 1969, argued for the part of our humanity that rests in belonging. Without the people and place that made us, we risk losing our whole selves. A farm in Kentucky was the God’s honest truth of Wendell Berry, the writer and the man. “What I stand for is what I stand on,” he said, and spent the rest of his life proving it.

It's a well-beaten path for rural kids: Go out and seek your fortune. I followed it myself, lured away from Kentucky by some combination of embarrassment for the homely and the shine of what's generally called opportunity. Yet having entered its temple, I found nothing worth saying until I could claim the place I'm from, as a cultural capital of its own surprising kind. I have a handful of writers to thank for lighting my circular path home, but mostly Wendell Berry.

People who live and work in land-based economies are well accustomed to being called backward by the more urbane, and Berry's work has sometimes borne this slight. But he was the opposite of backward; he was prescient. "The Unsettling of America" (1977), his seminal text on the dangers of our estrangement from the land that feeds us,

Wendell Berry in 2012.

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He saw danger in the conviction that new things are always better than old things.

is more urgently true today than when he wrote it five decades ago. If any readers still doubt that a farmer could have much to tell them, it's their loss.

His essays, the Sabbath Poems, the Port William novels — “Hannah Coulter,” “Jayber Crow,” “The Memory of Old Jack,” all quiet on the surface — are lakes of sleek astonishments. The possibilities of life in a small place are a mirror to the world, because let’s face it, every place is its own kind of small. It’s a universal clemency to find delight in what we have instead of craving what we don’t, and likewise, a balm to any existential dread to consider that “the fragment of the earth/that is now me” is just passing through: “It is on its way/from having been a tree,/a school of fish, a terrapin,/a flock of birds. It will pass/through all those forms again.”

Who doesn't want to be a flock of birds someday? Returning here to "Manifesto," we can all use instruction on how to "Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts."

His novels walk the unpaved roads between birth and death with an aching blend of human comedy and grace.

His poems hold the sacred in the palm of their hand. In service of what might be taken for simplicity, his logical currents are clear and complex; his essays contain multitudes. One of his most famous, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," challenges our devotion to technological fundamentalism — not because Berry was a Luddite, or failed to appreciate his wife, Tanya, as an editor, typist and invaluable partner. Nor did he oppose a tool that helps us do good work. Rather, he saw danger in the conviction that new things are always better than old things. (If you're a mortal human, you might think on that.) He saw the waste of endlessly buying solutions to problems we don't have, and tragedy in an elusive happiness built on constantly changing out our possessions and selves: a damaging doctrine for those who can't afford it, and also for those who can.

Most of all, he had the rare vision to see a thing, any thing, not just at the moment of acquisition but through its whole passage from mineral extraction, the mess of manufacture and transport to the consumer and beyond, to the desecration we call “landfill.” He nudged us to do the same, and to have the courage to ask, “Is my need important enough to inflict this injury on the world?” He didn’t say do, or don’t. He just said to look. Widen your gaze, and look again.

I can't remember a time when I didn't know about Wendell Berry. My grandmother talked about "that fellow that doesn't like a tractor" when I was young enough to picture a noble draft horse versus our noisy John Deere, and heartily agree that less is more. He and my father — coincidentally both named Wendell — worked together to help preserve some beautiful, threatened parts of Kentucky, in their shared belief that such wild places are sacred. When I saw him soon after my father died, Wendell told me, "They come back to us."

It's the truest, kindest counsel I've ever known for grief, perfectly rendered in his poem "The Loved Ones." In those first days we are sodden with deprivation and the loss itself: accident, illness or final decline. It's only with time that "the loved ones we call the dead" return as their full selves into our memories and dreams, and then:

We feel they have been near us when we have not thought of them. They are simply here, simply waiting while we are distracted among our obligations. At last it comes to us: They live now in the permanent world. We are the absent ones.

I'm taking that counsel today. He'll come back to us. He is here now, in these words. His poem "Stay Home" promises:

I will be standing in the woods where the old trees move only with the wind and then with gravity. In the stillness of the trees I am at home. Don't come with me. You stay home too.

A giant tree has surrendered to gravity. No, not surrendered. Accepted. I'll take Wendell's instruction to stay here, in these fragments of the earth that are still me, and use them while I can, to nurture a place, a family, a spiritual trust, a neighbor. To call that home, and carry on.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER is the author of 10 novels, most recently the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Demon Copperhead." Her new novel, "Partita," will be published this month.

