Supported by
editors’ choice
6 New Books We Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
From punk to poetry to politics, we’ve got you covered this week: Our recommended books include Kathleen Hanna’s memoir of life as a groundbreaking figure in music’s riot grrrl movement, Andrea Cohen’s latest collection of sly and engaging poems, and Isaac Arnsdorf’s deeply reported look at the grass roots loyalists who have sustained MAGA as a political force.
Also up, a biography of Sigmund Freud’s most famous patient and, in fiction, two noteworthy debut novels. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
FINISH WHAT WE STARTED:
The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy
Isaac Arnsdorf
There have been several books about the Trumpification of Republican elites, but Arnsdorf focuses instead on the MAGA grass roots — the “faces in the crowd” who continue to insist that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and are determined to never let such an outrage happen again.
Credit...“Arnsdorf’s book ... will give you a sense of how the Republican Party has landed on a plan to entrench power in a pincer movement: minority rule on the one hand and mass radicalization on the other.”
From Jennifer Szalai’s review
Little, Brown, | $30
EARLY SOBRIETIES
Michael Deagler
After years of drinking himself into “increasingly dire circumstances,” the narrator of Deagler’s debut novel quits the bottle and tries living at his parents’ suburban house, where sympathy and moral support are in short supply. He ends up couch-surfing in Philadelphia just months into his sobriety, challenged at every turn by the hazards and lures of the city.
Credit...“Builds into a moving, comic meditation on the impossibility of imposing narrative structure on our lives. … A wise and piercing book.”
From Charlie Lee’s review
Astra House | $26
THE SECRET MIND OF BERTHA PAPPENHEIM:
The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure
Gabriel Brownstein
You may know her as “Anna O.,” Freud’s famous case study of a “hysteric” cured by the nascent practice of psychoanalysis. In real life, as Brownstein relates, she was Bertha Pappenheim, a young Viennese woman who did indeed suffer from a range of mysterious symptoms. But she was not in fact cured, and spent many years in a mental hospital before finding some measure of relief. Brownstein intercuts this biography with an account of his own troubles and a discussion of functional neurological disorder, which he sees as a modern analog to hysteria.
Credit...“Brownstein is allergic to answers. He likens himself to a ‘conscientious archaeologist’ and leaves it to his readers to draw their conclusions based on the specimens he places before us.”
From Susannah Cahalan’s review
PublicAffairs | $32
REBEL GIRL:
My Life as a Feminist Punk
Kathleen Hanna
Though Hanna’s name is synonymous with the riot grrrl movement in music, her disarming memoir encompasses far more than her time fronting the formative indie bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Tales of an upbringing and young adulthood marked by rampant emotional and sexual abuse are leavened here by a ferocious wit and undimmable creative spirit.
Credit...“One of the most riveting frontpeople in recent musical history. … Her story, along with Bikini Kill’s upcoming tour, couldn’t feel more necessary.”
From Evelyn McDonnell’s review
Ecco | $26.99
DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG
Eve J. Chung
A Taiwanese American human rights lawyer by day, Chung imbues her debut novel — based in part on memories shared by her grandmother — with spitfire flair and real-life specificity. Her colorful portrait of a young girl’s harrowing journey across China in the wake of the Communist revolution comes alive with villains, twists and unlikely triumphs over adversity.
Credit...“Hai relates her story in the straightforward first-person style of a narrator who is not much given to cynicism or poetry but who can keep your attention with her wit, a knack for shrewd details and uncommon tenderness.”
From Alexander Chee’s review
Berkley | $28
THE SORROW APARTMENTS:
Poems
Andrea Cohen
Cohen is a poet who finds the romance in wit; in this collection, her eighth, her signature maneuver is a kind of twist or flourish that shifts a poem away from the (usually sentimental) ending that seems to be coming.
Credit...Cohen sticks to a conversational middle-voice that resolutely avoids ‘poetic’ phrasing. … While she’s not a formalist in the strict sense, Cohen has an acute ear and an easy command of technical felicities.”
From David Orr’s review
Four Way Books | Paperback, $17.95
Advertisement