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Dear readers,

In grade school, an imaginative pal and I tried to turn recess into a game of Calvin-ball. That, err, sport, from Bill Watterson's delightful "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip, has only one rule: "You can't play it the same way twice."

Perhaps the anarchy that ensued explains my middle-school embrace of Dungeons & Dragons rule books.

My teenage reading tastes skewed speculative, toward books that abided by the precise rules of their worlds. Flights of fancy were all well and good as long as they were hemmed in by some logic, however whimsical or wondrous. In novels that heavily employ world-building, a few regulations always go a long way. Each of these two very different books fits the bill.

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Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake Fiction, 1946

Peake was perhaps the most stylish English fantasist of the first half of the 20th century — in his prose, his clothes and his pose. He's mentioned far less often than he deserves, though when he is, it's often in the same breath as his contemporaries J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Those aren't perfect comparisons. The first two books in Peake's incomplete masterwork, his Gormenghast series, are as epic as "The Lord of the Rings" or the Narnia novels. But instead of sweeping allegory, they trade in a sort of gothic, absurdist class satire. Also, there's no magic.

Gormenghast is an impossibly large, labyrinthine, moldering castle inhabited by what a Washington Post critic once called "conniving Dickensian grotesques," with delicious names like Alfred Prunesquallor and Abiatha Swelter. (Guess which one is the cook.)

Then there is Titus Groan, the future 77th Earl of Gormenghast. In the first book of the series, he is born and inherits his title near the end of his infancy. Around him, peculiar adults lead lives governed by arcane rites as timeless and decayed as the stronghold that keeps them. Even breakfast adheres to ceremony: Throughout it, the master of rituals reads aloud the rest of that day's rituals.

Peake's own language is as tortuous as his mythos. And yet it sings. "Drear ritual turned its wheel," he writes. "The ferment of the heart, within these walls, was mocked by every length of sleeping shadow. The passions, no greater than candle flames, flickered in Time's yawn, for Gormenghast, huge and adumbrate, out-crumbles all."

If you like listening to your lore, Simon Vance's audiobook rendition is more than worth your time. And do try your luck at ferreting out the rather bonkers but unfairly maligned BBC mini-series.

READ IF YOU LIKE: "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell," by Susanna Clarke; "Rebecca," by Daphne du Maurier; the witch scenes in "Macbeth," specifically; candles scented with tobacco, heather and/or bog myrtle.

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Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey Fiction, 1968

Stop me if you've read this one before: A young woman forms a psychic bond with a dragon, rises to prominence within a patriarchal institution and gets entangled in a romance with a powerful dragon-rider.

But “Fourth Wing,” Rebecca Yarros’s blockbuster fantasy, this is not. If McCaffrey were alive today, she’d be 100 — and if you called her a romantasy writer, she might breathe more fire at you than all her and Yarros’s dragons combined ever could.

“Dragonflight” kicks off the influential Dragonriders of Pern series, which, despite its quasi-medieval setting and fire-breathing beasties, McCaffrey considered science fiction. (No magic here, either.)

Pern is a planet once settled by space-faring Earthlings, whose origins and technology have been largely lost to time. Its dragons were genetically engineered. An insentient, threadlike alien spore unspools from the sky at intervals determined by the eccentric orbit of its native rogue planet. Plus there's some time travel.

Most have forgotten why many of Pern's laws exist. It's been well over a century since the last alien threat. Why should the Pernese worry about little patches of grass growing in the grooves of their stonework feudal holds? What do you mean, that extraterrestrial material excruciatingly consumes all organic matter in its path?

Before their fellow inhabitants learn the answers to those questions the deadly way, the vengeful orphan Lessa has to bond with a golden dragon queen and work with an aloof dragon-rider, F'lar, to save the world. Though the stakes are high, this isn't a traditional page-turner; Pernese history and politics are too complex for that. But the richness of Pern's world makes it harder to leave after every visit — even if you'd never want to live there.

READ IF YOU LIKE: Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series; Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle; the frisson of adopting a pet and instantly becoming its favorite thing on Earth; endless debates over whether George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series is secretly science fiction.

We bring the best of the literary conversation to you.

The New York Times

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